The Book Of Ian Watson, page 8
I could have had playmates just like me!
Oh no I couldn’t. The experiment had been tried. The growing human infants had drifted into speaking idioglossic languages, private mishmashes which were neither chalk nor cheese.
“Let’s take a walk, Johnny.”
“To the golden wall? To the spikes? To the bottomless pool? To the creeping waters?”
“How about to Pumpkin Center?” (That was Sarah’s name for the place.)
“Okay.”
“And I’ll try to explain.”
Remember the market in Scarborough, Marianne, where we went last week? All those stalls in the sun piled high with gourds and marrows, purple eggplants, orange peppers, mangoes flushed like hot cheeks, bright yellow pumpkins and bananas?
Suppose you scatter all those fruit and vegetables across a rumpling plain and swell them up to the size of houses. Then you plant groves of broccoli-trees in between, and hang ceramic cradles and home-pods from the branches. Next, hollow out some of the largest marrows and pumpkins for workshops, bodycare centers, mindcare centers, admin, what have you. In the distance, rear up golden cliffs. Erect a cluster of crystalline spikes. Sketch a misty mauve lake far off. That’s the landscape I knew and loved back home.
Pumpkin Center was about a half Earth hour’s walk away. It was a multiple com-center nexing with the other main islands of Homestar’s world, interfacing with the space platforms up in orbit, databanking for the comp-terminals in local cradle-homes, feeding programs to the mindcare centers locally—one of which, carved within a great green-banded marrow, I attended, always struggling along at the bottom of the class. Yet always included, always bespoken and teamed with, wrestled and raced and riddled and all else.
On the way to Pumpkin Center that day mummy-Sarah tried to reconstruct my personal universe somewhat without upsetting it.
“A couple of centuries ago on Earth,” said mummy-Sarah, “the blessed Rupert Sheldrake fathered the principle of formative causation.”
“The what?”
“Patience, Johnny! Listen and learn. The blessed Rupert discovered that all shapes and patterns of activity of everything in the universe are guided by kin-patterns in the past. So a solution of chemical salts knows how to crystallize quickly in a particular way because of what’s called ‘morphic echo’ with similar events somewhere else in the past. Or suppose you put a little rat-animal into a maze with a tasty tidbit to find at the center; once the first rat has solved the maze, all other animals of the same kind will be able to solve the same maze faster in future. And an embryo animal in its mother’s womb knows how to make its body unfold in the way of its kind because kin-foetuses have done so likewise in the past. Persons on other worlds already knew this principle. We Earth-people came by this knowledge rather late, but then the blessed Rupert realized the truth.”
“He guessed because of morph … because of the echo?”
“No, that’s just the trouble. If a rat learns a maze, that helps all other rats. But it doesn’t help dog-animals or fish or mice.”
We were passing by Slark’s Hollow, where you could valve down into the long-distance undertube. A couple of persons popped up out of the ground-valve. Spying us, they bowed to mummy-Sarah and enquired of her stability from me; which I answered as well as I could, whilst Sarah smiled sadly and mutely at them. The two trotted on their way in the direction of Unspeakable Lake.
“Tell me, Johnny,” mummy-Sarah riddled me, “what’s the easiest and the most complicated thing a child ever learns?”
“How to walk, and not fall over?”
“No, how to talk. How to communicate. So how does a child achieve this?”
“By listening to its mummy and Dada? Then echoing them?”
“No, that isn’t how. If it was so, the child would never know how to put words together for itself. It would never be able to make up fresh sentences of its own, which other people can understand straight off. A child learns to talk because all human languages have the same deep structure. They have the same underlying general grammar rules—and the child only has to map what it hears on to this deep grammar. Let’s call that deep structure the ‘speech-maze’. No matter what the words are, or how they’re put together, or what language they belong to, the paths of the maze are the same. And that maze has been solved successfully a million times before, so it’s child’s play to solve it again.”
“So why is it hard to learn alien languages? Why can’t you talk to Dada? Why can’t he talk to you?”
“Because we both belong to different species. We have different mazes in our minds. This makes it damn near impossible for an alien to learn the language of any other alien even halfway fluently when their two species first meet. There’s no morphic echo to help, none at all. And in fact, the strong morphic echo from your own species really gets in the way. You just can’t grasp the alien pattern.”
“But can’t machines help out? Can’t comps crunch words like they do numbers and exchange them between different … species?”
“They can. But it isn’t good enough! Persons have got to be able to talk to each other directly. They have to be able to think along with each other. Back in the old days on Earth before the stargates opened, people used to fantasize about yacking on to strangers from the stars—buying them drinks, swapping jokes, telling tales. But the mazes don’t match. It turned out well-nigh impossible to think or speak an alien language naturally.”
“But what about me?”
“You. Yes, you. Indeed. The only way real communication can get going, Johnny—the only way all persons in the galaxy will get their act together—is if morphic fields can be established. Somehow we have to set up echoes of human people learning alien tongues from birth, in addition to their own. Learning languages is much easier for kids; but even so it’s ten times harder for a human child to learn alien speech, than it is for it to learn any human language. Still, it’s possible. And in time it’ll become easier, because there’ll be morphic echoes. Even adults will find it possible to learn.”
She ruffled my hair. “You’ve done well, Johnny—and your kids will do even better. In a hundred years we’ll all be able to communicate quite easily with the persons of Homestar’s world. Then we can really go out and buy them drinks and natter and tell stories. Till then, we’re verbal cripples.”
“Oh.”
“This is how alien races have learned to talk to each other in the past. Every time, every damn time. And every time it’s new and different. A new species: a new maze.”
“Could there be some sort of, well, super-maze? A maze of mazes?”
Mummy-Sarah looked so pleased that I felt proud. “There may well be, Johnny. We surely hope so. But none of us have found it yet.”
So that was it.
Of course, the implications didn’t sink in all at once: the grandeur, the perversity, the life-warping sacrifice for the sake of a future when men and aliens could swap yarns like buddies, and bargain and philosophize together …
Perversity, did I say?
Marianne, before I ever met you I already loved you. One day I would need to meet somebody just like you and mate and raise kids. We would have to be willing to stick it out together unflinchingly through years of dumb wedlock: you the human mother, and I the pretend-alien speaking only in alien. (And not especially well, at that! However, my infant successors on Homestar’s world would find the exotic word-maze easier to master, than I had; and my own kids would make better progress too.)
I would have to bed a human wife and stay with her as spouse. So I had to be properly motivated, to this end. Mummy-Sarah saw to that as soon as I reached puberty.
Consider: I was reared amidst aliens with amber bars across their eyes and crests upon their heads, and whose bodies were smooth hard yellow china.
At puberty I had to be, um, exposed … to the expectation of human sexuality. I had to be nudged firmly in the right direction. I needed my libido fixing on the right erotic images. Yes indeed, I was to be focused from afar—light years afar—on such as you, my dusky darling Marianne.
Attentive dutiful mummy-Sarah duly provided me with porno-pics and tapes for me to play with.
So I was conditioned to love and lust for such as you, my Marianne, just as I suppose you were trained for me. You’re dusky; mummy-Sarah was white and auburn. Musn’t focus my libido on mummy; must avoid incest or homosexuality. My pics and tapes saw to that.
Truth to tell, that day when we visited Pumpkin Center was (you’ve guessed it) to pick up a nicely graded, well-tailored package of human pornography for me. It wasn’t something to transmit to our comp-terminal. Private and personal. Anyway it wasn’t all electronic. In the package were real pic-books for me to amuse myself with.
Such is the quality of passion I lay at your feet, Marianne, here on the isle of Tobago. Such is the depth of my desire for you. Oh it’s deep—eighteen light-years deep, or so.
Your calypso minstrels aren’t always very delicate in their praise-singing:
How you love a man from the stars?
He’s from a globe where girls’ eyes got bars!
Girls got no bosoms and their skin’s hard as wood
But our boy does know how to give it to you good!
Or how about this one?
Man from the stars come to wed a woman
He’ll be an ET and she’ll be human
He knows his stuff but his Ma’s come too
In case their wedded life needs fixing with glue
(Oh yes, mummy-Sarah returned to Earth with me, cold-sleeping through the stargates for a year or so. Now she has a fine beach cottage up by Speyside fishing village; a decent distance away, nothing too obtrusive. As I understand it, arranged marriages and mothers-keeping-an-eye-on-things were common enough situations in the past …)
Marianne, you and I are going to be a sort of Holy Family (to add to the roster of other holy families secluded on various pleasant isles around the world). Johnny and Marianne: Mary and Joseph! Oh yes.
For didn’t a strange star shine over my own nativity, namely Homestar? What’s more, through our love we’ll help spread the Word. The alien word.
And so the calypso bards of next century, sporting bold names such as King Tutankhamun, General Mandigo and Captain Kidd, will be able to carol out their witty satires in alien patois in star bars out by Homestar or Arcturus or wherever.
Or wherever … We only know two alien races so far at first hand; those know a few others in turn. No doubt the real problems lie ahead when humans have to wed intelligent snakes or things that breathe poison gases; wed them somehow …
Do you know what I think, Marianne? There is something holy here. There’s something sacred about our love. I’m perfectly serious.
Listen: we oughtn’t to view the huge initial difficulty of speaking alien languages as some sort of malign barrier, some wicked way the universe has found to fox and hamper us. Look on the bright side. We’re obliged to wed aliens; or to do whatever passes for spousing or kin-bonding on each alien world. We have to live with aliens as if we love them. We have to become family to them; they to us. We have to become kin. This, I think, is something holy. Don’t you agree?
Thus, Marianne, our marriage is a sacrament; a love-pledge between Sol and other stars.
I’m glad I realized this. I feel a lot better about the whole thing. So let the calypso singers have their bit of fun.
Man from the stars got himself a wife
On our own Tobago for the rest of his life
Raising his kids in an alien way
His whole damn time’s a carnival day!
Precisely. I’m the King of the carnival, and you’re the Queen, Marianne. We’re King and Queen for life, or at least for the next twenty years. But I won’t wear an alien masquerade costume. I shan’t shave off all my hair and stain my skin yellow, or stick a crest on my head or wear lenses with orange bars across them. That would be going too far. Yet I shall speak with the tongue of an alien.
I do miss Dada. Considering our differences, we had some fun times, him and me. I’d say he was one fine father—and he must have been a fair spouse as well. I wonder if mummy-Sarah misses him too? I don’t suppose she and Dada could ever have … ? Well no, I don’t suppose they could.
Sarah must have had the dedication of a nun, during all my years a-growing. She’s making up for it now, I hear. I, of course, had to be pepped up by porn to assume my proper erotic place in human society …
I’m going to try to emulate Dada, Marianne. I’m going to be him exactly, to our kids. I’ll be just the sort of Dada he was to me; that’s the least I can do.
Oh my adorable Marianne, cynosure of my desire, target of my soul, our marriage was made in the heavens where the alien starlight shines. Accept my wedding gift of these few human words before my tongue becomes inhuman! The rest will be silence. The rest will be incomprehension, and alien jabber on my part. But one day because of us world will speak unto world. One day we’ll all buy each other drinks—ranging from rum to hydrochloric acid—and swap stories and puzzle the riddle of the cosmos and be family to one another from here to forever, stars without end.
At last I know how to sing my lovesong to you, Marianne! How else but calypso-style? (I’ll show them.)
Man from the stars he’s no more than a boy
But we wish him and Marianne lots of joy
It’s urgent we all get to talk to each other
So we all embrace every alien like our brother!
Now I’ll kiss you.
SCIENCE-FICTIONAL
I wrote science fiction for a reason. Being a good European (culturally, if not politically) I sought for a theory of what I was doing …
The Crudities of
Science Fiction
During the last decade the best Anglo-American SF has grown up. The bounds of the so-called genre ‘ghetto’ have burst. Its puberty is past; sex and human relations can be freely discussed. There is a reasonable awareness of political and social dimensions. Today’s new vintages (as opposed to the vin ordinaire which continues to be pressed out) are—to be paradoxical—mature ones. University presses aren’t ashamed to print critiques of SF; on the contrary. And these critiques deal with SF as a literature, not merely a peculiar sociological phenomenon. Meanwhile, many of the ‘best’ writers increasingly condemn the commercial classification ‘SF’—so convenient to publishers, so artistically constraining to the writers. Thus Harlan Ellison refuses to let the term ‘SF’ appear anywhere on the covers of his books; Malzberg quits the field because he feels that the label and the preconceptions implicit in the SF format hamper the imagination impossibly; Silverberg ceases to write since he considers that his best books haven’t, and by definition can’t, be appreciated within the field. There is a round of applause whenever a ‘superior’ SF novel is marketed as a novel for the general reader. The best future is seen as one where SF is simply part of general literature, where general literature (already borrowing devices and metaphors from SF) absorbs its prodigal son—ghettoized by the devilish Gernsback and other pulp magazine editors—back into its body, till there is again simply literature, fiction, in all its multifarious diversity. (The term ‘SF’ may be kept on, perhaps, as a convenient label for Perry Rhodan and suchlike adolescent immaturities.)
SF writers are supposed to be pleased about this. But I for one am not very pleased.
Why not, when we obviously have a new improved SF? Well, let us compare the old SF with the smart new literary model. Compare, for instance, the grandiose cardboard inanities of E. E. Smith with the artistic kind of story that often appears in original anthologies these days (I think particularly of Silver-berg’s New Dimensions series). In Smith, bright young heroes invent starships that skylark through the cosmos, saving kidnapped girlfriends from falling into dead stars (by firing morse-code messages through space by machine gun) followed by valiant cuddles in space armour. Blasters roar, crypto-science jargon jangles evocatively, galaxies collide. It’s gawkish stuff. Yet there is such sheer passion for science, discovery, space; such wonder (even though the human and social dimension is missing and the stuff is frankly unreadable beyond the age of 14 with its lumpy style, minimal characters and histrionic plots) that I turn with some sadness to some more obviously mature, adult, artistic SF of today.
Take a typical New Dimensions story. The piece is called “The Mothers’ March on Ecstasy”; it is by George Alec Effinger. In it the resident anti-hero proclaims:
“Oh, that I could enjoy anew the conscienceless
freedom of those long-dead days. But I am sure it
is impossible. I am not a scientist now. Perhaps
you have noticed from the loveliness of the words
that I have become a poet. It happened overnight …”
This story is rather symptomatic of what is happening in SF today, now that the ghetto walls are tumbling down. Sadly, the science ideas of genuine SF, and science itself too, become all too often a form of stylish kitsch, reflecting a self-indulgent Western disillusion with science, wonder, hope, the future, and their replacement by a sophisticated Silver Age rococo. Wry tragedy glitters. The future—that is all too rapidly becoming the present—is kitschified, as SF dons its laurels of respectabililty. (So Vonnegut—not that he would wish to be termed an SF writer!—reduces alien communication methods to farting and tap-dancing, and Malzberg’s entire opus is almost all parody.) This is not true of all writers, certainly. Le Guin is writing authentic exploratory SF that is mature, literary, politically relevant and positive towards our future. Philip Dick believes—perhaps hectically, perhaps crazily; but he has vision. John Brunner cares. Frank Herbert too. Yet the autumnal Silver Age elegance is there in Silverberg’s later books—which are far from being kitsch themselves, yet the imaginary cultural museum is being paced by a fine connoisseur before the barbarians breach the gates, before Death’s sickle reaps. It is there in Chris Priest’s The Space Machine—accomplished exercise in literary nostalgia that it is. It is there in Brian Aldiss’s recent The Malacia Tapestry, again not kitsch certainly, but a patrician private world. (And of course the barbarians are within us too). This is a literature of personal aesthetic statement, the solution to the founderings of the Western episteme being sought in sophisticated private craft, in formalism rather than idea content.
Oh no I couldn’t. The experiment had been tried. The growing human infants had drifted into speaking idioglossic languages, private mishmashes which were neither chalk nor cheese.
“Let’s take a walk, Johnny.”
“To the golden wall? To the spikes? To the bottomless pool? To the creeping waters?”
“How about to Pumpkin Center?” (That was Sarah’s name for the place.)
“Okay.”
“And I’ll try to explain.”
Remember the market in Scarborough, Marianne, where we went last week? All those stalls in the sun piled high with gourds and marrows, purple eggplants, orange peppers, mangoes flushed like hot cheeks, bright yellow pumpkins and bananas?
Suppose you scatter all those fruit and vegetables across a rumpling plain and swell them up to the size of houses. Then you plant groves of broccoli-trees in between, and hang ceramic cradles and home-pods from the branches. Next, hollow out some of the largest marrows and pumpkins for workshops, bodycare centers, mindcare centers, admin, what have you. In the distance, rear up golden cliffs. Erect a cluster of crystalline spikes. Sketch a misty mauve lake far off. That’s the landscape I knew and loved back home.
Pumpkin Center was about a half Earth hour’s walk away. It was a multiple com-center nexing with the other main islands of Homestar’s world, interfacing with the space platforms up in orbit, databanking for the comp-terminals in local cradle-homes, feeding programs to the mindcare centers locally—one of which, carved within a great green-banded marrow, I attended, always struggling along at the bottom of the class. Yet always included, always bespoken and teamed with, wrestled and raced and riddled and all else.
On the way to Pumpkin Center that day mummy-Sarah tried to reconstruct my personal universe somewhat without upsetting it.
“A couple of centuries ago on Earth,” said mummy-Sarah, “the blessed Rupert Sheldrake fathered the principle of formative causation.”
“The what?”
“Patience, Johnny! Listen and learn. The blessed Rupert discovered that all shapes and patterns of activity of everything in the universe are guided by kin-patterns in the past. So a solution of chemical salts knows how to crystallize quickly in a particular way because of what’s called ‘morphic echo’ with similar events somewhere else in the past. Or suppose you put a little rat-animal into a maze with a tasty tidbit to find at the center; once the first rat has solved the maze, all other animals of the same kind will be able to solve the same maze faster in future. And an embryo animal in its mother’s womb knows how to make its body unfold in the way of its kind because kin-foetuses have done so likewise in the past. Persons on other worlds already knew this principle. We Earth-people came by this knowledge rather late, but then the blessed Rupert realized the truth.”
“He guessed because of morph … because of the echo?”
“No, that’s just the trouble. If a rat learns a maze, that helps all other rats. But it doesn’t help dog-animals or fish or mice.”
We were passing by Slark’s Hollow, where you could valve down into the long-distance undertube. A couple of persons popped up out of the ground-valve. Spying us, they bowed to mummy-Sarah and enquired of her stability from me; which I answered as well as I could, whilst Sarah smiled sadly and mutely at them. The two trotted on their way in the direction of Unspeakable Lake.
“Tell me, Johnny,” mummy-Sarah riddled me, “what’s the easiest and the most complicated thing a child ever learns?”
“How to walk, and not fall over?”
“No, how to talk. How to communicate. So how does a child achieve this?”
“By listening to its mummy and Dada? Then echoing them?”
“No, that isn’t how. If it was so, the child would never know how to put words together for itself. It would never be able to make up fresh sentences of its own, which other people can understand straight off. A child learns to talk because all human languages have the same deep structure. They have the same underlying general grammar rules—and the child only has to map what it hears on to this deep grammar. Let’s call that deep structure the ‘speech-maze’. No matter what the words are, or how they’re put together, or what language they belong to, the paths of the maze are the same. And that maze has been solved successfully a million times before, so it’s child’s play to solve it again.”
“So why is it hard to learn alien languages? Why can’t you talk to Dada? Why can’t he talk to you?”
“Because we both belong to different species. We have different mazes in our minds. This makes it damn near impossible for an alien to learn the language of any other alien even halfway fluently when their two species first meet. There’s no morphic echo to help, none at all. And in fact, the strong morphic echo from your own species really gets in the way. You just can’t grasp the alien pattern.”
“But can’t machines help out? Can’t comps crunch words like they do numbers and exchange them between different … species?”
“They can. But it isn’t good enough! Persons have got to be able to talk to each other directly. They have to be able to think along with each other. Back in the old days on Earth before the stargates opened, people used to fantasize about yacking on to strangers from the stars—buying them drinks, swapping jokes, telling tales. But the mazes don’t match. It turned out well-nigh impossible to think or speak an alien language naturally.”
“But what about me?”
“You. Yes, you. Indeed. The only way real communication can get going, Johnny—the only way all persons in the galaxy will get their act together—is if morphic fields can be established. Somehow we have to set up echoes of human people learning alien tongues from birth, in addition to their own. Learning languages is much easier for kids; but even so it’s ten times harder for a human child to learn alien speech, than it is for it to learn any human language. Still, it’s possible. And in time it’ll become easier, because there’ll be morphic echoes. Even adults will find it possible to learn.”
She ruffled my hair. “You’ve done well, Johnny—and your kids will do even better. In a hundred years we’ll all be able to communicate quite easily with the persons of Homestar’s world. Then we can really go out and buy them drinks and natter and tell stories. Till then, we’re verbal cripples.”
“Oh.”
“This is how alien races have learned to talk to each other in the past. Every time, every damn time. And every time it’s new and different. A new species: a new maze.”
“Could there be some sort of, well, super-maze? A maze of mazes?”
Mummy-Sarah looked so pleased that I felt proud. “There may well be, Johnny. We surely hope so. But none of us have found it yet.”
So that was it.
Of course, the implications didn’t sink in all at once: the grandeur, the perversity, the life-warping sacrifice for the sake of a future when men and aliens could swap yarns like buddies, and bargain and philosophize together …
Perversity, did I say?
Marianne, before I ever met you I already loved you. One day I would need to meet somebody just like you and mate and raise kids. We would have to be willing to stick it out together unflinchingly through years of dumb wedlock: you the human mother, and I the pretend-alien speaking only in alien. (And not especially well, at that! However, my infant successors on Homestar’s world would find the exotic word-maze easier to master, than I had; and my own kids would make better progress too.)
I would have to bed a human wife and stay with her as spouse. So I had to be properly motivated, to this end. Mummy-Sarah saw to that as soon as I reached puberty.
Consider: I was reared amidst aliens with amber bars across their eyes and crests upon their heads, and whose bodies were smooth hard yellow china.
At puberty I had to be, um, exposed … to the expectation of human sexuality. I had to be nudged firmly in the right direction. I needed my libido fixing on the right erotic images. Yes indeed, I was to be focused from afar—light years afar—on such as you, my dusky darling Marianne.
Attentive dutiful mummy-Sarah duly provided me with porno-pics and tapes for me to play with.
So I was conditioned to love and lust for such as you, my Marianne, just as I suppose you were trained for me. You’re dusky; mummy-Sarah was white and auburn. Musn’t focus my libido on mummy; must avoid incest or homosexuality. My pics and tapes saw to that.
Truth to tell, that day when we visited Pumpkin Center was (you’ve guessed it) to pick up a nicely graded, well-tailored package of human pornography for me. It wasn’t something to transmit to our comp-terminal. Private and personal. Anyway it wasn’t all electronic. In the package were real pic-books for me to amuse myself with.
Such is the quality of passion I lay at your feet, Marianne, here on the isle of Tobago. Such is the depth of my desire for you. Oh it’s deep—eighteen light-years deep, or so.
Your calypso minstrels aren’t always very delicate in their praise-singing:
How you love a man from the stars?
He’s from a globe where girls’ eyes got bars!
Girls got no bosoms and their skin’s hard as wood
But our boy does know how to give it to you good!
Or how about this one?
Man from the stars come to wed a woman
He’ll be an ET and she’ll be human
He knows his stuff but his Ma’s come too
In case their wedded life needs fixing with glue
(Oh yes, mummy-Sarah returned to Earth with me, cold-sleeping through the stargates for a year or so. Now she has a fine beach cottage up by Speyside fishing village; a decent distance away, nothing too obtrusive. As I understand it, arranged marriages and mothers-keeping-an-eye-on-things were common enough situations in the past …)
Marianne, you and I are going to be a sort of Holy Family (to add to the roster of other holy families secluded on various pleasant isles around the world). Johnny and Marianne: Mary and Joseph! Oh yes.
For didn’t a strange star shine over my own nativity, namely Homestar? What’s more, through our love we’ll help spread the Word. The alien word.
And so the calypso bards of next century, sporting bold names such as King Tutankhamun, General Mandigo and Captain Kidd, will be able to carol out their witty satires in alien patois in star bars out by Homestar or Arcturus or wherever.
Or wherever … We only know two alien races so far at first hand; those know a few others in turn. No doubt the real problems lie ahead when humans have to wed intelligent snakes or things that breathe poison gases; wed them somehow …
Do you know what I think, Marianne? There is something holy here. There’s something sacred about our love. I’m perfectly serious.
Listen: we oughtn’t to view the huge initial difficulty of speaking alien languages as some sort of malign barrier, some wicked way the universe has found to fox and hamper us. Look on the bright side. We’re obliged to wed aliens; or to do whatever passes for spousing or kin-bonding on each alien world. We have to live with aliens as if we love them. We have to become family to them; they to us. We have to become kin. This, I think, is something holy. Don’t you agree?
Thus, Marianne, our marriage is a sacrament; a love-pledge between Sol and other stars.
I’m glad I realized this. I feel a lot better about the whole thing. So let the calypso singers have their bit of fun.
Man from the stars got himself a wife
On our own Tobago for the rest of his life
Raising his kids in an alien way
His whole damn time’s a carnival day!
Precisely. I’m the King of the carnival, and you’re the Queen, Marianne. We’re King and Queen for life, or at least for the next twenty years. But I won’t wear an alien masquerade costume. I shan’t shave off all my hair and stain my skin yellow, or stick a crest on my head or wear lenses with orange bars across them. That would be going too far. Yet I shall speak with the tongue of an alien.
I do miss Dada. Considering our differences, we had some fun times, him and me. I’d say he was one fine father—and he must have been a fair spouse as well. I wonder if mummy-Sarah misses him too? I don’t suppose she and Dada could ever have … ? Well no, I don’t suppose they could.
Sarah must have had the dedication of a nun, during all my years a-growing. She’s making up for it now, I hear. I, of course, had to be pepped up by porn to assume my proper erotic place in human society …
I’m going to try to emulate Dada, Marianne. I’m going to be him exactly, to our kids. I’ll be just the sort of Dada he was to me; that’s the least I can do.
Oh my adorable Marianne, cynosure of my desire, target of my soul, our marriage was made in the heavens where the alien starlight shines. Accept my wedding gift of these few human words before my tongue becomes inhuman! The rest will be silence. The rest will be incomprehension, and alien jabber on my part. But one day because of us world will speak unto world. One day we’ll all buy each other drinks—ranging from rum to hydrochloric acid—and swap stories and puzzle the riddle of the cosmos and be family to one another from here to forever, stars without end.
At last I know how to sing my lovesong to you, Marianne! How else but calypso-style? (I’ll show them.)
Man from the stars he’s no more than a boy
But we wish him and Marianne lots of joy
It’s urgent we all get to talk to each other
So we all embrace every alien like our brother!
Now I’ll kiss you.
SCIENCE-FICTIONAL
I wrote science fiction for a reason. Being a good European (culturally, if not politically) I sought for a theory of what I was doing …
The Crudities of
Science Fiction
During the last decade the best Anglo-American SF has grown up. The bounds of the so-called genre ‘ghetto’ have burst. Its puberty is past; sex and human relations can be freely discussed. There is a reasonable awareness of political and social dimensions. Today’s new vintages (as opposed to the vin ordinaire which continues to be pressed out) are—to be paradoxical—mature ones. University presses aren’t ashamed to print critiques of SF; on the contrary. And these critiques deal with SF as a literature, not merely a peculiar sociological phenomenon. Meanwhile, many of the ‘best’ writers increasingly condemn the commercial classification ‘SF’—so convenient to publishers, so artistically constraining to the writers. Thus Harlan Ellison refuses to let the term ‘SF’ appear anywhere on the covers of his books; Malzberg quits the field because he feels that the label and the preconceptions implicit in the SF format hamper the imagination impossibly; Silverberg ceases to write since he considers that his best books haven’t, and by definition can’t, be appreciated within the field. There is a round of applause whenever a ‘superior’ SF novel is marketed as a novel for the general reader. The best future is seen as one where SF is simply part of general literature, where general literature (already borrowing devices and metaphors from SF) absorbs its prodigal son—ghettoized by the devilish Gernsback and other pulp magazine editors—back into its body, till there is again simply literature, fiction, in all its multifarious diversity. (The term ‘SF’ may be kept on, perhaps, as a convenient label for Perry Rhodan and suchlike adolescent immaturities.)
SF writers are supposed to be pleased about this. But I for one am not very pleased.
Why not, when we obviously have a new improved SF? Well, let us compare the old SF with the smart new literary model. Compare, for instance, the grandiose cardboard inanities of E. E. Smith with the artistic kind of story that often appears in original anthologies these days (I think particularly of Silver-berg’s New Dimensions series). In Smith, bright young heroes invent starships that skylark through the cosmos, saving kidnapped girlfriends from falling into dead stars (by firing morse-code messages through space by machine gun) followed by valiant cuddles in space armour. Blasters roar, crypto-science jargon jangles evocatively, galaxies collide. It’s gawkish stuff. Yet there is such sheer passion for science, discovery, space; such wonder (even though the human and social dimension is missing and the stuff is frankly unreadable beyond the age of 14 with its lumpy style, minimal characters and histrionic plots) that I turn with some sadness to some more obviously mature, adult, artistic SF of today.
Take a typical New Dimensions story. The piece is called “The Mothers’ March on Ecstasy”; it is by George Alec Effinger. In it the resident anti-hero proclaims:
“Oh, that I could enjoy anew the conscienceless
freedom of those long-dead days. But I am sure it
is impossible. I am not a scientist now. Perhaps
you have noticed from the loveliness of the words
that I have become a poet. It happened overnight …”
This story is rather symptomatic of what is happening in SF today, now that the ghetto walls are tumbling down. Sadly, the science ideas of genuine SF, and science itself too, become all too often a form of stylish kitsch, reflecting a self-indulgent Western disillusion with science, wonder, hope, the future, and their replacement by a sophisticated Silver Age rococo. Wry tragedy glitters. The future—that is all too rapidly becoming the present—is kitschified, as SF dons its laurels of respectabililty. (So Vonnegut—not that he would wish to be termed an SF writer!—reduces alien communication methods to farting and tap-dancing, and Malzberg’s entire opus is almost all parody.) This is not true of all writers, certainly. Le Guin is writing authentic exploratory SF that is mature, literary, politically relevant and positive towards our future. Philip Dick believes—perhaps hectically, perhaps crazily; but he has vision. John Brunner cares. Frank Herbert too. Yet the autumnal Silver Age elegance is there in Silverberg’s later books—which are far from being kitsch themselves, yet the imaginary cultural museum is being paced by a fine connoisseur before the barbarians breach the gates, before Death’s sickle reaps. It is there in Chris Priest’s The Space Machine—accomplished exercise in literary nostalgia that it is. It is there in Brian Aldiss’s recent The Malacia Tapestry, again not kitsch certainly, but a patrician private world. (And of course the barbarians are within us too). This is a literature of personal aesthetic statement, the solution to the founderings of the Western episteme being sought in sophisticated private craft, in formalism rather than idea content.
