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What It Is We Do When We Read Sciece Fiction

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WHAT IT IS WE DO
WHEN WE READ
SCIENCE FICTION

Also by

Paul Kincaid
A Very British Genre: A Short History of
British Fantasy and Science Fiction
The Timechart of the Civil War
(co-author)

The Arthur C Clarke Award:

A Critical Anthology
(co-editor with Andrew M Butler)

WHAT IT IS WE DO
WHEN WE READ
SCIENCE FICTION
Paul Kincaid

Beccon Publications
2008

Copyright 2008
Paul Kincaid
Introduction
Copyright 2008
David Langford

First Edition
ISBN(10) : 1-870824-54-7
ISBN(13) : 978-1-870824-54-5

Beccon Publications
75 Rosslyn Avenue
Harold Wood
Essex RM3 0RG, U.K.
-- www.beccon.org -Printed by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham

For Maureen
for everything

-- i --

CONTENTS
iii
v

Acknowledgements
Introducing Paul Kincaid - by David Langford

I : THEORY
3
13

What it is we do when we read Science Fiction

On the Origins of Genre

II : PRACTICE
25
29
41
49
61
75

Anatomising Science Fiction

How Hard is SF?
The New Hard Men of SF
Mistah Kurtz, He Dead
The North-South Continuum
A Year at its Best?

III : CHRISTOPHER PRIEST

89

Blank pages
Islands and Identity in the Fiction of Christopher Priest

107
129
133

Mirrors, Doubles, Twins

The Discharge
10/10 May/May
Singling Out the Duplication in The Separation

IV : BRITAIN ...
141

Islomania? Insularity?
The Myth of the Island in Britiah Science Fiction

149
153
157
165
173
189

Apres moi
Elegy
Touching the Earth
Inside Chris Evans
The Furies
Maps of a Curious Sort
Landscape in the Fiction of Keith Roberts

197

In the Pickle Jar

Appleseed or Mimesis

-- ii --

V : ... AND THE WORLD

207
237
255
267
273
277

Secret Maps
Exhibits
Entering the Labyrinth
Emptiness Gets Into You
Forever Haldeman
A Mode of Head-on Collision
George Turners Critical Relationship with Science Fiction

291

Heterotopic Borders

VI : GENE WOLFE
297
307
321
325

Images of the Fall

We Joke for Gods
False Dog
Attending Daedalus

VII : 1 APRIL 1984

331

By-ways of the Shining Path

VIII : NOTES AND BIBLIOGRAPHY

335
339
343

Notes
Sources
Bibliography

IX : INDEX
351

Index - compiled by Leigh Kennedy Priest

-- iii --

Acknowledgements
A lot of people have, wittingly or unwittingly, contributed to this book. It would
be too big a task to name everyone, but I cannot get by without mentioning a few of
them.
Firstly, Greg Pickersgill, whose offhand remark started me along this route many
years ago; Russell and Jenny Blackford, who invited me to give the talk at Aussiecon
III which became the title essay of this collection, and, of course, Edward James who
published that and the essay on Steve Erickson in the pages of Foundation.
In fact, most of the pieces here owe their existence to friendly editors, and I would
like to thank, in particular, Claire Brialey and Mark Plummer, Andrew M. Butler, Gary
Dalkin, David Hartwell, Steve Jeffery, Joseph Nicholas, Rob Latham, Joan Gordon,
Javier A. Martnez, Bruce Gillespie, Farah Mendlesohn and Andy Sawyer.
Two of the pieces on Gene Wolfe were intended for an anthology that so far has
not seen the light of day, but I should thank John Clute and Peter Wright for wanting
to publish them in the first place.
The article on The Furies by Keith Roberts is intended to be the opening chapter
of a book that I have not yet completed so that, too, is original to this collection.
Many of the essays gathered here have been seen by the members of Acnestis,
and I want to thank all past and present members for their many helpful comments,
even if I havent always paid attention to them.
Finally, for encouragement and help above and beyond the call, I want to thank
Dave Langford, Leigh Priest, Chris Priest, Roger Robinson and my wife, Maureen
Kincaid Speller.

-- v --

Introducing Paul Kincaid

David Langford
A slightly embarrassing term of art thats much used by John Clute and other
compilers of sf reference works is secondary sources the references you fall back on
when you havent read the damned book but desperately need to write about it. Paul
Kincaid, a thoughtful and underrated critic, is one of the truly reliable secondary sources.
You know its safe to steal from him.
Over the years Ive been impressed by numerous Kincaid critiques. I admired his ability
to walk surefooted through Gene Wolfes The Book of the New Sun as it appeared volume
by volume, and to report with seeming confidence on that first, difficult reading when
hindsight and the impressions of others (secondary sources, again) werent available. His
valuable essays on borderline fantasists Steve Erickson is a prime example here have
alerted lazier readers to their genre importance and reminded us that knowledge of the
borders is crucial to any definition or intellectual grasp of fantastic literatures heartlands.
In the heartland itself, Paul is one of the dauntless few who are ready to take on
gruelling review assignments like the Encyclopedia of SF or Gardner Dozoiss massive
Years Best anthologies, and to deliver the goods with the proper mix of erudition,
gravitas, balance and readability. The present collections title essay, What it is we do
when we read science fiction, addresses the core issue of the language of sf, usefully
building on but also arguing with Samuel R. Delanys celebrated 1969 essay About 5,750
Words, and implicitly identifying the great stumbling block for readers who just cant get
into sf because they dont understand or dont enjoy the game of unpacking future
settings from hints embedded in nonstandard words and constructions. All this is
developed with admirable clarity.
As author of the ambitious, tightly packed and far from chauvinistic A Very British
Genre: A Short History of British Fantasy and Science Fiction (1995), Paul has followed
Brian Aldiss in celebrating the British as well as the American contribution to our
favourite genres. Hence the essays here that focus on Britains Holdstock, Priest and
Roberts, whose fiction has repeatedly (though in fascinatingly different ways) shaped itself
to the contours of English landscape. The Kincaid power of insight is equally effective with
ex-pat Clarke, a citizen of the world if ever there was one, and with major transatlantic
figures like to name three of my own favourites Borges, Haldeman, and Wolfe.
Collections like this are good to have, because an sf critics best work tends to be
scattered haphazardly through space and time, in fanzines, old British Science Fiction
Association magazines and copies of Foundation, and even (as with two of the Wolfe
essays here) marooned in books yet to be published. Now here at last is a solid volume of
Paul Kincaids intelligent, meticulous writings about sf and fantasy, showcasing his range
and consistency, a synthesis thats more than the sum of its parts. I very much hope that
sequels will follow. Meanwhile, this is a book I can steal from. ...

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

WHAT

IT IS WE DO WHEN WE READ

SCIENCE FICTION

I want to begin with two brief quotations. The first I came across only a couple of
days ago, when I began reading The Fantastic Self, and it occasioned a hurried
revision of this opening. It comes from Peter Nichollss article, Trapped in the Pattern,
where he says:
Structuralists and especially post structuralists will tell you that because words
are merely signposts to things, having no essential solidity in themselves, their
mimicking of reality must always be fluid and impossible to define with
scientific precision.1

I must say here and now that as far as I am aware I am neither a structuralist nor
a post-structuralist, though since Ive never been entirely sure what those terms really
mean I suppose its possible that I am. What I do want to do, however, is talk about
words as signposts, and especially about what neologisms are used to point towards.
My second quotation, and the place I originally intended to start this talk, comes
from Ludwig Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations:
When we say: Every word in language signifies something we have so far said
nothing whatever; unless we have explained exactly what distinction we wish
to make.2

Thus Wittgenstein sets up his argument that the meaning of words is contained in
the way we use them. In this talk I will explore the way we use words in science
fiction. Or rather, the way we use new words, neologisms, not as a device for making
things seem strange and alien (which is what we might expect) but, quite the contrary,
as a device for making the strange and alien seem familiar and understandable.
There is a philosophical problem with the very act of reading. It seems simple. We
read a sentence like The cat sat on the mat and we understand what it means. (I shall
ignore, at least for the moment, such relatively insignificant problems as how we
translate black marks on a page into sounds, and sounds into images.)
Let us assume that we know to equate the letters CAT with a cat and the letters
MAT with a mat, and that our understanding of grammatical structure allows us to
place the one upon the other. Nevertheless, the words on the page do not mirror
reality. The cat sat on the mat does not bear any sort of resemblance to a cat sitting
on a mat. And the word cat, for instance, does not change even though we can easily
understand the same word applying to a black and white tom or a tabby kitten.
What do we mean by mean?
This is a problem that has exercised philosophers for as long as they have studied
-- 3 --

logic and language. Wittgenstein, as Ive noted, spent half his career playing language
games, while J.L. Austin, in a series of lectures published under the wonderfully
straightforward title, How to Do Things with Words, argued: There are parasitic uses
of language, which are not serious, not the full normal use. The normal conditions
of reference may be suspended.3 In talking about how we do things with words in
fiction any sort of fiction, not just science fiction I am examining, I think, one of
these parasitic uses. But I dont think the normal conditions of reference are
suspended; rather, I suspect that they are simply reversed. I will come to that in time,
for now I want to say that I am not proposing to find a neat solution to these
philosophical problems, nor to formulate an elegant new theory. I raise this notion
only as a way of setting the scene for what I do want to discuss.
The standard theory of meaning is that the language in some way models the
reality, in the same way that 1 + 1 = 2 is a conventional way of modelling one apple
and one apple being two apples, even though the figures and their grammatical
structure bear no resemblance to the actual apples. This is easy to see in simple
descriptive statements the cat sat on the mat though it becomes a little more
esoteric, shall we say, when we move on to less concrete statements such as: There
is a philosophical problem with the very act of reading.
Nonetheless, let us accept this modelling theory. It is, after all, the simplest, most
commonsensical way of looking at the question. What this demands of us, of course,
is an understanding of the language: our knowledge of what the words mean, and
what the grammatical structure of the language means, is what allows us to see the
reality modelled by the sentence. It doesnt need to be a profound understanding. You
dont need to have John Clutes vocabulary to be able to read John Clutes reviews,
just the ability to refer to a good dictionary.
But if language models reality, how do we cope with fiction? Let me be pedantic
about this: fiction is not real. When Ebenezer Scrooge wakes on Christmas morning,
leans out of his window and instructs a boy in the street below to run and buy a goose
and deliver it to Bob Cratchit, none of this happened. Scrooge, Cratchit and the boy
did not exist, nor did the street, the house or the goose. The language models nothing
in reality.
Does this mean that the view of language as a model breaks down? Of course it
doesnt.
The word cat is not a cat. In fact, the word cat can be any cat, as I pointed out
earlier. If not, we would have to have a different word for every cat that ever existed,
and each new litter would require a new dictionary. The language would consist
entirely of proper names and would be useless. The very fact that we can use general
words to stand for general types of things is what allows us to communicate and
that, after all, is what language is for.
When I say The cat sat on the mat you dont have to know which cat, or which
mat, to understand my meaning. Language works by triggering general images which
we all share to some degree or another. Every one of us probably sees something
-- 4 --

different when I say The cat sat on the mat: a difference in the size or shape or
colour of the cat, or of the mat, a difference in posture, in whereabouts on the mat
the cat is. There are a myriad differences, even for a statement as simple as that, and
I cannot know in detail what any of you are seeing. But there is something common,
some degree to which we all see the same thing. This commonality allows you to
understand me when I say The cat sat on the mat, and this, for the sake of argument,
Ill call meaning.
Fiction exists because of that inbuilt lack of specificity in meaning.
We dont know Scrooges window or street, but we do know windows and streets.
Enough, at least, to get a general idea of the scene. And anything more specific we
need to know can be conveyed by other words whose meaning we share: a blue
frame, cobblestones.
Of course, for all it might have been near-contemporary for Dickens, A Christmas
Carol is set long in our past; so far, indeed, that it is beyond the direct experience of
any of us. Things common then might have disappeared by now; fashions, for
instance, must have changed more than a hundred times since then. Other words
might well have changed their meaning: gay, after all, has undergone a radical
change of meaning just in the last twenty years or so. Does that mean the book has,
in some way, lost its meaning?
No. The meaning, the commonality of the text, does not depend on the meaning
of individual words. We are used to words that make no sense in themselves.
Sometimes we can grasp the meaning from context, sometimes we might unearth it
in a dictionary, sometimes we might even skip over it: the meaning of the text as a
whole survives.
Which brings me, at last, to science fiction. Here is a fairly typical passage from a
fairly typical science fiction novel, in this case Beggars and Choosers by Nancy Kress:
Drew turned his powerchair to face Leishas golden hair, green eyes, genemod
perfect skin.4

Well, I dont know Drew or Leisha, but they are fictional people in the same way
that Scrooge and Cratchit are, and I can presumably draw some understanding of
them from other people I know, in life or in books. Powerchair I also dont know, but
I can stretch the word out a bit powered wheelchair and I have a pretty good
general idea of what is going on here. I may not know any specifics How is it
powered? What does it look like? Does it indeed run on wheels? just as I dont know
the specific cat when I read The cat sat on the mat. But I dont need to know such
detail to extract the meaning of the scene being presented. All I need to be able to
see is that Drew is in some way disabled and gets about by means of a chair. If I
needed to know more than this to understand the scene, or, indeed, the rest of the
book, the author would presumably provide it in further description.
Then we come to genemod Now I can unpack this word some variation on
genetic modification, obviously but that doesnt actually explain the word to me.
-- 5 --

I have some slight acquaintance with notions of genetic engineering from

newspapers, from magazines like New Scientist, from other science fictions, but it is
more alien to me than any of the mysteries of A Christmas Carol. Any mysterious
words in the Dickens novel were at least avatars of reality, even if the reality is
unfamiliar to me. But genemod is an avatar of nothing that exists. There is no
genetic modification of the sort casually adumbrated by the use of this word.
In this particular usage the word relates to someones skin but not just perfect
skin. Genemod clearly modifies the adjective perfect, but in a way I can never
understand. There is no image brought to my mind by these words, the sentence
models no reality, it is, literally, meaningless.
Now genemod is an example of something that is very common in science
fiction: the neologism. In fact, the critic Gary Westfahl has gone so far as to suggest
that the number of neologisms in a work can be used to provide some sort of
quantitative measure of it as science fiction. In his article, The Words That Could
Happen, in Extrapolation, he says:
I would contend that in most cases a new idea will demand a new word, and a
new word will be generated by a new idea; and assuming that the numbers of
exceptions will more or less cancel out, we can obtain a rough picture of the
number and nature of its new words. And the advantage of the process is
obvious: it would be difficult indeed to devise a widely accepted method for
identifying and quantifying ideas in science fiction, but it is relatively easy to
recognise and count neologisms.5

This is not a theory I happen to hold with. Its not even one I find easy to take
seriously. For a start, Im not sure that science fiction should be measured by the
number of new ideas it generates; I find that a very sterile way of looking at the
genre. Certainly, science fiction is about novelty. It is about our need to see things
anew, askew, in fresh surroundings or from fresh perspectives, but that does not
always, or even often, translate as new ideas. What we get frequently in science
fiction are old ideas put into new contexts, which open them afresh to our wonder
and appreciation. More than that, however, I think Westfahl has profoundly
misinterpreted the role of the neologism in science fiction. The neologism is not
there to establish new ideas by giving them a vocabulary. Still less is it there to
blind us with future science. Rather, the new words are there as a guide to the
reader; they domesticate the strange by making it familiar, they clarify the
incomprehensible by giving us a clue to understanding it. Far from blinding us with
science they throw a necessary light which reveals the science. As Westfahl himself
says elsewhere in that article: The new world is thus understood and absorbed by
means of its new words.6
But science fiction doesnt do this only, or even primarily, with new words. In fact,
old words are, wherever possible, better for conveying the new worlds. Let us take
another example, this time from Greg Egans much-reprinted story Wangs Carpets:
-- 6 --

Paolo willed the polis library to brief him; it promptly rewired the declarative
memory of his simulated traditional brain with all the information he was likely
to need to satisfy his immediate curiosity.7

There are a couple of obscure words in here I know polis, for instance, because
I once studied Greek philosophy but there are no new words. What the old words
do, however, is as new as the new words in the quotation from Beggars and Choosers,
and the language has to be unpacked in exactly the same way. Simulated traditional
brain, for instance, is not a phrase we would be likely to use in our everyday lives
because it would not apply to anything. There is no referent; it is as meaningless, in
a literal sense, as genemod. But we know the words that make up the phrase, just as
we know the words that make up genemod, and from them we can gather a vague
picture of the world. By modifying brain with traditional we gather that the grey
matter we are used to is now somewhat old-fashioned. That this traditional brain is,
moreover, simulated tells us that our fleshly existence is no longer necessary; that
Paolo is at liberty to simulate, or not, his own brain. Egan uses our understanding of
the words to make us understand something of the world he is building. The words
he uses are not neologisms, nor is he using old words as if they had a new meaning;
the words mean exactly what we expect them to mean, but they are combined in ways
which change our reading of the words, which change what we imagine they might
refer to.
The point about neologisms in science fiction is precisely that question of what
they refer to. English is a living language; new words come into existence with
startling frequency, but always they are words with a use. The referent comes first,
then comes the word to refer to it. The referent, remember, need not be an actual
physical object. It may be an idea, it may even be a new greeting taken up by a
nations youth to make them more incomprehensible to any other generation. In
fiction, however, especially in science fiction, it appears that the word may come first.
(In fact, if we examine the process of composition we will probably discover that the
writer more often than not comes up with the notion, then thinks of the word to
describe that notion; but when we enter that world by reading the fiction, the word
is there before we discover its referent.), However, the word always has a use. The
word is employed as if it has a referent. The new word is a way of imagining the
novelty of the fiction into existence, and the word itself has the vital function of
acting as our signpost towards that novelty.
Some neologisms have become so familiar that they have escaped the confines of
one science fiction novel and entered the everyday language even before they have
referents in reality. I am thinking, for example, of robot, spaceship, cyberspace.
Robot, which comes from the Czech word robotit: to drudge, and hence would have
been perfectly transparent in its meaning to its original audience, is old enough to
have changed its meaning. In Karel Capeks play, R.U.R., Domain, the General
Manager of Rossums Universal Robots, talks of the manufacture of artificial people,8
-- 7 --

and these artificial people are in fact much closer to what we would more commonly
term androids today. But clearly the fact that a word is coined for a fictional rather
than a real purpose is no bar to it having the commonality of reference that we call
meaning.
It is a commonplace that most neologisms in science fiction are put together from
easily identifiable roots: spaceship, genemod. If we come across a strange word in a
mainstream novel we can usually guess its meaning from its context. If we come
across a strange word in science fiction we are meant to guess the context from its
meaning, so we need to be given clues to the meaning. If we come across a new word
in a science fiction novel that isnt constructed from easily identifiable roots, then
almost invariably it is fully defined within the novel (and all too often is a straight
transposition for old words that would do just as well, such as codder and shiggy
for man and woman in John Brunners Stand On Zanzibar).
What I am saying by this is that in science fiction it is not so much important that
we identify the strange word spaceship as that through the word we glimpse the
context: there is travel through space. The exact meaning of the word genemod is
less important than its role as a signpost telling us that here genes are modified. The
sense of simulated traditional brain is secondary to its implications about the nature
of the brain, and hence the nature of humanity.
The neologisms do not inhabit the fictional world in any realist sense. Despite the
slangy way in which so many of these words are introduced into science fiction, they
are not there as a reflection of genuine speech patterns, or even what the authors
imagine might become genuine speech patterns. Take, for example, a term that has
been common in science fiction for at least fifty years, and which I found most
recently in George Turners posthumous novel Down There in Darkness. At one point
Turner has a character say: A few days before last Christmas I received a vidcall at
the complex.9 Now, in all probability the people of the 2030s, when this portion of
the story is set, would say they received a call, much as we do now. But a realist
account of how people might actually talk is not what Turner or any other science
fiction writer, come to that is trying to provide. The word vidcall is used not to
inhabit the future but to tell us, here and now, something of what that future is like.
Specifically, in reading vidcall rather than call we discover that in this future
technology has advanced sufficiently for us to see as well as hear people who call
us: and for almost as long as there has been the telephone, that has been a handy
shorthand image of the future. The word vidcall, as Turner uses it, is a signpost
towards the world he is presenting.
This, of course, is one of the reasons that Gary Westfahls theory falls down: it is
not really the new words that matter, but the contexts they signify. And, as Greg
Egans description of his extremely unfamiliar future shows, such strange contexts
the essential novelty of the situation can be signified without recourse to strange
words. Robert Heinleins famous line, for instance The door dilated.10 contains
no word that is not readily familiar.
-- 8 --

It is this line from Heinlein that Samuel R. Delany uses as the crux of his argument
that science fiction is a language we must learn. In his essay, About 5,750 Words,
Delany quotes Harlan Ellisons typically over-the-top reaction to that simple, threeword sentence:
the first time in a novel, I believe it was in Beyond This Horizon, that a
character came through a door that dilated. And no discussion. Just: The
door dilated. I read across it, and was two lines down before I realized what the
image had been, what the words had called forth. A dilating door. It didnt open,
it Irised! Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world11

Ellisons reaction what the words had called forth is precisely what I am
trying to say, more long-windedly, about the function of neologisms. If we did not
understand exactly what the words meant, we would not get the image that they are
striving to present. So any neologism in science fiction that is truly new, that cannot
be unpicked and unravelled so that we see the familiar, understandable words behind
it, is not doing its job. It is not just strange words that provoke the Ellisonian reaction
Dear God, now I knew I was in a future world it is what the words tell us. And
though there is nothing new in The door dilated, just as there is nothing new in
simulated traditional brain, it is as much a neologism within the language of science
fiction as genemod.
The language of science fiction? Delany contends that in other books, the sorts of
phrases that contain the very science-fictionality of a text may appear like metaphors
or flights of fancy; but in science fiction such metaphors are made concrete, and we
learn to understand this, we learn how to read this, through our familiarity with other
works of science fiction, through a gradual acclimatisation to the genre.
Now, I am quite happy to accept Delanys notion as a metaphor of the way we
read science fiction. Our first exposure to science fiction and here I am talking of
science fiction as novel or story, not as film or tv programme or graphic novel; there
the procedure is probably the same but the language is different to start with can
be disorienting. There are words we dont know, things that dont belong in our
familiar existence, events that dont make sense. For some, such disorientation can be
something we consciously seek out. Robert Silverberg once introduced a collection of
James Tiptree stories by describing her method: Start from the end and preferably
5,000 feet underground on a dark day and then DONT TELL THEM.12 But for others,
this can be a serious problem with science fiction; they might read one or two novels
then no more. It can take time to learn to read science fiction, to learn how to pick
up the clues to the world presented in the creation of new words or the shaping of
metaphor-like phrases. It takes time to learn the conventions, and if we see a language
as a set of conventions, then yes, science fiction is a language.
But if Delany means anything more concrete than this, if he wants to suggest that
science fiction has its own unique commonality of meaning, then he is wrong. In fact,
the exact opposite is true: science fiction can only work because it is not a language.
-- 9 --

On a trivial level, if science fiction were language it would be not one but
thousands. There is no commonality of worlds between sf novels, so there can be no
commonality of meaning. The word genemod might appear in Beggars in Spain or
Beggars Ride, respectively the predecessor and successor to Beggars and Choosers (I
havent gone back to check), but it will probably appear nowhere else in Nancy
Kresss work, or anywhere else in science fiction. Or, if it does appear elsewhere, it
wont be the same word because it will have a different meaning, point the way to a
different context, belong to a different world in which genetic engineering has taken
a different track and has different social or political or dramatic consequences.
Vidcall has appeared in countless other science fiction novels and stories before
George Turners Down There in Darkness, but although it is spelt and pronounced the
same it is probably not the same word. The technology described and the social
situation within which it is located would, to some degree, be different. If it was not,
then it would be essentially the same world, essentially the same story. The necessary
novelty of science fiction, in other words, means that if it were a language you would
have to learn it anew with each new book you opened.
On the contrary, you discover the strangeness afresh with each new book precisely
because of the familiarity of the language. When we read: The door dilated, the thrill
of the new image is in the familiarity of the words. If we didnt know the words, the
language, so well the vivid, surprising image would not hit us so immediately. We do
not have to learn the image (the very notion is in itself faintly ridiculous) but the
science-fictionality of that line is in the image it conjures up. Turning again to George
Turners novel, Down There in Darkness, for instance, we come across a line like: A
private car, placing him well in the Minder income bracket.13 Within this novel we
find out nothing else about the Minders, not even how they got their name, which is
not the sort of name we might normally apply to any social class. But we dont need
to know more. Can there be anyone here unclear about what this class is, just from
that brief quotation? The name alone tells us what we need to know; it was carefully
chosen by Turner not, I suspect, because it sounds like the sort of name a social class
in his future world might be given, but because its suggestion of intrusive paternalism
tells us, the readers, what we need to understand about this society. We can
extrapolate a great deal from that one word, Minder, and the familiarity of the
language is what makes a strange society easier for us to comprehend.
Parenthetically, it is worth pointing out that it isnt the neologism Minder that
makes my quotation science-fictional, no matter how much freight the word might
be made to bear. It is the remark, in plain English, that ownership of a private car is
enough to elevate one to an exclusive class that makes this science fiction.
So, the phrase genemod perfect skin may conjure up no particular precise image,
because the word genemod tells me nothing; that the library rewired the declarative
memory of his simulated traditional brain says things I cannot comprehend because
I have absolutely no experience of any of the materials or processes involved in this
action. But I can disinter something of the origin of the word, of the phrase, precisely
-- 10 --

because of the familiarity of the language, and it is that familiarity that lets it carry
its true freight, a suggestion of a world in which there is genetic modification, of a
transhuman state of being.
One of the central, defining characteristics of science fiction lies in the way it
creates worlds. We would not even recognise a work as science fiction if it did not
convey some sense of otherness, some key way in which the world presented differs
from the world we recognise as everyday reality. Language is the tool used to create
that world, to convey that otherness, so the language used has to be, in a sense,
outside that world rather than a part of it. In his story Nevermore, Ian R. MacLeod
creates a future where virtual reality has become ever more convincing until it has
reached the state where they just call it reality. Which means they had to find a new
term for our ordinary, everyday, consensus reality, the reality that fewer and fewer
people in the world of the story ever bother with. Or rather, MacLeod had to invent a
word so that we, the readers, might understand the importance of virtual reality to
the people of this future, and still be able to tell virtual from quotidian reality. The
inhabitants of such a world would not have the same problems with what is real that
we do, because we are trying to learn everything relevant about the world in the space
of just this one story. The neologism that MacLeod invents is foreal. It is easy for us
to unpack the word, in the same way that we unpacked words like powerchair or
genemod in the passage from Beggars and Choosers: foreal stretches into for real.
But the word also carries with it another reading, faux real or false real, a reading
that is important in our understanding of the world of the story and particularly in
our understanding of the dynamics of the characters within that story, and one which
is encouraged also by the fact that MacLeod sets his story in France. The words are
deliberately chosen for the image of the world they will convey to the reader.
Language is a means of conveyance; the message is what is conveyed. If we take
too literally Delanys notion that science fiction is a language, then we are confusing
the conveyance with the conveyed.
What we are actually doing when we read science fiction is allowing ourselves to
be mystified. Strange words, common words in strange conjunctions, all separate the
language from what we commonly expect its referents to be. To this extent, science
fiction appears to be literally meaningless, because the non-specificity of language
has gone beyond any connection to reality.
But, in fact, the language that mystifies us is also the only way we might discover
the meaning of what we read. By breaking the language loose from one set of
referents we are able to model a new, an invented reality. This new model does not
come from nowhere. It is made up of existing bits and pieces but put together in
unusual arrangements. It is our familiarity with the language that provides not only
the elements which go to make the model but also our ability to understand it.

-- 11 --

ON

THE

ORIGINS

OF

GENRE

There is no starting point for science fiction. There is no one novel that marks the
beginning of the genre. We have all had a go at identifying the ur-text, the source
from which Heinlein and Ellison and Gibson and Ballard and Priest and Le Guin and
a host of others flow. Brian Aldiss famously named Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, and
his suggestion has been taken up by a number of later commentators. Other strong
contenders include H.G. Wells, or Edgar Allen Poe, or Jules Verne. Gary Westfahl has
nominated Hugo Gernsback as the true father of science fiction. Still others (including
myself) have gone back to Thomas Mores Utopia.
We are all wrong.
We have to be wrong, because there is no ancestral text that could possibly
contain, even in nascent form, all that we have come to identify as science fiction.
What part of Frankenstein, for instance, as diluted as homeopathic medicine, is to
be found in Philip K. Dicks The Martian Timeslip, or Gene Wolfes The Book of the
New Sun, or Octavia Butlers Parable of the Talents, or Isaac Asimovs Foundation?
What, come to that, could possibly link these disparate texts, other than the fact that
we have come to apply the name science fiction to all of them?
This inability to define science fiction is a problem we have long recognised. In
his 1986 work, Critical Terms for Science Fiction: A Glossary and Guide to
Scholarship, Gary K. Wolfe included 33 different definitions of science fiction, many
of which overlapped to some degree or other, but all of which included contradictions.
The critical test for any definition is that it includes everything we believe should be
included within the term, and it excludes everything we believe should be omitted.
Strictly applied, every single one of those definitions would admit to the genre works
that we would prefer to exclude, or would omit works we feel belong in the genre.
Even Darko Suvins cognitive estrangement, expressed thus: SF in general through
its long history in different contexts can be defined as a literary genre whose
necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement
and cognition1, which seems to have become the default definition of choice of most
academic critics, is a prescriptive definition which works fine as long as we are
comfortable with what it prescribes, but can lead to extraordinary convolutions as we
try to show that certain favoured texts really do conform to the idea of cognitive
estrangement, and even more extraordinary convolutions to reveal that familiar nonsf texts dont.
Since Wolfes tour dhorizon, science fiction scholarship has expanded
exponentially, and most commentators have felt the need to add a new way of
defining what it is they are talking about. These vary from formulations that are so
-- 13 --

imprecise as to be virtually useless Kim Stanley Robinson, in his Guest of Honour

Speech at Readercon in 1997 said, Science fiction is the history that we cannot know
to those that attempt to touch every base, and end up tying themselves in knots in
the process. The Sixth Edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature (2000),
says:
The label science fiction suggests a hybrid form, not quite ordinary fiction, not
quite science, yet partaking of both. Beneath this label, we find a variety of
wares, some of which trail off from a hypothetical central point into utopianism
or dystopianism, heroic fantasy, horror, and books on UFOs and the paranormal.
Yet its startlements are normally based either on a possible scientific advance,
or on a natural or social change, or on a suspicion that the world is not as it is
commonly represented. It follows that one of the unacknowledged pleasures of
reading science fiction (or SF) is that it challenges readers to decide whether
what they are reading is within the bounds of the possible.2

This is an interesting definition, clearly written by someone sympathetic to the

genre, yet as a means of identifying what science fiction is, it is useless. [N]ot quite
ordinary fiction, not quite science, yet partaking of both: what does this mean? In
what way is it not quite ordinary fiction (and what might that be)? To what degree
is it science? By what proportions does it partake of both? The qualification
normally based implies that a goodly portion of science fiction might not be based
on any of the categories that follow. Yet these categories are hardly restricted to
science fiction: a suspicion that the world is not as it is commonly represented has
been the hallmark of conspiracy theories throughout history, without any suggestion
that such theories are necessarily science fiction. And literature based on some form
or notion of social change includes such key science-fictional texts as Sense and
Sensibility, The Road to Wigan Pier and at least half the oeuvre of P.G. Wodehouse. I
am being unduly harsh on what is, after all, an honourable attempt to apostrophize,
briefly, the indefinable. But much the same criticisms could be levelled against any
extant definition of science fiction, and it is only by looking at why these definitions
fail that we can start to consider what it is that makes science fiction indefinable.
In brief: the more comprehensively a definition seeks to encompass science
fiction, the more unsatisfactory it seems to those of us who know the genre. To which
one response is that we simply ignore the question altogether. The Clute and Nicholls
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) contains reference to just about every form of
science fiction, but though there is an entry on Definitions of SF, it doesnt actually
include a definition of sf. The article, which covers much the same ground as the
entry in Gary Wolfes book, is a conspectus of the different and often incompatible
definitions that have been proposed for the genre. But it does not arrive at a single,
comprehensive overview of what science fiction is. Either there is no such single,
comprehensive definition or, as when The Oxford Companion to English Literature
concludes that science fiction challenges readers to decide, we finally admit that
-- 14 --

science fiction is defined not by something intrinsic to the genre, but rather it is in
the eye of the beholder. In other words, many of us end up echoing Damon Knight:
science fiction is what we point to when we say it? (Though it is worth remembering
that what Damon Knight actually wrote in In Search of Wonder (1956) was: The term
science fiction is a misnomer, it will do us no particular harm if we remember
that, like The Saturday Evening Post, it means what we point to when we say it.3)
Knights ostensive definition of science fiction has been so frequently misquoted and
adapted one brutalist variant is Norman Spinrads (in Modern Science Fiction):
Science fiction is anything published as science fiction4, which excludes
Frankenstein, most of the works of H.G. Wells, and practically every contemporary
science fiction novel, at least in Britain where publishers have mostly abandoned
putting the descriptor science fiction on their books that its subtlety and value is
often missed. I will be trying to exploit that subtlety in this essay.
The two questions are, of course, intimately connected. Where we find the starting
point for science fiction inevitably affects how we define the genre, and vice versa.
Thus Brian Aldisss famous definition from Billion Year Spree (1973) Science
fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will
stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is
characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould5 cannily excludes
anything that might precede his chosen ur-text, Frankenstein. Alexei and Cory
Panshin, in The World Beyond the Hill (1989), want to present science fiction as being
centrally concerned with transcendence, so their definition, Science fiction is a
literature of the mythic imagination6, throws the net wide enough to include any of
early mans attempts at myth-making, while excluding more recent science fictions
that shade into social realism. Gary Westfahl wants to prove, in The Mechanics of
Wonder (1998), that Hugo Gernsback was the true father of science fiction and so
constructs a description of science fiction in which the community engendered by
Gernsback through his magazines is a vital part of what makes the genre: If we define
a genre as consisting of a body of texts related by a shared understanding of that
genre as recorded in contemporary commentary, then a true history of science fiction
as a genre must begin in 1926, at the time when Gernsback defined science fiction7.
In the beginning is the definition. And what we conceive science fiction to be
inevitably dictates how we identify its origin. Whats more, where we place that
starting point inevitably affects what we see as the history (and the prehistory) of the
genre, which in turn changes our perception of what science fiction is. It is a mobius
loop: the definition affects the perception of the historical starting point, which in
turn affects the definition.
Except that just as we have no commonly agreed definition of the genre; we have
no primum mobile that everyone can accept. Everyone is on a different mobius loop.
This is because, as I indicated in my opening statement, there is not one definition
of science fiction but many, there is not one ur-text but many. We choose whichever
best suit our conceptions of science fiction, and change those choices (or devise new
-- 15 --

ones) as our conceptions change. In other words, whenever we talk about science
fiction, we are effectively using a private language.
The amazing thing is that there is still enough overlap in our understanding of the
terms for us to know, more or less and in most cases, what other people are talking
about. The reason for this, I suggest, is best understood by taking a different approach
to the linked questions of the definition and the starting point for the genre.
It is a neat and rational idea to imagine that we can look at science fiction,
identify within it the various necessary elements that define the genre, and trace these
back to find the earliest single instance in which these necessary lineaments are
unequivocally combined. But reality is rarely so neat or so rational as this model
might suggest. How do we identify which elements are necessary and which are
sufficient to define the genre when, as I have noted, we cannot agree on a definition
in the first place? Which combination of these elements has to be in place for that
earliest instance to be unequivocal?
The truth is that this model could only work if science fiction was one thing, if
every instance of the genre shared 99% of the same DNA. But if we take as the DNA
of a genre the various story elements that we tend to hold up as identifiers of science
fiction for the sake of argument, these might include such disparate and often
imprecise things as hardware, setting, theme, authorial intent, feel it is possible for
two stories to share none of the same DNA and yet have readers willing to identify
them as science fiction: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and Pavane by Keith
Roberts, for instance. In Damon Knights terms, we can confidently point to both
these works, along with, for example, Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss,
Counter-Clock World by Philip K. Dick, The Affirmation by Christopher Priest, The
Female Man by Joanna Russ, and proclaim: yes, that is science fiction. But we could
point to nothing that makes every one of these science fiction at the same time and
in the same way. And it is worth remembering that no story is wholly science fiction.
Even stories like Day Million by Frederik Pohl or Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death
by James Tiptree Jr works which seem comprehensively to occupy the sciencefictionality of their worlds will share something, be it use of language,
characterisation, satirical intent, or whatever, which still links it with non-science
fiction works. So we can not extract a unique, common thread which we could trace
back to a unique, common origin.
Science fiction in particular, and probably all genres in general, do not work that
way. A genre does not emerge, entire and fully armed, from the body of literature. A
better analogy might be evolution by means of natural selection. There is an inchoate
mass of story, each individual writer struggling with each individual story to produce
something that will succeed, that will sell, or will please an editor, or will please a
reader, or will make a particular point, or will work in a formal experimental sense,
or, more likely, that will do several or all of these and perhaps more besides. In order
to do this they might use ideas or themes or settings picked up from other writers, or
which are a reaction against those of other writers; they might distort something old
-- 16 --

and familiar or invent something entirely new; they might take bits and pieces from
a dozen different sources and recombine them in a novel way or regard them from a
novel perspective. The exact details of this evolutionary process need not concern us,
but eventually enough writers will be producing work that is sufficiently similar for
us to start recognising patterns.
Once we have this identifiable pattern, and we have given a name to it (let us, for
the sake of argument, call it science fiction), some people will work strictly within
the pattern, others will deliberately avoid the pattern, still others will occupy a vague
hinterland part in and part out of the pattern, while there will be yet more who cross
the borders working within or outwith the pattern as the inspiration takes them. Yet
none of them, even those working strictly within its boundaries, will replicate the
pattern precisely in every instance. Were they to do so, they would be writing the
same book; as long as writers are writing different books they will be in a constant
process of taking different things from and adding different things to the pattern. The
pattern, the genre, is hence in a state of constant flux.
Having already appropriated the phrase private language from Ludwig
Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations, I now want to borrow another of his
terms: family resemblances. When he was looking at the way language is used,
Wittgenstein had a problem with the word sport. We use the word to identify a
clearly understood set of activities, but what it is that identifies those activities as
sport is not so clear. Some sports use a ball, but not all do. Some use some form of
racket or bat, but many dont. Many involve strenuous physical exercise, but some
(diving, snooker, target shooting) dont. Some require acute hand-eye coordination,
many dont. Some demand brute strength but not grace, others demand grace but not
brute strength, still others dont demand either. And so on. For every identifying
characteristic, there are activities which we call sports which do not possess them (and
there are activities which we do not call sports, certain games for instance, which may
possess them). In other words, the more closely we look at what the word sport
means, the fuzzier it becomes; but we are all quite clear in how we use the word, and
we are confident when we say X is a sport, but Y isnt (we may disagree on particular
instances is synchronised swimming a sport? but that doesnt affect our
confidence in using the word). Wittgensteins conclusion was that sports bear family
resemblances to other sports. To simplify the process, we might recognise that a sport
with characteristics A, B, C and D bears a family resemblance to a sport with
characteristics B, C, D and E, and this in turn has a family resemblance to a third sport
with characteristics C, D, E and F, and so on. It is because we recognise this network
of resemblances that we are able to use words like sport which stand for a wide
variety of very different instances. It is also easy to see that we can trace this network
of resemblances to discover a relationship between two sports which actually have no
individual characteristics in common.
The analogy with science fiction is, I hope, obvious. Again, we have a term,
science fiction, that we use to apply to a wide variety of individual works and groups
-- 17 --

of works, some of which have no obvious characteristics in common with others.

Again, we are confident, as Damon Knight implied, in using the term to say: X is
science fiction, but Y isnt (and again, we may disagree over individual instances
is the film Apollo 13 science fiction? Is the novel Perdido Street Station by China
Miville? but that does not affect our confidence in using the term). Thus science
fiction is as amenable to the idea of family resemblances as sport is, and I would
suggest that it is a more productive way of looking at our use of the term than is any
attempt at definition.
A definition attempts to fix the pattern that applies to science fiction, but the
pattern, as I have shown, is in constant flux, and no definition has successfully
managed to encompass all that it is, all that it has been, and all that it might be.
Family resemblances are more flexible, since they allow us to keep pace with every
change in the genre. A radical new work that takes science fiction in an unexpected
direction would not require a redefinition; all that is required is that it bear a family
resemblance to another work that we commonly agree is science fiction. (If the new
work is so radical that we cannot agree that it bears any resemblance to any other
work of science fiction, then perhaps we must concede that it is not science fiction;
but such an instance would take us beyond the purview of this essay.) Thus, family
resemblances recognise science fiction as a restless, dynamic form that might head
out in multiple different directions from multiple different origins, and yet still be
something that we can talk about sensibly under the one heading: science fiction.
If all that is required for us to call a work science fiction is that we recognise it is
a member of the same family as another work which we have already identified as
science fiction, it might seem that we are simply pushing the question of definition
back one stage. We cannot say that A is science fiction because it resembles B, which
in turn resembles C, which resembles D, which in turn etc. This is an endless regress
that tells us nothing, and if all that family resemblances are doing is embarking on
such a regress it is as useless as any attempt to define the genre. But, in fact, all we
need as a starting point is common agreement that something is science fiction. What
makes it science fiction may, and probably will, vary from instance to instance, and
is in fact irrelevant for our purposes here. It is not important why we agree that X is
science fiction, it is only important that we agree. And there are many hundreds,
indeed thousands, of works whose identity as science fiction is not problematic. We
do not engage in heated arguments about whether The War of the Worlds or The
Moon is a Harsh Mistress or I, Robot is science fiction, because such arguments would
be fruitless. It is not in the heartland of science fiction that definitions, or family
resemblances, are an issue, but on the borders, where science fiction is changing into
something else, or something else is changing into science fiction.
Why certain works are unequivocally part of the heartland of science fiction may
be historical accident; it may be as simple as certain editors (Hugo Gernsback, John
W. Campbell) buying stories of a familiar type which were published in magazines
labelled Science Fiction. Whatever the precise details of the case, what has
-- 18 --

undeniably happened is that certain works with certain characteristics in common

have been published so consistently under the label science fiction that they have
come to be seen as representative of that label. Consequently, there are any number
of works The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin, The Rose by Charles Harness,
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury that, for most purposes and in most circumstances,
we would not dream of labelling anything other than science fiction. We have no
problem in identifying these and countless similar stories as science fiction, so much
so that the question of what actually makes them science fiction never arises. As we
move away from this heartland, however, the science-fictionality of individual works
becomes less clear-cut, less unquestioned. Is the Canopus in Argos sequence science
fiction despite the fact that it was written by an author, Doris Lessing, not normally
associated with the genre, and who has deliberately eschewed the term in favour of
her own coinage, space fiction? Is Perdido Street Station science fiction despite the
fact that it makes significant use of devices more commonly associated with genre
fantasy or supernatural horror? Is Frankenstein science fiction despite the fact that it
predates our commonly accepted use of the term by a century and its tropes have
been most successfully taken up by the horror film?
It is precisely here, where questions of our use of the term science fiction are most
pertinent, that definitions of science fiction are generally least valuable. By
establishing rigid formulations designed, of necessity, to encompass the heartland,
they become questionable and often counter-intuitive just where they are most
needed, on the borderland. By tracing family resemblances, however, we have no
problem with whether or not the name science fiction can be applied, even to works
which actually cross the imprecise and ever-changing borders of the genre.
Moreover, it is rare for a work, even in the heartland of genre, to be all of one
thing or all of another. A novel such as The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov, for
instance, is clearly and unequivocally science fiction, but it also clearly and
deliberately partakes of the detective story. It is a recognisable member of two
different genre families. But there is no problem in saying that in respect of
characteristics A, B and C it resembles science fiction, and hence discussing it as a
work of science fiction; that in respect of characteristics X, Y and Z it resembles
detective fiction, and hence discussing it as a work of detective fiction. Whether the
science fiction, or any other genre aspects, are done well or ill is beside the point; that
they are there at all is what we recognise in a work. By the same token, in terms of
the beauty or otherwise of the language employed or the characterisation, or the scene
setting, or any of countless other qualities, we might equally recognise a novel as a
work of science fiction and at the same time more broadly as a work of fiction. Again,
a novel like Perdido Street Station, which partakes of elements of, among others,
science fiction, fantasy and horror, can be included in the discussion of science fiction
in relation to those elements which resemble science fiction, just as it can be included
in the discussions of fantasy and horror in relation to those elements which resemble
fantasy and horror.
-- 19 --

What I am proposing is a development of Damon Knights ostensive definition of

science fiction. That is science fiction which we point to and say: it has family
resemblances with what we agree is science fiction.
One thing to recognise, therefore, in this web of resemblances, is that one work
might bear different resemblances to many other works. And any number of those
resemblances might constitute what we would call science fiction. By thinking of
science fiction as a network of such family resemblances, it is easier to see that
science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things a future setting,
a marvellous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar
journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever
we may be looking for when we look for science fiction, here more overt, here more
subtle which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations. A
newcomer to the genre might find these combinations unsettling, hard to unravel,
formulaic; but the more familiar we are with the genre, the more readily we can
accept their variety, the more subtly we might interpret their combinations. So much
so that at times we might identify a work as science fiction for no other reason than
that it feels like science fiction; the furniture of a story, the obvious plot devices have
become subsumed under our interpretation of authorial intent. What constitutes the
warp and weft of science fiction, therefore, is endlessly subtle and intricate, made up
at times of more things than we can readily identify. Which is why what makes
science fiction is so hard to pin down, but what is science fiction is so easy to
recognise.
What is more, the web of resemblances extends backwards in time as well as
forwards. If we recognise a new work as science fiction because it resembles an earlier
work of science fiction, so we can go back and recognise an historical work as science
fiction because it resembles works we would later come to call science fiction.
Supposing we accept Gary Westfahls contention that science fiction only really
began in 1926 when the term (or at least Gernsbacks coinage, scientifiction) was
first applied to what we now recognise as genre sf; we can still identify certain works
of the 1890s The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Invisible Man as
science fiction because they resemble so closely works that are clearly science fiction.
Tracing the resemblances ever backwards will not lead to that original ur-text, of
course there is no such a thing but it does lead, rather, to a series of ur-texts.
Science fiction, as I have described it, consists of a series of threads (themes,
devices, approaches, ideas) that are braided together. This is cognate with David
Seeds argument, in Anticipations, that science fiction, rather than being one genre,
is actually a series of sub-genres that have come together over time. But rather than
thinking in terms of distinct sub-genres, I want to suggest a series of strands, none
of which would stand as a genre or even a sub-genre in their own right but which,
braided together in any of a possibly infinite number of combinations, make what we
have come to recognise as science fiction. Any one of the threads might be removed
from the braid and it would still be science fiction. The threads that make up the braid
-- 20 --

might be separated and then re-wound to make two separate braids, both of which
are science fiction. But there is not one single thread that can be removed and which
in itself is science fiction. Similarly, there is probably no critical point at which we
can say: this is the minimum number of threads required for us to call a work science
fiction; or: these particular threads are the ones that must be included if the whole is
to be called science fiction. Tracing family resemblances backwards through the
literature, therefore, is not going to lead us to the origins of science fiction; but it
might lead us to the origins of some of the threads that constitute science fiction.
Thus, there are strands extant in contemporary science fiction which may have
their origins in classical, or pre-classical, mythology. There are threads which may go
back to identifiable individual works, to the satirical celestial journeys of Lucian of
Samosata, for instance, to Thomas Mores Utopia, to Mary Shelleys Frankenstein, to
countless other works by Copernicus, by Cyrano de Bergerac, by Jules Verne or Edgar
Allan Poe or H.G. Wells. Whether this necessarily makes any of these works the urtext of science fiction, or whether it makes them science fiction at all is open to
debate, but they certainly resemble aspects of what we would come to call science
fiction, they might be considered the starting point for threads that would come to
constitute science fiction. Where the braid of these threads reaches the critical point
at which it unequivocally becomes science fiction is impossible to say. All we can say
is that science fiction starts here and here and here and here Which of these
particular starting points we choose, therefore, comes down not to a question of
definition but of inclination.
Science fiction is what we point to when we say science fiction, and where the
genre begins historically and what constitutes that genre will vary as the direction in
which we point varies. But because we can see the resemblances between works of
science fiction, because we can identify the various threads that combine to form the
whole, so we can talk sensibly about the genre and understand others when they do
the same, and so we can draw an historical model for the genre in which the details
may vary but the overall narrative tells a story we all understand.

-- 21 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

ANATOMISING SCIENCE FICTION

An encyclopedia is a curious enterprise. It aspires, it can only aspire, to contain
worlds. Here, we must assume, is the fount of all knowledge, our first step on the road
to enlightenment. It is an enterprise doomed to failure by the simple fact that no one
book might embrace a world. Even when that book is 1,370 pages long, when its
small, double-columned type contains 1.3 million words. The infinite Library of
Babel by Jorge Luis Borges (p.143 of the Encyclopedia, where he is quoted as saying
the compilation of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance) could
not contain such knowledge.
Nevertheless, the original Encyclopedia of Science Fiction became, when it was
first published in 1979, the authoritative reference work on science fiction. And in the
years since, despite the feeble efforts of the James Gunn Encyclopedia (p.529), and the
murkily inconsistent Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (p.277, Critical and
Historical Works about SF), and despite the fact that most of the authors leading the
field now had not begun to publish when the Encyclopedia first appeared, it has
remained pre-eminent.
This expansion and updating of the Encyclopedia has, therefore, been long
awaited, if only because any definitive reference work on the genre must at least
include articles on Iain Banks (p.88), Pat Cadigan (p.183), William Gibson (p.493),
Terry Pratchett (p.955), Bruce Sterling (p.1163) and a few dozen others. But the
question remains: how does this encyclopedia embrace the worlds of science fiction?
What is the science fiction anatomised by editors John Clute (p.239, entry by JC) and
Peter Nicholls (p.870, entry by PN)?
There is, of course, no entry on Science Fiction (except the US pulp magazine of
that name, p.1062), for such an entry would, recursively, have to encompass the entire
book. But there are, scattered within its pages, a series of articles which, taken
together, provide a distinct perspective on how they see the genre. Definitions of SF
(p.311) rounds up the usual suspects but fails to arrive at any conclusion: There is
really no good reason to expect that a workable definition of sf will ever be
established ... In practice, there is much consensus about what sf looks like in its
centre; it is only at the fringes that most of the fights take place.
Indeed, the centre does seem to be generally accepted, and here gets its own entry
as Genre SF (p.483): sf that is either labelled science fiction or is instantly recognized
by its readership as belonging to that category. This, the editors recognise, provides
the bulk of this encyclopedia. The Genre SF entry itself lists only Arthur Leo Zagat
(p.1363) and Miles J. Breuer (p.157) as examples of this category; but it is not difficult
to find all the names you would expect to encounter in a work of this nature
-- 25 --

Asimov (p.55), Heinlein (p.554), Herbert (p.558), Shaw (p.1094) and Wells (p.1312) all
receive substantial entries, Asimovs being probably the longest single-author entry
in the book. But the editors are willing to venture into the fringes and accept as sf
works which others (they quote Gunns American-centred and hard-sf oriented
Encyclopedia) might not. But they dont tell us how Genre SF is instantly recognised,
so we must follow the trail further.
Two concepts are set up in opposition to Genre SF: the Mainstream lies outside
the genre while Fabulation (p.399) is, we must assume, that sf which is not instantly
recognized as such. Both notions might give us some clue about the subject of this
encyclopedia. Let us begin by stepping right out of the genre.
Mainstream Writers of SF (p.768) tells us that as a piece of jargon, not yet fully
accepted into the language, mainstream lacks precision. Nevertheless there is a
useful distinction to be drawn, so long as we are not over-eager with the word
mainstream. The notion of a mainstream writer of sf actually has no meaning before
about 1960, when sf books began to appear regularly enough to be labelled as such.
Previous to that, they list Huxley (p.606), Burdekin (p.175), Wyndham Lewis (p.717),
Priestley (p.961), Stapledon (p.1151) and Wyndham (p.1353) among others as writers
whose work moved, without remark, from one side of the genre boundary to the other.
The way those within sf have grown to regard the mainstream writers of sf as invasive
and alien is castigated as one of the sadder results of sfs ghetto mentality.
Nevertheless they are right to distinguish between the writers whose work
demonstrates some knowledge of sf motifs and those who cumbersomely re-invent
the wheel. (One could almost begin to feel sorry for poor Paul Theroux (p.1218) who
is repeatedly held up as an example of this worst case.)
What it comes down to, it would seem, is that their work does not feel like genre
sf. It is that feel which is the proper subject of this encyclopedia, and which I am
pursuing through the books abundant and invaluable cross-referencing. And here we
do get some glimpse of what they mean by feel: sf ... lies at the heart of the realist
mode; its whole creative effort is bent on making its imaginary worlds, its imaginary
futures, as real as possible.
This notion is amplified when the editors turn to their other figure of opposition to
Genre SF, Fabulation (p.399). Here they contend that genre sf (and, by extension, all
that is truly sf) is essentially a continuation of the mimetic novel. The writers of the
great mimetic, realist novels of the nineteenth century assumed that their novels were
written as though they opened omniscient windows into reality ... Writers of genre sf
have never abandoned this assumption. The second great assumption is a more
Modernist one; that the world has a story which can be told, that there is an underlying
connectivity of things which allows us to make sense of the universe. This also is a
belief held by pure genre writers. But both assumptions have been denied by fabulists,
allowing us to arrive at the sort of definition which has been denied sf: a fabulation is
any story which challenges the two main assumptions of genre sf: that the world can
be seen; and that it can be told. It is, at heart, profoundly antipathetic to genre sf.
-- 26 --

This distinction between genre sf and fabulation is uneasy. How uneasy is

indicated by the list they give of writers whose works (or some of whose works) are
fabulations. Here we find Blumlein (p.140), Disch (p.339), Effinger (p.371), M. John
Harrison (p.547), Moorcock (p.822), Priest (p.960), Saxton (p.1053), Shepard (p.1100),
Sladek (p.1113), Spinrad (p.1146) and Wolfe (p.1338). Too many of these are seen as
at the forefront of what constitutes sf today to allow us to accept that they are
profoundly antipathetic to the genre. It leads me to suppose that either sf as we know
it today is no longer genre sf (at least as it is here presented) or that there is no valid
distinction between genre sf and fabulation (at least as this encyclopedia tries to draw
the line).
Can we explore the book to examine this question further? Certainly, the article
on Fabulation itself suggests a growing inter-relationship between the two. In the first
edition of the Encyclopedia the article on Fabulation was perhaps a tenth of the length
of this new incarnation. It referred the reader to, as examples of the type, Lawrence
Durrell (p.359), Kurt Vonnegut (p.1289) and John Barth (p.94), none of whom are used
as exemplars this time around. And in terms of theme entries it cross-referred only to
Absurdist SF (p.2), while this time around we are directed also to Magic Realism
(p.767), Slipstream SF (p.1116), and Postmodernism and SF (p.950). Obviously, no
serious examination of sf can cover the subject adequately without casting its net far
wider than genre sf would allow.
Curiously, Postmodernism and SF, the only one of these key articles on theory not
written wholly or largely by JC and PN (it is by Damien Broderick), accepts a much
closer relationship between sf and fabulation. [B]oth sf and Postmodernism ... stress
object over subject, ways of being over ways of knowing. The Universe itself becomes
a text, open to endless interpretation and rewriting. Among the postmodernist writers
listed are Dick (p.328) (oddly, Dick is included with Angela Carter (p.200), Don DeLillo
(p.318), Umberto Eco (p.364) and Thomas Pynchon (p.981) among writers outside the
genre but edging close to it) and Ballard (p.84), Delany (p.315), Russ (p.1035) and
Watson (p.1302) as well as the cyberpunks (p.288). Again there is the suggestion that,
if sf and fabulation arent the same thing, then they are at least part of the same
contemporary literary endeavour.
As one of the linking points between Postmodernism and sf, Broderick cites
Gothic rapture, which brings me to my other problem with the notion of sf as realist
fiction. Certainly, one of science fictions key characteristics is to make a realistic
presentation of the unreal, but it goes beyond the real in its evocation of a sense of
wonder (p.1083). This is a term which serious critics of science fiction have come to
dismiss as a superannuated clich (p.234) and which, it is true, is often associated with
badly-written books. E.E. Doc Smith (p.1123) and A.E. Van Vogt (p.1268) are both
quoted in this context, which suggests very close links with what the editors term
Genre SF. Nevertheless it is important to what sf is. It comes not from brilliant
writing nor even from brilliant conceptualizing; it comes from a sudden opening of
a closed door in the readers mind, and they contend that it may be necessary if we
-- 27 --

are to understand the essence of sf that distinguishes it from other forms of fiction.
Having invested it with such importance, however, the editors remain a little
sniffy about sense of wonder. True, it is easily counterfeited by the importation of big
dumb objects (p.118 which talks about the endearing ... disjunction between the
gigantic scale of the BDO and the comparatively trite fictional events taking place on,
in or about it. The sf imagination usually, if charmingly, falls short at this point).
True, also, that the examples given in the article tend to be from the potboiler side of
sf, by, for instance, Poul Anderson (p.31) and Edgar Rice Burroughs (p.177). When
Alexei and Cory Panshin (p.906) link sense of wonder with transcendence, John Clute
rages against a reified wet-dream, yet where the sense of wonder is not counterfeit,
is not a potboiler, then however charmingly it falls short of its goal it is an attempt
to achieve something sublime, something transcendent. When Arthur C. Clarke
(p.229) takes us through the gates of worlds to the climax of 2001, A Space Odyssey
and Paul J. McAuley (p.746) does something similar as the conclusion to Eternal
Light, or Cordwainer Smith (p.1121) plays The Game of Rat and Dragon, they are
taking us outwith the normal orbit of realist fiction and into something which many
of us would feel is truly and intrinsically science fiction.
But still we ask: what is science fiction? More and more as one flicks back and
forth through the Encyclopedia, following a trail of cross-references like some
hypertext ramble, one comes to the conclusion that it is a loose collection of
protocols and conventions whose old cohesion is now nearing an end. In the article
on John Crowley (p.282), for instance, it is remarked that his free and supple use of
numerous generic conventions [is]... possible only late in the life of any genre. Back
in Mainstream Writers of SF we reach the conclusion that by the 1980s the quarrel
[between those inside and outside the genre] was of historical interest only, for the
walls were tumbling down. Some still shelter behind those shards left standing, but,
if they look, they will see that the traffic is moving freely in both directions.
The second edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction provides as thorough
an anatomy of the genre as it is possible to squeeze between the covers of one book.
The editors have already begun to collect a list of errors but these are, for the most
part, trivial. As far as you, me and the rest of the sf world are concerned this is as
authoritative as you can get, certainly much more so than any other potential rival.
And it is liable to remain our first point of reference for any question on sf, at least
until some third edition might appear (one hopes without a gap of fourteen years).
Yet perhaps this magisterial perspective is only possible by imagining, if not that the
walls still stand, then at least that the ground plan is still visible. For, while they avoid
any definition of science fiction, the editors have to behave as though sf were distinct
and definable. This is just one version of science fiction; still it is large enough and
contentious enough to overlap with most other versions and to provoke us into
examining our own universes of discourse sufficiently to see where our personal
science fictions might lie.

-- 28 --

HOW HARD

IS

SF?

In the late 1950s, P. Schuyler Miller coined the term hard sf in his book review
column in Astounding. It is a term that has never been adequately defined (much like
science fiction) but it is generally recognised to be that branch of sf built around the
hard sciences (physics, chemistry, astronomy, biology) as opposed to the soft
sciences that were then creeping into sf (psychology, sociology). The term arose out
of John W. Campbells Astounding, and is most closely associated with Campbellian
writers, Asimov, Heinlein, Clement, Clarke, and their natural descendants, Niven,
Varley, Forward, Sheffield, Benford, Brin. By the time the term was coined, what it
represented was already under threat. Astounding was declining in influence as The
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and a coterie of writers and editors such as
Pohl, Kornbluth, Bester, Knight and Merril introduced newer and more varied literary
styles and devices into the genre. The New Wave of the 1960s didnt actually sweep
away hard SF, but it did nudge it into a backwater where, with occasional eruptions,
it has remained ever since. There are still devoted readers of Analog, there are still
works which are identifiably hard sf and which have a significant impact on the genre
(the most recent has probably been Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars trilogy), but even
that has changed beyond anything that Campbell might recognise as hard sf.
Through it all, the nature, the identity of hard sf has hardly been questioned. We
know what it is, or we assume we do. But in the last couple of years David Hartwell
and Kathryn Cramer have orchestrated a debate about hard sf in the pages of The New
York Review of Science Fiction, and that debate has finally engendered a massive
anthology, The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. The three introductions,
by Hartwell, Cramer and Gregory Benford, were all rehearsed in the pages of the New
York Review; many of the stories featured (especially Tom Godwins The Cold
Equations) have been discussed there at length. As a result this huge volume must he
seen as providing some definitive prospectus on the nature, character and
constitution of hard sf.
It is a labour of love, a massive enterprise, bringing together key science fiction
texts from the last 150 years. Whatever the criticisms that must follow, the book
stands or falls by the value of these stories. And the value is high. Here are sixtyseven stories from fifty-seven writers, good stories that are not widely anthologised
(John M. Fords Chromatic Aberration (1994), Hilbert Schencks The Morphology of
the Kirkham Wreck (1978), Michael F. Flynns Mammy Morgan Played the Organ;
Her Daddy Beat the Drum (1990)), and classics that belong in the library of every SF
fan (Rudyard Kiplings With the Night Mail (1905), Henry Kuttner & C.L. Moores
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (1943), Tom Godwins The Cold Equations' (1954)).
-- 29 --

There are stories not worth the effort of reprinting, where the writing limps, the ideas
crumble before your eyes, stories which demonstrate why sf was consigned to the
ghetto for so long (Raymond Z. Galluns Davy Jones Ambassador (1935), Raymond
F. Joness The Person from Porlock (1947) and (to prove it isnt connected with being
called Raymond) Jules Vernes In the Year 2889 (1889)); but in such a monumental
anthology, they are mercifully few. In short, this is an excellent collection of good
science fiction.
Here, then, as the subtitle advises us, we will find the stars of the hard sf
firmament: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, J.G. Ballard and Ursula K. Le
Guin, James Tiptree, Jr and Gene Wolfe ...
Therein lies the problem. We are presented with a radically different view of hard
sf than any we might have felt comfortable with before By my count, for instance,
fewer than half the stories are what I would describe as hard sf. Under the guise of
the word evolution they have brought together stories that predate hard sf and
stories that have emerged, changed, from it; there are stories that contradict and
argue with hard sf, and stories that appear to have nothing whatever to do with the
subject. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see how they bring hard sf forward, if only
because, publishing economies being what they are, we are unlikely to see a similar
such enterprise for some time, which means that this characterisation of hard sf is
going to stand unchallenged as the hard sf canon.
It is, of course, all a matter of definition. At one point in his introduction David
Hartwell says: Devoted readers of hard SF know the real thing when they see it. This
is a deliberate echo of Damon Knights famous and (intentionally) inadequate
definition of science fiction as what we point to when we say it, and it seems, if
anything, an admission of failure, for Hartwell has already accepted that readers of
hard sf will not recognise it in the works of Le Guin or Ballard. If this is how he has
to define his subject, then despite the title this is no collection of hard sf.
The three introductions are interesting. Benford provides the perspective of a
working scientist and writer of hard sf while Cramer gives us an historical lit. crit.
approach: both assume that we know what hard sf is. It is, therefore, left to Hartwell
in his main introduction and in the individual story introductions, which appear to
be mostly his work, to provide the agenda for the anthology, to define hard sf and
place the disparate stories within that definition. Unfortunately, he presents no one
coherent argument, but a series of conflicting perspectives.
At one point, Hard SF is about the beauty of truth; a position amplified by
Cramer who says: Hard science fiction is about the aesthetics of knowledge ... at its
core [it is] beyond questions of optimism and pessimism, beyond questions of
technology arid application. Hard SF recognises wonder as the finest human
emotion. Yet this romantic view sits ill with Hartwells later claim that Hard SF
embodies the fantasies of empowerment of the scientific and technological culture
of the modern era and validates its faith in scientific knowledge as dominant over
other ways of knowing.
-- 30 --

Again Hartwell claims that SF readers... expect to be surprised at some point by

a sudden perception of connection to things they know or observe in daily life. If the
revelation is of the inner life, as in ... Flowers for Algernon, then the story is not
hard SF; if the revelation is of the functioning of the laws of nature, as in Arthur C.
Clarkes Transit of Earth or Isaac Asimovs Waterclap then the story is hard SF.
Elsewhere he points out that Generally the central characters of hard science fiction
are winners (the competent man, the engineer, the scientist, the good soldier, the man
who transcends his circumstances, the inventor ...). These would seem reasonable
enough, were it not for Hartwells repeated attempts to recruit Ballard into the ranks
of the hard sf writers, despite the fact that all Ballards fiction hinges upon revelations
of inner life and his central characters tend to be losers, anti-heroes, figures lost
within the sweep of events. He maintains that: The implied argument of the
Ballardian stream of hard SF, written in reaction to the main tradition, is:
Campbellian hard SF said that if you know, you may survive; Ballard says, knowing
is not enough to survive. This argument drives a coach and horses through both the
two previous attempts to put a frame around hard sf. However much Hartwell may
puff Ballards scientific background (he was medically trained), this is still to change
the nature of hard sf and of the argument. If hard sf is so fluid in intent, in style, in
content, then we are hardly dealing with one clearly defined subset of science fiction,
we are dealing with a number of subsets which may share some characteristics, and
which may huddle close to each other, but they are not the same thing. The argument
works if we are talking about the core of science fiction, it is a multiform genre after
all, but it has to fail if Hartwell is presenting just one branch, one aspect of sf which
stands central to sf but is somehow clearly distinct from all its other forms.
Trying to pull all these statements and counter-statements together we are left,
therefore, with no straightforward, easily graspable account of what hard sf actually
is, as opposed to sf in general. But do the stories help?
It we assume that hard sf is as various as all of sf then, taking Hartwells fingerpointing definition, there is still a heartland which all readers readily recognise as
hard sf, and which is probably congruent with what Hartwell further defines as
Campbellian hard SF. Such stories might show a common characteristic which will
help to provide a measure of hard sf for the rest of the anthology. Perhaps the
archetypal hard SF story is Tom Godwins The Cold Equations in which a girl
stowaway has to die because her weight would add to the fuel consumption of the
landing craft just enough to make it burn up on re-entry and destroy the precious
cargo of medicines. We can leave aside for the moment the countless calculations
which show that if Godwin had really wanted to save the girl, he could have done so.
What hard sf is doing here is presenting a set of implacable rules that are dictated by
the very nature of the universe; the little man in the face of a huge galaxy must come
to terms with those rules or die. Philip Lathams The Xi Effect (1950) presents a
similar argument: scientists discover that the universe is shrinking but wavelengths
remain constant, so gradually the different means of communication are taken away
-- 31 --

from mankind until even the visible spectrum slips away into blackness. Again we see
how cold and unmoving the universe is out there, how man is humbled before a
power as mighty as former generations would have imagined God. (And there is a
strong religious, or at least transcendental, element running through hard sf, which I
will come to later.)
Of course not all hard sf leads to inevitable tragedy: by understanding the physics,
the chemistry or the maths, the competent man can comprehend the rules and see the
way to salvation. In Down and Out on Ellfive Prime by Dean Ing (1979) one minor
accident on a space station leads, step by inexorable step, to the point where the
entire station is threatened with destruction. But the competent administrator joins
forces with an engineer who is living with the down and outs in the interstices of the
station, and disaster is averted. The scientific and technical knowledge of the engineer
raises him from the lowest in society to his true worth. The Hole Man by Larry Niven
(1973) shows a different way in which the scientific man will triumph through his
knowledge, in this case using a quantum black hole as a murder weapon. Quantum
black holes may be a discarded notion nowadays, but that is not important; what
matters is the central understanding of some scientific truth. Hard sf is hard in the
sense of being rigid, unbending. The key hard sf stories involve rules that are not
made by man, rules that cannot be broken. Hard sf is often portrayed as being right
wing (and the apparently more liberal attitudes of the editors of this anthology makes
for some awkward moments in the individual story introductions) but the political
angle in The Cold Equations, for example, revolves not, as is popularly supposed,
around the fact that the victim is a girl (though hard sf is overwhelmingly male in its
authors, its heroes, its characters) but around the harsh law that everyone must obey.
As soon as you introduce character, or manmade rules, you introduce ambiguity; so
much hard sf, particularly early in its history, is schematic in formula and cardboard
in its characters. When Hal Clement says he doesnt need human villains because the
universe is opponent enough, he is saying that his hard sf is about men coming up
against the rules of the universe. Those rules are neat and predictable (this sf is not
about change), so a human opponent would upset the apple-cart by introducing the
possibility, nay the necessity, for change, development, other interpretations.
A right-wing political stance may, therefore, be a defining characteristic of hard
sf. Even when a story or a writer attempts a more liberal stance, as James Blish did
in Beep (1954) it comes up against the inflexibility of the rules and ends up, at best,
as libertarian. In Beep there is, in effect, an elite who rule the world on the strength
of privileged, if partial, knowledge of the future. They try to rule by liberal principles,
but there is still an elite, there are still all-powerful, secretive masters, and there are
still rigid codes which must be obeyed.
When the authors deny the rigidity and inevitability of the rules, when they admit
human frailty and fault, when they entertain ambiguity, then you get a story which,
however much it follows scientific notions and principles, cannot be hard sf. Which
is why writers like Ballard, with Prima Belladonna (1956) and Cage of Sand (1963),
-- 32 --

are out of place in this anthology. The dead astronauts endlessly circling Earth in
Cage of Sand are there as a sign of failure, are liable to burn up (as one of them
does), are open to misinterpretation, and are generally symbols to highlight the frailty
and ambiguity of the human watchers coming to terms with their own failures amid
the Martian sands of Florida. So much does Ballard deny inevitability that the very
landscape of the story is in constant flux. Similarly, H.G. Wells may have exulted that
the tank warfare of the First World War was engendered by his story The Land
Ironclads (1903) but, a poor example of his work though it is, the story itself is one
of defeat, not victory. And Wells, with his abiding interest in Darwinian evolution and
social criticism which imply a focus on change, even the desirability of change, in his
work, was no hard sf writer.
So how does this approach to hard sf sit with the more borderline inclusions in
this anthology? Anne McCaffrey has always insisted that her dragon stories and
novels are science fiction, not fantasy, and that certainly holds true of their
progenitor, Weyr Search (1967), even though the world-building is confined to a
brief scene-setting introduction. The story itself is straight, old-fashioned medieval
fantasy of lords and heroes and a quest for the saviour. What betrays the hard sf
antecedents is the strict, rule-driven attitude of the story. After centuries in which the
Threads have not returned to Pern, human society has not evolved, has not changed
one jot. Within the scheme of things it cannot be allowed to change, to develop new
weapons, new defences. Salvation can only come by strict adherence to the old,
implacable, unchanging rules; rigid, unquestioning obedience is good, ignoring the
law leads only and inevitably to death. Certainly there is an element of sf in Weyr
Search, certainly the underlying political attitudes of the story reflect the attitudes of
hard sf but that doesnt mean the story actually is hard sf.
When you consider Bob Shaws Light of Other Days (1966) you come up against
another problem with the editors selection policy. This is a genuine classic of the
genre, a simple story of slow glass in which the passage of light through glass is
slowed to a matter of years, so city dwellers use it to give themselves windows
showing the unspoilt landscape where the glass was farmed. So far, so hard sf. But
what makes this a story is the recognition that light passes both ways through glass,
and the slow-glass farmer uses it to gaze into his home to glimpse his wife and child
who have since been killed, with the added unstated poignancy that there has to be
a known, predictable ending to the vision. The question that must be considered is:
how much is this a hard sf story, and how much a sad little tale about love and loss
which happens to employ a science-fictional device to set it on its way? In this case
the answer is probably a bit of both, and in so far as the anthology represents the
spectrum of hard sf the story belongs here. But there are other instances in which the
presence of sf devices bulks far too large in the editors perceptions of whether the
story is hard sf or not.
In the introduction to Gene Wolfes Procreation (1984), for instance, we are told
that his acclaimed novel, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, was set on an alien planet,
-- 33 --

featured robots, colonists, a mysterious alien race. But it was constructed with so
much sophisticated literary ambiguity that it was not apprehended as hard SF. This is
a curious notion, for it suggests yet another definition of hard sf, as that which uses
certain devices from a prescribed list (and judging from the stories in the anthology,
that list includes time travel, robots, computers, space ships, alien worlds and many
more devices which are readily associated with sf of any stripe). A similar point is
made in the introduction to the second Wolfe story, All the Hues of Hell (1987): his
stories rarely have the overt affect of hard SF. It is therefore often a challenge to the
reader to perceive the scientific ideas of which the characters in the text are unaware.
This seems to suggest that if you search a story hard enough, if you ignore the literary
characteristics in order to discover some sf device or scientific notion buried however
deep in the text, then that story automatically qualifies as hard sf.
But does the paraphernalia of sf qualify a story as hard sf? George Turners In a
Petri Dish Upstairs (1978) might seem like hard sf if devices are what count: there is,
after all, an orbital space station. However, the main focus of the story is about the
way the two societies have grown apart; in orbit people are uncouth, forwardlooking, aggressive and unpleasant; on Earth they are over-sophisticated, doubledealing supporters of the status quo. The result is not so much hard sf as a comedy
of manners, very like a Henry James story of gauche Americans and their cultured
European cousins, but with a nasty twist. A genuinely hard sf version of the same sort
of story, Robert A. Heinleins Its Great to be Back (1947), has less actual hardware
than the Turner story yet its attitude is totally different. Would-be lunar colonists
return to Earth thinking themselves unsuited to the Moon, but as they encounter
Earth society they realise how well they have actually adapted to the Moon. The story
is full of the rightness, the inevitability, of the outward urge, the step into space. There
is none of the doubt, the unsettled ambiguity about the future in space as well as on
Earth that is expressed in the Turner story. It is more than paraphernalia, therefore,
which makes a story hard sf.
Heat of Fusion by John M. Ford (1984) is, according to the introduction,
interested more in the metaphorical and emotional reverberations of the scientists
work: it tells of a scientist dying as a result of an accident which killed most of his
colleagues. The location, the nature of their research and the details of the accident
are all hidden amid suggestions and hints, but as he thinks back over the causes of
the accident the scientist comes to understand the characters and drives of his
colleagues. Yet, the underlying belief in the power of science (physics) and scientists
(physicists) is still here. We seem to be moving towards yet another definition of hard
sf: any story in which scientists do science. Certainly that is what we must gather
from the introduction to Theodore Sturgeons Occams Scalpel (1971) which is on
the edge of being not SF at all ... yet it more centrally concerns science than a
majority of Sturgeons genre works: it is about scientists It is, in fact, about modelmakers and businessmen: when the worlds most powerful businessman dies, his
corpse is presented to his chosen successor as being that of an alien invader in order
-- 34 --

to change the course of the business to more ecologically friendly directions. There
are no aliens, there are no scientists, this is not even a science fiction story, let alone
hard sf. But if we are to believe that the presence of a scientist is enough to render a
story hard sf, then we may presume that, for example, John Banvilles historical
novels Kepler and Doctor Copernicus are hard sf. Perhaps it is not even necessary to
be sf in order to be hard sf?
In fact, the belief in science, the exploration of metaphorical and emotional
reverberations of scientific endeavour, are common currency in the domain of
science fiction, but are not congruent with the rule-driven practicalities of hard sf. If
you want to show mans place within the strictures of a vast and unbending universe,
as hard sf does, then you cannot do so by metaphor, which opens other meanings,
other possibilities. The editors are much nearer the mark in their introduction to
Robert L. Forwards The Singing Diamond (1979) when they say: The wonderful
ideas are the whole point, the foreground interest for the hard SF reader. The fiction
exists to display them. Nothing here about metaphor, or hiding the science beneath
Wolfes sophisticated literary ambiguity.
To often, in fact, the editors seem to change their notion of hard sf in order to fit
another story into the picture. In the introduction to Frederik Pohls Day Million
(1966), for instance, they ask directly: Whats so hard about it? The attitude is right
... It is written for the reader who understands the hopelessness of a universe without
physical constraints. This is understandable: rules, physical constraints, are the be-all
and end-all of the hard sf universe, so that a universe without them would be hopeless
to the hard SF reader. Except that this description of Day Million must refer to a
completely different story than the one printed here. The attitude is satirical, which
hard sf almost never is (except in stories such as James P. Hogans Making Light
(1981) which crudely satirises those who do not subscribe to the hard sf belief). Day
Million is not about hopelessness; rather, it deliberately confronts modern attitudes
with an overtly fanciful future in order to challenge those attitudes. It is sexually,
socially and politically liberal. In directly addressing the reader and foregrounding the
fictionality of the story, it uses postmodern techniques in contrast to hard sf, which
Hartwell is at pains to point out is resolutely modernist in manner. Day Million may
be the best thing that Pohl has ever written, and it can be described in all sorts of
ways, but it is not hard sf.
This attempt to bend stories to the will of hard sf is highlighted in one of the rare
but significant factual errors in the book. Ursula K. Le Guins The Author of the
Acacia Seeds (1974) is described as anthropological notes by an intelligent ant. In
fact, the first part of the story features a translation of a possibly rebellious statement
by an ant, but the translator is a human anthropologist (a soft scientist) and the piece
is just one extract from an academic journal. (It is significant, also, that the story is
not given its full title, The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the
Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics, either in the contents list, at the head
of the story or even in the copyright notices, so removing the sense that the story is,
-- 35 --

at least in part, parody.) The revised view of the story makes it more alien and allows
the science to be considered less soft, so making it fit more nearly into the hard sf
category.
The alien, the other, is important in hard sf, even if the story does not take us off
Earth or introduce any character other than human. Much of the direction of hard sf,
a positive step forward into the future, man taking his place on the universal stage,
has a transcendental element. The brave, the competent, the knowledgeable, the
archetypal hard sf hero is the man most able to understand the rigorous laws of
nature, and in so doing find a way around. And this way transforms us into beings
greater than we are. This may be simply the better society of competent people on the
Moon in Heinleins Its Great to be Back or the Stapledonian progress of our progeny
in Isaac Asimovs The Last Question (1956), or the literal transformation in Clifford
D. Simaks Desertion (1944). In this story, a human base on Jupiter has been unable
to survey the planet because the human explorers sent out in the shape of the native
inhabitants have all failed to return. Finally the station commander and his dog
undergo the transformation and step out onto the surface of Jupiter to discover a
glory that was unimaginable to their merely human (or canine) senses.
It is a religious awe at the majesty of what the future holds for us if we obey the
commandments, the rules of the universe, which crops up time and again in hard sf.
As Edgar Allan Poes protagonist says in A Descent into the Maelstrm (1841), how
foolish it was in me to think of so paltry a consideration as my own individual life,
in view of so wonderful a manifestation of Gods power. Substitute science or the
universe for God and you have the sensibility of much hard sf. Where religion
actually features in the story it is either belittled, as in Arthur C. Clarkes The Star
(1955) or shown as the only recourse for humanity unable to face the enormity of the
universe, as in Poul Andersons Kyrie (1969).
The Star tells of an expedition to a one-time supernova where the explorers find
evidence of a flourishing civilization destroyed when the sun exploded. The
astrophysicist, a Jesuit, works out that the supernova was the Star of Bethlehem. How
could God allow one advanced civilization to be destroyed to herald the birth of his
religion on Earth, is the question posed by the story. And the implicit answer is that
God is as nothing beside the raw nature of the universe. Much the same response is
implicit in Ian Watsons The Very Slow Time Machine (1978) in which religion is
explicitly linked with madness. A time traveller appears in a laboratory, and it
becomes obvious that he is living backwards through time to the point of his
appearance. He is also progressing steadily and inexorably into insanity, which the
observers from outside his time frame know all too well, but this doesnt stop them
making the time traveller the focus for a new religion. Religion does not mix with a
hard sf universe that has wonders enough of its own, though in Kyrie religion can
at least provide consolation when those wonders prove too awesome. A young
woman on a ship exploring the effects of a nova, that manifestation of the glory of
the universe, is telepathically linked to an alien space creature who provides a deeper
-- 36 --

and more understanding relationship than she has ever achieved with other humans.
The alien disappears into the black hole at the heart of the nova, and because of the
time dilation effects she is permanently telepathically plugged in to his endless dying
scream. She ends up in a religious retreat on the Moon.
When a writer is genuinely religious, as Wolfe is in All the Hues of Hell, in which
a survey ship scoops up dark matter and a creature which may be a devil, this is not
just another manifestation of the same theme. For Wolfe is expressing the importance
of religion, of belief in general, in its effect on his very human characters. This
affirmation of religion goes directly against the hard sf position, for it cannot
conform with the hard sf substitution of science for religion.
But is Wolfe in dialogue with hard sf? This collection is, after all, subtitled The
Evolution of Hard SF, and its intent must therefore be taken to include the fiction
from which hard sf emerged and that into which it developed or which it influenced.
Benford, in his introduction, makes an important point about the development of
ideas: Like other subgenres of fantastic literature, hard SF works in part because it
is an ongoing discussion ... Genre readers immerse themselves in a system of
thought, so that each fresh book or story is a further exploration of that system,
mental play illuminated by all the reader has discovered before ... With learned genre
competency come the pleasures of cross-talk the books speak to each other in an
ongoing debate over big issues, such as our place in creation, the nature of
consensus reality, etc ... Hard SF mirrors science itself in the importance of crosstalk. This is picked up in a number of the story introductions, especially to those
writers not normally associated with hard sf, such as Ballard, Le Guin and Wolfe,
which talk of them being in dialogue with or opposition to hard sf. It is a valid point,
but it is unfortunately too broad a point to work without greater rigour than is
employed here. For all sf is in constant dialogue as ideas, themes, devices are picked
up from various sources and carried forward in different directions. In Wolfes
Procreation, for instance, the children who wander into the dying of a different
universe are witnessing a scene which carries echoes of the final moments of The
Time Machine by H.G. Wells, while Watsons The Very Slow Time Machine echoes
that same novel in a very different way.
To trace influences, therefore, and show them to be specifically hard sf in
character or intent requires something more than the vague linking of Nathaniel
Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter' (1844) with J.G. Ballards Prima Belladonna:
This Faustian-Gothic strain, with its echoes of the sublime, is persistent in twentiethcentury science fiction ... and re-emerges, full-blown, in the early work of J.G.
Ballard. It is especially galling since the editors have not established the hard sf
credentials of either story (so they have not established the evolutionary development
into or out of the subgenre), have not pinpointed the precise points of influence, and
then separate the stories by some 250 pages.
In fact, the evolutionary theme seems to have had no influence whatsoever on the
organisation of this book. None of the stories is dated (except in a copyright listing
-- 37 --

which is incomplete Poe, Hawthorne, Verne, Wells and Kipling are all missing and
inaccurate Prima Belladonna has a copyright date of 1971 though it was one of
Ballards first published stories). The stories are divided into three sections though no
reason is given for the division and no link is apparent between the stories in any of
the groupings; nor does the order in which stories are printed do anything to provide
a thematic or a chronological sequence. The first four stories, for example, are Ursula
K. Le Guins Nine Lives (1969), Bob Shaws Light of Other Days, Nathaniel
Hawthornes Rappaccinis Daughter and Arthur C. Clarkes The Star; an order which
follows no logic whatsoever. And though Kathryn Cramer, in an Appendix, provides
a thematic grouping of the stories, this does not include all the stories in the
collection, but does include others (Nightfall by Isaac Asimov) which are not
published here. To derive any evolutionary pattern from this collection, the reader
needs to do a lot more work than the editors have done.
The reader must also contend with stories which are not only not hard sf, they are
not sf at all. Poes A Descent into the Maelstrm shows a pattern of problem-solving
which does indeed seem like the precursor of hard sfs heroic competence, while
Sturgeons Occams Scalpel (1971) reflects sf sensibilities that do throw an interesting
sidelight on the subgenre. But other stories, such as John M. Fords Chromatic
Aberration, seem to have no part to play in this anthology whatsoever. It is, as the
introduction makes clear, a form of magic realism which tells of a revolution in the
old, brutal, military sense so complete that the new order can even dictate that colour
is different. The introduction tries to justify its inclusion with some froth about
paradigm shifts as proposed by Thomas S. Kuhn, the philosopher of science, in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. But that is not what the story is about. A brief nod
is tossed in that direction to set up the narrative, but in the series of vignettes that
introduce the new colours the strength and point of the story is the persistence of
human nature, the way that the change of political order, even the change of
perception, doesnt alter the essential love, duplicity, heroism and cruelty of mankind.
This does not come close to sf in character, and in affect (a word drastically and
ludicrously over-used in the introductions) it runs directly counter to everything that
is hard sf.
Yet while we are presented with a host of stories (Cordwainer Smiths No, No, Not
Rogov! (1959), Bruce Sterlings The Beautiful and the Sublime (1986), James Tiptree
Jrs The Psychologist Who Wouldnt Do Awful Things to Rats (1976)) which are at
best tangential to hard sf, or even (Fords Chromatic Aberration, Ballards Prima
Belladonna) irrelevant to it, much that is central to hard sf is absent. There are no
stories by A.E. Van Vogt (despite repeated references to the notion that fans are
slans) or L. Sprague de Camp, nothing by Ben Bova or John Varley. Heinlein and
Clement, two of the central figures in any reckoning of hard sf, are represented by
only one story apiece (as opposed to two apiece by Ballard, Le Guin, Ford and Wolfe),
while a leading contemporary hard sf writer, Michael F. Flynn, is represented only by
one atypical ghost story, Mammy Morgan Played the Organ; Her Daddy Beat the
-- 38 --

Drum, which imposes a periodicity on ghostly appearances but otherwise features

none of the typical, rule-driven hard sf characteristics.
In other words, if this collection is to be seen as in any way definitive, then the
definition of hard sf has undergone a sea change. The way it stands, Ascent of Wonder
suggests that hard sf evolved out of sf in general, at its height was distinguished by
its use of typical sf devices, and has evolved back into sf. There is little here, in other
words, to say that hard sf is in any way different from any other form of science
fiction. This reads like a collection of hard sf put together by people who dont really
like hard sf and are therefore looking for excuses to include stories they do like but
which arent really hard sf.
How hard is sf? If this collection is anything to go by, not very.

-- 39 --

THE NEW HARD MEN

OF

SF

A few years ago David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer edited a monumental
anthology under the title The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF. It was a
controversial book, not least because their chosen representatives of hard sf were
idiosyncratic (J.G. Ballard, Gene Wolfe, Ursula K. Le Guin) and their view of what
constituted hard sf seemed indistinguishable from what most of us consider science
fiction as a whole. Now they have re-entered the fray with a new volume, The Hard
SF Renaissance, that is just as massive (960 large pages of small print), just as
extensive (forty-one stories by thirty-four writers), and every bit as idiosyncratic.
The earlier volume was intended as a survey of the history and development of
the subgenre from its ancestors (Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne) to the
present. This new volume posits a renaissance of hard sf in the 1990s, and confines
its attention to that decade (the earliest story gathered here, and the only one to
predate the 90s, is A Career in Sexual Chemistry by Brian Stableford (1987); there
are seven stories from 2000, and one, Fast Times at Fairmont High by Vernor Vinge,
from 2001). Where the earlier volume had three introductions (one each by Hartwell,
Cramer and Gregory Benford) and an Afterword among other critical paraphernalia;
this one makes do with just the one general introduction, though the introductions to
each individual story are, if anything, more extensive than last time and peppered
with lengthy quotations. These quotations are mostly from articles in The New York
Review of Science Fiction (I crop up at one point, somewhat to my surprise) or
interviews in Locus, though several times there are lengthy extracts from letters from
the authors. From these, it would appear that they asked a number of their
contributors to provide their thoughts on the subject of hard sf in general, and on
what they felt made them a hard sf writer. These letter extracts are, in their way, the
most interesting part of the book, if only because they illustrate how much even those
in the field disagree about what constitutes hard sf, and how certain contributors will
twist and turn in order to justify their inclusion among hard sf writers. Whatever we
may think, this is not a simple, straightforward, easily-identifiable thing we are
talking about here.
When Peter Watts, for instance, describes hard sf writers as missionaries of
rationalism whose tales abide by the spirit of science, if not the letter we seem to
be on relatively uncontroversial ground. Until he adds that the science in science
fiction may not, when we get right down to it, be all that important after all. All of
a sudden two thing strike us: that he is talking about science fiction, not just hard sf;
and that he is divorcing even hard sf from what we always considered its sine qua
non, science.
-- 41 --

If we take as the exemplar of hard sf Tom Godwins The Cold Equations (1954),
the formula presented is of a world in which there is no villain (Hal Clement, another
archetypal hard sf writer, is quoted here as saying he doesnt have villains in his
stories because the universe was a perfectly adequate villain!). Rather, there is a
problem that is a logical consequence of the hard and fast rules of the universe, and
those rules, if not fully understood, are liable to be lethal. This is the message of The
Cold Equations: the little girl must die not because she is a girl, nor because she is a
stowaway, but because she is ignorant of the rules. The universe in hard sf is huge
and cold and implacable, while humans are small and relatively weak though often
ingenious enough to see their way around the problem they face (such ingenuity
being an expression of our scientific understanding of the rules). Such human
insignificance, incidentally, may explain why the people in hard sf stories are
generally so under-characterised: they matter far less in the grand scheme of things
than the impersonal universe, its rules, and the ingenious way its rules might be
circumvented for the story.
Peter Wattss story, A Niche (1994), is one of a number of pieces in this anthology
that seem to fit this pattern exactly. Two women, knowingly called Clarke and
Ballard, occupy an isolated observation post deep under the ocean. As they come to
terms with the icy threat of their particular universe, one of the women, Ballard,
becomes paranoid and dangerously unhinged, while Clarke, who engages more
thoroughly with the reality of the ocean, comes through the challenge unscathed.
Superficially, therefore, this seems to belong unquestionably to the ranks of hard sf.
But the substance of the story actually subverts this impression. Ballards paranoia
turns out to be justified: the two are the subjects of a shadowy psychological
experiment; while Clarkes identification with the realities of the ocean turns out to
be a self-destructive mania in its own right. Engagement with the implacable rules of
the universe, understanding of the machinery of one or more of the hard sciences
(physics, chemistry, biology), everything which is normally understood to be what
makes a hard sf story work turns out to be irrelevant to the mechanics of this
particular fiction. A Niche is a good science fiction story, but whether its structural
adherence to the patterns of hard sf make it a hard sf story must be open to question.
Other stories here seem to pay lip service to the conventions of hard sf but
structure themselves in ways that seem antipathetic to the whole enterprise of hard
sf. A Walk in the Sun (1991) by Geoffrey A. Landis, for instance, seems to be an
almost pure Cold Equations set-up: a ship has crashed on the moon and the sole
survivor can only keep alive by remaining in sunlight to power her equipment, which
means that she must walk right around the moon. As Watts says, science as such is
irrelevant to the story, but it all depends upon the iron rules of the universe. Yet such
a pure hard sf endeavour is compromised by the fact that on her walk our protagonist
keeps herself going by talking to the ghost of her dead sister, who is walking beside
her. Crude though this psychological aspect may seem (it calls to mind the members
of Shackletons polar expedition who reported sensing a third person walking with
-- 42 --

them through the snow), it seems antithetical to the deliberate eschewal of such
humanising elements in most of what might be considered classic hard sf. It is also
curious that the Landis and Watts stories both centre on female protagonists, as do a
surprising number of the stories here (Reef (2000) by Paul J. McAuley, Marrow
(1997) by Robert Reed) while many others have prominent female characters; are the
authors trying to tell us that these are no longer stories for boys? Certainly the casual
sexism of something like The Cold Equations generally seems to be a thing of the
past.
There is a female central character also in Kinds of Strangers (1999) by Sarah
Zettel, another story which seems in outline to conform exactly to the hard sf norm.
In this instance a ship has been damaged and it seems its crew are doomed until,
responding to a curious message, they hitch a ride on a passing comet. Again we have
the implacability of the universe, the rules that can kill you unless knowledge of
science can provide a way around. But where The Cold Equations hardened its heart
against the human cost of its drama in order to emphasise its rule-driven concepts,
Kinds of Strangers almost ignores the implacable universe in favour of a
psychological examination of a crew at the end of its tether, coping with despair and
suicide in the face of their hopelessness. Even the message that brings their salvation
is unexplained: does it indeed come from aliens, in which case this becomes a firstcontact story whose implications are never developed; or is it from one of the crew
members, in which case why is it necessary to resort to such a stratagem?
Despite such quibbles, I think Kinds of Strangers does count as hard sf, and by
a woman too. Despite my earlier remark about the noticeable growth in strong female
characters, this does still seem to be a predominantly male subgenre. Only three of
the authors featured here are women, and of these Zettel seems to be the only one
unequivocally writing hard sf. Of the others, Nancy Kress is represented by the
inevitable Beggars in Spain (1991), the original novelette in a series that became
more and more attenuated as it grew from tightly structured story into loose and
careless trilogy. Yes, there is a scientific notion at the point where this story starts,
but it is not a story about that scientific notion, nor is it about the iron rules that
inevitably flow from a first principle. Rather, this is a social examination of the
growth and character and cost of intolerance on both sides of the divide. As such it
is an excellent work, one of the better science fiction stories of the decade, but it
doesnt even come within shouting distance of the borders of hard sf unless you
reinterpret hard sf in such a way that the distinction becomes meaningless. Joan
Slonczewskis Microbe (1995) comes closer in its rigour, giving us a brief
introduction to the weird and wonderful inhabitants of an alien planet where DNA is
differently constructed. But even so, this is more about the strangeness and wonder
of the other than it is about the inhospitability of the universe, and that still doesnt
feel as if it belongs within the main body of hard sf.
Of course this prospect of hard sf is meant to survey a renaissance, so we might
imagine that hard sf itself has evolved during the course of this rebirth. If so, and if
-- 43 --

such a mutation might allow for the influx of humanism into the technological
problem solving of traditional hard sf, we might consider where this birth lies and
what the offspring is. The where is clearly signalled throughout by frequent
references to the infamous early-80s editorial in Interzone which called for radical
hard SF, though it is interesting that by the time Hartwell is introducing the second
of two stories by Bruce Sterling this term has become associated with cyberpunk: in
spite of Sterlings own stance, the Movement was not received as Radical Hard SF in
the U.S., nor immediately influential in that way, though it did set the stage
internationally. This sets the whole edifice of a hard sf renaissance on dodgy ground.
The original coining of radical hard SF in Interzone was a piece of lazy phrasemaking; though repeatedly challenged on it (for the phrase certainly caught the
imagination) Interzones editorial collective was never adequately able to explain
what the term might mean. This uncertainty carried over into the magazine, as
indicated by the fact that the imagined birthplace of the new hard sf is represented
by only three out of forty-one stories, at least one of which, Reasons to be Cheerful
(1997) by Greg Egan, stretches my notions of hard sf to their breaking point. Hard sf,
in the sense of stories about a rule-driven universe, stories in which some
characteristic of physics, astronomy or, more rarely, chemistry or biology, provided
the entire raison detre, were not then and have not been since a characteristic of
Interzone. Moreover, Interzone, in line with the general ethos of British science fiction,
has followed a left-of-centre political line, while hard sf has traditionally assumed a
right-wing stance. If Radical Hard SF actually means anything, therefore, it might
well mean radical in a political sense.
This is something that Hartwell and Cramer tentatively acknowledge. The number
of stories about women, if not the number by women, indicates a new awareness of
gender politics, for instance. More generally, there are several casual references to
left-wing stances, but this is counterbalanced by the number of stories of which they
say: there are no overt politics here. This is said, for instance, of The Mendelian
Lamp Case (1997) by Paul Levinson, a work which is not hard sf by any sort of
definition I can imagine, but rather that awkward hybrid the sf-detective story, and
one which raises yet again that interminable bugbear of the libertarian right: the huge
and immortal secret crime syndicate hiding at the very heart of our society. There is
a suggestion, therefore, that Hartwell and Cramer might see one interpretation of
radical hard sf as referring to liberal politics, but they seem blind to any political
influence on the right. While it is fairly easy to see a generally liberal propensity in
most of the British or Australian writers featured here (I am thinking particularly of
Arthur C. Clarke, Paul McAuley, David Langford, Greg Egan ), fully half of the
American authors are clearly expressing positions on the political right (Poul
Anderson, Ben Bova, David Brin, Paul Levinson ). Mind you, it is hard to see some
of the left-of-centre stories from either side of the Atlantic as being particularly hard
sf. Langfords Different Kinds of Darkness (2000) is an ingenious example of that
staple sf story: the discovery of the true nature of the world. But this type of story is
-- 44 --

common throughout the genre, and there is nothing here that pins this example down
as hard sf. From the other side of the Atlantic, Kim Stanley Robinsons Arthur
Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars (1999) uses the science of how a ball might
fly in the different gravity of Mars as part of the scene-painting, but it is hardly
integral to the story of an unlikely friendship. Although there may, therefore, have
been some shift in the political spectrum of hard sf, it is far from universal, and far
from typifying a new hard sf.
As to the suggested linkage of Radical Hard SF with cyberpunk, it has to be said
that only one cyberpunk author is featured here, Bruce Sterling, and neither of his
two stories, Bicycle Repairman (1996) and Taklamakan (1998), comes close to
fitting the hard sf bill. Bicycle Repairman in particular, in which social organisation
is shown to win out over technology, runs directly counter to even the most liberal
interpretation of the hard sf agenda.
There are, however, a number of what we might consider post-cyberpunk writers
here, people like Greg Egan with Wangs Carpets (1995) and Ted Chiang with
Understand (1991), who have taken the cyberpunk ethos of a human-computer
interface and developed it in ways that do move towards the hard sf end of the
spectrum. Basically they are exploring posthumanity, what happens when genetic
modification, computer implants and other technological developments make us no
longer quite human. This can open up new scientific problems to be solved, new
threats inherent in the very nature of the universe, in other words a new range of hard
sf opportunities. Wangs Carpets, in which posthumans discover an alien planet with
a very different kind of life, seems to me to fit neatly into this extended hard sf
agenda by raising countless variations on the old question of what it is to be human.
Understand presents posthumanity as a more individual threat, exponentially
increased intelligence leading to a battle for survival between two superbeings. But it
is hard sf only to the extent that Flowers for Algernon (1959) by Daniel Keyes, whose
model Chiang follows and usurps, is hard sf. That is, tangentially so at best. Even so,
it is easy to come away from this anthology with the impression that the notion of
posthumanity has been the generating force behind what rebirth of hard sf there
might have been in the 1990s. Certainly, story after story presents some variation on
the idea of the posthuman, and seems to be included here on the strength of that
scenario alone. Genesis (1995) by Poul Anderson, Beggars in Spain (1991) by Nancy
Kress, Gene Wars (1991) by Paul J. McAuley, Marrow (1997) by Robert Reed, Fast
Times at Fairmont High (2001) by Vernor Vinge, among others, take for granted a
notion of enhanced humanity, this is the central scientific thesis that holds all these
stories together. Without the posthuman element what drives these stories is social,
observational, melodramatic; they are, in the main, good stories, but without the
posthuman some of them wouldnt even be science fiction, let alone hard sf. It is the
posthumanity, therefore, that must be seen as the reason for their inclusion here, but
does that count as qualification as hard sf? Andersons Genesis is a form of planetary
romance which even manages to incorporate elements of pseudo-medieval fantasy;
-- 45 --

Reeds Marrow is a big dumb story about a big dumb object which has no
justification other than sheer scale, and which resolves the plot with a denouement
so feeble as to make the attempted grandeur of the rest of it seem laughable; Vinges
Fast Times at Fairmont High is a social comedy about coping with the consequences
of the information age which again has a plot coupon of astounding feebleness but
which carries it off with considerably more style than the Reed. Only McAuleys
escalation of genetic change seems to fit comfortably within notions of hard sf. For
the rest, it seems to me yet again that what Hartwell and Cramer are taking as a
signifier of hard sf is no more than what makes the story science fiction in the
broadest sense.
If hard sf means anything other than science fiction, therefore, we are forced back
to the same set of exemplars we have been using ever since P. Schuyler Miller first
coined the term. It is something other than social satire, than big space adventures,
than planetary romances, from time travel, from warning glimpses of the human cost
of scientific advances, something in other words that stands apart from all the other
common characteristics of science fiction. It is still being written, often by the same
people who have always written it. Exchange Rate (1999) by Hal Clement reads like
any other Hal Clement story, long on scientific detail, short on drama, on humanity,
on anything that might make you want to keep reading it. It is typical of hard sf in
the fact that scientific ideas are so central to the situation and the plot that more
effort has to be expended in establishing and describing these than such extraneous
detail as characterisation, setting, plot development and the like. Though hard sf
doesnt always have to be so tedious, there are younger writers in the tradition who
are more succinct at establishing the scientific rationale and therefore have a little
more space to devote to the rest of the fiction. Stephen Baxter in Gossamer (1995)
has written an archetypal hard sf story in which survival is dependent upon an
understanding and exploitation of the rules of the universe (I am less certain that his
other story here, On the Orion Line (2000), a rather lumbering and old-fashioned
war-with-the-aliens tale, really fits so securely in the remit of this anthology). But
even the newer generation of writers associated with traditional hard sf dont
necessarily write that all the time. Why Hartwell and Cramer should pick Allen
Steeles The Good Rat (1995) to represent hard sf is beyond me: the storys only
novum is that humans rather than animals are used in experiments on medicines and
cosmetics. Apart from that it is a simple and rather touching social satire that is about
as far from hard sf as it is possible to get and still be in the same genre. Steele must
have written far more overtly hard sf stories than this, and one has to question the
editorial decision-making involved. Similarly, Michael Flynn is a fine hard sf writer
of the modern school, but Built Upon the Sands of Time (2000) is a limply humorous
bar story (the most obvious models are Arthur C. Clarkes Tales from the White Hart)
that hinges on the sort of alternate history game that is normally beyond the pale for
the rigorously-minded hard sf writer.
-- 46 --

It is only by distorting my understanding of what hard sf is, and always has been,
about that I am able to recognise even so many as half the stories in this anthology
as being hard sf at all. From that basis it is difficult to say that the editors have made
any sort of a case for a hard sf renaissance. What is hard sf here seems more like a
continuation (often by the same writers who have long been connected with the
subgenre) than a rebirth. Let me put that another way: if these stories represent a
radicalising of hard sf, a regeneration of what has gone before, then they are taking
it in directions that mean the results are no longer recognisable as hard sf, while those
stories which are recognisably hard sf do not seem to be doing anything radically
different from what hard sf has always been doing.
In the end, as with its predecessor, The Ascent of Wonder, one is left with the
impression that this is a hefty anthology of some fairly good science fiction (though
with more duds than one would really like to see), but an anthology that bears only
a tangential relationship with its title and stated aim.

-- 47 --

MISTAH KURTZ, HE DEAD

The brown current ran swiftly out of the heart of darkness, bearing us down
towards the sea with twice the speed of our upward progress; and Kurtzs life
was running swiftly, too, ebbing, ebbing out of his heart into the sea of
inexorable time. The manager was very placid, he had no vital anxieties now, he
took us both in with a comprehensive and satisfied glance: the affair had come
off as well as could be wished. ... The pilgrims looked upon me with disfavour.
I was, so to speak, numbered with the dead. It is strange how I accepted this
unforeseen partnership, this choice of nightmares forced upon me in the
tenebrous land invaded by these mean and greedy phantoms. ...
Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never
seen before, and hope never to see again. ... It was as though a veil had been
rent. I saw in that ivory face the expression of sombre pride, of ruthless power,
of craven terror of an intense and hopeless despair. ... He cried in a whisper
at some image, at some vision he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than
a breath
The horror! The horror!
I blew the candle out and left the cabin. The pilgrims were dining in the messroom, and I took my place opposite the manager, who lifted his eyes to give me
a questioning glance, which I successfully ignored. ... Suddenly the managers
boy put his insolent black head in the doorway, and said in a tone of scathing
contempt
Mistah Kurtz he dead.1

And so, British science fiction was born.

Well, not quite. Though it is sometimes hard to imagine how J.G. Ballard could
exist without Joseph Conrad.
I am starting this talk about the character of British science fiction by quoting a
Polish writer who never wrote science fiction (except for one curious collaboration)
for one simple reason. What Conrad did in Heart of Darkness was establish a tone and
a quality that have become inextricably linked with British sf.
By the time Conrads novella was published, right at the beginning of the
twentieth century, British science fiction was already old. Even if we agree with Brian
Aldiss that the very first science fiction novel was Mary Shelleys Frankenstein,2 were
going back nearly another century. If we start thinking of the robinsonades of the
early eighteenth century, or the fanciful voyages to the Moon and the Sun of the
seventeenthth century, of Thomas Mores Utopia, well, the centuries just pile up. But
-- 49 --

lets face it; such ur- or proto-science fiction wasnt that much different from the
other literature going on around it. Even when we get indisputably into the history
rather than the prehistory of sf, theres nothing necessarily or distinctly British about
any of it. The dark and gloomy Gothic imagination which inspired Mary Shelley was
little different from the dark and gloomy Gothic imagination which inspired, say,
Edgar Allen Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne. The bright and vivacious adventures of
Jules Verne were siblings to the bright and vivacious adventures of Robert Louis
Stevenson.
Indeed, it is only when we come to H.G. Wells, right at the end of the nineteenth
century, that science fiction itself starts to acquire any of the distinctive
characteristics that separate it from fantasy, or even from what I suppose we might
call mainstream fiction. And you wouldnt necessarily brand Wells as a distinctly
British sf writer. Theres too much about him of the excitement at the possibilities of
the future, for instance, that would become characteristic of American science fiction.
Too much of the urgent political underpinning that can be found in, say, Russian sf.
No, Wells is just too important an ancestor of all science fiction to be rudely thrust
into one narrow pigeonhole.
Nevertheless it is here, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that we first start
to trace the split or shall we be generous and say the parallel development between
what would become, in America, science fiction and what we, for a time at least,
called scientific romance. It is this split that I want to examine in this talk, or rather,
the British side of it. And here I suppose I must admit to rampant parochialism. After
all, science fiction is not exclusively British or American. It is French and Russian and
Chinese and Japanese and Romanian and heaven knows what else, and they have all
developed in their own individual ways. These days we have access to a large body of
Australian science fiction which, despite being in the English language, refuses to
conform to the patterns of either British or American sf. Even so, David Hartwell, as
sententious as ever, says in the introduction to his latest anthology: American science
fiction, in translation or in the original, dominated the discourse world-wide. It still
does; even though there have been major writers in other languages who have made
major contributions. American science fiction is still the dominant partner in all the
dialogues.3 Hartwell is wrong, of course, but if we substituted English language for
American, I think we would have to concede the point.
Now, the split. To a large extent this was due to what might be called an accident
of birth. We all know the story of Hugo Gernsback sticking the occasional didactic
tale into his gung-ho pulp magazines extolling the wonders of American technology.
And thats not too far from the truth. Science fiction emerged into its modern
American form at a time, not long after the First World War, when the United States
had become the worlds dominant economic power while politically it was entering
one of its periodic isolationist phases. While American magazines did reprint stories
by Wells and other British writers, and Wells in particular was a major influence on
early American science fiction writers, the emphasis was on stories which reflected
-- 50 --

the traditional American virtues, much like the ones reflected in stories of the old
West. Thus emerged, for example, the figure of the competent man as lone hero, who
would not seriously be challenged as an iconic figure in American sf until the New
Wave of the 1960s.
The British scientific romance emerged earlier, in popular magazines like
Pearsons or Blackwoods which flourished in the latter part of the nineteenth century
and on up to the various publishing crises of the early years of the twentieth century.
The stories they published tended to be as garish and as simplistic as those in the
American pulps, but they were not split along genre lines. The same magazine might
well publish a ghost story and a detective story, a romance and a fantasy. On a
popular level, a writer like Conan Doyle could write of Sherlock Holmes and of
Professor Challenger, while The Just So Stories and With the Night Mail could come
with equal facility from the pen of Rudyard Kipling and be greeted with the same
appreciation. And Henry James could seriously suggest to H.G. Wells that they
collaborate on a novel about Mars. James and Wells may have fallen out later, the
artist versus the populist foreshadowing the high-art/low-art split that would cast
science fiction forever from literary respectability, but even exponents of high art
would decry science fiction by writing it, as E.M. Forster did with The Machine
Stops; and even this anti-sf was archetypal British science fiction in its fear of the
consequence of change. This continuity between science fiction and the mainstream
even in the face of dismissal by the establishment would be important later.
But first, let me go back for a moment. Were all science fiction readers, we can
cope with these time shifts. Early science fiction, the proto-true quill as it were, from,
say, Thomas Mores Utopia to Jonathan Swifts Gullivers Travels, tended to be satires
in which writers could safely question the foibles of contemporary society by casting
some aspect of that society upon an alien shore. The sixteenth, seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries were a time of European expansion into a world that was still
largely empty (at least to our eyes), and these literal New Worlds that were being
discovered and explored were also in some way a measure of our own humanity.
Remember, John Donne could see sex as a new-found land, while Sir Walter Raleigh
thought Virginia might provide the setting for a genuine Utopia. The inner and outer
worlds were mirrored; wild travellers tales and genuine exploration, political satire
and the quest for El Dorado all merged into a fictional stew which produced fanciful
stories such as Gullivers Travels and more sober works such as Robinson Crusoe. As
long as there were plentiful blank areas on the map and warnings that here be
dragons, such unknown lands provided an appropriate and safely distant stage upon
which to present dramas which questioned our certainties.
Such questioning was as characteristic of scientific endeavour as of political
satire, and when Mary Shelley projected certain scientific questions of her age upon
the Other of an artificial man she wasnt so much starting a new genre as following
along the same route as More and Swift and others. Frankensteins most immediate
literary precursors were the Gothic novels, those expressions of literary Romanticism
-- 51 --

which saw wild landscapes as the model for the human condition. John Donnes
sexual new-found land had become a storm-lashed country of rugged peaks and
Arctic wastes wherein one might find oneself, away from the ordered and manicured
landscapes of the eighteenth-century city or country estate.
Mary Shelleys combination of the Gothic Otherness of wild landscapes with the
scientific Otherness of the Creature did not immediately set a trend. By the latter half
of the nineteenth century, however, the notion that the Other might reflect our own
social role was being explored in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, while the
notion of journeying to a strange land (in this case, the future) as a means of
isolating and examining our place in the world was surfacing again in The Time
Machine. These two strands, these two ways of presenting the Other, would come
together in British science fiction through the unlikely medium of Conrads Heart of
Darkness.
Yes, you knew wed have to get back to that eventually.
Heart of Darkness is an axis around which much of modern fiction, and
particularly modern British science fiction, revolves. It was written as the last empty
places on the map were being filled; it was indeed the last book that could be written
about the strangeness lost in the secret places of our world without a venture into
fancy. (When J.G. Ballard virtually rewrote Heart of Darkness as The Day of Creation
he had to take the fantastic leap of creating a river from nowhere before he could get
his story going.) And as these empty places were filled, Conrad replaced them with an
emptiness in the heart of his characters. Alienation, the leitmotif of so much
twentieth-century science fiction, was symbolised by the alien landscape of Conrads
Africa, while Kurtz, that tenebrous character so talked about but so little known, is as
directly alien to our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world as Mr
Hyde or Frankensteins Creature.
Without itself being science fiction, therefore, Heart of Darkness united the
themes that were to become the dominant patterns of science fiction, particularly
British science fiction, as it developed throughout the century. In New Maps of Hell,
Kingsley Amis quotes Edmund Crispin: Where an ordinary novel or short story
resembles portraiture or at widest the domestic interior, science fiction offers the less
cosy satisfaction of a landscape with figures.4 In Heart of Darkness we see how the
landscape and the figures are made to reflect each other. Though the figures may be
small and lacking detail, we know exactly who and what they are because of the
landscape through which they move. Kurtz has gone native, he and Africa are one.
We learn all we need to know of his character from Marlows experiences on the
journey up river, just as in Ballards The Crystal World, for example, the psychological
depths of the explorer are displayed in the crystalline landscape, or, taking a more
recent example, the rapid growth and decay of the tropical forest that has taken over
London in Ronald Wrights A Scientific Romance parallels the rapid growth and decay
(from CJD) of the narrator.
-- 52 --

In his survey of British science fiction, Ultimate Island, Nicholas Ruddick suggests
that the island, real or metaphorical, is the device, the symbol, which best represents
British science fiction. He illustrates this argument with examples that range from
Shakespeares The Tempest to Goldings Pincher Martin, from Wellss The Island of Dr
Moreau to Ballards Concrete Island. Certainly, it is easy to think of many more
island stories in British sf, and the identification of the distinctive characteristic of
our science fiction with our island state is almost too tempting. But at the same time,
it is also easy to think of many characteristic works of British science fiction that have
no island in them Stapledons Last and First Men, Orwells Nineteen Eighty-Four,
Roberts Pavane, Clarkes 2001 or American works that do feature islands whether
physically, as in Kim Stanley Robinsons A Short Sharp Shock or Lucius Shepards
Kalimantan, or metaphorically, as with the Golden Gate Bridge in William Gibsons
Virtual Light or the space station in more stories that I could possibly enumerate
for this notion to completely hold water.
Now, islands may feature largely in British science fiction because, as an island
race, it is easy for us to imagine a massive flood as the instrument for transforming
our world. Thats what happens, for instance, in S. Fowler Wrights The Amphibians
and Christopher Priests A Dream of Wessex. However, I suspect the island is a
significant feature of British science fiction because it is an isolated landscape in
which to place isolated characters. In so far as setting and psychology resonate with
each other in British sf, islands fit the character of most protagonists while keeping
within a restricted area the action that has to be encompassed though other settings
meet these requirements just as well the forest, the lonely village, the wilderness,
the ship or spaceship or space station and occur within British sf with almost as
much frequency.
In many ways the split the separate development of British and American sf
was at its most extreme between the wars. In America the simplistic pulp stories of
Gernsbacks magazines grew into the Campbellian Golden Age when many of the
giants of the genre, people like Asimov and Heinlein, first came on the scene. John
W. Campbell steered his writers, steered American science fiction, along very
distinctive lines. American writers explored ideas, strange devices, newness itself.
American sf focused on the relationship between the all-American hero, the
competent man, and innovation.
During the 1930s, when some of the American magazines started to become
available in this country, certain British writers such as Arthur C. Clarke, Eric Frank
Russell and John Wyndham began to write stories aimed squarely at this potential
market. In the main, though, British scientific romance of the time was not following
this path. Typically, British sf was concerned not so much with the new as with the
effect of the new. Writers such as S. Fowler Wright, John Gloag and Aldous Huxley
would spend less time than their American counterparts inspecting the wonderful
machine and more time recounting life when the machine was working (or, more
often, not). Their subject was not the relationship between the hero and the
-- 53 --

innovation, but the relationship between the ordinary person and the world after the
innovation. When a British writer directly addressed ideas, it was not the idea made
concrete and steel, as for instance in Heinleins The Roads Must Roll, but the idea as
a sequence of transformations, of changed men in relation to changing landscapes,
as in Stapledons Last and First Men.
After the Second World War the split between the two English-language science
fictions had already started to narrow. In America, new magazines like The Magazine
of Fantasy and Science Fiction and new writers like Frederik Pohl, Alfred Bester,
Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn, were moving away from their predecessors
gung-ho love affair with technology and the future. If nothing else, the atomic bomb
and the Cold War made it impossible to regard science and the future with unalloyed
optimism.
In Britain, meanwhile, the pre-war generation whose imaginations had been fired
by American sf magazines had now come to maturity, and Arthur C. Clarke in
particular was establishing himself as one of the greats of the genre, fully on a par,
in tone as well as in talent, with his American counterparts. Yet this was the time,
more than any other, when British science fiction was branded as distinctly different
from American, a literature usually classed as downbeat and pessimistic. And it is the
fault of one man.
John Wyndham, using various bits of his interminable name to create a variety of
pseudonyms, had started writing before the war. He sold his first story to Hugo
Gernsback in 1931, and during that decade his work was primarily adventure fiction
that fitted easily into the American style. After the war, however, he changed to the
John Wyndham form of his name, and changed his writing style. His first major work
after the war, the book that made his name and established the style with which he
became synonymous, was The Day of the Triffids. Other British writers John
Christopher, John Lymington, John Blackburn, Charles Eric Maine followed his
format during the 1950s and early 1960s, and what Brian Aldiss called the cosy
catastrophe5 became fixed in everybodys minds as being what British science fiction
was all about.
These were, typically, stories in which some part of Britain was devastated by a
catastrophe, usually of a bizarre sort (an attack by giant plants?). There were
innumerable deaths, an odyssey through the devastated landscape, and in the end
some small group of survivors would re-establish a sort of middle-class normality in
a world that had been wiped clean by the catastrophe. They were clearly stories about
loss of power, they were also conservative in the way they clung to old-fashioned
traditions and standards, and they were very, very English. They were, the common
view would have it, about the loss of Empire, and they were very depressing.
Because the cosy catastrophe is so important in the way people perceive British
science fiction, even today, I want to spend a little time looking at the circumstances
in which it arose.
Britains commercial and political empire, particularly during the age of Victorian
-- 54 --

expansion, attracted many of our brightest young people into colonial service (as well
as a fair number of younger sons and the less naturally gifted, who were parcelled
out to those distant corners of the empire where they might do least harm). Those who
stayed at home, meanwhile, were often involved in trade or directly benefited in other
ways from these international contacts. But the high casualty rate of the First World
War, and the resultant shortage of manpower, meant that local peoples became more
involved in their own government, business and commerce. Then the Second World
War brought about a major change in the world order.
The First World War had left America the dominant economic power in the world;
the Second World War left it the dominant political and, above all, military power.
With the development of the atomic bomb the arms race that had been the most
prominent characteristic of the pre-war balance of power entered a new phase. Now
there was only one state in a position to challenge American might, the Soviet Union,
and as one war ended a new, cold one began. All at once, Britains standing on the
world stage was not so certain as it had been before. And as the superpowers locked
horns and began to extend their influence across the globe, so the extent of British
influence began to decline. Those in the Far East and India who had begun to taste
political and economic freedom during the inter-war years now wanted full control of
their countries. Our picture of the world no longer showed the wealth and benevolence
of British rule, but rather the terrorist atrocities of the Stern Gang in Palestine, the
Mau Mau in Kenya and EOKA in Cyprus. Even our dominions, those great Englishspeaking lands of Australia, New Zealand and Canada for which we felt such a
paternal affection that the waves of post-war emigration from Britain to these warm
and wealthy countries did not really feel like leaving home, seemed to need the
mother country less and less, while South Africa was embarking upon the political
experiment of apartheid and was, in effect, turning its back upon the rest of the world.
Meanwhile, troops who returned from liberating Belsen (like Mervyn Peake) had
horror stories to tell, as did the soldiers and civilians (like J.G. Ballard) who survived
Japanese captivity in the Far East. The world, we were learning, didnt really want us,
and anyway it was full of far worse things than anyone might possibly have imagined
before the war. And things werent much better at home. As the war ended in Europe
(indeed, while it was still going on in the Far East) we elected a Labour government
whose radical platform promised a break with the past. The masses were going to
benefit from the brave new world we had fought for. But despite moves whose scale
captured the public imagination the establishment of the National Health Service,
the nationalisation of the coal industry the new governments reforming zeal soon
ran out of steam The economy, still recovering from the war and dependent on
foreign (specifically, American) aid, wasnt strong enough to sustain these changes.
Meanwhile, the first years of peace brought only shortages, flu epidemics and
exceptionally hard winters. The wartime sacrifice of rationing would not finally
disappear until the mid-1950s and bomb sites would remain a feature of the urban
landscape until well into the 1960s.
-- 55 --

It was a time, in other words, when Britains position as a world power was in
decline, when wealth (and food) no longer flowed in from possessions around the
world, when the economy lay in all-too-visible ruins wherever we looked, when old
certainties and securities were being undermined. By 1951, when the Labour
government had been voted out of office and Winston Churchill, with a Tory
government made up largely of the same people who had run the country during the
war, was back in power, people looking forward could see only uncertainty, while
those who looked back found disruption. We were not yet able to eat all we might
wish, fruits such as bananas were still considered exotic, and even fashion had to
replace the generous cut of pre-war clothing with the dowdier New Look of post-war
austerity. The Ealing Comedies of this period, such as Passport to Pimlico and The
Titfield Thunderbolt, perfectly captured the mood: a nervous preservation of the past
in the face of powers that thought only in terms of restrictions and cuts. So strong
was this need to hold on to the familiar and the safe that, despite humiliations such
as the Suez Crisis, scandals, accusations of mismanagement (which grew so
vociferous they led to Macmillans famous Night of the Long Knives) and a
continuing policy of cuts and restrictions that continued right up to Dr Beechings
famous axing of many branch railway lines, the Conservative government
comfortably held on to power for thirteen years.
It is against this background that the rise in popularity of the British catastrophe
story must be seen. Remember: as Ive said, the main focus of the scientific romance
and whatever else it was, the cosy catastrophe was just an extension of scientific
romances such as Richard Jefferiess After London, H.G. Wellss The War of the
Worlds, S. Fowler Wrights The Amphibians was not the change, the novelty, what
I believe Darko Suvin christened the novum, but the aftereffect, the consequence of
change. And people were seeing consequences of change all around them. The
disrupted landscapes of The Day of the Triffids or The Kraken Wakes or The Death of
Grass were transparent analogies for the way Britain actually was. The cosy
catastrophe was not a story about loss of empire so much as a way of coming to terms
with war, victory and reduced circumstances.
As the 1950s wore on, however, Britain experienced a pale, delayed, but
nevertheless welcome echo of Americas boom in consumer spending. We got
televisions, which showed a lot of imported American programmes and gave us a
taste of what the future might be. Harold Macmillan told us wed never had it so
good; and he was right. For decades to come cynical writers would still find reason
enough to write disaster stories Ballards The Drowned World, Roberts The Furies,
Priests Fugue for a Darkening Island, Cowpers The Twilight of Briareus which were
a natural mode of expression for the British approach to science fiction but the age
of the cosy catastrophe was over within a decade of its birth. By the early l960s
America had men in space, even though the assassination of President Kennedy had
been a blow to their optimism and esteem (and the American propensity for paranoia
turned from the Red Menace to the conspiracy theory). In Britain we had a new
-- 56 --

Labour government, the white heat of the technological revolution, near-enough full
employment, more money than wed ever had before, the rise of a wealthy, informed
and active youth, and the Beatles. For a while, with our pop stars and fashion
designers and photographers and other exponents of style, it seemed that Britain led
the world once more. We couldnt go on writing the same science fiction, because it
no longer reflected the world that was Britain. But, despite the success of writers like
Arthur C. Clarke, we couldnt start writing American science fiction either. After all,
the certainties that had underpinned American sf at its boldest no longer seemed so
certain following the demise of Kennedys Camelot, the increasing violence associated
with the civil rights movement and involvement in the Vietnam War. The solution, in
retrospect, is probably slightly less surprising than it must have seemed at the time.
But only slightly.
Despite the way that sf had been cast into the outer darkness by the literary
establishment, British science fiction had never quite lost contact with the
mainstream. Mainstream writers would continue to write books that belonged within
science fiction, as George Orwell did with Nineteen Eighty-Four, William Golding with
Lord of the Flies, Lawrence Durrell with Tunc and Numquam, Anthony Burgess with
A Clockwork Orange and so on. Science fiction writers would write mainstream
works, as Brian Aldiss has done ever since his first book, The Brightfount Diaries. And
sf would occasionally be deemed worthy of academic study it took only twenty
years for The Day of the Triffids to make the school curriculum. At the same time, in
the 1960s rebellious youth had to be rebellious in its choice of literature, and there
was an upswing in the literary avant-garde. The trial of Penguin Books over Lady
Chatterleys Lover early in the decade, and the string of obscenity trials that followed,
had the effect of liberalising British fiction. Taboos were being broken all over the
place, while writers who did away with traditional narrative structure, such as Henry
Miller and William Burroughs, enjoyed a vogue though this was, in part at least,
because they tended to deal explicitly with sex, drugs and violence, the taboo subjects
that were to be flaunted throughout the period.
Science fiction proved peculiarly fertile ground for such literary experiments.
Since it was despised by the establishment, it was already part of, or at least close to,
the underground. And it was easy to fit speculation about sexual possibilities or drug
fantasies into the wide-open subject matter of the genre. So the new generation of
British sf writers took the literary techniques of the mainstream most notably the
stream-of-consciousness and unreliable narrators of Modernism, techniques which
had no place in the straightforward narratives that had been a feature of virtually all
science fiction to this date mixed in the avant-garde subject matter of the new
underground, and the New Wave was formed.
It has to be said that the New Wave, as I am talking about it now, was an almost
exclusively British phenomenon. Though a few American writers, notably Thomas M.
Disch, John Sladek and Norman Spinrad, came to Britain and were a part of the
experiment, practically all the work that defines the character of the British New
-- 57 --

Wave was by British writers. In particular, Im thinking of Michael Moorcocks Jerry

Cornelius stories, Brian Aldisss Acid-Head War stories, J.G. Ballards condensed
novels, John Brunners Stand on Zanzibar and the early work of M. John Harrison,
Christopher Priest and Josephine Saxton.
The new generation of American writers was similarly looking for a new way of
writing science fiction that was more in keeping with the mood and attitude of the
times. The older sf, with its positive view of the future and its implicit belief in
Americas role in that future, was inherently conservative. The new writers coming up
were anything but. Some Americans did champion the British New Wave in the face
of the horrified reaction of the old guard, in particular Judith Merril, whose
anthology, England Swings SF, probably did as much as any other publication,
including Moorcocks New Worlds, to define the shape and characteristics of the
British New Wave. But when American writers did pick up on the New Wave it was
in a very different form than on this side of the Atlantic. The combination of literary
technique and avant-garde subject matter was ditched in favour of a more
straightforward iconoclasm. The American New Wave was more overtly revolutionary
than its British counterpart; taboos were shattered by attacking them head on and the
glory was in the demolition, not in the manner of its achievement.
The New Wave made a far bigger splash than, perhaps, it warranted. Certainly, the
whole movement had run its course by the end of the decade, a far shorter lifespan
even than the cosy catastrophe of the previous decade. Yet it did nothing to change
the image of British science fiction, probably because British sf, for all its literary
experimentalism, was still concerned with exploring the aftereffects of change, while
the Americans, with their delight in smashing icons, were still concentrating on the
point of change. The British New Wave continued to be far less enamoured of the
future than the American New Wave. Nevertheless, I think the New Waves on each
side of the Atlantic became confused, so it becomes difficult to see that this was the
last time that British science fiction had a distinctive character all its own.
The 1970s were a pretty dismal decade for British science fiction. New Worlds
staggered on as a Quarterly that managed only ten issues over six years, and
although it contained good stories there was little of the daring of its earlier
incarnation. Some of the writers who had emerged during the 1960s were producing
some of their best work Roberts The Chalk Giants, Priests Inverted World, Cowpers
The Road to Corlay but few new writers were coming up. Those that did emerge
during the decade Garry Kilworth, Ian Watson, Robert Holdstock were too few to
form a distinctive group and were mostly seen in terms of continuing what had gone
before.
At the same time, two events were set to change the nature and the perception of
science fiction. The first occurred during the mid-1960s with the appearance of Star
Trek which did so poorly at first that it was cancelled early, but which went on to be
shown continually all around the world. Then, at the end of the 1970s, came Star
Wars. Even as representatives of American science fiction at its most gung-ho, these
-- 58 --

two were clearly old-fashioned when they appeared but they reached a massive
audience normally resistant to science fiction, they were a formative taste of science
fiction for many of the writers on both sides of the Atlantic who have appeared over
the last couple of decades, and they were the first step in a homogenisation of science
fiction that has continued ever since.
Perhaps if British science fiction had been more vibrant at this time it might have
found preserving its distinctive voice easier. But it wasnt vibrant at all; it was, at best,
marking time. Even America wasnt immune to the malaise of the decade the most
distinctive new writer to emerge in America during this period was John Varley,
whose early stories and novels resolutely turned the clock back to Heinleinian days
of yore. There was nothing to put against the defining image of science fiction
presented by Star Trek and Star Wars.
Only in the 1980s did written sf on both sides of the Atlantic bestir itself from the
inertia of the previous decade. In America we got cyberpunk which wasnt as new as
some people have suggested, and those who proclaim it postmodern science fiction
tend to overlook the overt references to Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner,
J.G. Ballard and a host of other writers you will find throughout the movement.
Nevertheless, it was innovative, it did bring new life into the genre. Of course, one of
the ways writers and commentators did this was by being noisy about it, especially,
in the early days, Bruce Sterling in his Vincent Omniaveritas guise. Quieter, but in
their way almost as important, were are the writers who were briefly but
unsatisfactorily called the humanists. Gene Wolfe begat Kim Stanley Robinson who
begat Karen Joy Fowler, and so on. Where Gibson and Sterling and their ilk learned
their science fiction from the flashy American past and their literature in equal
measure from Dashiel Hammett and Thomas Pynchon; the humanists (if I have to
use the term) learned their science fiction from both British and American sources,
and their literature from across the American mainstream. The growing
homogenisation, the closure of the split Ive talked about, wasnt all a movement from
here to there; some of them, remember, were moving towards here.
As cyberpunk was stirring American sf, here in Britain we got Interzone which,
truth to tell, has made a pretty decent fist of doing the same thing over here. Though
that isnt the same thing as establishing a distinctive British voice, which New Worlds
had done earlier. When it started, Interzone tried too hard to be a reincarnation of
New Worlds, forgetting that the times and the mood had changed. Thatchers Britain
was no place to recreate a literature of Labour government, social revolution, and
student protest. By the time that false start had faded away, cyberpunk had become
the way to tell science fiction, and what we got were far more American writers than
had been usual in any previous British magazine, and far too many British writers
producing pale imitations of what the Americans were doing. These were not
necessarily bad stories, and Interzone was not necessarily a bad magazine, but it could
not in this way provide a focus for creating or sustaining a distinctively British
science fiction.
-- 59 --

Perhaps there was no need for such a focus. Certainly, it has to be a good thing if
we can point to Iain M. Banks and destroy the myth that British sf is depressing; if
we can point to Stephen Baxter and destroy the myth that it is all about loss of
empire. But I, for one, would be a little regretful if British science fiction entirely lost
its distinctive character, if there was nothing about what we wrote here that marked
it out as different from the science fiction written in Nebraska or New Orleans, or
Novosibirsk come to that.
But it isnt all gone. In the last fifteen years or so we have had a flowering of
British science fiction that has been unprecedented. And the science fiction we see
today still has something almost indefinably British about it. Iain M. Bankss fiction
may be wide-screen baroque in a way that nobody used to do as well as the
Americans, but there is an underlying political sensibility that would have stuck in
the craw of just about every member of John W. Campbells stable. Gwyneth Jones
writes about alien invasion in a way that is informed by the British colonial
experience; in her work science fiction and loss of empire really do go together. We
may not have the cosy catastrophe any more, but we do have writers who make use
of the landscape as Wyndham and his confrres did, such as Jeff Noon playing with
cyberpunk tropes in the rain-lashed streets of Manchester. In fact the one consistent
thing we do see, in Paul McAuleys Fairyland or Stephen Baxters The Time Ships or
any of the prominent British science fiction novels of the last decade or so, is that the
concern is still that very British concern with the aftereffect, not the event, with the
ordinary person not the hero. And when we see Ian McDonald, in Chaga, following
J.G. Ballards footsteps into the heart of Africa, we can conclude:
Mistah Kurtz he not quite dead yet!

-- 60 --

THE NORTH-SOUTH CONTINUUM

~~I
History changes in thousands of ways every moment of every day. Most changes
are small, but occasionally we can see one moment around which the whole fate of
the world has hinged. Some chance has briefly interfered with the vast agenda of
history, some decision was not made, some unlikely action was taken, and as a result
things are perhaps better than they might have been, perhaps worse, but clearly
different.
Writers are fascinated by such turning points, and so are historians (especially
military historians, since the unpredictable confusions of battle provide a perfect
arena for such workings of chance and human error). They return to them constantly,
exploring the might-have-beens that such changes expose. It is an endeavour that
brings together science fiction writers and historians, though their efforts may not be
quite as similar as they appear on the surface.
The terms alternate history and counterfactual have tended to be used
indiscriminately, but in this article I intend to use them to signify two very different
types of work. Novelists are primarily interested in exploring the consequences of
change. They want a reasonably realistic turning point from which they can construct
a new history, then set their alternate histories some way after the moment at which
history diverged from the path we are familiar with. Thus, in one admittedly extreme
example of the sub-genre, Pavane, Keith Roberts might take as his turning point a
Spanish victory in the Armada of 1588, but his novel explores the consequent world
in the 1960s. Historians, however, tend to be primarily interested in the process of
change. They want to examine in detail how and why history took the path it did and
how easily it might have been deflected. Such counterfactuals are almost invariably
set around the moment of change, employ no character who was not in the historical
record, and refer to the consequential history that flows from this moment of change,
if at all, as an afterthought.
Nevertheless, novelists and historians alike tend to turn again and again to the
same few hinge moments. The First World War, for example, devastating as it was for
the history of the Twentieth Century, has attracted very few counterfactual
examinations. For the historian, after the first few weeks it offered little in the way
of decisive moments that might have radically affected the outcome; for the novelist,
it offers no realistic turning point from which to build a dramatically different history.
The result of the Second World War, in contrast, hung in dramatic balance on many
an occasion and might easily have gone either way, giving historians considerable
ground for investigation; while the adversaries had such different aims in fighting the
war, and the world resulting from it might have been so different, that it has sparked
-- 61 --

a whole library of alternate histories. After the Second World War, the event that has
generated most alternate histories and counterfactuals has been the American Civil
War. There are many reasons for this. The workings of chance seem to have played a
major rle in the outcome of an inordinate number of battles; the war produced an
extraordinary number of romantic or tragic heroes, such as Robert E. Lee and
Abraham Lincoln, who inevitably attract the attention of novelists; and the issue of
slavery made that war instrumental in establishing the moral shape of the post-war
world. In this essay I want to look at what both these forms of imaginative literature,
the alternate history and the counterfactual, tell us about what happened and what
might have been.
Of course, the most radical alternative history of the Civil War is to imagine that
it never actually took place.

~~II
In the early hours of 4th July 1859 a tall, white-haired man as old as the century
rode into the small Virginia town of Harpers Ferry with 19 companions, including
several of his sons and a 39-year-old black woman who had once been a slave in
Maryland. The old man was John Brown, a charismatic figure with a bloody history
who believed he had a divine mission to bring Gods righteous wrath upon the
perpetrators of the sin of slavery. The black woman was Harriet Tubman, who had
helped mastermind the underground railways that spirited hundreds of escaped slaves
to the safety of Canada, and who provided the strategic genius that John Brown
lacked. Their target in Harpers Ferry was the Federal arsenal, and capturing it easily
they had the arms they needed to foment a slave rebellion and establish a new land
for the escaped slaves in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland.
That, at least, was John Browns plan, and in Fire on the Mountain, Terry Bisson
imagines that it all worked out this way. From such beginnings a very different history
develops, for there is no Civil War and in place of the putative Confederacy a Black
Utopia is created in the Southern States. The story of Browns successful raid, told
through the memoirs of Dr Abraham, who was at the time a young slave caught up in
the rebellion, forms only one strand of Bissons novel. The most dramatic strand,
certainly, but not really the most interesting. That honour lies with the story of Yasmin
Martin Odinga, Abrahams great-granddaughter, and her daughter Harriet, as they
cross this new land to donate Abrahams memoirs to the Harpers Ferry museum while
at the same time coming to terms with the death of Yasmins husband on the PanAfrican space expedition to Mars. This gives us a fascinating glimpse of a rich,
peaceful nation that has risen to become a leading force in a new world grouping of
black nations the contrast with Churchills English-speaking Union (which well
come to later) is worth noting: the victor in whatever mid-century conflict actually
occurs is clearly destined to be a leading world player in the next century.
Not that it happened like this. Tubman was ill and could not accompany Brown,
the raid was postponed repeatedly and did not happen until 16th October. Brown and
-- 62 --

his companions quickly seized the arsenal and took around 60 hostages, including the
grandson of George Washington. But the raid ran out of steam. No slaves rose in
revolt. Local militia surrounded the defensive positions Brown had taken up, and the
next day were reinforced by a company of US Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee.
(Surprisingly, perhaps, no-one has contemplated what might have happened if Lee
had been killed at Harpers Ferry, though a Civil War without the iconic figure of Lee
might have been less fascinating.) In the end, Brown surrendered and, after a
peremptory trial, was executed on 2nd December 1859.
Clearly, the Black Utopia and the contrast it presents to what actually happened
is what really interests Bisson. But attractive as such an outcome might be, its not
very likely that Browns raid would have succeeded under any circumstances. Nearly
30 years earlier, in August 1831, a black slave named Nat Turner led the bloodiest
slave revolt in American history (in the same year that Fire on the Mountain came
out, Bisson published a biography of Turner). Turner was eventually defeated and
hanged, but Southern whites were left with the conviction that their slaves might at
any moment rise up against them. The same conviction must have held sway among
abolitionists, for Brown seems to have fondly imagined that simply turning up in
Harpers Ferry would be sufficient to light the fire of rebellion. He seems to have done
nothing to prepare the slaves for this uprising. Even the redoubtable Harriet Tubman
is unlikely to have compensated for Browns lack of any leadership qualities,
especially since the army (officered mostly by Southerners and under a lacklustre but
pro-Southern administration) would inevitably have been called on to quash what
would at best have been an ill-disciplined, ill-armed and ill-led army.
Attractive as Bissons optimistic vision might be, therefore, it is probable that
Browns raid could have had no other outcome than to increase the distrust between
North and South which would, a year later, see the Democratic Party hopelessly split
and Lincoln elected president. A growing number of Southern states chose to secede,
then, during the dying days of Buchanans indolent presidency, a crisis was
manufactured at Fort Sumter in the harbour at Charleston, South Carolina. No
alternate historian has imagined a different spark to light the fire of Civil War,
perhaps because the occasion itself made no difference: if it had not been Sumter
there were tinderboxes aplenty lying around.

~~III
In the tenth anniversary issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History,
historians were asked for the most important might-have-beens of military history,
and their answers have been expanded into the volume What If? This collection of
counterfactuals considers a number of turning points during the Civil War, examined
by two of the finest of contemporary Civil War historians, Stephen W. Sears and
James M. McPherson. The earliest, suggested by Sears in A Confederate Cannae and
Other Scenarios, happened in the first major battle of the war, Manassas. Troops on
both sides were untried, the Union had the better of things at first and either side
-- 63 --

might have broken, but at a crucial point Confederate General Thomas Jackson held
his Virginians, earning his nickname, Stonewall, and ensuring that the South won.
But what might have happened if the bullet that nicked Jackson during this battle had
actually killed him? Where the demoralised Union troops had the formidable defences
of Washington to retreat behind, the Confederates had no such defensive positions in
their rear. Had they been the ones to break and run, the rout would probably have
been far more cataclysmic. For a start, since Jefferson Davies had ridden out the day
before to observe the battle, there is a good chance that he would have been captured.
The North seems to have been in a far better position to withstand a defeat at this
stage in the War than the South, and the likelihood is that a defeat at Bull Run would
have impelled the Confederacy to seek terms, leaving Lincoln with practically a full
presidential term in which to find a solution to the slavery problem from a far
stronger position than the North had ever enjoyed before.

~~IV
Alas, things did not turn out this way, and the War settled down to curious
stalemate for the rest of the year. Towards the end of the year, two Confederate
agents, Mason and Slidell, bound respectively for England and France, slipped out of
the country through the Federal blockade. In Havana, on Friday 8th November, they
boarded the British mail ship Trent, but later that day the Trent was stopped by the
Union ship San Jacinto in the Bahamas Passage and the two Confederate agents were
illegally taken as prisoners. Thus began the gravest international incident faced by
Lincoln. The British came within an ace of declaring war, and actually sent 11,000
troops to reinforce their existing garrison in Canada. Eleven thousand troops would
have made little difference against the hundreds of thousands already engaged in the
Civil War, but a second front coupled with the international recognition and arming
of the Confederacy that would have inevitably resulted would have presented the
Union with a major and possibly insoluble problem.
Strangely, only Harry Harrison has explored the alternate history possibilities
offered by this incident, in Stars and Stripes Forever and its sequel Stars and Stripes
in Peril, and he has chosen to ignore the realistic prospects of the Union fighting two
enemies. Instead, refusing the obvious course of a joint operation by Britain and the
Confederacy, he has Britain launch an ill-judged attack against what turns out to be
a Confederate position, and rather than have them admit the error (for such things do
indeed happen in war), Harrison assumes that the British would unilaterally declare
war on the Confederacy instead. Out of this farrago of nonsense, the possibilities of
the scenario are thrown away in favour of an instant rapprochement between Union
and Confederacy in which historical likelihood is ignored and the silliness escalates
until by the second volume the re-United States invades Ireland.
What actually happened was that Lincoln quietly released Mason and Slidell and
apologised to Britain, and the War went on much as before.

-- 64 --

~~V
As the winter of 1861-62 came to an end, McClellans Army of the Potomac had
been vastly reinforced, resupplied, trained and disciplined. In the spring, McClellan
sailed his entire army down to the point of the James peninsula and after a delay
during which Confederate General Magruder marched his tiny force in a huge circle
in and out of woodland so that the Federals became convinced they were opposed by
a far larger force than they actually were set out to march towards Richmond,
actually coming within the sound of Richmonds church bells. At Fair Oaks, on the
last day of May, the Confederate commander, Joseph E. Johnston, was wounded and
command passed to Robert E. Lee. (An interesting counterfactual proposition: what if
Johnston had not been wounded? Could McClellan have won?) Lees record to this
date had not been distinguished, but he quickly proved his worth in late June when
he faced McClellan in a series of battles known as the Seven Days. Strictly speaking,
McClellan won most of these battles, but he was nevertheless forced to withdraw
steadily. On the sixth day, at White Oak Swamp, Confederates under General James
Longstreet came within an ace of splitting the Union army, and would have done so
had Stonewall Jackson pressed an attack upon the Union rear guard. Instead Jackson,
exhausted after his brilliant campaign in the Shenandoah Valley, had fallen asleep
under a tree and the attack was not pressed. McClellan withdrew his forces intact to
Malvern Hill and lived to fight another day.
Sears imagines what might have happened if Jackson had done the sensible thing
the day before to ensure that he was mentally and physically fit for the battle at White
Oak Swamp. Assuming McClellans army had indeed been split in two and destroyed
piecemeal, it would have been devastating for the Union cause. Nothing but an
inadequate force under John Pope stood between Lee and Washington. The result
would almost certainly have been a Confederate victory. Unfortunately, the day
before had been a Sunday and Jackson was a religious fanatic who followed a very
strict regime every Sunday of his life; the sleep he needed would have meant
abandoning that habit, and Jackson was never going to do that. So McClellan kept
his army intact, and though Lee was able to achieve a stunning victory over Pope at
the Second Battle of Manassas, there was still a viable Union army to take into
account when Lee decided that now was the time to carry the war to the North.

~~VI
Now occurs one of the most intriguing incidents in the whole war, and a gift to
every alternate historian. On the morning of 13th September an Indiana corporal,
Barton W. Mitchell, discovered a bulky package lying in a field of clover. The package
contained three cigars which were wrapped in a copy of Lees Special Order No. 191,
which detailed his strategic plans for the coming campaign, including the fact that he
was going to split his forces. The Orders made their way up the Union chain of
command (the cigars disappeared from history) and if the Union commander had been
anyone other than McClellan they would have presented a unique opportunity to
-- 65 --

destroy the Confederate army. McClellan, however, hesitated, and when the Battle of
Antietam was finally joined, Lee was in a position to concentrate most of his forces
for what would be the bloodiest day in American history. Even though he handled the
battle with an ineptitude that was unusual even for him, McClellan still had the edge
and was able to claim victory.
But for those lost orders, it might all have been so different. James M. McPherson
presents a very cogent counterfactual analysis in If the Lost Order hadnt been Lost.
Interestingly, he sees Lee reuniting his army and continuing north, shadowed by
McClellan, who is reluctant to bring on a battle, until the two armies finally come
together in a place where hills and ridges give Lee the perfect ground to concentrate
his forces, Gettysburg. The resultant battle, a mirror image of the one that would
actually be fought there a year later, results in the destruction of McClellans army.
McPherson imagines McClellan himself being killed in a last ditch effort to rally his
troops. Northern congressional elections that November sweep the Peace Democrats
into office, and Britain (where William Gladstone declared that the South have made
an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more than
either, they have made a nation) not only recognises the Confederacy but also forces
the North to the negotiating table.
Harry Turtledove, in How Few Remain, has an alternate historical take on much
the same scenario (except for the nicety of the final battle being fought at
Gettysburg). In this scenario, the post-War division of the country is unsatisfactory
on both sides, finally prompting a second Civil War in the 1880s, with a young
Theodore Roosevelt leading troops as pugnaciously as he did in real life and an old
Abraham Lincoln touring the country to lecture on what seems suspiciously close to
socialism. That Turtledove has extrapolated from Lincolns stated views and come so
convincingly to this position is one of the most interesting things about a book that
is, in the end, unsatisfactory. The second Civil War is inconclusive, and the novel as
a whole seems to exist mostly to act as a curtain-raiser for his alternate version of
the First World War begun with American Front (1998).
The lost orders alone were not the only significant counterfactual aspect of
Antietam. McClellans slender victory was enough for Lincoln to issue, on 22nd
September 1862, the Emancipation Proclamation, which dramatically changed the
nature of the War. Despite the limitations of the Proclamation it applied only to
slaves in those territories where Lincolns writ did not actually reach the Civil War
was transformed, at a stroke, into a war to free the slaves. Lee had begun the Antietam
campaign in the confident and probably correct belief that one more victory would
be enough to win recognition from Britain and France. Now, it would be morally and
politically impossible for Britain or France to come out in support of a slaveholding
power against a nation striving to free the slaves. Outright military victory was now
the only option open to the South.

-- 66 --

~~VII
Not that military victory seemed out of the question. Despite a succession of
generals replacing the hopeless McClellan, Lincoln was unable to find any who might
achieve victory against the magical Lee. The closest came, as Sears suggests, at
Chancellorsville in early May 1863. A new Union commander, Fighting Joe Hooker,
had tricked the Confederates with a feint at Fredericksburg, then had brought his
army across the Rappahannock and was threatening Lees flank. Lee did what he
always did in such circumstances: he split his force, sending Jackson on a wide
flanking manoeuvre. Jacksons advance was seen by Union pickets, and Sears
imagines that Union communications behaved as they were meant to, that General
O.O. Howard acted with unusual attention to detail, that General John Reynolds
received the order which anchored his Corps on the right flank of the army. Had all
happened as Hooker indeed expected, Chancellorsville could easily have turned into
a Union victory. After this, Sears imagines Hooker sending Lees broken army reeling
back to a series of bitter engagements all the way from Fredericksburg to Richmond,
a sequence of events uncannily like those followed by Grant just a year later (while
Grant himself performs the Sherman rle out in the West), but with Hooker emerging
as the national hero and future president, the War shortened by twelve months, a few
hundred thousand men avoiding an untimely death, and the course of history not
really all that much different.
But Hooker was never that lucky. Instead Howard was unprepared, there were gaps
in the Union line, and Hooker himself was dazed when a cannonball struck his
headquarters and was not in effective command for much of the battle. Only one
thing spoiled the victory for Lee: Stonewall Jackson was killed by his own men after
riding ahead of his lines during the night. This precipitated a reorganisation in the
Army of Northern Virginia and the elevation of new generals who would be uncertain
in their new commands when facing their greatest test barely two months later. For
Chancellorsville didnt just prompt Lincoln to put yet another general in command,
this time the doughty George Meade, it also persuaded Lee that the time was ripe for
another invasion of the North. The two armies shadowed each other on either side of
the Blue Ridge Mountains (where John Brown had once dreamed of establishing his
kingdom of freed slaves) until they emerged, almost by accident, to face each other
at Gettysburg.

~~ VIII
Spread across the first three days of July, Gettysburg was the greatest battle of the
Civil War. It was here that the Confederate dream died, and the Lost Cause was born.
Yet it was an accidental battle, unplanned by the generals on either side; and
throughout the three days there were so many incidents that seemed to owe more to
chance than anything else, so many occasions where a minute either side might have
changed the outcome, so many opportunities seized or thrown away by an instants
decision or indecision. What if J.E.B. Stuart had brought his cavalry and his
-- 67 --

intelligence to Lee a day earlier? What if Ewell had seized Culps Hill when Lee
wanted? What if Lee had listened to Longstreets suggestion that they move between
Meade and Washington? What if Warren hadnt noticed that Little Round Top was
undefended, or Chamberlain hadnt ordered his unlikely bayonet charge when his men
were out of ammunition? What if Ulric Dahlgren hadnt seized those Confederate
papers that told Meade exactly what he was facing? Above all, what if Picketts Charge
had consolidated its breakthrough and the iconic high water mark of the Confederacy
hadnt been repulsed? Gettysburg is a battle that inevitably raises all of these and
many other questions, which is why it has proved such a magnet to alternate
historians and counterfactualists: there is so much ammunition for them here.
Peter G. Tsouras provides a counterfactual examination of all these questions and
more in his book-length study Gettysburg: An Alternate History. Strangely, those
changes that happen early in the battle Stuarts arrival, Ewells assault on Culps
Hill which is first delayed then repulsed, Longstreets march around the Round Tops,
which becomes bogged down when part of his force is withdrawn to deal with
Sickless advance into the Devils Den result in little overall difference in the
character of the battle. One cannot help but question whether such major changes
would have had such little result, or whether the alternate history has not been subtly
massaged to allow all the counterfactual possibilities from the entire three days of the
battle to be brought into one consistent account. Certainly, all is still in place to
permit the romantic and iconic climax of Picketts Charge. The result, strangely, is a
Union victory still. Though Tsouras mauls the Union army badly and brings it close
to defeat several times he seems to be suggesting that nothing Lee or Longstreet might
have done could have affected the eventual outcome. It is said that in military
colleges around the world, whenever the Battle of Waterloo is replayed it invariably
results in a victory for Napoleon. For most alternate historians, Gettysburg is a similar
instance: all the opportunities missed were missed by Lee and his underlings, all the
opportunities seized were seized by the Union. If there is to be any change in the roll
of the dice, therefore, it is going to come out favouring the Confederacy why
undertake the exercise of changing history if you are not actually going to change
history (a question we might well ask of George Alec Effinger shortly)? And just as,
in our world, Gettysburg was a decisive victory that virtually guaranteed an eventual
Union win, so, for everyone except Tsouras, a counterfactual Gettysburg remains
equally decisive and results in the Confederates winning the war.
Of course, few alternate historians, or even other counterfactualists, deem it
necessary to throw in quite so many turning points. Sir Winston Churchills curious
essay-story, If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg, seems to occupy ground
midway between counterfactual and alternate history. Here, briefly, we learn that
Warren failed to reinforce the Round Tops in time, fatally weakening the Union line
so that Picketts Charge was effectively unopposed. The battle itself, however, is over
in moments in Churchills account, though he spends a little bit more time on the
peace. Churchill shrewdly presents a Lee who is, through circumstance, in a far more
-- 68 --

powerful position than any Confederate politician, and uses that position to
unilaterally end slavery. This is shrewd for two reasons: in person, Lee was at best
ambivalent about slavery and in the last months of the war outraged his political
masters by proposing that slaves should be freed in order to recruit blacks into the
Confederate army, so this is indeed the sort of thing he might do (well see shortly
that Harry Turtledove follows the same sort of logic in The Guns of the South); and,
in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, some such gesture would have been
necessary if the Confederacy was not to have been considered a pariah among
nations. Nevertheless, it is unlikely to have worked because many of the most
powerful Southern politicians were so adamant in their opposition to abolition that
certain states actually came close to seceding from the Confederacy late in the war
because Jefferson Davis was making half-hearted comments about compromise, and
they would easily have been able to overturn Lees declaration. Still, if we allow this
conceit, we find that Churchills work is actually very little about the effects of these
events upon America, but rather how they changed British political history: the great
Tory Prime Minister Disraeli becomes a leader of the radicals, the great radical
Gladstone becomes the leader of the Conservatives.
On the whole, Churchill is comfortable with the idea of a Southern victory. He
imagines that with two roughly equal powers in America neither would assume the
economic dominance that the USA achieved during the latter part of the Nineteenth
Century, so Britain remains top dog. Alternate historians on the whole, however, tend
not to be so optimistic. One otherwise fairly insignificant story, A Place to Stand by
William H. Keith, Jr., will serve as an exemplar. A traveller from the future persuades
his younger self, a frightened new recruit to an Alabama regiment, that he has a
chance to change the course of the battle and guarantee a Confederate victory by
shooting the commander of the 20th Maine, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, at a vital
moment during the assault on Little Round Top, and by so doing prevent all the
wrongs of Reconstruction. The youth does so, the battle is won, and the time traveller
returns to reveal that the consequences of changing history are far, far worse than
Reconstruction, for it sets the scene for other secessions until the former USA is
thoroughly Balkanised and mankind will stand at the dizzying precipice of century
upon century of unrelenting, unforgiving war, a new Dark Age of death and blood
and utter barbarism. (p51).
Few would go that far, but in general alternate historians see a Southern victory
as undoubtedly a bad thing, as it is for instance in the finest of all alternate history
novels, Ward Moores Bring the Jubilee. Moore begins as Churchill did by plunging
us straight into a world in which the Confederacy had won at Gettysburg, but the
rough parity between the new nations that seems to lie behind Churchills vision is
not present here. On the model of Germany after the First World War, the North has
been saddled with crippling reparations which have ruined the economy. Moreover a
whistlestop tour of the Norths post-war political history demonstrates how this bleak
economic situation might have been further exacerbated:
-- 69 --

The postwar inflation entered the galloping stage during the Vallandigham
Administration, became dizzying in the time of President Seymour and
precipitated the food riots of 1873 and 74. It was only after the election of
President Butler that money and property became stable. (p14)

Vallandigham was Clement L. Vallandigham, a Northern Democrat devoted to the

Southern cause who was briefly imprisoned and then exiled for his activities among
what were called the Copperheads, those who worked underground in the North to
engineer a Southern victory at any cost. Seymour was Horatio Seymour, the Democrat
Governor of New York who supported the war but opposed most of the measures
Lincoln introduced in order to pursue it, such as the draft and the Emancipation
Proclamation. Butler was General Benjamin Butler, a Democrat politician who
supported the war and became an incompetent general; after Lincoln, he was
probably the most hated man in the South following his role as military governor in
New Orleans. In a defeated North, these are not only probable presidents, but by what
they represent they provide a telling portrait of the country, moving from initial
slavish submission to the South to a wily independence.
Political and economic decline have been matched by a social collapse. In the
1930s and 40s, when the novel is set, life in the USA is portrayed as largely rural,
with isolated communities and a dependence still on the horse and the blacksmith.
The common attitudes are a reflection of the perceived values of the dominant South,
with an antipathy towards blacks and abolitionists that matches that expressed during
the New York City draft riots of mid-July 1863, and in many Northern industrial
centres after emancipation. It is notable, for instance, that the only significant black
character in the book is Rene Enfandin, the Consul for Haiti, indicating that any
measure of racial equality can exist only outside the Americas. The first part of the
novel tells of the odyssey of Hodgins Backmaker (who does, indeed, make the world
back to what it should have been) through the underworld of the North, allowing him
to meet Confederate agents, underground agitators, foreign observers and those who
are quite content with their lot. The kaleidoscopic impressions they convey tell us a
lot about the world, though Moore tells us most through subtle remarks that mean
more the more we know about American politics during the early years of the
century:
From the first it was apparent the unpredictable electorate preferred Dewey to
Lewis. State after state, hitherto staunchly Populist, turned to the Whigs for the
first time since William Hale Thompson defeated President Thomas R. Marshall
back in 1920 and again Alfred E. Smith in 1924. (p57)

But the novel is also a quest: Hodges quest for education in a world without the
resources or the interest to provide it for any other than the rich. As an auto-didact,
he is eventually taken up by a curious establishment that seems to be part college,
part commune, and here by chance a time machine is invented. Hodge, the historian,
-- 70 --

of course travels back to witness the key moment in the War of Southron
Independence and finds himself accidentally delaying by a few precious moments
the Southern advance upon Little Round Top. The rest was our history.

~~IX
In his alternate history travesty, Stars and Stripes Forever, Harry Harrison has P.T.
Beauregard and William Tecumseh Sherman agreeing to re-unite the Confederate and
Union armies against the common enemy at Shiloh. With that slight exception, all the
alternate histories and counterfactuals examined so far have taken the Eastern
Theatre as their stage. While all these twists and turns in history were taking place,
Ulysses S. Grant was winning a series of solid victories at Forts Henry and Donaldson,
at Shiloh, and most spectacularly at Vicksburg (whose Confederate defenders
surrendered the day after the victory at Gettysburg); Nathan Bedford Forest was
causing havoc in the rear of Union lines and earning a reputation as perhaps the most
brilliant of all cavalry commanders in the war; Admiral David Glasgow Farragut was
damning the torpedoes at Mobile Bay as the Union navy took a stranglehold on the
Confederacy. All of this was dramatic enough, but there was a sense that events
moved by forces other than mere chance. Grant and his successor in the West,
Sherman, may have made the eventual Union victory inevitable, but in the main the
turning points of the war just did not happen here.
Sears examines one possible turning point in the West. In August 1863, as his
battered army was recovering from the mauling it had received at Gettysburg, Lee was
offered command of the Army of Tennessee. In a brilliant campaign, Federal General
Rosecrans had manoeuvred the Confederates out of Tennessee and on to Chattanooga
without once having to fight a major battle. Lee would have replaced Confederate
General Bragg, but he refused, and instead Longstreet was despatched West in a
subsidiary role to Bragg. Longstreet arrived just in time to play a major part in the
spectacular Confederate victory at Chickamauga (the only significant Confederate
victory in the West), but Bragg didnt follow up his victory. Grant replaced Rosecrans,
broke the siege of Chattanooga, then defeated Braggs army in a battle noted for the
spontaneous and overwhelmingly successful Union advance up Missionary Ridge.
What, Sears asks, if Lee had agreed to go West? Lee would not have failed to
follow up the victory at Chickamauga, so Chattanooga would have quickly fallen and
the Confederacy would have extended into strategically and politically important
Tennessee once more. But Lee would not have been allowed to stay long in the West,
he was too important in the East, and Grant would have been quickly able to recover
any Confederate gains. The net result, therefore, would have been no real difference,
which seems to be a common feature of any Western counterfactual (see George Alec
Effingers Look Away), which probably explains why so many alternate historians
have concentrated on the East.

-- 71 --

~~X
After Ward Moores Bring the Jubilee, the finest Civil War alternate history is
undoubtedly Harry Turtledoves The Guns of the South, and like its predecessor it
combines alternate history with time travel. By this point May 1864 Grant has
been promoted to the newly re-created rank of Lieutenant General and has been
placed in command of all the Union armies. Lee knows that, while he might delay
Grant, he has little real hope now of winning. Into this milieu arrive a group of timetravelling white South Africans bearing AK-47s as a gift for the Confederate Army.
They have chosen this late point in the war as one that will give them the greatest
leverage in achieving their aims: the establishment of a powerful slave-owning state.
Neither Lee nor the Confederate Army is in a position to look a gift horse in the
mouth, and when Grant finally does march his army across the Rappahannock and
into the Wilderness he finds an enemy with an unbeatable advantage. (Almost
incidentally, the AK-47s rid the Civil War of one of its most terrible moments: the
Battle of the Wilderness was fought in dense woodland that was bone dry, and sparks
from the muskets used by both sides set the undergrowth alight. Hundreds of
wounded caught between the lines burned to death that night.)
As in most alternate histories, the real interest in The Guns of the South lies
in what happens after the Union and Confederacy have agreed peace terms, but
in this instance, unusually, the concentration is upon what happens in the
victorious South rather than the defeated North. In one aspect, Turtledoves
vision is close to Ward Moores, for in the Northern election of November 1864
he has Lincoln defeated by Horatio Seymour, with Clement Vallandigham as his
Vice President. In the main, however, Turtledoves view of the post-war world
is much closer to Churchills (if we omit Churchills concentration on the
details of British politics). Although we only see the North obliquely, we do
know that, unlike Ward Moore, Turtledove has not assumed that the North is
saddled with crippling reparations. Hence, despite a pro-South government,
there is no reason to suggest that the Norths industrial capacity would be
damaged and we end up with the suggestion, much like Churchills and unlike
Turtledoves own later notions in How Few Remain, of two powers of roughly
equal status. Moreover, Turtledoves reading of Lees character is much like
Churchills: a clear-headed, practical man who saw the ending of slavery as the
only way forward for his country. When Lee is elected President after Davis
(and if the South really had won, it is difficult to imagine any circumstances
in which this might not have happened, unless Lees health got in the way
he had a couple of heart attacks during the War, one in the lead-up to
Gettysburg, and died in 1870), this inevitably brings him into conflict with the
South Africans (who are backed by Nathan Bedford Forest, and, since Forest
was the founder and first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, this is a very
likely pairing). The advantage of The Guns of the South being a time travel
story rather than a pure alternate history is not just that it initiates the change,
-- 72 --

but it allows Lee to discover what really happened, allowing histories to be

compared within the novel and also teaching Lee about the Crater, which gives
him the idea for one of the tactics he employs in his war to recover his country.

~~XI
At such a late stage in the war, only the deus ex machina of ahistorical weapons
such as the AK-47s allows Turtledove to change history enough for the South to win.
By now, though it still has nearly a year to run, the course of the war is clear and it
would take something drastic to shift it from its inevitable end. If the great turningpoint battles of Antietam and Gettysburg have attracted most alternate histories and
counterfactuals, the brutal blood-letting of Grants Virginia Campaign doesnt seem
to offer any other outcome. In a curious novella, Look Away, George Alec Effinger
presents one of the very rare alternate histories set in the Western Theatre. In this
world the European Powers have united to create a peacekeeping force on the model
of the United Nations, and we see their blue-topped wagons in action at Shermans
siege of Atlanta, but as with their present-day equivalents, these peacekeepers are
helpless, Atlanta falls, Sherman marches to the sea, and nothing changes. It is
virtually unheard of for an alternate history to change nothing, but it is perhaps a
tacit admission by Effinger that at this late stage and in that theatre nothing could
change.
There is, too, a last counterfactual flourish from Sears, who wonders if Lincoln
might have lost the November 1864 election. In choosing George McClellan as their
candidate, the Democrats had given themselves a good chance, which they
immediately threw away with an anti-war platform that even McClellan could not
support. Nevertheless, only a string of Union victories, most notably Shermans
capture of Atlanta, threw things decisively Lincolns way. If, however, the Democrats
had adopted a moderate pro-war platform, Sears suggests, they might well have
carried the day, even after Shermans victory. But if McClellan did find himself in the
White House come March 1865, with the pro-war policy that took him there he would
have done no different from Lincoln, and the war would have ended much as it
indeed did.
And so, whether Lincoln or McClellan held the reins of power, Sherman would
complete his march through Georgia, then cut a destructive swathe through the
Carolinas. Grant, meanwhile, would quietly force Lee to keep spreading his everdepleting forces along ever-longer lines around Petersburg. Something had to give,
on 1st April, 1865 Lees flank finally collapsed, on 3rd April Richmond was
abandoned, and Grant set out in pursuit of the remnants of Lees army. On Saturday
8th April, Grant had a dreadful headache when a messenger arrived under a flag of
truce bearing Lees offer to surrender. The headache disappeared instantly. The two
generals met the next day in the parlour of Wilbur MacLean, who had moved to the
little town of Appomattox Court House in 1861 to escape the war, after the battle of
Bull Run had been fought, as he put it, in his back yard.
-- 73 --

However, the war cannot be allowed to end without one final alternate historical
delight. James Thurber wrote If Grant had been Drinking at Appomattox as a direct
response to Churchills piece. In this brief but typically hilarious tale he imagines that
Grant, a notorious hard drinker, was rather the worse for wear when he met Lee at
Appomattox Court House. After a rambling discussion, during which Grant mistakes
Lee for the poet Robert Browning, he is finally reminded of the surrender:
Oh sure, sure, said Grant. He took another drink. All right, he said Here we
go. Slowly, sadly, he unbuckled his sword. Then he handed it to toe astonished
Lee. There you are, General, said Grant. We dam near licked you. If Id been
feeling better we would of licked you. (p173)

-- 74 --

A YEAR

AT ITS

BEST?

The year 2000 was a year much like any other. A poor year for fantasy, David
Hartwell tells us. A good year for fantasy, Terri Windling tells us. Probably, in truth,
it was neither good nor bad in either fantasy or science fiction. There were good
stories, certainly, some of which are collected here. There were bad stories, certainly,
some of which are collected here. But mostly there were stories that hovered
somewhere in between, many of which are collected here.
It was a year which, extraordinarily, generated four hefty tomes which purport to
present the year at its best.
This is a statement which raises many questions. What is meant by best, for
example; or even: what is meant by year? (Hartwell and Cramer have chosen to
include in their volume Debt of Bones by Terry Goodkind, a story which was first
published in 1998 and which therefore, regardless of how good or bad it might
actually be, hardly seems to qualify as one of the best stories of 2000.) But the first
question that springs to my mind is: can the year support such largesse?
Year after year one reads Dozoiss near-book-length survey of the year in
question, and every time one reels back from the gloom-laden tale. The magazines,
those familiar titles we have all somehow come to associate with the genre itself,
Asimovs and F&SF, Analog and Interzone, survive despite circulation figures in
freefall. Usually some brave little venture starts up (in 2000, it was the Scottish
magazine Spectrum), though this is more than offset by others that fail or fall quiet,
or that seem to be stuttering towards some sort of quietus (Science Fiction Age,
Marion Zimmer Bradleys Fantasy Magazine and, of course, the perennially ailing
Amazing). There are oddities, such as Nature running short-short speculations by
science fiction writers throughout the year, though these are, in the main and despite
the appearance of a number of them in the pages under review, too short and too
lacking in the usual constituents of fiction (drama, character, setting) to really count
as stories. And there are occasional original anthologies, though in what Dozois
terms another weak year only Vanishing Acts and Skylife seem to have made much
impact.
All in all, therefore, one is not encouraged to feel overwhelming optimism about
the state of the short-story market in the year 2000. And if we look at the four
magazines, Analog, Asimovs, F&SF and Interzone, which represent the core of the
genre short-fiction market, they published between them fewer than 300 stories in
total during the year (297, by my quick count). Yet these four anthologies have
gathered together 109 stories in total (only seven appear twice), and if we include the
long lists of Honorable Mentions that Dozois and Datlow and Windling feature, this
-- 75 --

brings the total up to a massive 878 stories. Heaven knows where they all come from.
I certainly wouldnt have the patience to plough through that much short fiction in a
year (or indeed to do so every year, as our valiant editors would appear to). But the
implication, surely, is that it is sufficient to get a (vaguely) genre story into print to
feature in some way or another in one of these anthologies. What distinctions of taste
or quality are being used to decide best here?
Ah, but best is a relative term. How might we identify the best? One possibility
is to look at the awards that are handed out each year (not necessarily an easy task,
most of the nominees for the short fiction categories in both the 2001 Nebula and
World Fantasy Awards were first published in 1999). Of the 16 nominations for the
Hugo short fiction awards, a mere five appear here. Of the five nominations for the
BSFA short fiction award, only one is featured. Someone somewhere clearly has a
different interpretation of best.
If the award shortlists are giving us one definition of best, these anthologies are,
therefore, giving us another. A personal selection, perhaps? It is hard to say; none of
the editors gives any criteria for their choice, as if the titles alone made that
unnecessary. And it is clear that they do not agree on their criteria, since they so
rarely make the same choice. But if we are to gather from these anthologies some
understanding of what was indeed best about the short fiction of the year 2000,
perhaps we should begin with those stories that do overlap.
Most of the overlap is between the two science fiction collections. Of the 23 stories
chosen by Dozois and the 27 stories chosen by Hartwell, there are five they have in
common. One of these is, to my mind, one of the weakest stories in either collection:
The Thing About Benny by M. Shayne Bell. In a world waking up to its ecological
loss, an idiot-savant with a fixation on the music of Abba has a mysterious ability to
identify supposedly lost species of plants that have survived in office flower pots.
Thats it, really; not much of an idea, though you can sense its potential as a way of
exploring what I suppose we might call an ecologically challenged world.
Unfortunately, we dont learn enough about Benny or his minder, our narrator, to
know whether either is interesting, and the ecologically challenged world is so
sketchily drawn that it might as well not be there. Its the sort of story you skip across
quickly as a routine magazine filler. Why two vastly experienced editors should have
chosen it as one of the best stories of the year is beyond my comprehension.
Fortunately, the other instances on which Hartwell and Dozois agree are much
better. Patient Zero by Tananarive Due is perhaps the best of them, though it has to
be said it is not exactly the most original of stories. A patient locked away in an
isolation ward while the world outside dies is, in outline, a story we have all
encountered before. What makes this fresh is that the patient in question is a child
with a childs inability to take in all that is going on outside; she is also, unknowingly,
the source of the infection that is wiping everyone else out. The one other principal
character, our narrators contact with the outside world, is mostly offstage, and what
she does and says are not clearly understood by the child, but Due tells us enough for
-- 76 --

us to comprehend her sympathy and her sacrifice. It is an end-of-the-world story, but

one that is paradoxically humane and life affirming.
In Oracle, Greg Egan handles character with more humanity and success than I
think Ive ever seen in his work before, though it has to be said it is still pretty hamfisted in comparison to Due. This is the story that brings Alan Turing head-to-head
with C.S. Lewis, only Egan doesnt call them that, and he sets them in a world slightly
aslant from our own which allows him to inflict tortures on the Turing character that
are never really explained. You can also watch Egan loading the dice in the climactic
debate, which means that the story tends to fall apart in contrivance towards the end.
Nevertheless, if the story ends up less satisfying than it might have been, it remains
an interesting and challenging failure.
Ursula K. Le Guins Birthday of the World is better primarily because she restrains
herself from loading the dice as heavily and as blatantly as she has tended to do in
many of her recent stories. Which means that this remains a vividly realised and
colourfully portrayed tale of an ancient culture falling apart, rather than the heavyhanded and politically correct propaganda that recent experience might have led us
to expect. What is so good is that though this is a story of old ways failing, of civil
war looming, it is told not in broad strokes but in fine details and delicate individual
perspectives. We feel we know far more about this world than, when you look back
at it, we are actually told, simply because we feel we are behind the eyes of someone
we trust to know the ways of the world.
Such delicacy would have made a great difference to Paul McAuleys Reef, but
instead we get more caricature than character, and the sort of abrupt, crude plotting
that sends his heroine, Margaret Wu, from success to the very bottom of the social
scale, then sets her off on a desperate, all-lasers-firing race to prove she was right all
along. Its a piece of gosh-wow adventure, and competently handled of its type, but
McAuley has done much better than this. (Curiously, McAuley also turns up in the
Datlow and Windling collection with Bone Orchards, which looks like a fairly routine
fantasy about the way we are haunted by our past misdeeds, but which is handled
with a subtlety of touch and surety of tone that make a run-of-the-mill fantasy a far
better story than the more inventive Reef.)
Of the other two duplicated stories, one, The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O by Michael
Swanwick, is identified as science fiction by Dozois and as fantasy by Hartwell and
Cramer. If it means anything, I tend to side with Hartwell and Cramer on this, though
such conflicts over definition are usually redundant and cause more harm than good.
(Dozois, for instance, identifies Ted Chiangs Seventy-Two Letters as one of the best
stories of the year, but omits it because he decides it is fantasy, thereby doing no more
than depriving his collection of one of the best stories of the year. Hartwell, sensibly,
includes it in his Best SF, but curiously neither Hartwell and Cramer nor Datlow and
Windling pick it among the Best Fantasy. Still, I will come to Chiangs story later in
this review.) What we get in the Swanwick story is a take on the old folk song that
somehow manages to bring together an extraordinary combination of elements
-- 77 --

including time travel, dinosaurs in the Coliseum, Vietnam, and life after death. Im
not sure it hangs together. No, Im damn sure it doesnt hang together. But it is a
bravura performance none the less, and as much fun as just about anything else in
these four collections.
And finally there is Nalo Hopkinsons Greedy Choke Puppy, which crops up in
both Datlow and Windling, and in Hartwell and Cramer. A great number of the
straightforward fantasy stories gathered here seem to be playing around with the
familiar tropes of traditional folk tales and fairy stories. Going through the two
collections we get a steady and repetitive diet of golems and trolls and Hansel and
Gretel, until we feel overloaded with them. Among them, Hopkinsons take on a
traditional and rather grisly Caribbean legend stands out partly, I suspect, because it
is simply unfamiliar, but mostly because it is handled with a much lighter touch than
the rather turgid stew I will come to later, and because it calmly twists our
expectations in a way that makes us feel unexpectedly sympathetic towards the
central character.
Of these seven stories, only one, Greg Egans Oracle, also shared an award
nomination, in the Hugo novella category. Of the other five stories that made a Hugo
or BSFA Award shortlist, Dozois has picked Radiant Green Star by Lucius Shepard
(Hugo novella), On the Orion Line by Stephen Baxter (Hugo novelette), and The
Suspect Genome by Peter F. Hamilton (winner of the BSFA Award). Hartwell fights
back with David Langfords Different Kinds of Darkness (Hugo short story winner),
and Ted Chiangs Seventy-Two Letters (Hugo novella). Dozoiss choice is oddly
traditional; even Shepard, returning to Vietnam as he has done in various guises
throughout his career, is hardly doing anything to make us sit up and wonder at the
freshness of it all. So we get a sense of the hot, sweaty Orient, of wars past, of new
technologies that somehow merge into the old ways to give new life to ancient
mystery and menace. It sounds like any of a half-dozen or more other stories by
Shepard, and like them it is well written, beautifully controlled, a delight to read. But
it doesnt shock and surprise the way Shepard once did. As for the Baxter: the brave
boys of our space navy crash into the alien enemys death star, learn about their own
courage as they discover new things about the mysterious enemy, and at great
personal expense allow one alone to escape and bring the news back to our fleet. Im
sorry, this sort of derring-do could have been written any time in the last fifty or sixty
years with no more than minor changes depending on the passing fads that affect the
most hidebound core of sf. Its heartland stuff, but its not what we would normally
expect to represent the genre at its best. Still, it is better than the Baxter story
Hartwell has chosen: Sheena 5, a selection of offcuts from a novel, Time, that was
published a year before this story first appeared. Peter Hamiltons The Suspect
Genome is another very traditional type of story: science fiction meets police
procedural, and it is a reversion to the setting of Hamiltons first three novels. Since
Hamiltons work is not normally to my taste, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed
this story; it is written with as much verve as usual, but with rather more control than
-- 78 --

I have come to expect. And if the crime aspects of the story work better than the
science fiction, at least it reaches a satisfactory conclusion.
I suppose, because Dozois edits Asimovs, I expect him to pick the more daring
stories, but much of what appears in his collection is very traditional in tone and
approach. (Reading his Years Best monolith, year on year, this really should not have
been as much of a surprise as it was.) I suppose, because Hartwell has mined our
genres past for so many heavy tomes, I expect his choice to be the more traditional,
but his selection actually feels the more daring. (It is Hartwell, after all, who has
picked seven of the short short pieces from Nature as opposed to Dozoiss one (it is
what gives Hartwell the higher story count, despite larger type size, smaller pages and
fewer of them), and though these barely count as stories, they at least allow the
authors to stretch and try out some occasionally bold speculations.) Thus, where
Dozois backed away from Seventy-Two Letters, Hartwell has included it, and so has
the honour of publishing what is perhaps the finest story in any of these four
volumes.
Chiang posits a Victorian world in which strings of letters can animate objects,
much as computer code animates a program, and hence programming these letters
becomes a highly sought-after skill. As with John Crowleys Great Work of Time, a
novella with which Chiangs story shares much in the way of tone and atmosphere,
we are presented with a vision of high Victorian industrial society that is recognisable
and yet vastly different. This is a story that builds worlds, extrapolates logically from
its innovations, yet surprises us with the way we glimpse ourselves within this world;
in other words it does, with assurance, all that we ask of science fiction but so rarely
find.
It is not to denigrate David Langford to say that, by comparison, Different Kinds
of Darkness is a slighter story. This is still an impressive work, and for once a story
that thoroughly deserved its Hugo Award. It is one of the oldest of all fictional forms:
a coming-of-age story. In this case, however, the children grow up by learning to see
into the blackness that has blotted out part of their world throughout their childhood,
and what they see is a mathematical weapon that is one of science fictions more
curious inventions: metaphor and drama blending to perfection
So we are beginning to get an idea of how Dozois and Hartwell, at least, see their
remit. We might learn more by looking at the other duplications in these books, those
authors who, as we noted with both McAuley and Baxter, appear more than once in
the four volumes. Brian Stableford, for instance, appears three times: Hartwell
chooses The Last Supper, Hartwell and Cramer Chanterelle, and Dozois Snowball in
Hell. Although Stableford would thus seem to be thrice among the best, Im not sure
I would have picked any of these stories if I were in the unenviable position of editing
such an anthology. At his best, in his recent sequence of novels and the stories from
which they grew, Stableford imagines a change (usually with its basis in genetics or
biology), extrapolates a colourful but consistent world from that point, then stands
back to provide a broad view of the world. The perspective in Mortimer Greys
-- 79 --

History of Death, for example, is quite stunning. By contrast, both The Last Supper
and Snowball in Hell feel narrow in focus, contrived in structure and limited in
effect. The fantasy, Chanterelle, plays with poisonous mushrooms and the traditional
tropes of the Hansel and Gretel story, but it hammers its cleverness home so heavily
and so repeatedly that it loses the very lightness of touch that such a story needs if
it is to work at all.
Two other authors shared by both Hartwell and Dozois are Nancy Kress and
Robert Charles Wilson. In the case of Wilson, Dozois has chosen one of the vignettes
from Nature, which has slightly more in the way of plot and character than most of
the others though it still hardly counts as a story, let alone one judged the best in
the genre. Hartwell, meanwhile, has gone for The Dryads Wedding, the story of a
woman being literally absorbed into the biosphere of an alien world. It is not a bad
story and it is not badly told, but I would describe it as the best only in a mediocre
year. In the case of Kress, it is Hartwell who has chosen the short-short story, To
Cuddle Amy. This is not, for once, taken from the pages of Nature, but it is still too
short to be interesting; Kress barely gives herself enough room to get going, let alone
take us anywhere worthwhile. Dozoiss choice is Savior, which consists of a series of
vignettes (none much longer than To Cuddle Amy) which present reactions to an
enigmatic alien object over a period of nearly 300 years, as society falls and rises
around it. Its a good story, its snapshots of the future both economic and telling while
maintaining an overarching story. But I must confess I could have done without yet
another enigmatic alien object; they are becoming too easy and familiar a metaphor
for the great mystery of life. Theres another in Darrell Schweitzers The Fire Eggs in
Hartwell, on a more domestic scale and again well-told, but the problem with
metaphors for the great mystery is that they can never reveal their secret (it would
inevitably be trite were they to do so), so such stories are always doomed to end
before their conclusion.
There are, thus, several duplications between Hartwell and Dozois; on the other
hand, there is only one author who appears in both Hartwell and Cramer and Datlow
and Windling: Charles de Lint. Of the two, Hartwell and Cramer have chosen by far
the better story. Granny Weather in Datlow and Windling is a trite little piece about
a woman getting caught up in a battle of magics in her dream world, and since both
the magic and the dream setting allow anything to happen, nothing that does happen
seems of any consequence. Making a Noise in This World, in Hartwell and Cramer,
at least seems to be aware of consequences, of responsibilities, of effects. A young
American Indian discovers something of his role in life when he comes across another
man dying in the snow. It is the sort of fantasy that seems in touch with our reality,
and if there is a little glibness to it, it still makes for the better story.
As well as these duplications, there are four writers who seem to have taken on
the role of teachers pet. Robert Sheckley appears in both Hartwell (with The New
Horla) and Hartwell and Cramer (with Magic, Maples and Maryanne), though neither
story felt fully thought out, fully developed to me. Charles Stross makes two
-- 80 --

appearances in Dozois. One of these, A Colder War, reworks the Cthulhu mythos as
contact with another dimension, and though it is quite clever in its way, I have
already read more than enough reworkings of the Cthulhu mythos to last me a
lifetime. (Hartwell and Cramer take us directly into Lovecraftian territory with Don
Webbs The Prophecies at Newfane Asylum, and close to it with The Hunger of
Leaves by Joel Lane, a Zothique story after Clark Ashton Smith; oh how my cup
runneth over.) The other contribution by Stross, Antibodies, also concerns other
realities, but in a much more interesting way, though the story does trail off into
melodrama before the end, and he should have resisted the temptation to have a
character declare: Resistance is futile!
Datlow and Windling have two pets: Terry Dowling and Ramsey Campbell. Of
course, it is in the nature of this anthology, with Ellen Datlow selecting the horror and
Terri Windling choosing the fantasy, that a writer could be picked once by each. That
seems to be the case with Terry Dowling, The Saltimbanques having been chosen by
Windling, and Basic Black by Datlow. Of these, The Saltimbanques is that old
standby: a mysterious circus arrives at the edge of town (even in these collections the
pattern is repeated in Lucius Shepards Radiant Green Star and Glen Hirshbergs Mr.
Darks Carnival, which Ill come to later); Dowling does, however, ring a few changes
and nice touches out of the old material. Basic Black, though, is a different matter:
a psychologist is brought in to profile a rather nasty mass murderer, then there is a
twist that is only possible because the murderer behaves completely out of character,
and I was left with that worst of all possible reactions to a so-so horror story: so
what?
If Dowlings routine grue made me dubious of Datlows editorial stance, the two
stories by Ramsey Campbell just amplified my doubts. These No Strings and No
Story In It, clumsy titles both are both horror stories, both Datlows selection. I
admit that I am not partial to horror and not at all well read in the genre, but what I
found in these stories was writing of such a perfunctory quality and such lame
plotting that I knew exactly what was about to happen, not with a terrible
anticipation but with a dull inevitability; my spine was not chilled, but my hackles
were certainly raised.
If the number of overlapping stories and writers shared by Dozois and Hartwell
tells us anything, it is that the two editors are at least working within some sort of
shared understanding of what their genre is, even if a picture seems to be emerging
of a traditionalist Dozois playing it safe compared to a rather more adventurous
Hartwell. By comparison, the lack of overlap between Hartwell and Cramer on the one
hand and Datlow and Windling on the other suggests they are playing different
games. To a degree, this is obvious: Hartwell and Cramer have taken fantasy as their
remit, while Datlow and Windling have taken fantasy and horror. But even narrowing
our focus down to just the fantasy elements of the latter, the Windling as it were, the
two collections seem to be doing different jobs. Where there is overlap, what I have
looked at so far might suggest that again the Hartwell and Cramer is the more
-- 81 --

adventurous of the two. But this isnt actually the case. Although the copyright
notices in Hartwell and Cramer are not as forthcoming as they might be, it is obvious
that the stories gathered here come from a narrow range of sources: Interzone; Marion
Zimmer Bradleys Fantasy Magazine; Asimovs; Black Heart, Ivory Bones. We are in
the genre heartland, and the collection includes a preponderance of tales designed
simply to satisfy genre expectations. Here, for instance, you will find slight but
amusing variations on genre staples such as the fire-breathing dragon (Everything
Changes by John Sullivan); slavish adherence to the tropes of folk tales from around
the world (A Troll Story by Nicola Griffith); oh-so-clever games with the works of
Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm (And Still She Sleeps by Greg
Costikyan, which reveals not only a failure to appreciate the original Sleeping
Beauty but also a dreadful tin ear for English regional accents); and stories where the
author seems to think that turning a clich on its head means it is no longer a clich
(Path of the Dragon by George R.R. Martin, a pompous and overblown work that
pretends to a fashionable amorality but achieves only nastiness).
Datlow and Windling also take stories from the genre core F&SF and Black
Heart, Ivory Bones are both popular, though it is notable that there is nothing from
Marion Zimmer Bradleys Fantasy Magazine or Asimovs but they cast their net
much wider The New Yorker, Colorado Review, The Time Out Book of London
Stories. It means that though we do get knowing reworkings of legends and fairy
stories (An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings by John Crowley, not his best work, or
Susanna Clarkes Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower which brilliantly combines the
world of Faerie with the manners and mores of Jane Austen), the sort of musclebound, knuckle-headed action story set in some quasi-medieval society is absent. But
if the fantasy selection feels less mired in genre expectations, the horror tends to be
as hidebound as it is possible to be. Bearing in mind what I said before, that I am no
expert when it comes to horror, the fact that so many of these stories seemed familiar,
that I felt I was treading a path I had already followed too many times before, bodes
ill. Maybe it is the nature of the beast, maybe aficionados of the genre relish the
anticipation that comes when hackneyed characters set off towards their predictable
end, but for me it robbed stories like My Present Wife by Dennis Etchison, Endless
Summer by Stewart ONan and The Shape of Things by Ellen Steiber of any sense
of involvement or menace, while Down Here in the Garden by Tia V. Travis, which
used the story of the Donner Party as a running theme in an overwrought tale of gross
revenge, seemed more like an insult to the memory of the dead than the horrifying
gruesomeness we were meant to see.
Following tradition isnt always a bad thing, of course. The Penny Drops by Ian
Rodwell and Steve Duffy is an old-fashioned ghost story of the type everyone
assumes died with M.R. James but which, like some strange revenant, somehow lives
a pale afterlife in the pages of small presses and little magazines. This particular
example contains rather too knowing references to past masters of the genre, but
beyond that it builds its atmosphere and springs its surprises with considerable skill.
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Apart from The Penny Drops, however, only two stories among the horrors really
seemed to work for me. Mr. Darks Carnival by Glen Hirshberg also seems familiar
in its structure: a mid-Western town which takes its Halloween celebrations very
seriously and a legendary Halloween circus that one day turns up for real. But though
there is enough here to generate pleasurable little shivers up the back of the neck, this
isnt a story concerned with scaring the reader so much as examining and exposing
the fears of the people who wander through the curious haunted house. The Man on
the Ceiling by Steve Rasnic Tem and Melanie Tem is even better because it does
something I had begun to think the horror genre could not do: it breaks every rule.
The central characters are Steve and Melanie Tem, who take it in turns to write about
the writing of horror stories while around them something in the world changes. In
any year and in any setting this is the sort of story that would make you stop and
take notice, here, amid so much that is routine, it starts to seem almost extravagantly
transgressive and powerful.
In general, then, it seems I have a rather different take on what counts as best to
the editors of these volumes. It is not that I necessarily want the stories to be
transgressive; there are times, as with the Rodwell and Duffy, when following a
tradition well can produce a satisfying result. But in the majority of cases, particularly
in genres such as science fiction and fantasy where novelty is held high, taking us in
new directions seems to me to play an important part in representing the best of what
the genres can do. Im not sure that the editors necessarily agree. Both Dozois and
Datlow and Windling, for instance, habitually promise on their covers more than
250,000 words, which suggests that word length could play as much a part in the
selection process as quality. Certainly, Im not sure that each and every year one could
guarantee that much short fiction being published which really qualifies for the
description best. If these annuals are therefore considered no more than a conspectus
of the year, it might provide a more modest but more reliable perspective. That way
we can expect the poor, the unimaginative, the retrograde. Stories like Built Upon the
Sands of Time by Michael F. Flynn in Hartwell or A Migrant Bird by John F. Deane
in Datlow and Windling, both variations on the old tall story told in a bar, which only
serve to show how tired that particular sub-genre has become. Or Great Wall of Mars
by Alastair Reynolds in Dozois, which suggests that, apart from a dusting of modern
scientific catchwords, science fiction was frozen sometime back in the 1950s. Or The
Devil Disinvests by Scott Bradfield in Hartwell and Cramer which is the old, old story
of the devil quitting Hell, dressed up in the language of the contemporary investment
bank but otherwise unchanged. Or well, you get the picture. These are by no means
the worst stories in their respective anthologies, though that fact alone suggests that
the average quality of genre writing in 2000 was nothing to get excited about.
Sometimes you wonder whether the dross is there so that the few gems might
sparkle more brightly. No, that is too cynical even for me. But these collections do
each have their gems, stories which give you faith that a word like best still means
what it always used to mean. In the science fiction, Hartwell probably has the better
-- 83 --

of it with Chiangs Seventy-Two Letters, Langfords Different Kinds of Darkness, Le

Guins The Birthday of the World and Dues Patient Zero. Dozois shares the Le Guin
and the Due, and also offers Tendeleos Story by Ian McDonald, yet another visit to
the world of Chaga which he has now mined in two novels and a number of shorter
stories (at least one of which has been featured by Dozois before now). This time
around it is the emotional impact of the middle section of the story, which leaves
chaga-ridden Africa for the back streets of Manchester, which suggests that the
sequence still has life left in it, though there is still a little too much repetition here
for me to be completely happy with the novella. Then there is Milo and Sylvie by
Eliot Fintushel, who seems to have inherited the title of science fictions great
idiosyncratic voice from Avram Davidson, R.A. Lafferty and Howard Waldrop
(Waldrops story in Hartwell, Our Mortal Span, is distinctly lacking the old sparkle).
As with his great predecessors, one reads Fintushels story less for the story and more
for the way it is told; and as with his predecessors it is likely that Fintushel will never
be one of the genres great success stories, but he could well be one of its treasures.
In the fantasy, Hartwell and Cramer stick too closely to the heartland of the genre
to have much in the way of fiction that breaks new ground, and it is perhaps for that
reason that nothing springs out of this collection as truly great, with the possible
exception of Hopkinsons Greedy Choke Puppy. But there are stories here that play
strictly according to the conventions yet still seem to find something fresh in the way
they do it. Best of these is probably The Face of Sekt by Storm Constantine, which
works principally because of the strong and attractive character of the Egyptian
priestess at the heart of the story. Two other stories, Ebb Tide by Sarah Singleton
about a mermaid swept up on a beach, and The Golem by Naomi Kritzer about a
golem raised in Nazi-occupied Prague, work because of the way they use very
standard fantasy devices to evoke sadness and humanity in the face of the
inhumanity of our last century.
Datlow and Windling, perhaps because of the very unimaginative feel of most of
the horror stories, seem to have collected more clunkers than Hartwell and Cramer. It
was certainly the hardest of the four books to read simply because the quality could
vary so wildly from one story to the next. But because their view of what constitutes
fantasy is so much broader than Hartwells and Cramers, there is much more chance
that stories might head off in new directions. Partly, this is because the collision of
mainstream literary sensibilities with fantastic story devices can prove very fruitful.
This is not always the case; Le Mooz by Louise Erdrich is frankly awful, but where
it does work, as in Justin Tussings The Artificial Cloud, the story of an acerbic dwarf
floating in an artificial cloud in order to spy on the neighbouring kingdom, the result
can be curiously magical. It must be said, though, that the stories which impressed
me most among the fantasy in this years collection came from squarely within the
genre. As well as Clarkes Mr. Simonelli or the Fairy Widower, there was Esther M.
Friesners humane and vivid account of cathedral-building in medieval France that
results in contact with the land of Fairy. Jonathan Carrolls The Heidelberg Cylinder
-- 84 --

is as curious as his fiction so often is: hell has become overcrowded, so the damned
are moving out to take over our Earth. It creates some wonderful moments, though
these are not always joined together as well as they might have been and Carroll still
seems to have difficulty bringing his stories to a conclusion, but the invention, the
madness of the idea, carry you through and make the thing work.
Then there is Jack Daws Pack by Greer Gilman. This stands, alongside Chiangs
Seventy-Two Letters in science fiction and Tem and Tems The Man on the Ceiling
in horror, as the outstanding work of fantasy in the year (or at least in these
anthologies). If I hesitate about it, it is because I am not altogether sure it is a story,
and that is because I am not altogether sure I know what is going on. This is a dense
and allusive work, more difficult to get a grip on than anything I have read in fantasy
for some years. It is packed to overflowing with tendrils of reference to a hundred
legends and fragments of folklore from northern England, though I also found
offshoots of Greek myth and Norse tales creeping in among others. It is told in a
language so laden with dialect terms that it almost feels as if it needs a translation
into English. And it never states anything directly if it can leave us to pick our way
through a maze of hints and allusions. It is a mystery, and until I can work my way
through it some more I wont be certain that it is one story or fractions of several, but
its power and, I think, its importance within the genre are clear.
So the titles are, to some degree, right. These anthologies do contain the best
stories of science fiction, fantasy and horror published during the year. Though to
justify the title fully you could probably scour through these four books and come up
with just one anthology that is probably shorter than the shortest of these four. I
remain unconvinced that the genres, as they stand at the moment, can really sustain
four such volumes. I remain unconvinced that most of the stories gathered here
deserve their places in the collections (and there are one or two that have yet to
convince me they deserved any sort of publication in the first place). Still there are
stories here that deserve no, that demand the attention of anyone with any concern
for the state of the genres. And that, I presume, is why these anthologies exist.
ADDENDUM: since reading these books and completing this review I have
learned that the SF Book Club edition of the Hartwell and Cramer includes two
additional stories which were excluded from the mass-market paperback on the
grounds of space. These stories are Hey, Hey, Something, Something by Jan
Lars Jensen and The Saltimbanques by Terry Dowling, which gives us another
overlap between Hartwell and Cramer and Datlow and Windling. This is
certainly the better of the two Dowling stories featured, and tends to support
my view that where there is overlap Hartwell and Cramer are the more
adventurous, while its use of genre staples keeps it solidly within the heart of
genre fantasy.

-- 85 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

BLANK PAGES:

ISLANDS AND IDENTITY IN THE

FICTION OF CHRISTOPHER PRIEST
Peter Sinclair had reached the age of 212 pages. As with many other protagonists
in the novels of Christopher Priest, from Alan Whitman to J.L. Sawyer, his knowledge
of who and what he is is compromised, open to doubts and hesitations. We discover
during the course of The Affirmation (1981), for instance, that Sinclair isnt even sure
whether he is 29 or 31. His confidence in his own identity is invested in the
manuscript to which he clings obsessively throughout all that happens to him. In this
manuscript he has poured out the story of his life, displaced into an imaginary
landscape which may be London or it may be the Dream Archipelago. In putting
himself within this other place Sinclair has, as he says, imagined myself into
existence (The Affirmation [A], p15), [m]y manuscript had become a metaphor for
myself. (A, p23) So fully is the manuscript linked to his identity that the revelation,
late in the novel, that the pages are all blank is a devastating revelation of what is
going on in Sinclairs mind. In the end, blank pages lay scattered across the floor,
like islands of plain truth, auguring what was to come. (A, p212)
There are islands of plain truth scattered throughout Priests work. Sometimes
these are genuine, sea-girt islands Wessex, Muriseay sometimes they are set
within a more metaphorical ocean the Planalto, Earth City. They are not solitary
places, Priest has shown no interest in writing about a Robinson Crusoe or a Pincher
Martin, a lone figure whose humanity is the key to whether he masters or is mastered
by his environment. Invariably, Priests islands are socially, politically and morally
complex places, though they are also, equally invariably, places that are equated with
the identity of his characters, their nature essential in any understanding of how a
protagonist writes the story of who and what he is.
And the story usually is written. It is not just The Affirmation in which books play
an inextricable part. The written word, in one form or another, reveals or undermines
the world in Inverted World (1974) and A Dream of Wessex (1977) as much as it does
in The Quiet Woman (1990), The Prestige (1996) and The Separation (2002). Nor
should we forget the importance of a novel called The Affirmation in Priests story
The Negation (1978, revised 1999). The world of Priests novels is created and
understood through the written word, so that the book is one of the three key images
that echo and recur throughout his work. The second is the double, whether it is
Edwards brief glimpse of a second Amelia that sets the events of The Space Machine
(1976) in motion, Peter Sinclair bifurcating in The Affirmation, the secret of The
Prestige, or the twins whose separation splits the world in The Separation. The third
-- 89 --

is the focus of this exploration: the island. Though to examine any one of these tropes
in isolation is impossible; to consider the island in Priests work inevitably involves
books and doubles, because all three pertain to his investigation of identity. In that
other novel called The Affirmation a journey through the exotic landscape of the
Dream Archipelago [is] also a voyage of self-exploration. (The Dream
Archipelago [DA], p42)
In accompanying the endless island-hopping of the restless characters forever
seeking a sense of identity (DA, p32), our journey must begin with the scientific
project, the Concentration of Indoctrinaire (1970, revised 1979), the observatory of
Real-Time World (1972), the establishment of Inverted World. These are notable for
their absolute impregnability (Indoctrinaire [I], p7), but it is their very impregnability
that cuts the inhabitants off from consensus reality. The less they know about the
world around them We never get to know about the weather down here (I, p15),
as Wentik comments in a letter to his wife the less they know about themselves.
When, in both Real-Time World and Inverted World, the local reality becomes
distorted, the residents interpret it as a distortion in the world outside them. They are
adrift in a sea of ignorance, not realising that the ignorance is their own. Throughout
his career, Priest has found ways to cut his characters off from consensus reality. Even
in the post-Dream Archipelago stories where islands as literal settings tend to
disappear from his work, there is a sense that his characters are isolated from reality
by invisibility (in The Glamour (1984, revised 1996)), by virtual reality (in The
Extremes (1998)), by alternate realities (in The Separation) but it is still the same
impulse. Indoctrinaire, his first novel, may explore the idea less subtly than in his
later works, but that doesnt alter the fact that some of the issues of identity and
insularity first raised there resound throughout his entire oeuvre.
Indoctrinaire is the closest Priest has come to a Robinson Crusoe type of island
story. Taken from the Concentration by the enigmatic agents, Astourde and Musgrove,
Wentik finds himself in the Planalto, a part of the world where you can see in one
direction but not the other. A place you can walk into, but not out of (I, p19). It is
an island of time, stepping out of the Brazilian jungle into the circle of grassland that
is the Planalto, the men travel 200 years into the future. The setting alone is enough
to give Wentik a hopeless sensation of separation from reality (I, p51), but he finds
himself further isolated by his sanity as Astourde and Musgrove, themselves
becoming increasingly irrational, subject him to bizarre imprisonment and
interrogation. When he does eventually reach the future Sao Paulo, Wentik learns that
it was a Disturbance Gas, an off-shoot of his own research, that was responsible for
their madness. His entirely peaceful research was used for deadly military purposes.
It was all part of the permanent gulf between theory and practice, between the cold
clinical light of a research-bench and the blinding heat of an interrogation-room (I,
p135). The gulf, in other words, between the island of the Concentration and the
mainland of Wentiks family (whom we never see), between asocial insularity and
social context, between madness and sanity.
-- 90 --

Though there is always some such gulf to be found in Priests work, and social
connection is always a good, the island isnt always associated with disconnection. It
is, however, always associated with identity. Here, for instance, when Wentik itemises
all the people he knew and loved who would be lost in the war, he concludes: But
even more than this, a whole set of memories and impressions and images which go
to make up an identity. For Wentik to accept the destruction of all this would be to
condone the removal of a part of himself (I, p163). It is significant, therefore, that
having travelled back in time but still not able to rescue his family from the war,
Wentik chooses to cast himself away on the island of the Planalto at the end of the
novel. He has become a Robinson Crusoe, or perhaps more appropriately a Pincher
Martin, because the social context that makes him who he is has already been taken
away from him. The island does not isolate him, it is his isolation that leaves him
washed up on the island.
All that occurs in Indoctrinaire, the war, the bizarre imprisonment in the Planalto,
is a direct consequence of the malevolent insularity of the Concentration. But in
Priests first novel we hardly have a chance to see how this disconnection from the
world distorts perceptions of the world. In two subsequent works, however, the story
Real-Time World and the novel Inverted World, this distortion would be brought into
sharp focus. This is because, in both instances, our attention is almost exclusively
fixed upon the closed, insular world of the blandly-named observatory or
establishment.
In many ways, Real-Time World, notably the Tolneuve Theory around which it
revolves, encapsulates everything that islands represent in Priests work at this stage:
people raised in a high-stimulus environment become a product of their society, and
could not keep their orientation without some knowledge of what is outside their
sphere (Real-Time World [RTW], p139). From Indoctrinaire all the way to A Dream of
Wessex, Priests fiction is filled with people who lose their orientation, their sanity,
their sense of identity, through losing their context, their connection with consensus
reality. The story is, in fact, an experiment in just such loss of orientation, an
experiment that is summarised thus: what, precisely what, would be the effect on a
community deprived of news? Or in another sense: does an awareness of current
events really matter? (RTW, p138).
The form of the experiment involves complex layers of deception. The story is that
the scientists are manning an observatory on another planet, though, as in the
Planalto, they are enisled by time more than by space due to an effect known as
elocation.
Elocation had about as much relation to time-travel as a flight of stairs has to
space-travel All the elocation field can do is to push the observatory back in
time by about one nanosecond. (RTW, p141)

In other words, they are cut off from their reality in every way possible. Their only
access to the world outside this hermetically sealed observatory is through a series of
-- 91 --

personal news sheets which are doled out, once every twenty-eight days, by the
narrator, Dan Winter. It is Winters job to observe the experiment, plotting the way
rumours about what is actually happening on Earth spread through the community.
After a while, [t]he rumours lost any basis in reality, became fantastic, wild,
demented (RTW, p144), but then speculation turned towards reality again, incredibly,
the rumours began to anticipate fact (RTW, p145). As he follows this bell-curve,
Winter believes that he alone knows the truth: that they are not on some distant
planet but in the Joliot-Curie crater on the Moon, which is visible from earth only
once every 28 days, hence the four-week pattern in receiving news from outside. But
as the scientists understanding of their world returns towards consensus reality, they
realise that they are not on some distant planet, nor on the Moon, but are still on
Earth. They simply walk out. Only the narrator, Winter, enmired in his own distorted
view of reality and unable to imagine that they are not on the Moon, remains. He
cannot walk out because in his reality that would mean dying instantly in a vacuum,
so he stays in a social and intellectual vacuum of his own making.
It is not the island of the observatory that physically cuts its inhabitants off from
the world; it is the consensus view of the scientists. When their view of the world
changes, when their social, political and intellectual context allows a connection with
outside reality the scientists are able to move freely between the worlds. Only the
narrator, socially at odds with the other scientists, is unable to share their consensus
reality and therefore alone is left a castaway.
Real-Time World is probably the best of Priests early stories because of its
psychological and moral complexity, but it would soon be overshadowed by another
work that employed exactly the same scenario. In Inverted World Priest would once
again examine the social insularity of his characters by placing them upon the island
of a scientific establishment that is technologically cut-off from outside reality, and
again it would be the willingness of the characters to connect with that outside world
and share in its consensus that would dictate whether they can escape the dying
island of their imaginations for the world of our reality.
Practically the first thing we learn about Earth City, after Helward Manns startling
and famous opening declaration I had reached the age of six hundred and fifty
miles (Inverted World [IW], p11) is about its confinement and regulation. Helwards
mother, for instance, had left the city soon after his birth and all he had known while
growing up were the confining walls of the crche (IW, p11), but now there are
rituals to go through as he enters the highly regulated adult world of the guilds. This
emotional isolation is combined with a deliberate intellectual and cultural insularity.
Like the scientists in Real-Time World, for instance, the inhabitants of Earth City
understand that they are not on the planet Earth, but knowledge of the planet they
are on is withheld from them.
We knew, or thought we knew, much about everyday life on Earth planet, but
we were told that this was not what we would find on this world. A childs
-- 92 --

natural curiosity immediately demanded to know the alternative, but on this the
teachers had kept their silence. (IW, p49)

Although Helwards future wife, Victoria, will rail against the frustrating
limitations of this insularity
the system which runs my life is itself dominated by what goes on outside the
city. As I can never take part in that I can never do anything to determine my
own life. (IW, p54)

nothing is done to understand the world. The guilds, who alone have contact
with anyone or anything outside the city, are constrained by their rituals to tell noone of what they see, even the spiked shape of the sun. More than that, they behave
towards the people they encounter with a disdain bordering on disgust that is typical
of the reaction of islanders to others in all Priests work from Fugue for a Darkening
Island (1972) to the Dream Archipelago stories. Reason enough for this disdain is
shown in the novels bravura central section in which Helward journeys south and
experiences all the distortions of the inverted world. But it is after he returns, in the
war with the tooks (as the local inhabitants are called, a name clearly cognate with
the gooks of Vietnam) that we learn something of the social and political
consequences of this isolation.
We have already learned, when Helward discovers the old plan of Earth City, that
it had once had several languages, and realise that it has become homogenised. We
know, also, that the population is shrinking, and especially that fewer girls are being
born. So we have an impression already of a society becoming smaller and narrower,
more and more cut off. Now Helward himself, seeing parallels between what he has
been taught and what he has experienced, recognises Earth City as the inheritor of an
uncomfortable truth about Earth planet, where [c]ivilisation was equated with
selfishness and greed; those people who lived in a civilised state exploited those who
did not. (IW, pp166/7) Earth City is repeating that pattern: the guilds see themselves
as civilised and therefore exploit economically in terms of their labour but also
sexually by taking and using their women the tooks whom they see as noncivilised, their physical isolation is a graphic representation of their emotional and
moral isolation, their selfish and self-chosen insularity.
All of this is possible only as long as the City and its inhabitants remain detached
from the world through which they travel. As Helward puts it:
Survival on this world was a matter of initiative: on the grand scale, by hauling
the city northwards away from that zone of amazing distortion behind us, and
on the personal scale by deriving for oneself a pattern of life that was selfdetermined. (IW, p167)

But already that self-determination, that evident discipline, the sense of purpose,
and a real and vital understanding of their own identity (IW, p230), is starting to
-- 93 --

break down. The guilds, with their secret oaths and their sense of being special, are
comparable with the sort of fascistic organisation that crops up elsewhere in Priests
work, in Fugue for a Darkening Island and in The Quiet Woman for instance. But these
can survive only as long as all their members are united in the same dream, and as
long as they remain inviolate from the influences of an outside world. But on Earth
City the sense of unity is already slipping. After attending a meeting of the
Navigators, the city government, for instance, Helward concludes that perhaps more
guildsmen should attend the Navigators meetings (IW, p186), suggesting a declining
commitment to the group even among the supposedly elite. And when the attack by
the tooks opens part of the city to the sky so that even the restricted ordinary
inhabitants can see the strange sun, it awakens a wave of protest and rebellion, led
by Helwards former wife, Victoria, who has already expressed her dissatisfactions
with the restrictions of city life.
Nevertheless, Helward himself is totally committed to the enclosed world of the
city, his experiences in the outside world have convinced him that the disciplined
rituals of the guilds are the only possible response to the hostile world that daily
threatens our survival (IW, p180). And because his own response to the world is
determined so totally by the group, his reaction when Elizabeth finally reveals that
Earth City is still on Earth, that their distorted view of reality is a physical and
psychological effect of the machinery that powers the city, is simply despair (IW,
p226). So much so, in fact, that he refuses to accept the real world as we perceive it.
Our final glimpse of him has him thrashing in the Atlantic Ocean, convinced it is just
a river that the city can cross. Like Winter in Real-Time World, he cannot leave his
island because he can see only death outside it. Later, when Peter Sinclair crosses
desperately between Jethra and London, unable to accept the non-reality of either, we
see it as the breakdown of his own identity. And so it is now, Helward Mann cannot
leave Earth City though it might mean death through the horrible distortions he has
already witnessed, because to do so would be to abandon his identity which is even
more terrible.
After Inverted World, Priest turned from artificial islands to what we might as well
call real islands, real in the sense that they are bodies of land surrounded by water,
though all are to some degree imaginary, and as they emerge from the dreams of their
inhabitants, so they are tied even more closely to the wished-for identities of his
characters. But before we consider the related creations of Wessex and the Dream
Archipelago, it is worth turning back briefly to one other sea-girt island, Britain, as
it appears in Fugue for a Darkening Island. In the early seventies the British
catastrophe novel as established by writers such as John Wyndham and John
Christopher (to both of whom Priest has acknowledged a debt) was enjoying a late
flourish. The previous year M. John Harrison had published The Committed Men
(1971), and shortly afterwards Richard Cowper would produce The Twilight of
Briareus (1974), and Fugue seems to fit neatly within this pattern: helpless men move
in a complex dance through a shattered landscape in which their helplessness, their
-- 94 --

inability to act, is part of the catastrophe.

In a way that would become characteristic of Priests work, he begins the novel
by undermining our confidence in the identity of the narrator. The two opening
paragraphs of the novel provide echoing descriptions of our narrator, Alan Whitman,
but with strange and significant differences: I have white skin I have no political
ambitions (Fugue for a Darkening Island [FDI], p5) the first tells us; My skin is
smudged with dirt I do not think I have political ambitions (FDI, p5) we learn from
the second. In a novel that deliberately eschews a straightforward chronological
narrative we soon realise that this is our hero as the story opens and as it closes, so
we see from the start how he is changed and how he stays the same. But at the same
time the effect is to make us doubt, to establish from the start that this is no coherent
and reliable figure. We will see the same undermining of identity right at the start of
The Affirmation, and even Inverted Worlds I had reached the age of six hundred and
fifty miles (IW, p11) tells us not to take Helward Manns identity in our own terms.
So we have a shattered political climate reflected in a shattered narrative structure
which in turn presages a shattering in the identity of our narrator. That our narrator
is a comfortably middle class everyman, or at least an every-Englishman, only asks
us to accept the shattering of his identity as the shattering of our own.
Again, as in Inverted World, we have an inviolable island whose grip on its own
inward-turning reality is dislodged by an intrusion from a greater outside world, by
the forced acceptance of a new consensus reality. The inward-turning nature of
British reality prior to the Afrim (African immigrant) invasion is represented by the
largely off-stage rise of an extreme right-wing government. The lesson we will learn
from the fascistic inventions of Gordon in The Quiet Woman is that fascism is equated
by Priest with dislocation from reality, and so it is here. Whitman, drifting into an
unsatisfactory marriage and an unsatisfactory career, has lost his way even before the
first of the Afrims arrive, and so has his country. The war that follows, glimpsed only
tangentially, appears to be a conventional one of national forces battling invaders,
but is marked by disruption to national unity with individual streets barricaded and
towns fortified. It is an abandonment of the moral values that might in other terms
be considered a part of the national identity: a small and vociferous section of the
community adhered to its moral principles, but more and more ordinary people
were coming into direct conflict with the Afrims as the armed insurgence went on
(FDI, p42). The whole country, in other words, is broken down into individuals
fighting for their personal survival. The presence of United Nations personnel
manning refugee camps suggests that the rest of the world has not reacted so
violently to the influx of African refugees, but there is very little awareness of the
rest of the world in this England.
Although the chronology of the novel is deliberately out of sequence, there is a
clear dynamic towards greater isolation. Whitman successively loses his work, his
home and his family; he leaves the refugee band when it starts to arm itself, but also
rejects the seaside town which has managed to preserve old values; in the end he is
-- 95 --

left standing alone over the bodies of his wife and daughter. Like Wentik, he is cast
away upon an island of his own making, for the failure that has destroyed his country
is a direct consequence of his own failure. The fascist government that is the root
cause of the disruption Everywhere [Afrims] caused social upheaval; but in Britain,
where a neo-racist government had come to power on an economic-reform ticket,
they did much more (FDI, p69) has achieved power through an abdication of their
social and cultural obligations by people like Whitman. His lack of commitment is
described as insularity (FDI, p44), of his marriage he says: While we were living at
our house we were able to disregard both the fact that our relationship was
hypocritical and that the political situation of that period had an effect on us (FDI,
p47), and even when his father dies I tried unsuccessfully to feel more than a few
minutes of regret (FDI, p53). When he describes one of the women with whom he has
an affair as existing in a kind of personal vacuum living in but not belonging to
our society (FDI, p105) we recognise that the description applies to him and to all
around him. Each man is an island, and having abandoned society they have
abandoned all that contributes towards their security and their identity.
In these early works, from Indoctrinaire through to Inverted World, insularity is
seen in broad terms as an avoidance of social or political commitment. The Space
Machine acts as a sort of entracte. Though not really an island novel, his central
characters, Edward and Amelia might be seen as castaways upon Mars, where they
are forced to engage politically with the revolutionary Martians while Edward learns
to engage psychologically with the more sexually and socially liberated Amelia. From
this point onwards, psychological and sexual engagement, and the issues of
individual identity implicit in this, become a significant part of the political
commitment that is a continuing theme in Priests work. Concomitant with this new
focus was a new maturity in Priests writing, first evident in stories that sprang
directly out of the writing of The Space Machine, An Infinite Summer (1976) and
Palely Loitering (1978), but which was more fully expressed in his next novel, A
Dream of Wessex.
One shift in attitude is immediately apparent. The near-future England in which
the novel opens is undergoing a political upheaval reminiscent of Fugue for a
Darkening Island. In the very first sentence we learn that [t]he Tartan Army had
planted a bomb at Heathrow (A Dream of Wessex [DW], p1) and travel about the
country is disrupted by army checkpoints. But where Whitman in Fugue was expected
to engage politically to hold together his disintegrating society, Julia Stretton in
Wessex is allowed to escape into the personal and psychological commitment
represented by the future island. Similarly in The Glamour there are terrorist
disruptions to the body politic, and in that novel our viewpoint character, Gray, is
appropriately a news cameraman, an observer of rather than a participant in the
political scene, who escapes into invisibility.
The bomb at the start of Wessex is only a part of a world turned upside down. We
also learn, for instance, that now in July there had been reports of snow-flurries
-- 96 --

along the Yorkshire coast (DW, p1). In part, of course, this acts as a contrast with the
endless summer of Wessex, though it also speaks of a disorder greater than any
individual, no matter how politically engaged, could hope to change. Though, of
course, Julias imaginative engagement within Wessex will eventually mend disorder
of a similar scale.
Wessex Island is a projection from the minds of the volunteers of the Wessex
Project, it is literally a concretisation of their identities, and because we see it mostly
through Julias eyes it is primarily an expression of her identity. It is a place of
contradictions: politically, for instance, Britain is now a repressive communist state
while America is part of the austere Moslem world; yet Wessex Island is an
international holiday destination popular with American tourists and a place of openair cafes, casinos and casual nudity. In part, we can gather from this that old-style
party politics are really irrelevant to the social healing represented by Wessex; in part,
it simply emphasises that the island is a place apart.
Both Julia and, by inference, the island with which she is associated, seemed
degenerate and wanton, giving off an air of anarchy and irresponsibility (DW, p20).
Much the same is discovered by Peter Sinclair when he reaches Muriseay: The whole
city was a new kind of sensation: a feeling of careless indifference to many things I
took for granted a teeming, shouting and colliding city, uneven and untidy, yet
charged with life (A, p57). Both of these impressions of the island echo something
John Fowles says in his island novel of psycho-sexual exploration, The Magus: It was
Greece again, the Alexandrian Greece of Cavafy; there were only degrees of aesthetic
pleasure; of beauty in decadence. Morality was a North European lie. (p249) The
Greek Islands, where Britains post-war generation shook off their repressions, were
an ideal more than a real, a fantasy of liberation. And both Wessex and the Dream
Archipelago are representations of the Greek Islands in their warmth, their aesthetic
pleasures, their decadence. The specific identification of the Dream Archipelago with
the Greek Islands comes later, in The Quiet Woman, when we learn that the old writer,
Eleanor, is also Seri Fulton, the name of the woman who personifies the Dream
Archipelago in The Affirmation, and that returning from Greece at the outset of war
she had an affair with a man named Peter, we presume Peter Sinclair. Here, then, is
an ideal setting for sexual liberty, for freedom and fulfilment, a place where Julias
sexual happiness and the curious sexual experiments of the Dream Archipelago
stories rightly seem to belong. But at the same time, it must be protected from the
repressions that are being escaped. Hence, as a place apart, an island of desire, Wessex
must remain inviolate, shut off to most visitors, a Grail whose achievement is itself a
measure of some grace. So it is that, despite David Harkmans instinctive knowledge
that Wessex was a spiritual and emotional home (DW, p23), it had seemed a part of
the world as unreachable from London as the Presidential Palace in Riyadh (DW,
p22). The Dream Archipelago, similarly, would be a place where access is restricted,
where only the fortunate can enter, and which, like the Planalto, can be entered but
not left.
-- 97 --

Thus enclosed, protected as much as isolated by the sea that surrounds it, Wessex
had a hypnotic quality of peace and security, an ordered languor; it was a restful,
secure place... Wessex, tourist island in an imagined future, became the ultimate
escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality. (DW, p78) To the participants, Wessex comes
to seem real, and the world they have fled is shadowy:
Although they were sometimes accused of running away from the real world,
the fact was that once they had lived in Wessex the participants became
distanced from real life, and there was no need to hide from something
insubstantial. (DW, p95)

Into this protected world intrudes Paul Mason, Julias manipulative and
destructive former lover. Paul is portrayed as intrusive from the first moment we see
him. When Julia runs into him at Wessex House it was like the breach of a
sanctuary (DW, p1) and he had the ability to invade her life (DW, p2). If Priests
books, politically, are about engagement, then in Julia and David we have people
who engage with their world, even if it is a world they have created from their own
imaginations; but in Paul we have someone who does not engage, but who tries to
make the world, any world, over in his own image. Like Niall in The Glamour who
sees invisibility as a means of denying the morality of the world (to the extent that
he can engage in an invisible rape of Susan), so Paul sees Wessex as a way of
twisting the world (and Julia in particular) to his own moral rules. For Julia and
David, Wessex is not a perfect place: David is caught up in a dull, grey bureaucracy
in Dorchester; Julia is locked in a loveless sexual relationship. Nevertheless, it is a
place they can make better through their own personal engagement, such that on
their first encounter David feels a need to stay with her, a need to talk and make
some kind of contact. (DW, p41) Paul, on the other hand, stands for the destruction
of her pride, of her sense of identity, of her self-respect (DW, p66), and when he does
finally breach the sanctuary and enter Wessex he turns this destruction of identity
into a destruction of the refuge and the hope that the island represents.
The changes that Paul brings to the island are signalled by a change in the
weather. The summer idyll, a fragment of the Mediterranean relocated in southern
England, is replaced by cold and wind and rain, noticeably similar to the unpleasant
weather Julia had left in her present at the beginning of the book. Paul is symbolically
bringing all the ills of the present, including the psycho-sexual ills of his relationship
with Julia, into the idealised island escape of the future. The change in climate is
followed by a change in the purpose and character of Wessex, the warm holiday
retreat is replaced by an unwelcoming and environmentally heedless
industrialisation: The smoke from the oil-refinery poured over the town, dark and
depressing and greasy (DW, p143). When Julia and David triumph in the end the oil
refineries and factory chimneys disappear from the view, sunshine returns. This is not
only a restoration of the Wessex of their original idyll, but a healing as great in its
way as if Julia had been able to correct the unseasonal weather that opens the novel.
-- 98 --

It signals the completeness of their engagement with each other and with their world.
She had ceased to be an organic part of the real world from the day she had
first entered the projection. She belonged to the future; life could never again
be stable except in the Wessex of her mind. (DW, p174)

Whether it is now a projection of their imaginations or reality is irrelevant, such

distinctions have been removed. It would be real, or real-seeming. It made no
difference. It would be as it was, or as she expected it to be and it therefore was of
no importance (DW, p179).
This question of the reality of Wessex is, of course, important in any consideration
of the island as a representation of the identity of the characters. When one of the
participants is out of the projector they leave a doppelganger in Wessex, like a
bookmark preserving their place in the story of the island. This persona is shadowy,
so that when David continues his romance with Julias doppelganger he did not
experience her. He remembered her into existence (DW, p119) but when she returns
to the projection [r]eality began at this instant, at every instant, and the past became
false (DW, p124). How real the world is depends on how thoroughly one is engaged
with it. Significantly, mirrors are used to recall people from the projection, you see
yourself and hence see where you belong; but the mirrors do not work on David, he
sees himself and knows himself in Wessex. He is so thoroughly engaged with this
world that it is no longer a projection, it has become his reality, an echo of what we
will later see in the shift to virtual reality in The Extremes.
Then David discovers a newspaper article. It is important to note the role that texts
play in Priests work. Only the fictional work, The Affirmation, in his story The
Negation, unequivocally reveals the truth about the world. Every non-fiction, from
Destaines Directive in Inverted World to the various texts that make up The
Separation, may seem to state a simple fact about the world but actually serves to
undermine our notion of what is reality. As Peter Sinclair says in The Affirmation:
If I could find the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion
write all that was true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the
mind that chooses them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. (A,
p1)

So it is with the clipping David finds in which the project is described thus: we
are imagining a future world, which is made palpable to us by the Ridpath projector
(DW, p138). The photographs of himself and Julia accompanying the article force
David to confront what Helward Mann has already faced in Inverted World, and that
other of Priests protagonists will also face: the fact that his reality may be a creation.
It is notable that it is only after this discovery, after Davids faith in his world is
shaken, that the degradation of Wessex that marks Pauls assault on the identity of
Julia and of David, begins to be noticeable.
When Paul inverts this world, sending the participants back through the Ridpath
-- 99 --

projector, they emerge severely damaged. The loss of memory was like the loss they
all experienced inside the projection: a total severance from their real lives (DW,
p177). Only Julia emerges intact because, through her love for David, she is now
grounded in the reality of Wessex. And it is the strength of this engagement with each
other and with the world that allows them to overcome Paul and remake Wessex.
At the end of A Dream of Wessex, as Julia and David possess their newly remade
world, there is a lingering question about its status: Where was the present from
which Wessex was being projected? Were they the same or was the system now
closed? (DW, p188) Priest has created a loop, the real world feeds into the dream, the
dream world feeds into the real, engagement with another equates with engagement
with the world. This turn in the mobius strip which makes it impossible to tell where
one reality ends and another begins is a pattern that will become familiar in the
ending of books such as The Extremes and The Separation and especially in The
Affirmation.
In many ways it seems that A Dream of Wessex set a pattern, or rather a series of
patterns, which have been further explored and elaborated in the novels that
followed. The triangular relationship between Julia, David and Paul, for instance, is
repeated in The Glamour, and echoed also in The Extremes and The Separation. More
significantly, as is evidenced from the way that references to The Affirmation have
wound themselves inextricably through this discussion of A Dream of Wessex, is the
way Wessex would transform into the Dream Archipelago.
The Dream Archipelago, the setting for some of the most darkly unsettling of
Priests fictions, first appeared in a series of four stories published in 1978, the year
after Wessex. A fifth story, The Miraculous Cairn, appeared in Granta in 1980 as part
of the promotion of the Best of Young British Writers in which Priest was featured.
These stories were all slightly revised for the collection The Dream Archipelago in
1999, with a brief scene-setting piece, The Equatorial Moment, added. A further
novelette, The Discharge, was published in France in 2000 and subsequently
appeared in an English version. Each of these stories, along with Priests novel The
Affirmation, appears to share the same geographical setting: the archipelago is always
an innumerable swathe of islands that girdle the equator, so many that there are
always several other islands visible from whichever island you are on; they separate
a technologically sophisticated northern continent whose nations are involved in a
seemingly endless war, from a barren southern continent where the war is fought (the
North Africa campaign of the Second World War seems to be the model here); the
northern city of Jethra and various islands such as Muriseay recur. Yet for all these
repetitions, the infinitude of islands seems to be deliberately exploited to allow an
infinitude of settings. The religious institution in The Miraculous Cairn does not
cohere with the funeral rites of The Cremation, whose sexual predation is very
different from the sexual predation of Whores, while the refuge to soldiers in that
latter story seems a world away from the refuge to civilians offered in The Watched.
And so it goes; what really ties these stories together is their insularity, the island
-- 100 --

setting allows Priest to separate his protagonists from the familiarity of their world
and cast them away in a place where their own darker imaginings come to haunt
them. Where the Dream Archipelago resembles Wessex is in its evocation of Greece,
a realm of sunshine, of moral and sexual liberty. But where this liberty allowed David
and Julia to discover love, freedom and escape, these self-same liberties in the Dream
Archipelago lead to nightmare as the various protagonists discover that freedom on
their terms means freedom on other peoples terms also, and they are not equipped to
cope with that.
It is notable that the main point of The Equatorial Moment is to point up a
curious temporal effect experienced by those flying over the archipelago (most of the
minor changes made to the stories for The Dream Archipelago introduce passing
references to this effect). In other words, like the Planalto in Indoctrinaire and the
observatory in Real-Time World, the Dream Archipelago is isolated not just by the
sea and by the forced neutrality of war but also by time.
With a sense of future removed the past became irrelevant and those who came
to the Archipelago, choosing the permanence of neutrality, made a conscious
decision to abandon their former lives. (DA, p191)

In fact, the isolation of those who visit the islands is stressed all through these
stories. In the stories of Moylita Kaine in The Negation it is a place of walls. Graian
Sheeld in The Cremation finds a sheltered, oppressive place (DA, p73) where
everything is exotic and difficult and [h]e felt isolated and cast adrift in the islands
(DA, p72). This is partly a cultural effect; Alanyas frank stories only helped to cut
him off further from the other guests (DA, p76) so that in the end Sheeld becomes
the victim of the general paralysis of his culture shock and social alienation (DA,
p78).
The islands are places of allure only to those who have not been there (Dik in The
Negation), but to those who do go there they become places of mystery, of
inexplicable threat, of alienation. But it is an alienation that cannot be escaped: the
law says that those who move to the islands cannot return, and in fact they offer no
opportunity to return for there will always be some new seduction that leads on to
the grave. Even if you get back to Jethra, as the narrator in The Mysterious Cairn
does, some lotus-eating experience will have changed you forever. Significantly, as
islands always reflect the identity of Priests characters, those who seek out the islands
do so to escape a troubled life, and bring their trouble with them amplified by the
magic of the islands. Graian Sheeld, for instance, is fleeing the mounting confusion
and emotional fall-out (DA, p88) caused by his infidelities. It is fitting, therefore, that
what he finds in the islands is a sexually predatory woman who becomes implicit in
his gruesome death. While Yvann Ordier, in The Watched, leaves behind his
involvement with the microscopic spying devices known as scintillas, only to find
himself emotionally trapped by his own voyeurism which leads eventually to him
taking the place of the one he was watching.
-- 101 --

The narrator of The Miraculous Cairn is typical, seeing the Dream Archipelago at
once as a place of escape and of retribution. A sexually nervous middle-aged teacher
we discover only at the mid-point of the story that she is female and a lesbian
revisits the island of Seevl where, as a teenager, she had her first sexual encounter.
As a child, even though she knew the island, she half-shared the popular impression
that:
Seevl was populated by bogeymen and creeping horrors, while the actual
landscape was thought to be a nightmare terrain of crevasses and volcanic
pools, sulphurous mists, steaming craters and shifting rocks (DA, p117).

Curiously, the nightmare is not far from what she actually discovers there. Led on
by a carefree older girl, her first sexual encounter is unconsummated, but marked by
an extraordinary incident in which her arm is caught in the jaws of a monstrous beast
she never sees, and when she escapes its bite she finds it has left no mark on her flesh.
Now, years later, she discovers that the ruined tower in which this strangely formative
experience occurred does not actually exist. The island, like that childhood nightmare,
is a place of psycho-sexual terror where fears of ones sexuality are externalised and
turned into creatures of irrational punishment. And in that, as invariably occurs
within Priests fiction, lies the key to her identity, or lack of it.
Everything I am, that I have been as an adult, began here at the seminary. I
gained my identity here. If I hadnt come back I would still feel that I had that
identity, but now its gone. I am not sure of anything. (DA, p184)

The result is the existential doubt that marks so many of Priests characters, and
which we will encounter most notably in Peter Sinclair. And as with Sinclair, that
doubt is identified with the islands.
Sinclair starts out with certainties, the clearest way of recognising that his identity
is made up of uncertainties:
This much I know for sure:
My name is Peter Sinclair, I am English and I am, or I was, twenty-nine years
old. Already there is an uncertainty, and my sureness recedes. Age is a variable;
I am no longer twenty-nine. (A, p1)

It is a litany that calls to mind Whitmans statement of identity at the beginning

of Fugue, and in exactly the same way it prefigures doubts, hesitations and a
profound remaking of who Peter Sinclair is. (The other Peter Sinclair, writing a
parallel narrative in the Dream Archipelago, will later have the same hesitation at
Lotterie-Collago when he claims to be 29 though the records state he is 31.) At this
point Peters life is breaking apart. How much is his fault we are never entirely sure,
but we know he loses his job, his girlfriend and his father in short order. When a
friend of his father offers him a cottage in the country he deliberately cuts himself off
from what remains of his life: I wanted to be unencumbered after my move (A, p8).
-- 102 --

This is a deliberate isolation from reality: in London I had been extensively aware of
the world [N]ow I was cut off from all that (A, p11). This is exactly the loss of news
experienced by the scientists in Real-Time World, but in this more sophisticated
working out of the Tolneuve Theory there is no guarantee that Sinclair will follow the
same bell curve. His loss of identity quickly becomes apparent: One day I looked in
the bloom-spotted mirror in the kitchen and saw the familiar face staring back at me,
but I could not identify it with anything I knew of myself (A, p13). The mirror which
reaffirmed the real identity of the inhabitants of Wessex clearly does not work here.
To reclaim his identity, therefore, Peter Sinclair starts to write his autobiography.
When Julia is brought back into a recursive present in A Dream of Wessex, the event
which destroys the mind of her fellow participants, she is able to retain her grip on
reality and hence defy Paul by clinging onto the reality of her memories of Wessex
and of David. Similarly, Sinclair now decides I could only regain my sense of identity
through my memories (A, p14). Looking upon his autobiography he declares: I had
imagined myself into existence (A, p15) and later, as his manuscript changes through
the invention of the Dream Archipelago and to achieve total truth I must create total
falsehood (A, p23): I had found myself, explained myself, and in a very personal
sense of the word I had defined myself (A, p25). These islands represented a form of
wish, or of escape (A, p24), but they are also the metaphor that he lives. This is surely
what Helward Mann is doing in Inverted World and David and Julia in Wessex, living
a metaphor; and the metaphor is an island separated from mundane reality. But the
island of release, of identity, of escape, also implies a mainland, and the mainland is
the place of confusion and anarchy, but also the place of connection and reality. In
Inverted World and Wessex and The Extremes, even back in Indoctrinaire and RealTime World, the protagonists turn their backs on reality and find escape in the dream
island. But they do so at a cost, which may be isolation or madness or even nonexistence (Wessex, The Extremes) which is what madness and isolation amount to. In
The Affirmation we discover the madness and isolation early in the way Sinclair splits
his reality even while still wholly in this world.
Charged by the owners of the cottage to redecorate it, Sinclair realises that [t]o
visualize the rooms newly painted, made clean and tidy, was in a sense half the work
already done (A, p12), and from that moment we are unsure if what we are told is
real or only what he imagines. Then his sister, Felicity, visits, and having exclaimed
about the filthiness of this supposedly pristine cottage, begins to wash up.
Is there no hot water?
Yes its hot. I could see the steam cascading around her arms. (A, p30)
But this doubling of reality is not a problem for Sinclair, it was Felicitys failure,
not mine. She was perceiving it wrongly (A, p33).
Throughout it all the breakdown in the cottage, the enforced stay with Felicity,
renewed contact with his suicidal girlfriend, Gracia Sinclair clings to his manuscript
which tells of Peter Sinclair in the Dream Archipelago. Meanwhile Peter Sinclair sets
-- 103 --

sail among the islands of the Dream Archipelago carrying a manuscript he wrote two
years before during a long summer in the country while he had been unemployed.
This manuscript, we will eventually discover, tells of a Peter Sinclair who lives in the
imaginary city of London. Only the fact that The Affirmation opens in London gives
Peter Sinclair the Londoner any precedence over the Jethran Peter Sinclair: each
invents the other, and either or neither could be real. The Jethran Sinclair is travelling
to claim a prize he won in a lottery, athanasia treatment, which will give him
prolonged life. Just as there has been a consistent temporal element in the island
settings Priest has created from Indoctrinaire to the Dream Archipelago stories, this
treatment too is a way of isolating Sinclair in time: My friends, my family, would
move on into biological future, while I would be fixed, or petrified (A, p83). The
symbolism of this is emphasised when Sinclair and Seri visit a village where objects
are left in running water to become petrified, an event echoed in this world when
Sinclair goes with Felicitys family to visit Castleton in the Peak District where there
is a pool which could turn things to stone (A, p88). As a result of one visit Sinclair
and Seri become lovers, as a result of the other Sinclair and Gracia are reunited.
When Sinclair leaves Sheffield to move back to London and Gracia:
I was moving from one island to another. Beside me was Seri, behind me were
Kalia and Yallow. Through them I could discover myself in the glowing
landscape of the mind. I felt that at last I saw a way to free myself from the
confinements of the page. There were now two realities, and each explained the
other. (A, p100)

This is as potent a statement as can be found of the role islands play in Priests
fiction. Islands are the glowing landscape of the mind, the second of two realities
that Priests protagonists inhabit. But because the two realities, islands and the
mainland, as it were, each explain the other, they cannot be independent; there must
be movement each way. (It is noticeable how often there is an interdiction on travel
between the worlds, from the supposed temporal dislocation of Real-Time World to
the restrictions on movement in Fugue and the Dream Archipelago stories.) Each
reality is necessary: in the island of the imagination is to be found individual identity;
in the mainland of the outside world is social, political and cultural connection.
Alone, the island is a place of madness; alone, the mainland is a place of anarchy and
turmoil. Too often, however, Priests protagonists choose one world over the next.
Sinclair, in this brief moment of self-knowledge, might recognise that through them
I could discover myself, but he makes no discoveries through them. He might wish
to free himself from the confinements of the page, but that is something he will
prove unable to do. Indeed, as The Affirmation ends with the same broken sentence
that Sinclairs manuscript has twice reached, there is a recursion that turns us back,
glancingly at an odd angle, into the novel. Neither Sinclair nor the reader can, in the
end, escape the page; quite the opposite, when Sinclair is asked to write his life story
as part of the athanasia treatment it is so that afterwards I could be made into the
-- 104 --

words I had written (A, p117). Reality is trapped within the novel as it is also in The
Prestige and The Separation. Though as Seri tells Sinclair towards the end of the
novel, Theres no such thing as truth. You are living by your manuscript, and
everything in it is false (A, p208).
What happens throughout the second half of The Affirmation is a progressive
breaking down of the walls that separate the two worlds of the imagination. Mostly
this revolves round the character of Seri/Gracia, with each Peter Sinclair finding it
increasingly difficult to know which was which. I knew that Seri must be more than
a fictional analogue of Gracia. She was too real, too complete, too motivated by her
own personality, (A, p143) as Sinclair acknowledges. After which, Seri and Gracia
change places during lovemaking, a scene uncomfortably reminiscent of the invisible
rape in The Glamour. Later, as each Sinclair moves restlessly between London and
Jethra without really connecting with either, Seri becomes specifically linked to the
islands: To her, each island represented a different facet of her personality, each one
vested in her a sense of identity. She was incomplete without islands, she was spread
across the sea (A, p183). Seri has become the Dream Archipelago. Sinclair had hoped
to find his own identity within the islands, but finds only the identity of his girlfriend,
or the avatar of his girlfriend; and in the end he is unable to commit himself to her.
His final abandonment of Gracia/Seri, which leaves the novel uncompleted, is also his
abandonment of the islands and hence of his own identity. He had been promised:
For you, the islands will be a redemption (A, p150), but there can be no redemption
now. He has turned back into the words on the page, into an imagination that does
not connect with reality. That is to abandon the world.
Others will follow this trajectory to more or less the same effect, Niall in The
Glamour, Angier in The Prestige, Teresa in The Extremes. They follow routes that
involve duplicates of themselves, as Peter Sinclairs duplication is echoed by Borden
in The Prestige and by J.L. Sawyer in The Separation. It is a route that takes them
away from the world, into islands of invisibility or virtual reality or alternate worlds.
Again and again Priest follows his protagonists on their journeys into the islands,
whether it be the Planalto or Earth City, Wessex or the Dream Archipelago. Sometimes
they might find their identity there, as David and Julia did in A Dream of Wessex;
sometimes they might lose it, as Peter Sinclair does. Conflating Seri with the islands
of the Dream Archipelago, Sinclair recognises at one point: She offered only escape
but escape from, not to, so there was nothing to replace what I left behind (A,
p186). Though the focus may be on the escape, Christopher Priests island stories are
always really about what is left behind.

-- 105 --

MIRRORS, DOUBLES, TWINS

1: In the Dreamtime
I once thought that the emphatic nature of words ensured truth. If I could find
the right words, then with the proper will I could by assertion write all that was
true. I have since learned that words are only as valid as the mind that chooses
them, so that of essence all prose is a form of deception. (The Affirmation [A],
p.1)

In his earliest work, Christopher Priest wrote within the conventions of science
fiction. Early novels the psychological isolation of Indoctrinaire or the variant on
the typically British catastrophe story in Fugue for a Darkening Island gave little
notice of the dramatic invention of Inverted World in which he presented, with
rigorous authority, a world turned inside out. Inverted World was, rightly, one of the
most acclaimed works of British science fiction to come out of the 1970s, yet even
this, with its startling originality, did not yet display to the world the unique and
distinctive voice that has been the hallmark of Priests work from the mid-1970s
onwards.
There are many features which make up this voice: the prose, of course, which is
controlled and transparent; the central role played by psychology in his work,
particularly the emphasis on sexual dysfunction and perversion; and the place of the
secondary world. His later work is full of doubles, pairs, echoes. Sometimes they are
twins, as in The Prestige; sometimes mirror images, as in The Extremes. Typically,
sexual relationships are triangular, each central female character finds herself torn
between a pair of lovers who echo each other. Even more common is Priests use of
a secondary world, sometimes specifically identified as the land of dream, as a way
of refracting psychosexual aspects of our own world. In this essay I want to look at
these doublings and the role they have played in the work of Christopher Priest since
the mid-1970s.
The other world parallels our own, reflecting it as in a distorting mirror. It is a
world made up of our desires and hopes, a secret, personal place, and if we dont
always recognise it, this is because we are not always comfortable with what it might
reveal of ourselves. It is the world we dream, but then we forget our dreams as
daylight comes. This is the world Christopher Priest writes about, the world he has
made as uniquely and identifiably his own as Robert Holdstocks Ryhope Wood or M.
John Harrisons Viriconium.
We got our first glimpse of the role this secondary world would play in his work
in Inverted World, in that famous ending where, after spending the whole novel in the
-- 107 --

city as it trundles through its dreamlike distortions of squat or elongated characters

(like people glimpsed in a fun house mirror) we suddenly shift into a familiar waking
world that lets us look back and reinterpret the dream. But this was really a tentative
start, and the double world of Earth and Mars in his next novel, The Space Machine,
was too tied to its Wellsian source material to explore the idea with any real
conviction. The approach that would build into his strongest fictions, however, was
clearly being developed because, all of a sudden, it emerged in three very different
forms simultaneously.
The first was in his short story An Infinite Summer which, as Priest tells us in the
introduction to his collection An Infinite Summer, grew out of The Space Machine: I
wrote the story in the middle, literally, of the novel; somewhere in Chapter 13, to be
precise. (An Infinite Summer [IS] p.9) In this story he recognises that the power of the
parallel world lies more in its atmosphere than its detail. We do not need to know
anything about the world of the future, whose emissaries precipitate the story by
freezing various tableau. We do not need to know how or why Lloyd is released ahead
of time, to wander like a tangible ghost through the Richmond of 1940, a world he
does not understand, in the midst of a war that means nothing to him: Thomas Lloyd,
of neither the past nor the present, saw himself as a product of both, and as a victim
of the future. (IS p.28) In some ways this description could apply to any of us, but
Lloyds circumstances, literally caught between worlds, lends it a special poignancy
within the context of the story.
In Inverted World, Priest takes us directly into the world. Helward Mann who,
famously, had reached the age of six hundred and fifty miles (Inverted World p.11)
is fully of the world of the city; for him the reality of that world is unquestioned (as
it is for the reader, until the revelations at the end of the book). With An Infinite
Summer, however, what is more important is that Lloyd does not fully belong in the
world in which he finds himself; it is not solid and real for him. From this point on,
Priests characters will typically be between worlds, caught in a moment of transition.
In Palely Loitering for instance a story that seems to serve as a rather more
elegantly written and emotionally complex companion piece to An Infinite Summer
the hinge about which the whole story turns is the moment Mykle first jumps from
bridge to shore, the moment of transition between times. As in An Infinite Summer,
there is a nineteenth-century sensibility behind the story. Again, there is the basic plot
device of lovers separated by time but in this story, with its central image of the flux
stream crossed by bridges angled to lead to Yesterday, Tomorrow or Today, the
youthful infatuation built into something altogether darker.
She frightened me because of the power she had, the power to awaken and
arouse my emotions. I did not know what it was. Everyone has adolescent
passions, but how many people have the chance to revisit those passions in
maturity?
It elated me, but also made me deeply melancholic. (IS p.96)
-- 108 --

Both Lloyd and Mykle are caught between times, but where, for Lloyd, this trap is
an incomprehensible barrier to an essentially innocent romance, for Mykle it signifies
also an ambivalence of feeling. The movement between secondary worlds is starting
to become an emotional movement. In A Dream of Wessex (1977) Julias movement
between worlds is also a movement between lovers, as is that of Susan moving
between the everyday and the invisible in The Glamour; as indeed, in a sense, is that
of Teresa moving between America and Britain, between everyday reality and virtual
reality in The Extremes.
This transition between worlds, with its endless reflections one upon the other,
also helps to account for the traditional figure of the sexual triangle which has
become such a feature of Priests work. The worlds and the lovers partake of each
other, explain and describe each other, so that Niall is the personification of the
glamour, Gerry Grove is the personification of Extreme Experience, and the
movement of their lovers towards and away from them reflects the movement
between worlds. This sense of moving between worlds without fully belonging to
either creates a poignancy that Priest was starting to use to emphasise the atmosphere
of his secondary world over the physicality that was its primary characteristic in
works like Inverted World, while the darkening of the sexual mood noticeable between
An Infinite Summer and Palely Loitering gathers apace, becoming an essential
component in the structure of the Dream Archipelago and its avatars.
If An Infinite Summer gave this mirror world its sense of mood, its emotion, then
the next expression gave it a shape, and started to give it a location. The first Dream
Archipelago stories appeared the year after A Dream of Wessex was published, but the
novel was clearly setting the scene for the later stories. The Dream Archipelago
more an idea than an actual place, but if it has a correlative reality then it would be
a fusion of the Channel Islands and Greece, with bits of Harrow-on-the-Hill and St
Tropez thrown in for good measure (IS p.10) is unmistakably foreshadowed in
Wessex. In his first experience of the Dream Archipelago, for instance, Peter Sinclair
feels:
It was as if I had somehow crossed over into another universe, one where the
degree of activity had been perceptibly increased: realitys tuner had been
adjusted, so noises were louder, colours were brighter, crowds were more dense,
heat was greater, time moved faster. I felt a curious sense of diminished
responsibility, as if I were in a dream. (A p.57)

There is a similar sense of a world that is a perpetual holiday resort in one of our
first glimpses of Dorchester in A Dream of Wessex:
Harkman relished the lightness and cleanness of the air, the decadence of the
architecture, the narrowness of the streets. It was a town with a sunny
hangover; the night-clubs and bars of Dorchester catered to the tastes of the
visitors late into the night, and the shutters and louvred doors of the villas and
-- 109 --

apartment-blocks were closed against the freshness of the morning. (A Dream

of Wessex [DW] p.24)

The sexual duality that Priest is exploring in these stories is reflected in this
movement into the light of the secondary world. Julia was escaping from one man
she detested, to seek another she did not care for. (DW p.4) The man she detests is
Paul, manipulative and cruel:
Then he smiled at her, seeming to seek her approval, but saying with his eyes
what she was to learn a hundred times over in the months ahead: I possess you
and control you. There is nothing of yours that I cannot touch or colour. There
is nothing of yours you may call your own. (DW p.83)

The man she is seeking is David Harkman, a man she doesnt know well, who at
first seems rather colourless stable and authoritative, but not ambitious (DW p.4)
but who is soon identified with the light and colour of the dream world Wessex.
The story begins in a near future of terrorist bombs and increasingly repressive
government (a political situation which feels very close to that presented in The
Glamour, which opens with Richard Grey recovering after being blown up by a
terrorist bomb). It is a hard, destructive world, a natural setting for Paul Mason who
had almost destroyed her once. (DW p.1) But this world also contains within it the
means of her escape: the Ridpath Projector. This projects volunteers into a consensus
dream world, a future in which seismic activity has separated the area around
Dorchester from the rest of Britain, turning it into the isle of Wessex. In this dream
future Britain is under an intensely bureaucratic communist rule, but the more
untrammelled lifestyle of Wessex is tolerated as a way of attracting tourist money
(thus the duality of modern Britain and the dream future is mirrored in the duality of
communist Britain and relaxed Wessex, yet more layers in a novel in which
everything has its parallel). Although the Ridpath Project is supposedly a sociological
experiment, it is clear that most of the volunteers relish the escape into the dream
Wessex. Indeed, David has become so absorbed into the dream that he has resisted all
attempts to lure him back into the present. It is, perhaps, significant that this
mirroring between the worlds is made concrete by the use of mirrors to summon
dreamers out of the dream:
Her gaze became locked with that of her reflected self. The same fright and
fascination were there, drawing her in, holding her in the limbo of the illusory
mirrored world. She became two-dimensional, spread across the plane between
glass and silver. She felt a last, terrible compulsion to run, to hide, but it was
too late and she was held in the mirror. (DW p.56)

Julia has the task of going into Wessex to find David and bring him out, but at
the same time Paul joins the project. As Julia becomes more attracted to David, so he
becomes more closely identified with Wessex. Paul, on the other hand, who will not
-- 110 --

let her go and who tries to destroy David, is a malign influence who literally corrupts
the dream.
While he had been inside the vault the wind and rain had increased, gusting in
from the heaths. The smoke from the oil-refinery poured over the town, dark
and depressing and greasy. There were very few people about and the trees
along the front were dulled and dirty. (DW p.143)

Through Paul the worst aspects of the modern world are seeping into the dream:
bad weather, pollution, alienation. The dream that is intimately associated with David
is, by contrast, a place of sunshine, bright colours, happy crowds. Thus the sexual
triangle, the contest between David and Paul for Julia, is also the contest between
David and Paul for Wessex. The setting and the psychosexual tension that are the two
entwined strands of the story are inseparable; each reflects the other.
This doubling of sexual conflict and setting becomes even more apparent in the
Dream Archipelago stories, in which the distinctive manner of storytelling that Priest
had been developing through An Infinite Summer and A Dream of Wessex finally
flowers. Priest has, to date, written only one novel and five stories set in the Dream
Archipelago but the place has a disproportionate role in any study of his fiction.1 The
idea at least, if not the place, has a defining influence on all his subsequent fiction.
The social other world of the glamorous, the virtual reality of The Extremes, even the
stage magic of The Prestige are all versions of the dream world made real that is the
Dream Archipelago.
The first Dream Archipelago stories came quickly on the heels of A Dream of
Wessex, as if that summery island setting just offshore from a threatening northern
bulk had provided a seed from which a far more complex vision had grown. But the
relatively simple sexual tensions in that novel between the threat of Paul (possessive,
destructive, a grim modern world of pollution and violence) and the haven of David
(loving, caring, a bright future of sunshine and clarity) have darkened even more. The
hot, dusty, Mediterranean colonnades of the Dream Archipelago provide a landscape
upon which are played out games of voyeurism and sadism. Here, sexual affairs are,
as Sheeld discovers in The Cremation, incongruous, intriguing and dangerous (The
Dream Archipelago [DA] p.75) and that is reflected in the nature of the Archipelago.
The Archipelago is made up of a chain of islands that stretch right around the planets
equator, so many islands in fact that from any one it is always possible to see several
others. The islands are anomalous in more ways than one: for one thing there is a
curious time-dilation effect around them; for another there is a seemingly endless war
going on between the nations of the northern continent, a war which is fought
primarily on the mostly uninhabited southern continent, and the islands form a
neutral zone but one where tensions inevitably run high; moreover, for a curious
combination of legal and psychological reasons, visitors to the islands are rarely if
ever able to leave again. Despite this last, all the Dream Archipelago stories (with one
exception, The Negation, which is set in an icy mountain border post during the war
-- 111 --

and doesnt visit the islands at all) concern visitors to the islands. This helps to
generate the sense of transience and estrangement that is so vital a part of the
secondary world as Priest creates it. It is, above all, a sexually threatening place, as
the narrator of Whores (1978) discovers. A soldier recuperating in the Dream
Archipelago from the disturbing effects of synaesthetic gases, (DA p.49) he visits a
local woman he thinks of as a whore only for this to have a devastating effect:
My dreams were rich and textured with agony, and lurid colours, and an
uncontrollable and unfulfilled sexual desire. Images of Elvas mouth haunted
me. I awoke in the morning with what I thought was an erection, but instead
the sheets of the bed were stiff with the blood from my wounds. (DA p.70)

Another potent but unconsummated sexual encounter between Graian Sheeld and
the enigmatic woman he encounters in The Cremation ends as a spasm of
excruciating pain coursed through him, (DA p.114) while in one of the most powerful
and disturbing of the Dream Archipelago stories, The Watched, the voyeur Yvann
Ordier finds himself mysteriously translated into the central role in the sexual ritual
he has been spying upon. It is this that is the key to the Dream Archipelago stories,
the mirroring of effect that turns the predator into the victim. Ordier, the watcher,
ends up as the one who is watched, the soldier in Whores feels he is in control of
his relationship with the woman but discovers to his cost that he is not. As Lenden
Cros, the narrator of The Miraculous Cairn, realises, I could not shake off the idea
that our roles were reversing. (DA p.136)
It is this sense that, psychologically if not physically, the Dream Archipelago is
truly an inverted world, that makes it the perfect setting for one of Priests finest and
most disorienting novels, The Affirmation. If A Dream of Wessex was his first attempt
to create a novel of dualities, The Affirmation developed that idea to an astonishing
degree. Everything has its echo, each character is reflected in a distorting mirror,
everyone has a double. As M. John Harrison would later do with A Young Mans
Journey to Viriconium, Priest destroyed the landscape of his imagination by making
it directly accessible from this world. In this case Peter Sinclair is a young man whose
world, mental and social, is disintegrating around him: his father dies, he loses his
job and he becomes alienated from his girlfriend when she attempts suicide (it is a
sign of his mental alienation from the world that he has no real concern for why she
should attempt suicide or how she might be afterwards). To escape these troubles, he
moves to a cottage in Wales where he lives rent-free on condition that he redecorates.
In his imagination he does redecorate, creating in particular a perfect white room
which is the room he uses to write in, but the failure of his engagement with the world
is soon shown when his sister Felicity arrives: Peter, whats been happening to you?
Your clothes are filthy, the house is a tip, you look as if you havent eaten a proper
meal in weeks. (A p.28) He hasnt, because the world has become only as real to him
as his imagination can make it; far more important is his manuscript, which started
out as an attempt at autobiography, which would make sense of how his life got this
-- 112 --

way, but more and more the autobiography has become subsumed in an imaginative
recreation of his life in which he lives in a city called Jethra, within sight of the
Dream Archipelago. That this reimagination of his life is important to him I had
imagined myself into existence (A p.15) he announces at one point, and later calls it
a definition of myself (A p.39) is reinforced by the story of his Uncle Billy, a
glamorous character who disappeared while Peter was a child. At first Peter was told
that Billy was working abroad, but eventually he learned that Billy had died in prison.
The story, however, continues to have as much validity in Peters mind as the reality:
Both versions of him were true, but in different qualities of truth. One was
sordid, disagreeable and final. The other had imaginative plausibility, in my
personal terms, and furthermore had the distinctly attractive bonus that it
allowed for Billy to return one day. (A p.19)

For Peter, both versions of his own story are true, but the Dream Archipelago is
the more attractive and readily overlays his quondam reality. When Felicity arrives,
for instance, he sees her primarily as her alter ego, Kalia:
I felt an odd sensation of recognizing her, as if she were somebody I had
created. I remembered her from the manuscript: she was there and her name was
Kalia. (A p.27)

Felicity takes Peter back to her home in Sheffield, he slowly recuperates, genuine
repairs are made to the cottage in Wales, and eventually Peter meets up again with
his girlfriend, Gracia. But this story is interwoven with the story of Peter Sinclair who
lives in Jethra and who has just won the lottery. The lottery prize is treatment for
immortality which takes place in the Dream Archipelago, so Peter sails to collect his
prize and on the way meets and falls in love with a girl called Seri. At first it might
seem that this is simply the imaginative recreation of his own life that Peter in our
reality has written, a fairly familiar duality. But Priest takes it a step further, confusing
realities: this Peter has also written a story of his life, and this story also fictionalises
the truth, describing a Peter who lives in another world, in a city called London. When
Peter and Seri eventually arrive at the clinic, he discovers that the athanasia treatment
has the effect of wiping out his memory, so in preparation he is meant to write the
story of his life. This Peter decides to use his reimagination of his life, declaring, as
another Peter in another world has already done, I had already become what I had
written. I was defined by my work. (A p.84)
This complex echoing of one world upon the other, so that it is impossible to tell
which is the real world and which the imaginary one, turns the book into an
examination of what it is that does define us. Memory, and in particular the fallibility
of memory, is a theme that sounds throughout the novel from its opening pages when
we are told The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers, (A p.6) and
it is significant that in both worlds the manuscript comes to an end with the same
broken sentence: For a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked
-- 113 --

back. (A p.35) Yet for all its fallibility, and despite Peters assertion that the artistic
recreation of the past constituted a higher truth than mere memory, (A p.134) the
importance of memory is stressed over and over again, particularly as Peter prepares
for the athanasia treatment:
But life is memory. As long as I am alive, as long as I wake every morning, I
remember my life, and as the years pass my memory becomes enriched. Old men
are wise, not by nature but by absorption and retention, and by the
accumulation of sufficient memories to be able to select what is important.
Memory is continuity too, a sense of identity and place and consequence. I
am what I am because I can remember how I became it. (A p.124)

Here, the identification of self and place is spelled out. As with Julia in A Dream
of Wessex and Susan in The Glamour, Peters journeys across the boundaries between
real world and dream world are intimately connected with issues of self identity and
with psychosexual conflicts. As Peter gets together again with Gracia, for instance,
we see that she and Seri are not avatars of the same person but distinct if
complementary characters, forceful or pliant, liable to break as Gracia does or to bend
as Seri does. When the two worlds start to overlap it is clear that Peters failure to
cope with the needs and demands of a relationship are highlighted by the way his
imaginative portrait of his girlfriend differs radically from her reality (this is true of
the Peters in both worlds):
A creation of my manuscript, she was intended to explain Gracia to me. But the
events and the places described in the manuscript were imaginative extensions
of myself, and so were the characters. I had thought they stood for other people,
but now I realized they were all different manifestations of myself. (A p.187)

More importantly, the two Peters are different. The duality is a way of asking who
we are, or rather the double, the twin, is who we are not:
In the fugue the dream dispersed, leaving a void. Life returned later, in the form
of this calm-eyed, patient woman, returning my memories to me as if she were
a hand writing words on blank paper. (A p.132)

The manuscript, the imagination, fills in the blanks of who we are until we arrive
at the most powerful, the most shocking moment in the whole book:
I spread the battered pages across the bed, like a conjurer fans a pack of cards.
The words, the story of my life, the definition of my identity, lay before me. It
was all there: the lines of typewritten text, the frequent corrections, the
pencillings and notes and deletions. Black type, blue ballpoint, grey pencil, and
brown whale-shaped droplets of dried blood. It was all of me.
Theres nothing there, Peter! For Gods sake, its blank paper! (A p.196)

In An Infinite Summer the dual world of an Edwardian man trapped like a ghost
-- 114 --

within Second World War London worked mostly to evoke a poignant atmosphere. By
A Dream of Wessex that atmosphere had already begun to coalesce into issues of
sexual identity which took form in the moment of crossing between worlds. The early
Dream Archipelago stories delved deeper into that sexual identity, looking at darker
issues such as perversion and cruelty. But it is our own individual identity that is
questioned and undermined in The Affirmation, and it is this selfhood that becomes
ever more tenebrous, ever more open to question, in the books to follow.
There is no easy resolution of these questions, there is no certainty about who any
of us are. Our identity is defined by our memory, yet memory is as fallible, as
treacherous, as the stories we conjure on an empty page. It is no surprise that The
Affirmation ends exactly as the two aborted memory-manuscripts end within it: For
a moment I thought I knew where I was, but when I looked back (A p.213)

2: In the Realtime
Grey was a practical man, trained to use eye and hand. His vocation was with
visual images, deliberately lit, carefully photographed. What he saw he believed
in; what he could not see was not there. (The Glamour [G] p.267)

By the time he wrote The Affirmation (1981), Christopher Priest had already
exhausted the possibilities of the Dream Archipelago, and indeed in that novel
destroyed the archipelago as a potential setting for any further fiction. The world of
dream and the world of reality moved steadily closer within the book until they
became one, and the identification of the Dream Archipelago with the psychology of
Peter Sinclair made it impossible to return to the islands as any sort of objective
reality. But though he abandoned dream as the location for his secondary world,
Priest did not abandon the secondary world. In fact, the novels he has written since
The Affirmation have examined the secondary world, the fluid movement between
parallel realities, the way the world is mirrored and refracted, more thoroughly and
more obsessively than ever.
The two novels he wrote after The Affirmation, The Glamour and The Quiet
Woman, were in their various ways perhaps the most troublesome of his career. The
Glamour has been reworked constantly so that the first three editions of the book each
contain significant differences, and a thoroughly reworked revised edition appeared
in 1996 while Priest himself has said of The Quiet Woman, I dont feel very strongly
about it. I dont like it, myself.2 There are external reasons enough for this. Of The
Glamour Priest said it is unendable. Its not a plot, The Glamour is a set-up, it
explains an idea,3 while The Quiet Woman came out of a very bad period of my life.4
But there is another explanation: they are both works in which Priest is slowly
working out the move from an objective secondary world to one which reflects
perspective and interpretation, a fiction which explores not one secondary world but
a myriad. This transition eventually produced what is perhaps his finest work, The
-- 115 --

Prestige, and perhaps his most complex, The Extremes (1998), but much of what came
to fruition in those two later works was already there in the earlier novels.
The Glamour, as A Dream of Wessex before it, opens in a world threatened by
terrorism, but where A Dream of Wessex was already distanced from our reality by
being set in the future, The Glamour is set clearly in the here and now, and breaks
the pattern of all of Priests earlier fiction by resolutely staying there. Richard Grey is
an acclaimed television cameraman who, as the story opens, is recovering after being
caught in a terrorist bomb explosion. Practically the first thing we learn about Grey
is that he is a loner who resists the subtle but constant pressure to mix with the
other patients. (G p.8) This alienation is important; the whole novel revolves around
forms of social alienation which are expressed in the social invisibility of the
Glamour, as is made explicit when Susan tells us:
I was only partially an invisible woman, barely under the surface of normality,
able to rise to visibility if I made the effort. Niall had no such choice. He was
deeply invisible, profoundly lost from the world of normal people. (G p.157)

It is the perceptions of the world engendered by this alienation which provide the
novels secondary world.
What is also invisible in this world is the self. Grey is suffering partial amnesia
brought on by the blast; he can no longer see part of what makes him who he is. It
is noticeable that when Susan Kewley turns up he does not at first see her, for Susan
doesnt just recall him to the world of the invisible, she also belongs to that part of
his life obliterated by the amnesia.
Part of the shock of dislocation provided by The Affirmation stems from the
parallel narratives which, we are repeatedly told, refract upon each other but which
we eventually learn do not exist. This disorienting refraction, which shatters reality
into a kaleidoscope of other worlds, is a device that Priest uses in The Prestige, The
Extremes and here in The Glamour; but where, for much of the narrative, we are
meant to see the parallel worlds of The Affirmation as objective realities, in The
Glamour Priest begins to use them right from the start to upset our notion of what is
real.
It should be said that Grey is not an unreliable narrator. Of all Priests narrators
only Gordon in The Quiet Woman is clearly unreliable and that is primarily the result
of his madness; Priests narrators are generally telling the truth as they see it, but the
narrative is unreliable. Truth is a variable, and it is this lack of an absolute that breaks
reality down into so many incoherent worlds. Thus Grey tells the story of his meeting
with Susan, how they got together on a trip to France and decided to stay together.
Susan was supposedly on her way to an abusive boyfriend, Niall, who remains an
unseen but threatening presence throughout the story. At first, despite its origins, it
seems we can trust this version of events, it seems perfectly reasonable, until small
incongruities start to creep in. At one point the couple encounter a painter who might
be Picasso, though this is after Picassos death, and another time see bathers in old-- 116 --

fashioned costumes, as if time has been subtly distorted. Later we discover more
reasons to distrust Greys narrative. When he returns from the nursing home he finds
his flat has one room fewer than he remembered, and his car is not where he recalled
leaving it before the explosion. Moreover, Susan tells us flatly that she has never been
to France.
It is interesting to note that when Susan takes over the narrative we find ourselves
more ready to trust her because of the inconsistencies that have been revealed in
Greys story, even though what she has to tell us is more overtly fantastic. For it is
Susan who reveals the world of the glamorous, people so distanced from society that
they become invisible to it. This is not the invisibility of H.G. Wellss The Invisible
Man (or even of Priests Rupert Angier in The Prestige) in which the body literally
becomes transparent to light; rather, society at large simply chooses not to notice
them. This has its thrilling aspects; at one point Susan shows Grey how the glamorous
are able to invade somebodys house and do as they will without being seen. It also
has its less glamorous aspects: lack of adequate medical care, inattention to personal
hygiene, a life lived always beyond the edges of society. Though glamour is mostly
associated with sexuality:
It was invariably like this when the glamour was consented to. It was like
stripping in front of strangers, like those dreams of nakedness in public places,
like sexual fantasies of total vulnerability and helplessness. Yet invisibility was
secure, a concealment and a hiding, a power and a curse. The half-guilty surge
of sexual arousal, the sweet desire of unprotected surrender, the sacrifice of
privacy, the exposure of hidden desire, the realisation that it had started and
could not be stopped. (G p.150)

Susans story seems to fill in some of the gaps in Greys narrative, and to correct
some of its inconsistencies. They are seen, for instance, taking a tour of England, not
of France. But it is a mistake to take any narrative in Priests fiction at face value.
Susan tells of meeting Grey in a London pub, of starting a relationship despite the
opposition of the profoundly glamorous Niall. Susan, Grey and Niall form the same
triangular relationship as Julia, David and Paul in A Dream of Wessex. Niall even has
Pauls violent proclivities; he knows how to hurt you, how to manipulate you, how
to twist things round against you. (G p.71) There is one chilling episode in which
Niall, invisible, rapes Susan while she and Grey are making love. Our sympathies are,
not unnaturally, drawn to Grey, and just as Julia and David are drawn together so
Susan is drawn towards Grey. However, in this instance the pattern is a mirror image
of A Dream of Wessex. Where Julias flight to David was a flight into the dream world,
Susans flight is away from the dream world of the glamorous and into reality. As
Susan says at one point: I was growing up at last. (G p.185) Abandoning glamour is
equated with growing maturity.
But Priest has one more twist in the pattern, one that is almost as disturbing to
our sense of reality as the discovery that Peter Sinclairs manuscript in The
-- 117 --

Affirmation is composed of blank pages. At the very beginning of the book is a short
prologue in which a narrator explains how he became increasingly alienated from
other children during his youth. He ends, in a clumsy way: at the moment I am only
I. Soon I shall have a name. (G p.4) Since we go immediately into Richard Greys
story, and he is clearly the central character in this story, it is tempting to equate Grey
with this I. In the very last pages of the novel, however, we discover that the narrator
is Niall. Earlier, before the bomb that injured Grey, we have seen Niall hand a
manuscript over to Susan. Now, this story, which started after the manuscript had
been written, is revealed to be the story told in that manuscript. All of a sudden our
sense of reality takes another knock. Everything in this book, Nialls villainy, the
relationship between Susan and Grey, the fact of invisibility, is called into question.
It is clearly a twist ending designed to close off a novel that Priest called unendable,
but it is at the same time a highly appropriate ending, producing yet another in a
complex series of shifts in our sense of reality. If reality is itself unstable, there is no
need to create a parallel dream world as its counterpoint, and this notion, first fully
explored in The Glamour, is the thrust of the three novels that follow.
That there are parallel worlds within the one reality is actually embedded in the
structure of The Quiet Woman with Alices story told in the third person, Gordons in
the first, distinctly different viewpoints that reflect the distinctly different ways in
which reality is perceived. The Quiet Woman is a novel about paranoia. Alice is
caught up in the Kafkaesque coils of faceless government when her book on six
women is confiscated: the effect of the restriction order is that the book has no
existence until they decide otherwise So long as the order is in effect we cant tell
anyone that it exists, or that theyve taken it in. (The Quiet Woman [QW] pp.20-1) She
is also researching the life of her friend and neighbour, Eleanor Hamilton, who has
been murdered. Moreover, there has recently been a massive accident at a nuclear
plant at Cap La Hague just across the Channel and there is the resultant fear of
radiation poisoning. All of this is told in the third person. Gordon, who tells his story
in the first person, is one of the faceless people who has caught Alice in these
Kafkaesque coils; he is the alienated son of Eleanor Hamilton, and he sees the world
as a source of constant threat. There has been threat before in Priests work (one
thinks of the terrorist bombs in A Dream of Wessex and The Glamour) but it has been
largely offstage; this is the first time it has been at the centre of the action. And while
there have been allusions to madness before, in The Affirmation and The Glamour, in
those cases it was tied up with more important issues of identity, love and ones role
in the world. Like the amnesiac Grey before him, Gordon is invisible to himself, which
explains the stories he makes up to explain who he is, but this time there is no
secondary world offering escape or resolution, nor even the questionable escape of
invisibility; there is only the corporate madness of the situation and the personal
madness of Gordon.
That Gordon is not only mad but also the most straightforwardly unreliable
narrator in all of Priests fiction is the major weakness in this book. On his first
-- 118 --

appearance Gordon witnesses UFOs landing and creating corn circles, enough,
perhaps, to make us feel dubious about him, but when, a little later during the funeral
of his mother, he witnesses a nuclear bomber crash while no one around him notices
anything, both his sanity and his reliability are undermined. Gordon offsets his
madness onto his mother. At one point he tells a story, uncorroborated by anything
else we learn about him or his mother, in which his father and brother are killed in a
bizarre Ferris wheel accident. Eleanor suffers traumatic amnesia as a result of the
shock (as in The Glamour, loss of memory is suggested as a way of losing self), or as
Gordon puts it: My mother became mad, but I became sane and whole. (QW p.42)
When Gordon was a child, Eleanor told him stories which she then developed into a
series of successful childrens books, the Donnie books. For Gordon, these stories are
further proof of her madness: The proof for me that my mother was irremediably mad
was the way she told me her stories, (QW p.78) though since he subsequently says I
stole the stories from her and made them my own, (QW p.82) one wonders if he is not
also taking on the madness that he ascribes to her. Certainly the dreamworld he goes
on to describe bears a striking resemblance to the tales his mother wrote: there is even
one in the series called Donnie and the Flying Saucers.
Eleanors stories also bring up a curious resonance. Alice discovers that Eleanor
wrote the books under her maiden name, E.S. Fulton, and we have already learned
that she used to be called Seri, an abbreviation of her middle name, Seraphina. So
Eleanor is Seri Fulton, the woman who to some extent personifies the Dream
Archipelago in The Affirmation. More than that, Eleanor reports that she was in
Greece when the Second World War broke out, and on the boat taking her back to
Britain had an affair with an Englishman called Peter who had been convalescing in
Greece. The parallels with the Dream Archipelago are clearly deliberate, and as The
Affirmation resolved into a story of a shattered personality, so The Quiet Woman
constantly presents us with people who are more than one thing. At times this is on
a relatively trivial level Eleanor is both Eleanor Hamilton, the Hilda Murrell-like
campaigner, and E.S. Fulton, the writer of childrens books but at other times it is
less so: as Gordons fantasies become wilder, for instance, we are presented with two
perverse sexual encounters with an Alice who clearly bears no resemblance to the
Alice we know. Most significantly, like Peter Sinclair in The Affirmation before him,
Gordon lives a double life, as Gordon Sinclair and as Peter Hamilton (the names are
clearly meant to echo the earlier book), and again there is a connection with
literature, in this case his mothers childrens books. As the book progresses we
discover parallels between what we know of Eleanors novels and what he tells us of
his life, but in this case, perhaps because Gordons madness is both nastier and more
clearly a reflection of society than that of either Peter or Niall, it is less easy to tell
how much he made up his life and how much he was made up by the stories. In one
reality he lives a life of odd dramas, including spending a time as a member of a
quasi-military but nonexistent force, which almost turns this part of the book into a
fully realised secondary world; in another he operates at or very near the top of a
-- 119 --

shadowy quasi-government office, a scenario that seems almost as unbelievable as his

militaristic fantasies, except that clues in the objective reality of the novel suggest
that this is really the case. As so often in Priests work, we are left questioning what
is really happening in the novel, though for once dubious events are not presented as
a mirror of the protagonists mental state, but as a construction from out of that
madness. Throughout The Quiet Woman we are being shown that the world consists
of many different realities, some of them insane to us, but none of them splinter off
into fully realised dream worlds as in A Dream of Wessex or The Affirmation. As
Gordon puts it: All my life I had walked around with an instinctive pseudo-reality as
alive to me as the external world itself. (QW p.116)
Intimately entwined around all these multiple versions of reality is the
extraordinary power of secrecy that runs throughout the book. Alice is a biographer,
part of what she does is to seek out the secrets of others. Yet right at the start of the
novel she is enjoined to secrecy about her own most recent book. The force of the
government order placed upon her is such that she cannot even admit to its existence.
Moving to the village Alice had realised Very little could be kept secret. And the
Home Office had completed the process, making her feel not only picked on, but
picked out. (QW p.87) In other words she is a believer in openness and the secrecy
imposed upon her is presented as a threat, both to her work and to her sense of self.
Yet she quickly learns the habits of secrecy, making an illicit backup copy of her work
and hiding it from the authorities. Moreover, at the end of the book she is shown
using duplicity to get a grant out of the authorities, and this is presented as success.
She has learned the skills of survival in this secretive world. Eleanor is first seen by
Alice as open and friendly; it is why she warms to the older woman in the first place.
But gradually she discovers more and more about Eleanor, things that were not
exactly secret but were not exactly open either: the fact that she had a son, her
involvement with the protest movement, her childrens stories. Even the name under
which Eleanor wrote her books is deliberately withheld from Alice. And there is
Gordon, of course, whose two lives are both built upon secrecy, until his eventual
comeuppance, which comes about, it is implied, because the secrecy starts to break
down.
This secrecy, the way it shapes lives and creates levels of reality, is sketchily
portrayed in The Quiet Woman, never quite attaining the symbolic weight it seems
intended to bear, but it is more thoroughly developed and more effectively presented
in Priests next novel, The Prestige. One of the two main narrators of this novel,
Alfred Borden, even begins by saying: The story of my life is the story of the secrets
by which I have lived my life. (The Prestige [P] p.35) Borden and the other main
narrator, Rupert Angier, are rival stage magicians during the latter part of the
nineteenth century. Their careers, their livelihoods, are therefore based on duplicity
and secrecy, and the secrecy shapes their lives. Borden tells the story of Ching Ling
Foo, whose most famous trick involved producing a heavy goldfish bowl at the
climax of his act. There was only one place the bowl could be concealed, held
-- 120 --

between his knees beneath his mandarin gown, but Ching Ling Foo was obviously too
frail a man to be able to carry that weight. In fact, this frailty was a deception, he
was a robust man who walked with a hobble to present the illusion of being frail, and
never, at any time, at home or in the street, day or night, did he walk with a normal
gait lest his secret be exposed. (P p.40) The effort to maintain his illusion has taken
over his life, and the story of Ching Ling Foo serves as a metaphor for both Borden
and Angier: My deception rules my life, (P p.41) Borden says. Borden claims to
believe that The wonder of magic lies not in the technical secret, but in the skill with
which it is performed, (P p.72) yet bends his very being to maintain the deception of
his trademark illusion, the New Transported Man. Angier, meanwhile, seems, like
Alice, to believe in greater openness: If five hundred people are baffled, he said, it
was of no importance that five others should see the secret (P p.63) yet his quest first
to discover the technical secret behind the New Transported Man, then to create his
own illusion, is to have a drastic effect upon his life.
Borden and Angier are opposites; their intense rivalry comes to obsess them so
much that they put themselves and each other in danger in order to pursue it. In the
end, neither can really exist without the other Borden and I might have made better
collaborators than adversaries (P p.359) but this pairing of characters is just the
most obvious if least significant of the many doublings that run through this novel.
As the characters in The Quiet Woman are all in some way double, so The Prestige is
made up of a succession of twins and pairings, real and imagined, as if we are
watching events enacted before a mirror. We start with a young journalist, Andrew
Westley, travelling to an assignment and convinced that a twin brother is trying to
communicate with him a direct urging of me to arrive, to be there with him (P
p.14) even though the records show that he had no twin. Westleys assignment is to
investigate a cult whose leader is supposed to be able to be in two places at once.
Though quickly dismissed, this bilocation is a prefiguring of the instantaneous
transportation that is, in very different ways, incorporated into the acts of both
Borden and Angier. Westley, it turns out, is a descendant of Borden; the strange
young woman whose home is now occupied by the cult is a descendant of Angier.
Both have suffered as a consequence of the ancient rivalry, and their story frames the
narratives of the two magicians.
Bordens story is extracted from an autobiographical introduction he wrote to a
book of magic, a book that was, unknown to its author, edited and published by his
arch rival, Angier. We learn that Angier has, even if only in a minor way, interfered
with the text I have improved his text by making it less obscure (P p.361) adding
a subtle extra layer of uncertainty to the narrative. As in The Affirmation and The
Glamour, we are told that the very heart of the novel, the very act of literature itself,
is untrustworthy. (And as in The Glamour, inconsistencies lead us to distrust the first
narrator, Borden, so we are more likely to trust the second narrator, Angier, whose
story, though more overtly fantastic, seems to set the record straight. Significantly,
however, we also know that Angier has ripped pages from his own diary: no work of
-- 121 --

literature within any of Priests novels stands entire and reliable.) Not that Bordens
story needs any extra uncertainties, for this is a story whose very texture contains an
odd dislocation, as if the words are at war within themselves. The very act of
describing my secrets might indeed be construed as a betrayal of myself, except of
course that as I am an illusionist I can make sure you only see what I wish you to
see (P p.36) the opening of Bordens narrative admits the conflict within the text,
indeed draws attention to it the way that a magician might draw attention to some
feature as a way of concealing what is really going on behind it. The question
remains: who is being betrayed, and is this legerdemain really concealing anything,
or is it revealing more than the author might care to admit? It is not long before the
text seems to betray a curious schizophrenia: I said nothing of this to me!, (P p.50)
what I intended to do before I interrupted, (P p.55) I ... remained in the workshop
while I returned to the flat. (P p.100) The clue comes very early:
Already, without once writing a falsehood, I have started the deception that is
my life. The lie is contained in these words, even in the very first of them. It is
the fabric of everything that follows, yet nowhere will it be apparent. (P p.38)

The very first word of Bordens narrative is I. (P p.35) Like Ching Ling Foo,
Borden has made his whole life an illusion in order to preserve the secret of his great
stage trick. Later, an investigative journalist will provide Angier with information
about his rival that is sufficient to make us doubt everything we have been told by
Borden, in turn revealing how extensive an illusion this is. Not even the name is
correct The childs full name was Frederick Andrew Borden, and according to the
almoners records his was a single birth (P p.232) in fact Frederick and Andrew
were twins, the explanation for Bordens celebrated New Transported Man, and one
of the most important instances of the twinning that occurs throughout this
extraordinary novel.
The lengths to which Borden will go for the sake of his trick reveals how much
value he places on the craft of being a stage magician, the importance of preserving
the illusion. So when Angier, who has publicly argued against the necessity to
preserve the secrets of the craft, uses his skills as a magician by working as a fake
medium, it seems to Borden like a betrayal (that word again) of everything he most
cherishes. Angier, on the other hand, clearly finds the skills of a magician difficult to
acquire I never understand the working of an illusion until it is explained to me
(P p.186) and is less interested in the illusion than in the technology that produces
it. He is a product of the new rational, scientific age, and sees his work as a medium
as no more than a way of earning a living while exploiting the gullibility of an older,
credulous age. Their rivalry grows out of these different sets of beliefs, but is ignited
when Borden disrupts one of Angiers seances and accidentally injures Angiers future
wife. From then on their careers are dogged by the constant attempts of the one to
disrupt the act of the other. In another example of the way everything in the novel
works by being part of a duality, Angier even sends his assistant to spy on Borden.
-- 122 --

She eventually becomes Bordens mistress but there are suspicions that she may be a
double agent. She, furthermore, becomes a part of the duality of Bordens life. As he
puts it: I had my family, I had my mistress. I lived in my house with my wife, and I
stayed in my flat with my lover. I worshipped my children, adored my wife, loved my
mistress. My life was in two distinct halves. (P p., 97) Borden maintains this illusion
within his life by the same means he maintains the illusion of the New Transported
Man.
It is the New Transported Man, inevitably, that is at the heart of the plot. This is
the one trick whose workings Angier cannot penetrate, so he sets out to create his
own. To do so, he travels to America to enlist Nikola Tesla (inevitably, given the
pattern of doubling throughout the book, Borden had been inspired to elaborate his
own trick following a lecture by Tesla). Tesla devises a form of matter transmitter, its
drawback being that any living thing used in the device is killed, but an identical and
living copy is created instantaneously in a new place:
My body is wrenched apart, disassembled. Every tiny particle of me is thrown
asunder, becoming one with the aether. In a fraction of a second, a fraction so
small that it cannot be measured, my body is converted into electrical waves. It
is radiated through space. It is reassembled at its designated target. (P p.315)

To perform his act, therefore, Angier must constantly double himself by being
killed and reborn; in rehearsing the trick he says: I had died twice. I had become one
of the walking dead, a damned soul.(P p.317) Where Borden has sacrificed his
identity, his individuality, for the sake of his illusion, Angier sacrifices himself; in the
end it comes to the same thing. Death seems to attach itself to Angier: when he
separates from his wife, Julia, to maintain appearances she lives the life of a widow
so I have perforce become a dead man. (P p.236) Later he says: Death uniquely
surrounds my life! (p.p. 364) It is perhaps no surprise, therefore, that Angier becomes
addicted to the pain and shock of transportation; in a sense it is an addiction to death,
so that when Borden accidentally interferes with the act at a critical moment and
Angier, only partially transported, becomes like a living ghost, it seems to be a natural
culmination of Angiers own desires. Throughout the novel the outcome of a magic
trick is referred to as the prestige (a word of Priests own devising), and this is the
word that Angier applies to his own dead bodies that are the outcome of his act.
Describing Bordens existence, Angier has said:
Two lives made into one means a halving of those lives. While one lives in the
world, the other hides in a nether world, literally non-existent, a lurking spirit,
a doppelgnger, a prestige. (P p.358)

Yet this precisely describes Angiers state after the accident. Just as the two Peter
Sinclairs became one in The Affirmation, so the two magicians effectively become
one. There are, for a time, two Rupert Angiers, as there are two Alfred Bordens. One
-- 123 --

is a tangible being but with most of the life sucked out of him, the other an invisible
man (the action takes place only a few years after the publication of H.G. Wellss
novel, though it is never referred to) into which a full quota of life has not been
projected. For Angier, as for Niall, invisibility is a form of non-being All that I love
is forbidden to me by the state I am in (P p.384) so when the corporeal Angier
finally dies, the invisible one plans to use the Tesla device to project himself into the
body. The result would be either suicide or reanimation, but for Angier the two states
have become indistinguishable. What he achieves, however, is a sort of eternal
undeath. So, many years later, when Bordens grandson, Andrew Westley, comes to
the cellar where the Tesla machine is stored to learn that as a child he was flung
through the transportation device, and to discover his own prestige and still the voice
of his brother in his head, he also finds Rupert Angier. Having been Wellss invisible
man for a while, Angier has become, at the last, Mary Shelleys Creature, wild and
monstrous, shambling away into eternity across a snowy waste.
In The Glamour, Priest presented the notion that the secondary world could be
part of our real world, defined only by our perceptions. In The Quiet Woman he
moved towards the notion that each individual is a secondary world to everyone else,
but he did not find a way of expressing this notion successfully until The Prestige
with its proliferation of doubles, twins, and mirror images. By the time of his next
novel, The Extremes, he was taking the idea a stage further by giving his characters
the opportunity to create their own secondary worlds, to give their imaginings
concrete form.
The link between The Extremes and the proliferation of twins and doubles in The
Prestige is made explicit right at the beginning of the later book when, as a child,
Teresa has a mirror through which she can see into another world. (The Extremes [E]
p.1) In later life, Teresa is constantly trying to push the envelope of Extreme
Experience, taking her avatars within these virtual reality worlds beyond the scenario
that has been created for them. The origin of that is laid in childhood when we learn:
The mirror world is where her private reality begins. Through there it is possible for
her to run for ever. (E p.3) More significantly, in this mirror she sees Megan, an
imaginary playmate. When she is seven Teresa plays with her fathers gun and shoots
the mirror, in effect killing her playmate and destroying the secondary world of the
mirror. Thus the theme of the book is played out in miniature in this brief prologue
to the novel, how violence crosses the boundaries between worlds, affecting and
reinfecting the inhabitants of both. Moreover, there is an important later discovery
about this incident when we learn:
Yes, there had been a twin sister; yes, and her name was Megan. But Megan had
died at birth, so frail, so small, such a tragedy. You wouldnt remember Megan,
they said. What she thought she remembered was untrue, unreliable. (E p.195)

Symbolically, Teresa has killed her twin, thus becoming a player in the continuing
mirror-drama begun in The Prestige. More than that, the unreliability of memory ties
-- 124 --

in with a continuing theme that has developed from The Affirmation and The
Glamour.
This small version of the huge drama played out in The Extremes gives the reader
a clear statement of the story to hold on to as the novel itself twists and turns through
the most contorted plot Priest has so far essayed. The plot seems simple enough: there
have been two shooting incidents on the same day, one in Kingwood City, Texas in
which FBI agent Andy Simons is among those killed, and one in the English seaside
town of Bulverton, a town so appallingly twinned with Kingwood City that it became
an irresistible lure. (E p.190) Teresa Simons, Andys widow and herself an FBI agent,
cannot resist the lure and goes to Bulverton to see if the one shooting will give her
the clues she needs to understand the other. But this simplicity cannot hold, realities
slip, events in one world seem to have an effect in the other, some incidents seem to
have been caused by actions that only occurred later.
We tend to think our quotidian reality is fairly solid, that in any event in which
we are a participant or a witness we know what happened, that any mystery or
confusion over historical events can be resolved if only we have access to all the
facts. But accounts of any event, even from reliable witnesses, rarely tally; memories
are selective and often differ. For instance we are told The Grove shooting was
probably the single most disruptive event in Bulverton since the upheavals of World
War II, but the crucial moment within it was misremembered by those who witnessed
it. (E p.299) It is this gap in reality, this sense that all our private worlds are in a way
secondary, that comes to be the core of The Extremes, when even so public, so
thoroughly examined an event as the massacre proves to be not entirely coherent. We
get our first hint of this when Teresa recaps her initial investigations and concludes:
There were anomalies she had yet to resolve: there was an unexplained gap in the
timing, and an apparent overlap, but she knew that more investigation would
probably resolve these. (E p.129) In fact, far from resolving them, further
investigation will make the anomalies ever more mysterious, but like most of us
Teresa believes the world can be made sense of. That it cant is increasingly the
message of Priests novels.
More and more, as Teresa investigates the massacre that Gerry Grove carried out
in Bulverton, the boundaries of her reality break down. As Greys remembered holiday
in France contains incidents out of time, so here, in addition to the coincidence of the
two shootings, evidence mounts that time is somehow out of true. The first time
Teresa sees Dave Hartland she feels she recognises him; GunHo are offering an
Extreme Experience scenario of the Bulverton massacre while they are still collecting
memories; Groves timetable has inexplicable gaps; the two guns that Grove used in
his massacre and which were found by his body were also found in the boot of his
car; Teresa comes out of her long ExEx session in the mind of Gerry Grove to find
her credit card wont become valid for a couple of months, she has travelled back to
the day of the massacre.

-- 125 --

If entering the Grove scenario, then leaving it, had taken her eight months into
the past via the medium of Gerry Groves disgusting consciousness, how come
she had turned up here in the same clothes she was wearing when she left the
hotel this morning? How come she had the same shoulder-bag? Carried the
same credit cards? Had the same tissue in her pocket when she needed to mop
her face, the first time to wipe away the rain of a freezing day, the second time
the perspiration of a heatwave? (E pp.352-3)

The key to all this is Extreme Experience, ExEx, a form of virtual reality that is
first introduced as part of Teresas FBI training. Virtual reality provides an obvious
secondary world, but when Teresa, as a trainee, meets some of the real people featured
in her training scenarios it emphasises the fact that one persons secondary world is
another persons reality. Teresa learns that she could defy the scenario and act
independently of it, (E p.173) making Elsa Durdle, the old black woman involved in
a scenario about a police roadblock in San Diego in 1950, drive away from the scene
and into an endlessly unchanging landscape as the limits of the prescribed scenario
are reached. She also learns to communicate with Shandy, the star of a porn scenario
she visits. In other words, Teresa herself is initiating the breakdown between realities.
She was learning how to push at the limits of the scenarios. There was a
freedom involved. At first it had seemed to be one of landscape: distant
mountains, roads leading away, endless vistas and promises of an everunfolding terrain. She had tested the limits of landscape, though, with results
that were usually disappointing, and at best only ambiguous.
At last she was realizing there were other landscapes, other highways, the
inner world of the consciousness. (E p.267)

Eventually she finds herself linking scenarios An ExEx scenario already

represented a sort of intersection (E p.298) until at one point she discovers 268
scenarios linking Elsa Durdle with Shandy, two people with no connection at all other
than that Teresa has accessed scenarios involving them. An intrusion from this world,
therefore, is already beginning to affect the nature of the secondary world. There are
also hints that the effect can work the other way. Twice, as she has gone about
Bulverton, Teresa seems to have directly experienced scenes from the massacre eight
months before: It not only felt strange it felt unsafe, a place that existed on the edge
of chaos, (E p.142) and this chaos breaks down the barriers between the worlds when
Teresa enters the ExEx scenario of the Bulverton massacre. Riding inside the mind of
Gerry Grove, she discovers that not only can she control his actions, but that he is
aware of her presence. When he carries out the first shootings she realises that he
cannot handle his gun properly, that he could not have committed the crimes he was
supposed to have done, that it is her weapons training that comes to the fore and
allows him to shoot as efficiently as he in fact did. Only her intervention makes it
possible for Grove to carry out the crime she has come to investigate.
-- 126 --

Even more alarming, when Teresa enters a scenario of the Kingwood City shooting
in which her husband was killed, she discovers that Aronwitz, the gunman, was Gerry
Grove. Just as she was the only link that connected Elsa Durdle and Shandy, so she
is the only link that connects Bulverton and Kingwood City. But she is also the trigger
who, simply by virtue of her interest in both events, is the cause of each of them.
Reality has shattered. Each person is their own world, and their own secondary
world. Regardless of what actually happened in both Bulverton and Kingwood City,
Teresa has made them part of her own reality, and has therefore shaped them to fit
her own perspectives. Briefly, towards the end of the novel, as Teresa rides inside the
mind of Gerry Grove, a triangular relationship begins to develop, similar to the
relationships that tied together Julia, Paul and David in A Dream of Wessex, or Susan,
Niall and Richard in The Glamour. Grove, violent, manipulative and dominating, is a
clear avatar of Paul and Niall, and as such he exercises a genuine fascination over
Teresa. But just as Julia was eventually drawn to David and as Susan turned to
Richard as part of her growing up, so Teresa is drawn to her husband, Andy. In the
end she exploits the hyperlinks, cross-references, hyperreality (E p.286) that she has
found connecting the multiplicity of ExEx scenarios, and as Julia and David retreat
into the dreamworld of Wessex, she and Andy drive away into the limitless scenarios
of this virtual reality dreamworld.
Have these patterns and cross-references that link the novels of Christopher Priest,
and illuminate them by reference one to another, drawn this sequence of novels into
a full circle? It is tempting to think so, and the ending of The Extremes certainly calls
A Dream of Wessex irresistibly to mind. But Wessex represented a single secondary
world, a benevolent world that stood in stark and significant contrast to the real
world. Wessex was a place, but the Dream Archipelago, and particularly The
Affirmation, turned that place into a mirror of the mind. The books that have
followed, The Glamour, The Quiet Woman, The Prestige and The Extremes, have
shown that the secondary world continues to exist, but it exists, as Peter Sinclair
discovered, within the ravages of one persons mind. Authors traditionally play the
role of God over their creations, and the authors who inhabit the worlds of The
Affirmation, The Glamour, The Quiet Woman and The Prestige are all in their way
responsible, as prime movers, for the worlds they make, even though those worlds
might be an attempt to describe reality as they see it. If the mind is insane, then so
is the world, as we see in The Quiet Woman. But even minds that are not insane, as
in The Prestige for instance, create entire worlds to support their illusions. All that
The Extremes has done is suggest that every person is the author of their own world,
every person is supporting their own illusions. One secondary world has become a
multiplicity, and the dreamworld into which Teresa and Andy escape is no consensus
world but hers alone.

-- 127 --

THE DISCHARGE
Sometime in the mid-1970s there was a change in Christopher Priests writing. It
was signalled by a pair of short stories, An Infinite Summer (1976) and Palely
Loitering (1979), atmospheric tales whose emphasis on psychology and strangeness
was a move away from the overtly science fictional pieces that had preceded them.
His novel of that period, A Dream of Wessex (1977), in retrospect, can be seen as a
harbinger of the themes and manners of his later work. But it was the stories set in
the Dream Archipelago that really trumpeted the fact that here was something
disturbing, challenging and new. There were only five stories, the first appearing in
1978, the last in 1980, but they must loom large in any appreciation of Priests
subsequent writing.
The Dream Archipelago stories are set in a world in which the large continent in
the north is home to sophisticated nations whose technology and culture are roughly
on a par with our own. The two largest of these nations are engaged in a seemingly
endless war, which is fought out in the barren and largely uninhabited southern
continent. The sea between the two continents is dotted with a string of islands so
profuse that there is no island from which it is impossible to see several others. The
islands of the Dream Archipelago have maintained a strict neutrality, though the
terms differ from island to island. Some allow no outsiders to land, others allow no
outsiders to leave once they have landed, still others allow troopships to visit for the
purposes of rest and recreation. There are many whores in the Dream Archipelago.
Overtly based on the Greek islands, just becoming a popular but still exotic
package holiday destination at the time the stories were being written, the islands of
the Dream Archipelago are presented as warm and alluring. But for the visitors we
follow in four of the five original stories (in The Negation (1978), the Dream
Archipelago is an aspiration that is never achieved), it is a place where sexual dreams
become nightmares, where the desirable becomes a trap, and where perverse psychosexual dramas are played out to a generally fatal conclusion. The Dream Archipelago
sequence reached its climax with The Affirmation (1981), which revealed our world
to be a psychotic echo of the Dream Archipelago, and vice versa, a self-deluding
mobius strip of realities which drained the setting of all further figurative and
psychological value. After that stunning tour de force of a novel, it seemed, there was
nothing more that could possibly be said about the Dream Archipelago.
Then, in 1999, twenty years after his first visit to the islands, Priest gathered the
Dream Archipelago stories (all revised to some extent) into one volume, with a linking
thread of narrative. The enterprise clearly reawakened the narrative energy that the
setting had once provided, and he followed the collection with a new Dream
-- 129 --

Archipelago story, The Discharge. With such a genesis there is one inevitable
question: has the Dream Archipelago emerged intact from its twenty-year hiatus? To
which the answer has to be: yes. The sheer nastiness of the fate that awaited visitors
the islands can feel like a sort of Venus fly trap, tempting their victims in to a sweet
and sticky end is no more. Indeed the story ends, if not with a note of redemption,
then at least with a sense of continuity, of survival, possibly even of some sort of
achievement. But if that is different, the casual cruelty of the islands along the way
is the same as ever, and the perverse, unsettling, psycho-sexual overtones remain dark
and foreboding.
The Discharge as in so many of Priests fictions, the title is a simple declarative
that yet hides a dizzying multiplicity of interpretations: electrical discharge, military
discharge, ejaculation, pus, among others is a story of lost identity, of the
uncertainty of our place within the world. One of the things that the Dream
Archipelago allowed was the displacement of the individual, the cutting loose from
context. When, in The Affirmation, that displacement became possible within our
contemporary reality, it opened up the road that Priests fictions have followed ever
since. As our unnamed narrator emerge(s) into my memories in the very first line of
the story, it places him immediately in the company of Peter Sinclair in The
Affirmation, Richard Grey in The Glamour (1984, revised 1996), and J.L. Sawyer in
The Separation (2002), all characters whose memory is unreliable, hence weakening
their grip on who they are.
Our narrator is, we discover, a new recruit in a northern army marching down to
the troopship that will take him away to the battlefields of the southern continent.
But as the troopship carries him past the mysterious islands of the Dream Archipelago,
the litany of their names found on an illicit map (maps have been a recurring feature
of Priests work since at least the one found in Inverted World (1974)) reawakens
something in our narrators fragmented memory. It seems he was an artist, or at least
had an interest in art, or at least in the works of one particular painter, Rascar
Acizzone, from the Dream Archipelago island of Muriseay. Acizzone was a leading
exponent of an art style known as tactilism, which employed a new technology,
ultrasound microcircuity. Like the scintilla in The Watched (1978), this new
technology is used within the Dream Archipelago to lay bare the sexual self and then
entrap the user within that sexuality. In this instance, Acizzones paintings are
layerings of colour that more than anything seem to resemble the work of Rothko,
but when anyone touches the paintings the ultrasound reveals a representation of
their deepest sexual imagining. Over time, we discover later in the story, the
ultrasound can also destroy ones memory, which probably explains what happened
to our narrator (and almost certainly explains why Acizzones paintings have now
fallen out of fashion and are all but forgotten).
Then the troops are given shore time in Muriseay. The narrator goes in search of
Acizzone (and, implicitly, his own memory), but without success, and in the end finds
himself drawn to a nightclub already crowded with soldiers. He is targeted by the
-- 130 --

whores in the club and led away into a dark labyrinth of rooms and corridors where,
inexplicably, he finds himself witness to sexual tableaux which recreate two of the
most charged images he had found in Acizzones paintings. Then, abruptly, he escapes
and returns to the troopship which takes him on to the war zone. During the years he
spends in the army in the freezing wastelands of the southern continent, he
experiences an almost constant diet of fear and boredom, but no actual fighting. The
war itself seems to be always somewhere else. But as the three-thousandth
anniversary of the start of the war approaches, the troops become convinced that a
major push is about to happen. On the eve of the campaign, the narrator deserts. By
giving over all his accumulated army pay, he persuades a group of whores to smuggle
him across to the Dream Archipelago, only to discover he is just one of a very large
number making the same journey.
Since the Dream Archipelago is so clearly identified with sex, at its most alluring
and its most threatening, it is inevitable that it is a network of whores who provide
his safe refuge on island after island as he makes his way across the Dream
Archipelago. He discovers, or rediscovers, an artistic talent of his own, and funds his
journey by painting for tourists along the way. His destination, inevitably, is
Muriseay, where he starts to experiment with ultrasound. Eventually he produces a
series of pictures whose hidden sexual imagery is overlaid with images drawn from
the fear and isolation he experienced in the army. To store his pictures he rents an
abandoned building which contains a curious labyrinth of corridors and rooms, and
which is surely the same night club where he experienced the strange sexual visions
on his journey to the war. Then military policemen catch up with him at the store
house. They are here to give him his discharge a euphemism for beating him up and
perhaps killing him but though injured the narrator escapes because the policemen
accidentally touch the paintings, and the images they contain prove too powerful for
them. A fire starts, caused by the use of their electric batons against the paintings;
but even if they were not killed in the fire we might safely assume that they had been
destroyed by the images in the pictures.
And our narrator flees to another island, to face more mysteries of the Dream
Archipelago. For once, the islands have not killed the one caught in their sexual trap,
but for all that they remain as potent and disturbing as ever. The Discharge is a
measure of how far Priest has come in the last quarter century. The evocation of
islands with a beautiful surface but which are considerably less beautiful underneath,
is perhaps more subtle. These are real, working places, as contradictory as anywhere
else we might visit. But what is really interesting is how the familiar setting proves
so adept at staging a story of fragmentary identity, uncertainty of self, the sort of
theme that has become more and more central in novels such as The Prestige (1996),
The Extremes (1998) and The Separation (2002). In the early stories the exotic
landscape of the Dream Archipelago was a place where the sexual imaginings of the
characters could be made visible and then turned against them. In The Discharge
these same sexual imaginings serve a more subtle purpose, not to establish an identity
-- 131 --

 the narrator remains as unknown and unknowable at the end of the story as he is
at the beginning, even to himself but to make a damaged personality whole enough
to survive. It is more positive than we are used to in the Dream Archipelago, but it
forms a fascinating development in the way Priest is exploring how our sense of
identity shapes our understanding of and our engagement with the world about us.

-- 132 --

10/10 MAY/MAY:

SINGLING OUT THE DUPLICATIONS

IN T HE S EPARATION
When you read any of the later novels of Christopher Priest you are never entirely
confident that you trust what is going on. Traditionally this would be because the
narrators were unreliable, but I dont believe that (with the exception of Gordon
Sinclair in The Quiet Woman, who is probably mad) Priest has written a single
unreliable narrator. It is not the narrators who are unreliable, but the worlds that they
narrate.
One of the consistent ways by which Priest has undermined our confidence in his
worlds is the presentation of alternatives, worlds operating in parallel but with the
membranes between them porous at best. Wessex and the present day in A Dream of
Wessex, the dream archipelago and contemporary London in The Affirmation, the
realm of the glamorous and mundane reality in The Glamour, the world as seen by
Borden and the world as seen by Angier in The Prestige, virtual reality and consensus
reality in The Extremes all operate this way. The viewpoint characters move between
these worlds with increasing fluidity, but the more easily they penetrate the parallel
world the less easy it is for them, and for us, to tell exactly when one world ends and
the next one starts.
The Separation seems on one level to fit this paradigm precisely. You have the
twins, J.L. Sawyer (Jack) and J.L. Sawyer (Joe); and when we follow Jacks story the
Second World War follows much the course we know from our history books, but
when we follow Joes story, the war ends in 1941. But although there is this very
obvious pairing of worlds, in another sense the novel does not seem to fit the
paradigm because the worlds do not seem to be porous, there is no overt movement
from one world into the next.
What I want to suggest is that there is in fact movement between the worlds, and
it is not just two worlds. This is, I think, Priests most complex novel to date and there
are at least four parallel worlds, probably more, and the membranes are so porous that
we are moving between them constantly throughout the novel. Indeed, I would
further suggest that it is this movement which explains what is perhaps the most
problematic aspect of the whole novel, the ending in which Joe apparently relates his
own death.
We begin with popular historian Stuart Grattan being handed a manuscript by
Angela Chipperton. This is the first indication of how porous the membranes are,
because Stuart and Angela cannot exist in the same world. When Stuart has a
fleeting illusory sense that he had seen her before (5) it is understandable, they are
-- 133 --

effectively the same person. Angela is Jacks child by Birgit in a world in which Joe
was killed; Stuart is Joes child by Birgit in a world in which Jack was killed.
Throughout The Separation there are doublings: Joe and Jack, Birgit and the twins
mother who are both German, the real Churchill and the actor with whom Jack tours
bomb-damaged London, Hess and his doppelganger who flies to Britain on 10th May
1941 on a mission of peace. These suggest a duality in the novel, but it is the hidden
duplications, such as the identity of Stuart and Angela which is never made explicit,
that are far more significant in suggesting a multiplicity of worlds and signalling the
movement between them.
The manuscript Stuart is given is Jacks memoir. In part this is an account of Jack
and Joe winning a bronze medal for rowing in the Berlin Olympics. During the course
of this they meet Hess, who is fascinated by their likeness We never try to deceive
anyone (93) Jack tells him, a hostage to fortune and who also seems to be sexually
attracted to Jack. At the same time, Joe is arranging to smuggle the daughter of their
Jewish hosts out of Germany; this is Birgit, whom Joe will marry but both will love.
This part of the story is unproblematic, Joes accounts also will look back to the same
events. The split in history must occur later than this, but unlike most authors of
alternate histories, Priest never specifies a moment when the split occurs, by the time
we pick up the wartime portion of the narrative the split has already happened.
Jacks account of the Olympics is punctuated by memories of the moment he
crashed his Wellington bomber, following a raid on Hamburg on 10th May 1941. (This
is a pivotal date, it is the date, among other things, when Hess flew to Britain, when
Stuart dates the end of the war, when Stuart was born and when Joe witnesses the
signing of the peace treaty.) Jack repeatedly breaks into his memoir with accounts of
this moment which always begin Five years later (40). The uncertainty which
surrounds this event is curious, marked by phrases such as a fog of amnesia (40,
repeated 50) or like fragments of a dream (50). The sense that Jack is actually
creating the memory rather than reliving the experience is suggested when he says,
for example, I worked backwards to find the memories I needed, learning as I went
(41), or later: I must have been in shock. I was confused then, I was confused when
I tried to remember it later, I am still confused all these years on. (48) He returns to
this moment four times in all, each time starting the memory a little earlier and
continuing a little longer, before, on the fourth iteration which begins much more
precisely: At the end of June 1941, nearly five years after (76), it eventually
acquires enough substance to move the story forward. But the repetitions are
interesting, because of the small discrepancies that creep in. In one version the crew
definitely bail out, in another he cant remember if they jumped; in one version the
shrapnel seems to hit behind Jack, in another it hits forward of him throwing him
backwards; in one version it is Kris who reports that Levy has been wounded, in
another Lofty does so. This is not enough to suggest that we are not witnessing the
one central event, but it suggests the unreliability of memory and sets us up for the
far more radical discontinuities in Joes accounts later.
-- 134 --

Another thing that these recurring memories do is cut us loose from time. Jacks
subsequent account will wander achronologically backwards to his affair with Birgit
and forwards to his time as an aide to Churchill and his meeting with Hesss
doppelganger, the fluidity of this movement making it not always clear when these
events are taking place. At the core of his account, however, is the raid on Hamburg,
and in particular a strange scene recounted only during the fourth iteration. As Jack
and his crew approach the German coast they see an ME-110 being shot down by four
ME-109s, then, moments later, another lone ME-110 is attacked by four more ME109s, but this time the lone plane escapes and the four attackers head back in the
direction of Denmark. It is Hesss flight to Britain, and that of his doppelganger, a
duplication which signals a split in time.
When Jacks account is concluded, there is a brief interlude during which Stuart
discovers that Angela does not exist in his world, then we get another account of
that raid on Hamburg, this time from the navigator, Levy. Although the account
matches Jacks in broad outline, in detail it is significantly different. In this world
Jack and Birgit are married and expecting the child who is presumably Angela. When
they spot the duplicate Messerschmitt attacks the details are identical, except that it
is the first group of four raiders who return to Denmark. And when the plane crashes,
Jack is killed.
This is the third distinct timeline in the novel. Because he belongs to Angelas
world, this cannot be congruent with Stuarts, and it clearly differs from Jacks. It also
differs from Joes world. But the membranes are most permeable to documents,
because Levy provides Stuart with a body of print-outs, mostly taken from the
internet, which constitute the final portion of the novel. Central to this portion is Joes
own account, or rather, accounts: as I will show, there is a curious discontinuity in
what follows.
The account begins straightforwardly enough: we see Joe register as a
conscientious objector, start to work for the Red Cross in Manchester, and then go to
London to help in the Blitz. This is where things start to go awry. In Jacks world, Joe
is killed during the Blitz when his ambulance is hit by a bomb; here Joe isnt even in
the ambulance at the time, but goes missing and is found some days later suffering
concussion. Up to this point we have been reading extracts from the diaries of J.L.
Sawyer held at the Collection Britannique, Le Muse de Paix, Genve; now we start
to read extracts from the holograph notebooks of J.L. Sawyer, University of
Manchester, Department of Vernacular History. We have shifted, unheralded, into yet
another timeline, and it is marked by one of the most significant passages in the book,
which occurs when Joe is being taken by ambulance back to Manchester:
I was inside a Red Cross ambulance, shocked into reality when the vehicle jolted
over an uneven patch of road. I braced myself defensively against the knocks
and bumps I was receiving, but my waist and legs were held gently in place with
restraining straps. I was alone in the compartment with an orderly, a young Red
-- 135 --

Cross worker I knew was called Ken Wilson. It was difficult to talk in the noisy,
unventilated compartment. Ken braced his arms against the overhead shelves as
the vehicle swung about. He said we were well on our way in the journey, not
to worry. But I was worried. Where were we going? (303)

Why is that passage significant? Because almost 300 pages earlier this passage is
used, word for word, by Jack when he is being taken from hospital to the
rehabilitation centre after the Hamburg raid. It is a point of very deliberate
duplication. There are others through the novel, though none so long or so far apart,
and I think it is worth looking at in some detail.
For a start it contains the notion of being shocked into reality, and Priest is
careful to stress the idea that reality is something to wake into, or something to be
recreated the way Jack recreated his memories of the crash. Within pages of this scene
Joe goes on to say the world was suddenly in focus (303) and Concussion creates a
sense of unfilled blankness behind you unreachable by memory. Discovering what
is there in your memory, and what might not be, is a painful process. (304) He
concludes: My conscious life began again, there and then. (305) This heavy emphasis
on the reality of the world he wakes up to in the ambulance actually serves to
undermine that reality, and as we discover in the following pages this reality is a very
fragile and uncertain thing.
There is the importance also of being in an ambulance. In Jacks reality Joe was
killed in the ambulance he was driving in the Blitz. In the earlier version of Joes
reality there is an enigmatic letter to the driver of the ambulance Joe is travelling in,
a letter which talks of a serious crash though it contains no details. That crash does
not feature in Joes notebook, another clue to the fact that time shifts part way
through Joes portion of the book. The ambulance itself, therefore, is a symbol of
death within Joes narrative.
As a duplication, the passage itself signals a time shift. It is, after all, practically
the first thing we read in Joes notebook, and elsewhere in the book duplication of
incidents or of phrasings are used as signals that reality has moved slightly.
And because it duplicates an experience of Jacks, it is indicative of a growing
identity of Jack and Joe. When the twins are together at the Olympics, they are
fiercely defensive of their separate identity; as Jack says: What you want, what you
crave, is to be treated as a separate human being You want an independent life.
(44). But once they are separated, during the war, they more and more come to take
on each others identity. Jack tells how, during his affair with Birgit, he allows himself
to appear as Joe. Joe tells how he finds an Air Force uniform in his wardrobe, and
when he puts it on seems for a moment to become Jack. These are just cosmetic
instances of a developing cross-identity; in a very important sense this is not a novel
about separation but about unification.
From this moment in the ambulance onwards, time fractures into so many shards
that it is difficult to keep track of what is going on. As Jack repeatedly revisits variant
-- 136 --

experiences of the Hamburg raid until it coheres into one story that makes sense, so
Joe seems to be persistently trying on alternative futures to find the one that works
for him. He returns home to fine Jack and Birgit together; then wakes back in the
ambulance once more. It was as if I had slipped suddenly back in time, out of one
reality into another, but which reality, now, was the one I should believe in? (310)
This is presented as a metaphor, in fact it is a concrete representation of what is going
on in The Separation.
All of these lucid imaginings, as Joe terms them, keep bringing Joe and Jack
together like colliding atoms: finding Jack with Birgit, finding Jacks uniform and
trying it on, discovering that Jack is the pilot of the plane taking him to the Red Cross
peace negotiations, the testy inconclusive meeting between the brothers at the
airfield. This last is another instance of Priests use of repeated passages. Each time
the meeting is replayed we are told: as soon as I saw him I felt a familiar surge of
many of the old feelings about him: love, envy, resentment, admiration, irritation. He
was still my brother. (383, repeated 390) That these repetitions indicate a shift in the
substance of reality is indicated when we are told twice: We kept drawing on our
cigarettes, using them like punctuation, for emphasis (387, repeated 393), yet when
Joe emerges from the second of these lucid dreams and finds himself back in the pub
bedroom, I felt stray tobacco strands sticking to my lips. (394) The supposed fancy
of the lucid imagining has had a measureable effect upon reality.
Throughout these fractured realities, Joe the pacifist is working towards an end to
the war, which he eventually achieves. But on his return home he finds that Birgit has
already had their baby, a boy named Stuart that neighbour Henry Gratton is taking a
possessive and fatherly interest in. And then Jack, supposedly seriously injured but
not killed in a raid on Hamburg, suddenly appears. In that moment Joe falls, cracks
his head on the floor, and finds himself back in the ambulance. This is something he
has already foreseen. As he became aware of the lucid imagining he had wondered:
Was everything I thought of as real in fact another more subtle and extended
delusion, a lucid imagining of forked alternatives, while in reality, real reality, I lay
in the back of the noisy Red Cross ambulance, still being driven slowly across
benighted England? (330) It is a return, therefore, for which we have been prepared.
Perhaps in this world that crash which so mysteriously never happened, will occur.
After all, there is a doom-laden quality to Joes final words: ahead of me lay that life
which was obscurely rejecting me (463)
But if Joe is indeed recounting his own death, how could he do that? And how
can he die at this moment before the peace that he is instrumental in bringing about,
and that earns him the measure of fame which will get historian Stuart Gratton
interested in him in the first place, and so set this entire novel in motion? Because
the worlds are porous and the multiverse of the novel has resolved itself into the
history we know; Joe has disappeared from a reality rejecting him, to receive the
death scheduled for him in Jacks world, which somehow allows Jack to survive.

-- 137 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

Islomania? Insularity?
The Myth of the Island in
British Science Fiction

Utopia by Thomas More, The Tempest by William Shakespeare, New Atlantis by

Francis Bacon, Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe, Gullivers Travels by Jonathan
Swift, The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells, Deluge by S. Fowler Wright, The
Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Web by John Wyndham, Concrete Island by J.G.
Ballard, A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest, The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks,
The Scar by China Miville ...
That is a brief list of some notable works in the history of British science fiction.
(It is not the purpose of this paper to argue that all these titles necessarily are science
fiction, but if pushed I would be happy to do so.) I could double the list, triple it; I
could take just one author from that list, Christopher Priest, and produce another list:
Indoctrinaire, Fugue for a Darkening Island, Inverted World, The Dream Archipelago,
The Affirmation and still everything I named would share one obvious
characteristic: they are all island stories!
The island is a state of mind J.G. Ballard said in an interview once1. He was
talking specifically about Concrete Island, but the remark has far wider implications.
I want to look at those implications, and at why that state of mind seems so
distinctively British.
Nicholas Ruddick, in his study of British science fiction appropriately entitled
Ultimate Island, proposed that: the Island is a metaphor for the (at once) positive
separateness and negative alienation of the Self from Other as well as for the
predicament of humanity itself on its island world encircled by the indifferent or
hostile ocean of space. (p.57) Its a good metaphor, but it has an almost universal
application to the enterprise of science fiction. If Ruddicks notion held, we would
expect islands to emerge as dominant metaphorical features wherever we found sf.
We dont, however; the island is almost unknown in the metaphorical language of
contemporary American or Australian sf. We can pluck out examples, Kim Stanley
Robinsons A Short Sharp Shock, the skein of islands in Ursula K. Le Guins Earthsea
books and perhaps Steve Ericksons Amnesiascope with its vision of Los Angeles cut
off by rings of fire, but these are isolated examples, notable precisely because they
are so rare. Nowhere outside Britain has the island become such a familiar, such an
essential part of the imagery of science fiction that it passes almost unnoticed.
One simple explanation is that Britain is an island. America, it would thus be
argued, is a place where the mythic power of the frontier has focussed imaginative
attention upon its wide interior landscapes penetrated by long river roads, and this
-- 141 --

has therefore provided the default setting for works from Mark Twains Tom Sawyer
to Kim Stanley Robinsons Mars Trilogy. Australia is a narrow veneer of civilisation
enclosing a vast, mysterious and threatening emptiness, which thus provides the
metaphorical location of works from Terry Dowlings Rynosseros to George Turners
Down There in Darkness. It is an attractive thesis, but in the end I think it is as subtle
and sustainable as the notion that all British science fiction from The Day of the
Triffids onwards is driven by loss of empire. We do not inhabit islands in our
imagination for any simple, brute, geographical fact; as Ruddick says: Britain is far
too large, even from the familiar late-twentieth-century perspective of a jetliner at
35,000 feet, to be seen as an island. (p.57) No, we inhabit islands because of the
imaginative dividend, in terms of mythic resonance, that they pay, and this has an
historical and cultural basis.
I will be examining two basic contrasting responses to the island in British science
fiction. Islomania: the island as dream state, the object of desire, the ideal; and
insularity: the island as prison or fortress that holds us apart from the rest of the
world, Shakespeares famous precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in
the office of a wall.2 Inevitably there are overlaps and linkages between these two
responses. Utopia can only be the ideal state because it is set upon an artificially
created island which cuts it off from the baleful influence of the rest of the world. It
is, perhaps, the creative tension arising from this opposition in our response to the
island that has kept it as such a vital aspect of British science fiction for some five
hundred years.
Peter Ackroyd, in his idiosyncratic survey of the English imagination, Albion,
makes great play of the role of the sea in English literature from the Anglo-Saxons
up to the present day, but somewhere on the cusp when what we tend to call, broadly,
the Middle Ages, turned into what we call, equally inaccurately, the Modern World,
the sea stopped being the natural force that was, in and of itself, a test of manhood.
Fuelled by the voyages of discovery being conducted by Vasco da Gama and
Christopher Columbus and their successors, we began to see the sea as a road, and
what lay at the end of that road was as important as the journey itself. The initial
reports of the navigators, and later accounts of voyages by what we might consider
as the 16th century version of the pop-science writer, such as Richard Haklyut and
Samuel Purchas, made these new lands full of wonders. And they were, often, islands;
even when early explorers reached the coast of South America they initially thought
of it as another island. These islands were a magical, mysterious blank slate upon
which any vision of the world might be conveniently etched.
The English imagination already had an island firmly lodged at its heart, of
course: Avalon, the Summer Isle, the Isle of Apples, a mysterious terrestrial heaven
where King Arthur was carried after his death to live forever and rise again in the
hour of his countrys need. Avalon had been a potent part of the stories of King
Arthur at least since Geoffrey of Monmouth, but in the 1480s, around the time in
other words that Bartolomeu Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope, Arthurs place at
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the centre of English romance was confirmed by the publication of one of the most
popular works to emerge from William Caxtons newfangled printing press: Sir
Thomas Malorys Le Morte DArthur. Just at this moment, therefore, when the Middle
Ages were beginning to give way to the Renaissance in England, a combination of
real travellers tales and popular national mythology established the island as the
seat of strangeness and wonder and desire.
One of the first and greatest of the literary explorations of this new imaginative
territory was Thomas Mores Utopia (1516). Utopia, the realm literally created by King
Utopus, was clearly located off South America (our narrator, Raphael Hythlodeus, was
on one of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci), but at the same time its geography
equally clearly echoes that of Britain. The general shape and size of the island, the
distribution of the cities, even the way the river flows through the principal city,
Amaurotum London redrawn by visionary imagination, as Peter Ackroyd puts it3
all deliberately echo the land that was the intended target of Mores satire. Thus the
famous ambiguity of the title no-place or good-place has a curious
geographical echo: we go to the very end of the earth only to find ourselves where
we started from. The island of desire is brought home to us.
So effective and popular was Mores version of islomania that later British utopias
Bishop Joseph Halls Mundus Alter et Idem (1605), Sir Francis Bacons New Atlantis
(1627), James Harringtons The Commonwealth of Oceania (1656), Henry Nevilles The
Isle of Pines (1668), right up to Aldous Huxleys Island (1962) and Margaret
Elphinstones Hy Brasil (2002) would almost inevitably be set on an island. Even
Francis Godwin, who set his utopia on the moon in The Man in the Moone (1638),
invented an Island of God as the perfect centre of his lunar society. It is as if the
island setting provided both protective swaddling for the delicate experiment of their
imagination and automatic identification with the true subject. The place of desire
now had to be an island.
But the isle of desire also had to be protected. In 1588, when high winds and
questionable strategy sent the Spanish Armada scuttling right around Britain, it
helped to establish the idea of the island fortress that Shakespeare would eulogise just
seven years later in John of Gaunts speech from Richard II. Of course, most science
fiction writers who have consciously engaged with this Shakespearean insularity have
done so only to highlight how readily the walls might be breeched. The succession of
invasion stories that followed hot on the heels of German reunification and the
militancy revealed in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 and the Franco-Prussian War
of 1871, beginning with The Invasion of England by Alfred Bate Richards (1870) and
The Battle of Dorking by George T. Chesney (1871), were primarily intended to shake
British complacency behind the defensive moat of the Channel. But when we are not
examining the strength of the defences too closely, it is remarkable how readily we
turn to the protection of an island. It is surely no coincidence, for instance, that the
survivors of invasion by ambulatory plants at the end of John Wyndhams The Day
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of the Triffids (1951), and of extraterrestrial wasps at the end of Keith Robertss The
Furies (1966), retreat to the Isle of Wight.
A fortress, however, is far more than just a defensive bastion. The most famous
island in English literature, Crusoes island, hardly offers protection from the pirates.
But it is an example of insularity because it acts as a prison, isolating Crusoe from
society. Even before he is shipwrecked, while he is working on his plantation in Brazil,
Crusoe remarks: I had no body to converse with but now and then this neighbour;
no work to be done, but by the labour of my hands; and I used to say, I livd just like
a man cast away upon some desolate island (p.30). Like all good prison narratives,
therefore, the story turns inwards by forcing Crusoe to depend upon his own
resources. What happens on the island, after Crusoe finds his metaphor of social
isolation made concrete, serves as a representation of what is happening within
Crusoe himself. The true exemplar of omnicompetent Enlightenment man, he
establishes by the labour of his own hands dominion over wild nature and lesser men.
Like Mores Utopia, Defoes Robinson Crusoe (1719) established a pattern that
others would follow as if it were the only option. Where More had laid down that the
island was the theatre in which to witness an experiment in the perfection of society;
Defoe laid down that an island was the theatre in which to witness an experiment in
the perfection of man. Thereafter, in and out of science fiction, individuals and small
groups were forever being shipwrecked to test their fitness as human beings. Defoe,
imbued with the ideas of technical and cultural achievement embodied in the English
Enlightenment, demonstrated the mastery of Crusoe over his world so that he emerges
from his island prison a better man than he had been. In subsequent robinsonades,
however, notably Johann Wysss The Swiss Family Robinson (1812-13) and R.M.
Ballantynes The Coral Island (1857), it is the innate goodness of the child
protagonists as god-fearing representatives of Western civilisation that guarantees
their success. J.M. Barrie would use the robinsonade for his comedy of social reversal,
The Admirable Crichton (1902), which carefully turns the social world right side up
again once lord and butler are returned to civilisation: the qualities that make survival
on a desert island so simple include knowing ones place. This benign image of the
island would be overturned by the most significant robinsonade since Defoes
original. William Golding, imbued with ideas of the Fall of Man, presents a Hobbesian
image in The Lord of the Flies (1954), with his public schoolchildren, representatives
of the peak of English culture and an overt response to Ballantynes young heroes,
descending into brutal barbarism away from the constraints of society.
Where Defoe had suggested that mans qualities would allow him to succeed even
in isolation; The Lord of the Flies suggested that isolation would defeat man whatever
his qualities. This was an idea that Golding would go on to develop in one of the two
most potent reworkings of Robinson Crusoe in post-war English literature: Pincher
Martin (1956). This island, unlike Crusoes island, offers no comforts whatsoever, and
here, on a purely realistic level, it is the island, harsh and unconquerable, that wins
the struggle for dominion. But behind this account of a failure to survive there is a
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struggle to understand Christopher Pincher Martins own humanity, and this is

achieved as the crag upon which he is suspended comes more and more to resemble
the inside of his head. The novel results, therefore, in a sort of redemption,
Christopher becoming Christ-like. And there is redemption, too, of a sort, for the
character who could almost be Pincher Martins twin, Maitland, who finds himself
cast ashore upon a traffic island in J.G. Ballards Concrete Island (1974). Although the
philosophical, one might almost say spiritual impulses of the two authors are
diametrically opposed, they have chosen remarkably similar metaphors through
which to explore these impulses. Maitlands island is as unforgivingly devoid of
comfort and sustenance as Martins, and again we realise that the island was
becoming an exact model of his head. (p.51) But where Martin, devoid of all human
company, learns that it is his role within society that makes him human; Maitland,
through his interactions with the other castaways, the ex-acrobat Proctor and the
prostitute Jane who have both deliberately divorced themselves from the modern
world, achieves a liberation from the demands of society.
Neither of these novels, nor any of the other countless varieties of robinsonade,
could work without the insularity dictated by the island setting. Yet these islands,
rigorous and unwelcoming as they are, have something of the island of desire about
them, as Arthur C. Clarke, for instance, imagines a physical link between the romantic
tropical island of desire and the technocratic island of separation, the space station,
in The Fountains of Paradise (1979). Islomania and insularity seem to merge in that
place where our wishes and our fears come together, as they do somewhere between
the social experiment of Utopia and the personal experiment of Robinson Crusoe.
There is a third experiment for which, again, the island provides the ideal metaphoric
setting: the evolutionary experiment. And here the island always seems to combine
aspects of islomania and insularity. It was, after all, on islands not too dissimilar from
Pincher Martins rocky crag that Charles Darwin found the material he needed to
direct his thoughts towards evolution by natural selection. On the Origin of Species,
when it finally appeared in 1859, electrified British intellectual life just at that point
when Imperial England was at its most expansive and confident. H.G. Wells, who
studied under Darwins disciple, T.H. Huxley, spent his career playing thought
experiments upon the idea of evolution, often casting his characters ashore upon
islands resembling Crusoes island, as in the story Aepyornis Island (1894), or a
would-be Utopia, as in his most thorough examination of the topic, The Island of Dr
Moreau (1896). Just as More and Defoe contained their experiments within an island,
so in this novel the island becomes like a petrie dish, sealed off from the world as a
way of avoiding contamination in either direction.
Again the literary pattern is set. Even though the growth in marine and air travel
throughout the twentieth century made even the remotest islands less and less
inviolate, still British writers who have followed Wells in exploring evolutionary
themes have often tended to choose island settings. The island detaches it from our
reality, so the most extraordinary events can be played out there without impinging
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on the familiar reality around us, while at the same time remaining sufficiently part
of the world that the relevance of the warning (and many evolutionary fictions carry
the subtext: do not mess with nature) is not going to be lost. Thus Arthur Conan
Doyle set his evolutionary fantasy, The Lost World (1912) on an island-like plateau
deep in the sea of the South American jungle (a setting which Paul J. McAuley inverts
in his evolutionary fantasy, The Rift (2000), which is played out not on a plateau but
within a deep cleft within the Amazonian jungle), while Arthur C. Clarke, in an early
story Retreat from Earth (1938), has his termites achieve dominance on a remote
island. When, after the Second World War, nuclear tests were carried out on Bikini
Atoll, an extra layer of dread was added to evolutionary fictions and an additional
reason was acquired for shifting the action to an island setting. Hence John
Wyndhams posthumously-published novel Web (1979) combines familiar
evolutionary angst involving super-ants with nuclear dread, all set upon a remote
Pacific Island that lies, at least thematically, midway between Galapagos and Bikini.
The islands I have looked at so far are all reached at the end of a sea road, they
are chosen as settings for science fiction, for experiments in the perfection of society,
the perfection of man, or evolution, precisely because they are distant, we must
journey towards them. But sometimes the islands come to us. There is a precursor to
this notion in Richard Jefferiess After London; or, Wild England (1885) in which, with
a nod towards Noahs Flood, he has the Midlands drowned under a great lake. This
facilitates the romantic notion of achieving utopia by way of a return to a pastoral
innocence. It also provides a direct linking of Britain with Utopia, something Thomas
More suggested but did not make explicit. This idealistic expansion of the idea that
home is where the heart is, this direct engagement with the notion that our island
home should, or could, in some manner be our ideal home, is something that an
increasing number of British writers have pursued over the last century. The first
writer to make England into an archipelago, S. Fowler Wright in his novel Deluge
(1927), was not so romantic as Jefferies in his intent. Wright, like many science fiction
writers, saw few redeeming features in humankind, and there clearly is a Biblical
dimension in the inundation which provides for a possibility of utopia by wiping out
the sickness that has bespoiled humanity, which Wright saw as being civilisation.
Somehow I suspect that the Wright of Deluge would not have got along with the
Golding of The Lord of the Flies.
The notion that utopia might be achieved only at the expense of civilisation is
something that seems to lie behind a number of the fantasies of depopulation that
became popular particularly after the Second World War, when atomic weapons made
such depopulation imaginable. In Britain these stories, misleadingly labelled cosy
catastrophes by Brian Aldiss, often featured enisled Britain. From John Wyndhams
The Kraken Wakes (1953) to J.G. Ballards The Drowned World (1962) such
catastrophes have emphasised the spiritual isolation of their depopulated worlds by
placing their survivors upon the physical isolation of islands. John Christophers
catastrophe novel A Wrinkle in the Skin (1965) is actually set on the British
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archipelago of the Channel Islands. But unlike Wright, these writers see the promise
of utopia not in the destruction of civilisation but in its re-establishment, with the
implication that we might get it right this time. Other writers who have followed
Wrights example in drowning Britain (a surprisingly common scenario) include Keith
Roberts, whose views on utopia vs civilisation probably lay closer to Goldings.
Roberts seemed to make a habit of breaking Britain apart, perhaps most significantly
in The Chalk Giants (1974) where Monkey, having taught himself to read maps, finds
sea cutting across his route where no sea should be: His bright new world was
shattered. (p.73) If Wright saw enisled Britain as an island of desire, for Monkey, like
Crusoe before him, it is a prison, a restriction on his movements, a condemnation, for
he will soon die horribly of diseases brought about by the nuclear war which created
the island in the first place.
Richard Cowper, I think, lies somewhere between the two. His enisled Britain, in
The Road to Corlay (1978) and its sequels, is a prison for it is a geographical
expression of the loss of cohesion and civilisation which he, unlike Wright, sees as a
bad thing. But it is also an island of desire, for, as Keith Roberts did in Pavane (1968),
he presents a cyclic view of history with a new civilisation emerging from pastoral
medievalism.
At roughly the same time Cowper was working on The Road to Corlay, Christopher
Priest was creating a similarly drowned Britain in A Dream of Wessex (1977). In this
case, however, the island is not a prison but a fortress, a place of warmth and light
and joy that is a defence against the cold and forbidding character of his near-future
Britain. When a representative of this heartless aspect of post-war Britain invades the
sunny, rural island it becomes, briefly, as grey, polluted and miserable as the realm
from which the dreamers are trying to escape. Wessex is also, literally, a dream island,
a piece of the Mediterranean that has been misplaced in southern England, and in this
Priests islomania is on a par with the intellectual mood of post-war Britain. In his
essay Utopias and Antiutopias William Golding said of The Lord of the Flies: I
flew away from rationed, broken England with all its bomb damage, flew away across
the flowers of foam to where the lianas dropped their cables from the strange tropical
trees. (p.183) Many British writers were flying away from rationed, broken England
(or, as Roberts and Cowper and Priest did, they were breaking England). Generally
they flew to the warmth and sexual relaxation of the Mediterranean, as John Fowles
did in The Magus (1965, revised 1977), where the Prospero-like figure of Conchis
enwraps his Greek island in a series of psycho-sexual spells. Priest created something
very similar in his sequence of Dream Archipelago stories, and the novel The
Affirmation (1981). Even more than in A Dream of Wessex, these are islands of desire.
While the northern continent is cold, urban, repressed and at war; the archipelago is
warm, at peace, languid and rife with sexual mystery. That Priests Dream Archipelago
is (like Fowles before him, and like Lawrence Durrell before him) modelled upon what
was the epitome of warm allure to the post-war British imagination, the islands of
Greece, is made explicit in The Quiet Woman (1990). In this novel, in which Britain
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becomes an island besieged by nuclear threat and political and sexual repression, the
central figure is identified as Seri from The Affirmation and is shown returning from
the Greek Islands at the outbreak of World War Two, a retreat from islomania to
insularity.
Both Golding and Fowles have written essays on Islands an indication, perhaps,
of how thoroughly they invest the English imagination but I dont think any English
writer has so consistently weaved islands into the structure of his fiction as
Christopher Priest. These are usually exemplars of islomania rather than insularity: he
does not want to cut his characters off from society because engagement with others
goes to the core of how they reveal their psychology (one reason, perhaps, why twins
and doppelgangers feature so frequently in his work). But one example of insularity
reveals another aspect of the island story. With Laputa, the flying island of Jonathan
Swifts Gullivers Travels, we are introduced to the idea of an island that comes to us,
but this notion wasnt further developed until Priests Inverted World (1974). Here the
city that must forever travel forward because staying in one place means losing
reality is an extreme representative of the island as prison. This notion of the island
as mobile city seems to have acquired a curious currency in contemporary science
fiction. Philip Reeve in Mortal Engines (2001) presents his cities as predators rolling
across a seemingly barren landscape; it is significant that we first glimpse London in
the dried-out bed of the North Sea. China Mivilles Armada, in The Scar (2002), on
the other hand, is conventional to the extent that it is surrounded by water, but
unconventional in that it is made up of a myriad of boats lashed together. It is another
example of the island as fortress, moving across the sea to avoid detection; but it is
also the island as prison, for there is no escape, and the island of desire for it
represents liberty for those who knew none elsewhere.
Most of the roles I have ascribed to islands in this paper prison and fortress,
theatre of experiment, dreamscape are roles that suit the enterprise of science
fiction, indeed the enterprise of fiction, wherever it may be developed. But at the same
time these are all British works by British writers, imbued with an indefinable British
sensibility. Part of the reason for that may lie in the fact that we are an island nation,
at least to the extent that this led us to develop a maritime empire, that our explorers
and traders and pirates ranged the sea roads and discovered islands across the globe.
But it is not just that we are an island race; more important is that our experience of
the sea and its islands made these a natural setting for key works that established the
myths of utopia, of Crusoe, of the ultimate island. And other writers in the tradition,
who have developed and exploited these myths, found the island a convenient and
often a necessary setting for their literary continuation of these themes. In time the
island became so established a part of our literary imagination that often, I suspect,
in works such as Mortal Engines, we may not even realise that the island lies at the
core of the fiction.

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APRES MOI
Brian Aldisss talent for phrase-making has done as much disservice as service to
science fiction over the years; in particular his idea of the cosy catastrophe, which
so elegantly summed up, and dismissed, the generation of British science fiction
writers before Aldisss own. It is hard to read the best works of John Wyndham or
John Christopher and apply the description cosy to them. Worse, by so
apostrophizing a decade of British science fiction, Aldiss gave the impression that it
was a clearly defined era set apart from the general flow of British scientific
romances. In fact, Wyndham, Christopher and their contemporaries sat squarely in the
middle of a well-established and continuing tradition that ran unbroken from Richard
Jefferies After London (1885) through various novels by J.G. Ballard, Keith Roberts
and Christopher Priest, at least up to Ronald Wrights A Scientific Romance (1997).
The nature of the catastrophe, the tenor of the work, the survival strategies, even the
highlighting of class distinctions are all consistent.
This new edition of what is perhaps the most significant scientific romance
published between the wars clearly illustrates that continuity. Brian Stableford, in a
very good Introduction, points up the debt Fowler Wright owes to Jefferies, and as
might be expected is excellent at placing this work within the context of the scientific
romances of the period. If his treatment of the influence that Deluge had in its turn
is somewhat perfunctory, it is not hard to see how nature turning inexplicably against
civilization, and a bunch of middle class characters struggling to re-establish what
they can amid the depopulated ruins, has found its echoes in Robertss The Chalk
Giants (1974), Priests A Dream of Wessex (1977) or Cowpers The Road to Corlay
(1978), among others. Deluge did not invent the uncosy catastrophe, but as the
Midlands sink under the cold, implacable waves it is hard to think of a better
exemplar of the form.
But let us pause at this point and consider this new edition (ah, Fowler Wrights
discursive style is catching, and he does have a talent for digression, often stopping
the action at a crucial point in order to fill us in on the background of a minor
character). We are told this is the definitive edition, which is likely enough given that
Fowler Wright made few textual alterations between editions. Footnotes point out
where the name of a minor character was changed from one edition to the next, or
where there has been a slight tidying-up of the text (normally corrected to
nominally, for instance, though Stableford doesnt specify whether this was his
change or something that Fowler Wright had done at some point). But one later
edition, and the text reproduced on the family web site, had significant cuts, and
Stableford makes no note of where these cuts came, which is a pity. Other than that,
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the notes are all that is really necessary, though it has to be said that the text doesnt
need much in the way of explanations beyond pointing out who Jack Hobbs was, or
noting that many place names are made up.
As for the Introduction: a succinct biographical sketch; an outline of Fowler
Wrights career with particular attention paid to the genesis of this novel, its success
and the subsequent decline of his literary reputation; and a placing of Fowler Wright
within the context of British scientific romance, is all one might ask for. One might
quibble that Stableford is clearly so close to and reliant on the Fowler Wright family
that his impartiality on certain issues of character and career may be open to
question. Moreover, where he notes, as he does frequently, that the given dates for
articles or reviews are clearly wrong, he seems to make no effort to establish the
actual date, or to check precise wording or context. But these are quibbles at most.
Anyone coming to this Introduction is going to learn a lot that is valuable about the
man and his work.
We learn, for example, that Fowler Wright was fiercely ambitious for social
position, but always seemed to live on the ragged edge of financial disaster. He
appears to have been bankrupted at least once and to have avoided bankruptcy on
another occasion only because of the unexpected commercial success of Deluge in
America. This is a portrait of the middle classes at their most anxious and most
ruthless, and that is precisely what comes across in the novel. Like most members of
the middle classes Fowler Wright regarded the upper class with disdain, and the two
representatives of that class who feature, briefly, in Deluge are idiotic wastrels. On the
other hand, the working class (here indistinguishable from the criminal class) is nasty,
brutish and thick. The members of that class who feature in the novel are mostly
enemies of our middle-class protagonists; they are inarticulate, driven exclusively by
their lusts, and incapable of coherent planning. As for lawyers Fowler Wrights
unhealthy financial status must have driven him into contact with those
representatives of the upper middle classes on numerous unwelcome occasions
when they fleece the Earl of Hollowby they would have considered it dishonest to
charge him more than the rate agreed by the trade union to which they belonged
(p.152). By rendering the professional body of these legal thieves as a trade union,
Fowler Wright is neatly putting them on a level with the working class.
In this light it is interesting that the hero of Deluge, Martin, is a lawyer, but, we
are repeatedly told, an honest one. One who has learned survival skills such as how
to handle a gun from the working-class murderers he has defended; but at the same
time, one able to provide the intellectual leadership that the good members of the
working class so need in this post-apocalyptic world. In a curious speech, when
Martin first rejects and then accepts their request that he become their leader, he tells
them that he dismisses out of hand all their conditions, all the things they want, all
the arrangements they have so far managed to work out. And yet, for all this
arrogance, he is acclaimed by the mob. This is, in other words, a work riddled with
class snobbery, though Fowler Wright tends to disguise it with sweeping
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pronouncements against all that we call civilization. We are told repeatedly how
unpleasant, unhealthy, unwise or plain wrong were all the things that now lie beneath
the sea. At the same time, by the actions of his characters, it is clear that what must
be preserved are middle-class values.
With one significant exception.
Reading between the lines of Brian Stablefords introduction, it is clear that
Fowler Wright was puzzled by the success of Deluge. He kept trying to replicate that
success in later works, with ever diminishing returns. I suspect he believed it was
brought about through the combination of his literary talents and his over-arching
vision of a worn-out society swept away in a cleansing flood. I imagine the real
reason for the success, however, was sex. Stableford presents a very believable
scenario: would-be author S. Fowler Wright wrote a long, rambling and possibly
unfinished novel while commuting during and just after the First World War. It was
from that unfinished novel that he would eventually extract the passages that became
Deluge and its sequel, Dawn (1931). The timing is interesting. Although he did not see
action in the war (he was 40 in 1914), Fowler Wright was recruited by the War Office
and spent the war and its aftermath working on the procurement and production of
munitions. If not himself a member of that lost generation, therefore, he was acutely
aware of the wars devastating effects. The despair that marks his work, the disdain
for all that civilization represents, was a typical product of the post-war experience,
and would have found a ready audience. But more than that the rejection of all the
values that had allowed the war to happen included a rejection of prevalent sexual
morality. On the one hand this resulted in the desperate fun of the Roaring Twenties,
on the other the sexual licence that plays such an important part in this novel. This
is not overt sex, Fowler Wright ties himself in ever more baroque linguistic curlicues
as he tries to avoid describing the human body or any form of sexual activity. Yet he
strips his heroine, Claire, naked with obsessive regularity though no-one seems to
remark on the fact of her nudity, as if she is somehow invisible without clothes. Serial
rape is the overt threat from the brute working classes that drives the whole plot. And
in the end Martin is allowed sexual freedom without guilt; in a world with far fewer
women than men, both pre-lapsarian wife and post-apocalypse mistress choose to
stay with him in an unlikely menage. Forget the millions of dead (most of whom we
do not see), forget the hardships (no one here is really going short of any of the
necessities); sexually this is a very attractive proposition.
The plot of Deluge is quite simple and filled with coincidences. A minor tremor in
the surface of the Earth causes much of the land surface to be drowned. Martin, his
wife Helen and their two young children survive the catastrophe but are separated.
Helen and the children are rescued by Tom, a miner who was once acquitted of
murder, thanks to Martin. Tom desires Helen but she is waiting for Martin to reappear.
Martin, meanwhile, creates a safe place in an old railway tunnel. He meets Claire, an
athletic young widow who has just swum thirty miles to reach this island. When
Martin rescues Claire from rape by Bellamy and his gang of louts, the two become
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lovers. But Bellamy is determined to get the woman and lays siege to the tunnel. So
superior are Martin and Claire that together they have already killed Bellamy and
many of his gang before Tom coincidentally arrives to rescue them. Martin is
immediately acclaimed leader of Toms little bit of sustained civilization, but
unbeknown to them a rival gang has just set out to kidnap Helen. Eventually the plot
brings Martin, Claire and Helen together so that Helen and Claire can decide to share
Martin and a new sexual morality is born. Along the way there are plenty of
exquisitely perceived vignettes of the reality of survival and the details of everyday
life after the apocalypse; but these are mixed with an equal measure of splenetic
invective against the routine horrors of modern civilization. (Fowler Wright includes
just one footnote in this novel, which inveighs against the ineffectuality of speeding
fines.)
In other words it is a novel that can, by turns, delight and infuriate the reader. It
is well written, in a languid, Victorian prose that can still rise to moments of
melodramatic action. It is, on the other hand, probably not a novel that would be
much read today, the stately pace would annoy many, and the coyness many more.
If it deserves its reprint and I believe it does it is probably more for its historical
value as an important milestone on the ongoing journey of British science fiction,
than for any immediate literary relevance. H.G. Wells and other writers of his era
produced works that continue to be read today; Fowler Wright, I suspect, belongs to
that rather larger company of writers who are referred to today, but not read. This
new edition is, I fear, unlikely to change that, but it will provide a pleasure for those
of us who, for whatever historical or critical reason, do like to look back at the works
which shaped the literature we know today.

-- 152 --

ELEGY
Philip K. Dicks Collected Stories came to six volumes. Theodore Sturgeon is on
his way to ten volumes, although the early ones have too many previously
unpublished stories that add little to his reputation. Arthur C. Clarke warrants only a
single volume, though it does present 104 stories in nearly a thousand large pages of
small print, and it is shorn of all critical paraphernalia except for laconic
introductions which say just enough and no more. Any future literary historian who
counts shelf inches as a measure of importance, will get a very distorted view of the
last half century.
Clarkes entire career as a short story writer is contained within these covers. It
ranges from Travel By Wire which appeared in Amateur Science Fiction Stories in
December 1937, to Improving the Neighbourhood which appeared in Nature in
November 1999 (and the difference between the places of original publication says
much for how far he has come between those two dates). Unlike Dick and Sturgeon,
Clarkes Collected Stories has been put together while he is still very much alive, so
there is always the chance that this volume will, in time, prove not to be complete. I
doubt it; only six stories cover the 30 years since A Meeting With Medusa, and with
the exception of a collaboration with Stephen Baxter (The Wire Continuum, 1997,
credited as a collaboration only in the contents list, not in the heading to the story
itself) these are inconsequential pieces.
In any career that stretches over more than 60 years there are bound to be duds.
To my mind the early stories and the most recent could, in the main, be trimmed
from this collection without much loss. The most recent are generally the work of
someone going through the motions, someone who has said as much as he has to
say and is here repeating himself. In the earliest he wasnt taking his work seriously
enough. I dont mean that they are comedies, though they often are and Clarkes
attempts at humour are almost invariably the worst things here, but he hadnt
discovered how daring science fiction would allow him to be. These tales do little
more than nibble at the edge of the genre in a very unconvincing manner. If you
were to hold up How We Went To Mars from 1938 or Quarantine from 1977 and
say that these were the work of the most significant writer of science fiction from
the last half of the twentieth century you would be laughed out of court. But
between these two stories, generally between the mid-1940s and the early 1960s,
Clarke was producing story after story that would knock the socks off the
competition, stories which explored everything that science fiction would allow and
came back with a view of the future at the same time convincing and amazing, full
of technical wonders yet always humane.
-- 153 --

You can watch him begin to discover his voice. In a story called The Awakening,
first published in 1942, an all-powerful figure known only by the menacing name
The Master tries to escape death by having his body cryogenically frozen. But future
history forgets him and he lies undisturbed for millennia until finally awakened by
Mans inheritors, the insects. In a story called Nemesis, first published in 1950, a
once-powerful figure known only as The Master escapes the enemies who are closing
in on him by having his body cryogenically frozen. But the world changes and it is
many thousands of years before The Master wakes to find only one other person, a
human of a more gentle age, who reads the Masters thoughts and kills him for them.
Between these two stories, so close together in date and shape, there is a world of
difference. The first, competently written, is simple in form: it is a dramatic way of
presenting Clarkes ideas about our inheritors (a theme he will return to repeatedly
throughout his career), and beyond the threat implied in the name we learn nothing
about The Master. The second, while not much better written (Clarke would never be
what one might call a stylist), is a far more complex work. Again we get the long view
of history, but this time we also get glimpses of what makes The Master and, more
importantly, what makes Trevindor, the future human he encounters. Indeed the
climax of the story becomes not simply the revelation of how the world has changed
during The Masters sleep, but the moral and cultural dilemma that the man from the
past forces upon the man from the future.
This is not to say that Nemesis is a model of characterisation in science fiction,
but it is to say that Clarke is starting, in this story and others around this time, to
recognise that what makes us human is the real engine of his fiction.
One way of illustrating this is to take the standard view of science fiction
expounded by John W. Campbell. The editor of Astounding, who was perhaps the
most powerful and influential figure in the world of science fiction between the late
1930s and the mid-1950s, saw the genre as a means of glorifying man. Time and
again you will find a consistent pattern developing through the stories he published:
whenever man encounters the alien it is man who wins, and even when he is
outgunned, mans intellect provides the ultimate weapon. It is a formula you will find
recurring in the work of the great writers of Campbells stable, Asimov and Heinlein,
Van Vogt and the like; it is a formula that results as often as not in the lone hero,
Heinleins competent man, winning against the odds.
Clarke returns to this scenario frequently, yet subverts it nearly every time. In A
Walk in the Dark (1950), the lone hero is defeated by the alien in the darkness that
surrounds him. In Breaking Strain (1949) one character survives a Cold Equationstype situation by the simple but decidedly unheroic method of murdering his
companion. Hide-and-Seek (1949) looks like the archetypal Campbell story in that a
man alone in a spacesuit on the tiny worldlet of Phobos manages by his own wit to
escape the heavily armed warship that is pursuing him, except that in the end our
sympathies are turned around and we are made to see the story from the perspective
of the spaceship commander who was defeated. (This story was first published in
-- 154 --

Campbells Astounding, though considering that Clarke was held up alongside Asimov
and Heinlein as one of the giants of the genre it is surprising how few of his stories
actually did appear there. Or maybe not that surprising when one considers how
rarely Clarkes stories could be said to follow the Campbellian model.) Most often,
Clarke subverted the Campbellian model by denying the role of the lone, competent
hero; rather, his isolated characters survive, as in Summertime on Icarus (1960) or
Maelstrom II (1962), not through their own intellect but by the skill of a back-up
team. Clarkes most effective heroes are team players, not loners.
There is one other crucial difference between Clarkes characters and those of the
typical sf story of the time: Clarkes characters are generally married, not only that
but the nature of the relationship and regret for what might be lost play a big part in
the development of the character. Much of Maelstrom II, for instance, is taken up
with the supposedly-dying hero thinking of his last message to home and family.
These are not the independent figures who bestride so much mid-century science
fiction.
Moreover, they are mortal figures. Personal and racial deaths occur with
unexpected frequency throughout his work, usually accepted with an equanimity that
is rare in a genre that so rages against the coming of the night that longevity and
immortality are unquestioned facets of our notion of the future. One of the best of
Clarkes later stories, for instance, is Transit of Earth (1971), which offers a situation
ripe for any competent hero to triumph against overwhelming odds: the last survivor
of the first manned expedition to Mars has no way of returning home. In another age,
this would have been a story about how he created a spaceship out of the most
unlikely ingredients found on Mars; but for Clarke it is a story about coming to terms
with death, and in the final paragraphs our hero simply and quietly walks away into
the Martian desert. This story contains a specific reference to Robert Falcon Scotts
Antarctic expedition, and more than once in the brief story introductions there are
references to this schoolboy hero standing, as he does, for honourable failure and
noble self-sacrifice. It is the influence of Scott which runs through so much of
Clarkes work that, despite American settings, American characters, mid-Atlantic
language, marks Clarke out indelibly as a British science fiction writer.
Perhaps even more significant than Transit of Earth is a short story from 1961
called Death and the Senator in which a remote and powerful figure learns humanity
by coming to terms with his own death. Accepting death is the key to knowing who
we are, and through that comes transcendence, as it does, for instance, in 2001: A
Space Odyssey, in which Bowman must die in order to become the Starchild, or in
Childhoods End in which demon-like aliens, representatives of Hell and hence of
death, offer our only way forward into the future. These quasi-religious themes are
represented in what are probably Clarkes two most famous stories, The Star (1955),
in which the Star of Bethlehem turns out to have been a supernova which destroyed
an advanced civilisation, and The Nine Billion Names of God (1953), in which a
computer is used to spell out all the possible names of God and hence, in accordance
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with Buddhist tradition, bring about the end of the world. It is not that faith is the
only way to address such immense issues as the end of humanity Clarke does it
often enough in a matter-of-fact way throughout this volume but that faith and fate
are two of the principal ways of addressing what it is to be human, and Clarke seems
to be drawn repeatedly to the death of humanity as a way of considering what being
human amounts to.
Certainly it is easy to hypothesise that as well as hero-worshipping the noble
sacrifice of Scott and his fellows, Clarke has also been inspired by a profound
opposition to war. There are no stories here of daring exploits in the heat of battle or
of triumph over an evil enemy; in fact the military hardly ever appear in these stories,
and when they do, as for instance in Earthlight (1951), they are seen in opposition
to the life-enhancing, wonder-exploring scientists whose duty is to the future rather
than to a rigidly defined sense of the present. In Second Dawn (1951) the terrible
aftermath of a war is replaced by hope for the future through an unexpected new
technology. Even at the height of the Cold War, Clarke persistently filled his stories
with sympathetic Russian characters (those encountered on the space station in 2001:
A Space Odyssey, for example, or in The Shining Ones (1962)), while aliens are never
invaders but objects of mystery or even of hope. We face more than enough
implacable enemies in this collection: the glaciers advancing on a near-deserted
London in The Forgotten Enemy (1949) or the simple advance of evolution which
will eventually replace humanity as the dominant race on Earth, as we see in
Transience (1949); clearly, we dont need to manufacture enmities among ourselves.
This humane quality is sometimes used facetiously, as in History Lesson (1949) in
which future Venusians learn about the long-extinct races of Earth by careful study
of a surviving strip of film which turns out to bear the legend: A Walt Disney
Production. Nevertheless, this humane quality is one of the defining characteristics of
Clarkes work.
In If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth (1951) we are told of the awe generated by
looking at the Earth from the Moon. In this instance the Earth is a poisoned, burning
land and those who look upon it are the few who survive in exile. Nevertheless, this
view, with its concomitant sense of wonder, keeps reappearing throughout these
stories. Wherever we are in time or space, Clarke is always looking back at the Earth,
always looking back at its inhabitants and what they do to survive. At one point in
this story he says: unless there was a goal, a future towards which it could work, the
Colony would lose the will to live and neither machines nor skill nor science could
save it then. We here on Earth are a Colony as lonely, as desperate, as those few
survivors on the Moon; and Clarke, in these stories, is forever looking to find, in space
and in our humanity, the goal, the future towards which we must work.

-- 156 --

TOUCHING

THE

EARTH

Unless God strikes me down, it will not be easy for anyone to kill me, Lleu reveals
unwittingly to his adulterous wife Blodeuedd. I cannot be killed indoors or out of
doors, on horse or on foot. And so the Mabinogion goes on to reveal that Lleu is killed
by Blodeuedds lover, Goronwy, standing neither on dry land nor in water, but in the
somewhat unlikely position of having one foot on the back of a goat, and one on the
rim of a bathtub.
Without going through such contortions to do so, Robert Holdstock is not about
to lose his power as a writer. For he is like Lleu, drawing his strength from the earth,
and from the rich fertile loam of Celtic mythology. His finest work, specifically
Mythago Wood and Lavondyss, draw their inspiration directly from this source, from
the same wellspring of British legend which inspired, for instance, Ralph Vaughan
Williams, who takes an appropriate bow in Lavondyss. It is hard to know whether it
was wilfulness or uncertainty about his own direction which made Holdstock begin
his career so far from its sources, but even in his earliest, most science-fictional works
it is easy to see these influences drawing him remorselessly back to the earth from
which his fiction flows.
Robert Holdstock belongs to that curious generation of British science fiction
writers (like Garry Kilworth, Ian Watson, Chris Evans) who emerged on the coat tails
of the rush of creative enthusiasm engendered in this country by New Worlds, before
the abrupt dearth of new talent which lasted for most of the 1970s and 1980s. In
consequence, he must have been classed as a new writer for about twice as long as
most other people, a galling prospect. The benefits of such a view are, at best,
ambiguous: it can draw a veil over the weaknesses of early novels, but it can draw
the same veil over the strengths.
In this article I want to look at some, at least, of the themes which provide a
consistent and coherent thread throughout Holdstocks work. I think it is fair to say
that Robert Holdstock did not begin with a flash of brilliance which has gradually
faded; rather his work has shown steady improvement as it has drawn together the
disparate elements which characterised the beginnings of his career. The early books
published under his own name were painstakingly crafted while at the same time he
produced pseudonymous novels such as the Berserker series, as by Chris Carlsen, and
novelisations of films and TV programmes (Legend of the Werewolf, The
Professionals), which have bequeathed a stronger sense of momentum and narrative
purpose to his later books.
His first novel, Eye Among the Blind, was as straightforwardly science-fictional as
anything he has written since. Robert Zeitman (zeit=time, which is interesting; time
-- 157 --

is one of those strange threads which range throughout Holdstocks work) arrives on
Reehdworld to attempt a reconciliation with his ex-wife, and also to warn that an
incurable disease is sweeping through the rest of the known universe and has sent a
horde of refugees in the direction of this planet. Since this is the home of the only
intelligent race that has been discovered thus far, the refugees must be kept away. But
now the Reehd are acting strangely, turning against the human colonists for the first
time in 700 years. It is a potent brew, confused even more by the admixture of other
elements, like the blind man who should have been dead for 700 years, and the
ghostly appearance of semi-mythical figures from the Reehds prehistory.
Certainly in terms of typical science-fictional themes and devices the book has an
abundance, not to say an embarrassment, of riches. In outline it smacks of the most
common of first-novel faults: excess. The usual result is a bitty, unsatisfactory novel
that covers too much too superficially and nothing in depth; in the case of Eye Among
the Blind, however, such an impression would be wide of the mark, for so many of
these themes and ideas, all vital to the development of the plot, actually appear only
peripherally. Zeitman, from whose point of view most of the story is told, is an
observer, someone there when things happen, someone to whom things happen, but
not someone who acts, not an instigator. He happens to be on the spot to witness
historical and evolutionary changes, but he does nothing to bring any of them about.
This, of course, is all well and good: no one individual could have any significant
effect upon evolutionary changes anyway, and I would find it almost as difficult to
believe that someone in Zeitmans position would have any noticeable effect upon the
historical process. Instead. the time-man is a catalyst around whom events with their
origin deep in the past rise to their conclusion.
But against the background of this slightly over-blown science fiction epic there
is a far more domestic and insightful narrative, the story of Zeitmans failure to be
reunited with his ex-wife, and her attempts to become integrated with the Reehd.
Probably one of the most telling scenes in this respect occurs fairly early in Eye
Among the Blind: Zeitman and Kristina meet again after several years. Zeitman wants
them to start again, and to that end is self-pitying, desperate to find any clue that it
might not be over, and bitter when Kristina rejects him. Kristina, on the other hand,
regards him as an irritation, a potentially disruptive influence on the life she has
established for herself, and so is brutally honest and a little intolerant.
Happy, repeated Zeitman. Content? She nodded. When she said no more
Zeitman pressed. Lovers?
Are you really interested?
A little. Tell me to mind my own business if you like.
She looked at him wondering whether he was worthless enough to be told
all about her emotional life of the past few years.
Lovers? Yes several. All early on ... and none of them lived in my heart
beyond two or three days.
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How long did I?

A little longer. Dont become tedious, Robert. Its difficult enough for me to
be here without you building up to an adolescent tantrum.1

It is a vivid, realistic scene; it strikes home because it has a ring of truth to it. It
happens to take place in caves under the human installation on the planet
Reehdworld; but if that is ignored, and also the added complication that Kristinas
current lover isnt human, it could just as well be taking place here and now, in a bar
in London or a house in Melbourne or a flat in Manhattan, or in a novel by any of
our popular mainstream writers.
It is here that the strongest links with the developing interests of Holdstocks work
are to be found. There is the central importance of understanding, both of individuals
and of societies, and an understanding which has to go deep into history, into the
forces which have shaped that which is being understood. Kristina is attempting that
with the Reehd, Zeitman fails that with Kristina; therein lie the seeds of their future
success or failure. The Reehd themselves are the best thing about the book, a vividly
perceived yet never fully comprehensible society whose closeness to nature prefigures
the place that the idea of roots, spiritual and physical, will play in Holdstocks
subsequent fiction. For a start, Reehdworld has a complete ecology, with its own fish
and animals. This is a rarity anyway within sf, but more than that the culture of the
Reehd is shown to be intimately tied up with the world; it is a genuine element within
the ecology rather than any old race grafted onto any old planet for the sake of the
story. Such an organic whole is impressive enough as it is, but Holdstock builds on
this by giving us glimpses of a society that is eminently believable. It is an accessible
society, comprehensible enough without too much difficulty, made the more so by
showing it through the eyes of Kristina Zeitman, who is becoming a Reehd. Yet he
never loses sight of the fact that the Reehd are alien, and so never quite
comprehensible in solely human terms. He has managed the trick of presenting us
with creatures that are satisfyingly alien without being purely figures of mystery. And
in the moment in which a statue of a semi-mythical Pianhmar is unearthed, abiding
symbols of statues, of stone and soil, combine powerfully. And it is this, if anything
which is the strongest link with Holdstocks second novel, Earthwind.
This novel had all the science-fictional paraphernalia which cluttered the first
book, but it also had the first overt showing of the obsessions with myth and ritual
which have become the most significant factors in Holdstocks work. The result was
a complex novel which didnt quite succeed, in retrospect, perhaps because it was the
first attempt to bring all these ideas together. The book contained an
acknowledgement to The Office of Public Works in Dublin for allowing me to see
unpublished photography of certain discoveries from the Boyne Valley excavations at
the Knowth tumulus, and in an interview with Geoff Rippington Holdstock said that
during the writing of Earthwind he took six months off in the middle when I went
to Ireland to research the Megalith Builders culture, neolithic man in Ireland.
-- 159 --

Theyre the people who raised those immense tumuli, and pecked out the most
complex and beautiful patterns on the stone walls of the tombs, and on standing
stones. I got so immersed in that culture, so fascinated by the art, that I took a
sabbatical from the novel just to become a modern again.2 It is clear that this was not
the origin of Holdstocks obsession with the birth of Celtic and pro-Celtic culture, but
we are surely seeing the first inkling that this is his subject, his root matter, the germ
around which his fiction is to take mature form.
Colonists on the planet Aeran have undergone an inexplicable degeneration, and
their culture now resembles a prehistoric Irish society. Archaeologist Elspeth Mueller
is there to study the society by becoming a part of it shades of Kristina Zeitman,
except that Elspeth Mueller is black and has jewels implanted in her breasts while
Peter Ashka leads his expedition by consultation with the I Ching, surface illustrations
that the primitive state to which they are reduced as everything is stripped from
around them is not that far below the surface of the supposedly advanced cultures
they came from. A colleague of Elspeths returned from Aeran insane, and something
about the planet is making Elspeth lose her memory, but she remains because she has
become obsessed with finding the meaning of the rock carvings that are a vital part
of the local culture, particularly the enigmatic Earthwind. Her plans are threatened
by the arrival of Ashka and the crew of the Gilbert Ryle on a mission to implant
monitors in all the Aerani. The Aerani, meanwhile, are guided by their own oracle
which gives absolute predictions; and this says that the monitors will be implanted.
Elspeth therefore finds herself at odds with both groups. At first the conflict is lowkey and she becomes friendly with Ashka who is worried about his loss of rapport
with the I Ching, but when, eventually, he solves the mystery of Aeran, it is already
too late: Elspeth has destroyed the monitors as the only way to end the threat. She
then has to flee with a small group of companions in search of the mysterious
Earthwind while being pursued by Gorstein, the captain of the Gilbert Ryle, who has
already killed Ashka. But Aeran has its revenge; the erosion of their memories drives
the group into barbarism without them ever discovering the Earthwind. This is an
exquisite science-fictional device: on Aeran time does not flow as it does in the rest
of the universe but its behaviour is oscillatory. It fluctuates cyclically about the
normal time flow.3 If the science-fictional elements of Eye Among the Blind are
somewhat conventional, this idea of time flowing not in the customary straight line
but like a wind, gusting and swirling, is wonderfully original. Another of Holdstocks
obsessions has found a fresh expression, but again it is under-developed, as if the
concept has been placed in the novel before it is fully grown. Only when he returns
to this idea in Where Time Winds Blow will he be able to extract from it the
resonances and symbolic strength missing from Earthwind.
Earthwinds exploration of the cultural and ritualistic ingredients which go into
shaping a man was fascinating but never more than superficial. As the ideas were
absorbed more fully they became better integrated into his later stories and novels,
especially in stories such as Earth and Stone, which grew out of the same trip to
-- 160 --

Ireland and provide, the best pointer into the fertile jungle of Mythago Wood, but in
Earthwind there was little sense that what shapes the society is actually a deep-rooted
part of people.
This clash of subject matter seemed to have had its effect, because in his next two
books Holdstock neatly divided the twin obsessions of Earthwind and treated both at
more considered length. At the heart of Necromancer, therefore, are the stones and
symbols which graced Earthwind without ever achieving the sharpness of focus they
demanded, while Where Time Winds Blow provides his obsession with time and the
concept of its progression being oscillatory with the flowering it demanded.
Necromancer was packaged as a straightforward horror novel, and very good of
its sort it is too, a gripping, well-paced narrative dripping with the usual effluvia of
ancient priests and malevolent forces, blood and violence and gore. But Holdstock has
brought this to the service of an idea which obviously ties in with the power of ritual
and roots in Earthwind. Here the centrepiece is an ancient standing stone carved with
ritual images from a pre-Christian era which has, over the centuries, become the font
of the Catholic church. Little is made of ritual Catholicism which is disappointing
considering that it might have provided a counterpoint to the older rituals and so
illuminated the sense of the continuance of what is fed by these ancient roots into
modern awareness but if Holdstock misses that one trick, he misses no other for the
book is a brash, confident work which for the first time shows signs that the pithy
action-narratives of his pseudonymous work have fed his other writings.
Where Holdstock departs from clich is in his characterisation of the people who
become involved with the stone. They are, to put it bluntly, the best realised, most
rounded characters he had created to that point. June Hunter, who believes that the
soul of her retarded son is trapped in the alter, is a marvellous example of an ordinary
person driven by obsession. Holdstock had made use of obsessed characters before,
most notably Elspeth Mueller, but this was the first time that the obsession seemed
authentic. Lee Kline and Francoise Jeury, who investigate and eventually solve the
mystery of the alter, have personality flaws and a history that affects their present,
and a degree of humanity far greater than is usually allotted to such roles. Much the
best character, though, is Junes long-suffering husband, Edward, who obstinately
refuses to accept the fantastical happenings going on all around him, all the time
seeking the simplest, ordinary explanation he can find. He is presented as being
wrong-headed, which he is, in part, but he is also a brilliantly drawn ordinary human
being who has had to cope with a retarded child and an obsessive wife for several
years. Slowly he wins our sympathy as the representative of ourselves, people who
would react in just such a way if someone were to tell us that such outlandish things
were going on in normal, non-fictional life. Holdstock treats even the most
extraordinary events as a good science fiction writer would treat the alien, not
trumpeting the strangeness but accepting that it exists and then treating it as part of
the natural order of things.
At this point one is obliged to ponder the significance of coincidence. The central
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character of Necromancer is June Hunter: around this time Holdstocks pseudonymous

work included the horror-series Night Hunter, as by Robert Faulcon. The central
character of Where Time Winds Blow is Leo Faulcon. All, I am sure, is no more than
coincidence.
What is certainly not coincidence is the way Holdstock returns to his earlier, more
overtly science-fictional style in this new novel, not just in the central play of time,
but in the quest for understanding of an alien, or in this case Manchanged human
society, and the back-to-nature simplicities of that society. Above all, there is the way
that the comforts and carapaces of humanity are stripped away by the natural forces
of the world. In this sense Eye Among the Blind, Earthwind and Where Time Winds
Blow form a neat trilogy of novels which describe anguished loss of humanity upon
alien planets, gripped by an alien past which has generated alien forces. To this extent
they are richly detailed but grim fables which are excellent at creating a sense of the
fully alien but they never surrender themselves wholly to this one impulse, because
the importance of roots and rootlessness also summon up a symbolism of our own
social and cultural origins. When one member of Faulcons team is lost to the time
winds custom demands he sacrifice himself to them also or he will bring bad luck:
thus ritual and superstition are still a part of this supposedly advanced and
technological society. Holdstocks work always has such manifestations of
primitiveness, but the further away from Earth he roams the more tenuous the links
become. The roots are stretched too far, and one feels that the impulses and beliefs
upon which his work feeds are more powerful the closer he is to home.
In Earth and Stone, which takes its protagonist to Ireland in the third millennium
BC and Holdstock directly into the milieu which most fruitfully feeds his imagination,
the hero ends up literally fucking the earth. That is how close Holdstock needs to
come to his wellspring to give his stories their genuine primordial power. Earth and
Stone itself comes from his first short story collection, In the Valley of Statues, and
though the stories range over the years 1974-1981, the same period during which he
was writing the novels discussed above, they reflect perhaps more succinctly the way
his imagination was taking him. All the themes I have been exploring are, of course,
present. Time, in particular, either provides a gateway to the past wherein lies
salvation and creativity, as in Travellers and Earth and Stone, or a gateway to the
future, as in The Graveyard Cross where a space pilot returns to Earth so changed
that he must first be transformed into a cyborg before he can be allowed onto its
surface, and even then finds an environment so hostile that he is, as so many
Holdstock characters are, stripped of his humanity by his alienation. It is easy to see
the direction which Holdstocks imagination takes: as one character laments in the
far-future setting of A Small Event: Weve lost that very valuable sense of the
primitive.4
But if we are to seek direction in this collection then we have to look no further
than the most recent story it contains: Mythago Wood. Here the journey into the
past, the quest for the primitive, the search for archetypes which give shape and
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understanding to who we are, are all made concrete in a story which lays the
groundwork for everything he has done since. Parenthetically it is worth remarking
at this point that the only film novelisation Holdstock has produced under his own
name was The Emerald Forest which has the same creative impetus, sending its
characters back to discover the primordial within the forest.
And then there was Mythago Wood. All of a sudden Holdstock had tapped the
core; here, in the dank woodland where mythagos the strange personifications of
mythic figures roam amid the primal squalor and violence, he had found the ideal
voice for his obsessions with the dank and dark birthplace of our creative and cultural
being. That this book was labelled A fantasy as opposed to his earlier science fiction
is no more than a consequence of the vagaries of the publishing business. This book
is straight in the line of development which leads from Eye Among the Blind; it is just
that the line did not lead forward to some glitzy high-tech future but backwards to
some sort of ur-imagination which prefigures our dreams and our history. This, to
point the way, is not the book of Robin Hood, nor of his precursor Herne the Hunter,
but of the shambling foetid ritualistic beast-man who predates even that myth.
Mankind created our myths, when mankind was but a simple thing living within the
terrifying belly of nature. Myths were our shield and our endeavour in that time, and
the mythagos they created were not the heroic, sanitised Arthur and Tristan but
creatures of the world which gave birth to them. It is the genius of this book, and its
successors, to delve into that wild primitivism of the mind and present it for what it
is. Mythago Wood is no clean and cheerful heroic saga.
In all honesty this act of primitive creation would have been enough; a journey
into the heart of the forest to reveal its splendours and its horrors would have sufficed
to make this a significant book. But Holdstock has by now fucked the earth and let
its roots entangle him. This is a genuine exploration of the mystic imagination, not
just a simple story about it, so the story itself takes on mythic echoes and aspects.
There are, if you look for them, reverberations from all the key British myths within
this tale. Arthur, of course, but also Herne and Lleu and others, but none of them are
presented straightforwardly. Rather they are essences, half-glimpsed, much like the
mythagos themselves. There is the woman Guiwenneth, for instance, who plays the
role of the faithless woman between Steven and his brother Christian. She is
Guinevere obviously, but also an analogue of Blodeuedd with whose story I opened
this article. And there is the shape of the story, and particularly the third part of the
novel which follows Stevens journey into the heart of the wood: a quest, of course,
that most representative of all fantasy forms, but one as archetypal as Cuchulainns
cattle raid.
And we are talking about archetype and creativity, a link made the more explicit
by the sequel, Lavondyss. Here the central character is Tallis (another of Holdstocks
strong female protagonists, like Kristina in Eye Among the Blind and Elspeth in
Earthwind, denying the charges of being male-centred which might have been laid
against Mythago Wood). In her name we not only get echoes of the ancient tale-teller
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Taliesin and of Thomas Tallis (and let us not forget that Vaughan Williams, who
appears here, wrote A Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis), but also of tales;
Holdstock is emphasising the creative nature of myth and its inspirational role in the
creative process long after its ritualistic role is forgotten. It is also significant that in
this work Holdstock has clarified his own vision both of the mythagos and of the
world they inhabit; Talliss own quest into the forest takes a very different route from
Stevens, and arrives at a very different destination (the landscape of myth is vast and
contains many worlds). The wintery land of Lavondyss is the sire of Avalon and
Lyonesse, Tallis takes on the role of Guiwenneth or Blodeuedd, the myths are shapes
into which we must fit ourselves.
There is also Holdstocks obsession with time to be taken into account. It might
seem to have dropped by the wayside in these recent books, but not so; the world of
Ryhope Wood is timeless and all time. He takes us backwards through the
development of mythic archetypes so that successive incarnations become less
defined. And time itself gusts and eddies about the shape of the books. Steven
postdates Tallis, while in the latest incarnation of this vast mystic structure, the
novella The Bone Forest, Steven appears as an eight-year-old.
This novella appears in Holdstocks latest collection The Bone Forest, yet even if
he had not returned again to the possibly endless exploration of the possibilities
generated by the mythago wood, it would be clear that Holdstock has now identified
the wellspring of his creativity and is supping deep from its waters. Thorn is built
around the ancient figure carved into the stonework of a medieval church; in The
Shapechanger there is a mystical communion between a modern boy and Sir Gawain;
The Boy Who Jumped the Rapids opens with that mythic figure, a horn-helmeted
man, and so it goes on. The further he penetrates back into the primitive fancies and
beliefs which shaped our modern understanding of the world, the more he gets in
touch with the earth, the more powerful Robert Holdstocks writing becomes.

-- 164 --

INSIDE CHRISTOPHER EVANS

Ive started writing this several times. I would get a paragraph or two into it, then
wipe the lot. The problem is finding some overarching theme from which to hang
discussion of Christopher Evanss work. Each new direction seemed to require so
many qualifications, so much hedging and doubting and hesitating, that the whole
edifice was clearly doomed to topple over from its own unstable weight. The reason,
I eventually realised as I wiped another paragraph overburdened with exceptions and
parentheses, was that I was not writing about one writer called Christopher Evans, but
two. In fact, there are probably more than two, but this essay is not going to pursue
his pseudonymous work or much in the way of his short fiction, and lets face it, two
is complicated enough already.
The reason this revelation was sufficient to make me slam my head and go Doh!
was because it was blindingly obvious. Its there in the chronology of Evanss work:
three novels clustered together in the first half of the 1980s; three very different
novels clustered together in the middle years of the 1990s. In his second book, The
Insider, Evans imagines the personality of an old writer becoming lodged in the body
of a younger businessman. Its easy to imagine something similar happening to Evans
at some point during the half-decade or more that separated In Limbo from Chimeras.
The earlier books seem cold and alienated, the latter feel warm and communal. The
difference, for me, is the difference between admiring an accomplished writer and
adoring a talented novelist.
Christopher Evanss first novel, Capellas Golden Eyes, came out in 1980. It was,
if you like, the last shout of that generation of British science fiction writers squeezed
between the dying fall of the New Wave and the rebirth of the 1980s. Although never
a part of the British New Wave, they were indelibly affected by its attitudes and
aspirations. Cool psychological investigation outweighed passionate emotional
involvement, deft realism was favoured over dashing impasto. They were pitching
prose that would have graced the mainstream at an audience already hooked on Star
Wars. Capellas Golden Eyes fitted the tenor of the times perfectly. Like the early
novels of Evanss contemporaries, Robert Holdstock (Eye Among the Blind, 1976) and
Garry Kilworth (The Night of Kadar, 1978), it used traditional science-fiction devices,
but with a distanced, uncertain feel as if Evans didnt quite believe in the colourful
world he was creating. It was an overtly literary device; we were, rather too blatantly,
invited to look behind the story at the psychological realism, the relevance to now.
As in much of the British science fiction of the late 1970s (one thinks particularly
of Christopher Priests A Dream of Wessex (1977) or the Dream Archipelago stories),
the setting for Capellas Golden Eyes, Gaia, has a warm, Mediterranean feel to it. It is
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a pleasant and fruitful place to live, but not fruitful enough. The first colonists nearly
dont make it, until the arrival of enigmatic aliens, the Mthrenni, who provide just
what the humans need to survive. Even now, more than a century later, the human
colonists are still largely dependent on Mthrenni supplies. In exchange, the Mthrenni
occupy an island enclave shut off from human eyes, and take selected humans to act
as a sort of interface with the colony. These unfortunates (slaves or servants, their
exact status is unclear) appear to be linked directly to the alien mind, and hence
drained of all human personality.
Thus is set the background for a story of political intrigue in which the Mthrenni
loom less large than one would expect. Our hero, David, is a character who will
become only too familiar in these early novels: someone who does not, perhaps
cannot, fully engage with his society; who drifts rather than pursuing an active
course; who feels himself a victim of unspecified sins; whose alienation does not
provide stimulus enough for him to take significant, effective action. As the novel
opens he is approaching one of the rites of passage in a society that has, in just a
hundred years, developed an extraordinarily complex hierarchical structure. His
passage into the first stage of adulthood (full adulthood will come later, and with it
the acquisition of a surname), takes him from the backwoods community where he
grew up to university in the big city. It also entails leaving behind his (few) friends
(a concomitance of intellect would seem to be loneliness), and soon he will learn that
his tentative girlfriend has been killed. Later still we discover that she has in fact been
taken by the Mthrenni, though this is less important to the development of the plot
than perhaps it should be. At university, David finds himself drawn to the virtually
non-existent discipline of Mthrenni Studies, and this in turn leads him into politics.
Theres a right-wing government which believes in appeasing the aliens, and there is
an underground left-wing opposition. Davids childhood friend turns out to be an
opposition activist who is captured and tortured by the government, but an attempt
to rescue him goes wrong and David and the opposition leader find themselves hiding
out on a remote island for a year. During this period all the real action in the novel
suddenly happens off stage: a new mission from Earth is detected, and the aliens
leave. By the time David is back on the scene theres nothing left but a final twist in
the tale: the newly arriving humans turn out to be Chinese communists, and a new
form of dictatorship is promised.
The setting is beautifully realised, leaving one wishing that it had been the
background for a more carefully structured story. The problem, at least in part, is that
Evans, like other British writers of his generation, could not believe in the aliens he
created other than as a manifestation of our psychoses. It is significant that the
moment contact with Earth is re-established in Capellas Golden Eyes, the aliens
disappear. This is even more pronounced in his second novel, The Insider (1981), in
which the alien is a thinly-developed excuse for the mid-life crisis which is the heart
of this novel. In the Prologue we are introduced to an old and unsuccessful hack
writer, and to the long-cherished opening for a book he had never finished in which
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a boy, orphaned in the Blitz, finds in the ruins of his home An oval ball of pulsating
silver-white light, like a perfectly symmetrical egg larger than the span of his
outstretched arms. The alien in this egg takes over the boy, and we are led to suppose
the passage is autobiographical though it could as well be fiction. At the end of this
brief chapter the writer dies, and the alien passenger flees to the first person he sees,
who happens to be Stephen Marsh, a moderately successful management consultant.
Thus the novel begins.
We are led to believe that before this moment Stephen was happily married,
popular, successful in business, a pleasant convivial character. We see none of this.
We enter Stephen with the alien, and in that moment he becomes the archetypal
Evans hero. His loving relationship with his wife sours, and eventually he moves out
into a small, depressing flat. He can no longer relate to his daughter, so that she
cannot share with him a confidence that will have a major effect upon his life. His
bosss wife dies and his boss effectively retires, leaving Stephen in charge of the
business, yet he stops going in to the office and starts drinking. And through it all he
has fleeting memories of a life as a writer. This could have been effective in its own
right without any need to introduce the symbolic alien, and certainly one feels that
Evans would have been much happier writing this as a straight mainstream novel.
Meanwhile, as a melodramatic underpinning to this psychological investigation,
there is an insidious right-wing takeover of Britain. Stephens daughter is in a lesbian
relationship with the daughter of the leading right-wing demagogue, which may be
why she is attacked and raped. The tragedy brings Stephen and his wife together
again, but just as we get a sense that he may reconnect with his world, he is killed in
what may also be a politically motivated crime (the political dimension of the novel
is too under-developed for this to be absolutely clear). The relentless alienation makes
this a cold, hard book to read, and the half-hearted science fictionality just gets in the
way of the psychological depth it was attempting. It is perhaps best, therefore, to read
this novel as an experimental dry run for the genuine achievement of his third book,
In Limbo (1985).
Although In Limbo is informed with a science fiction sensibility, Evans has
simply dispensed with the SF trappings he clearly could not believe in and instead
has concentrated on the social realism and psychological insight he has been
working towards all along. The result is still a novel to be admired rather than liked,
but it is unquestionably one of his finest achievements. Carpenter is one of a
mismatched bunch of inmates in a strange institution they call Limbo. None of them
knows why they are there, but the implication is that some authoritarian regime has
picked them more or less at random for this curious incarceration. Certainly the
guards seem to treat them with a mixture of bland benevolence and bored sadism.
The rule of the ineffectual governor is easy-going they eat well, they have
apparently unfettered access to newspapers and magazines and television, they have
games but none of them knows where they are or how to get out. Consequently,
they sink into a lethargy interrupted by petty disputes and curiously feeble escape
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attempts. In other words, the whole world has become a metaphor for the alienation
that has characterised Evanss work to date. Yet, even within this bland, blank,
unconnected realm, Carpenter is further detached: he stands back and watches,
rather than initiating or even taking part in the battles and escape attempts of his
fellows.
Having established this heavily symbolic mental prison, Evans then opens up the
story to tell us of Carpenters life in a vividly presented contemporary Britain. It is,
as we might expect, a life of dullness and failure, listless and unengaged. Brought up
in the depressed suburbs of Manchester, Carpenter is unable to approach the girl he
fancies and so watches as his best friend takes her away. That inaction is the key to
his whole character, and the friend (who plays in a series of rock bands that never
quite make it) and the girl reappear throughout the novel as a constant reminder of
Carpenters inability to act upon his life. Rather than follow his friend into the
glamorous if uncertain world of pop music, Carpenter drifts into university in Cardiff
where he also embarks on the first of a series of increasingly weird sexual liaisons.
After university, still without any conscious motivation (he will regularly rush back
to Cardiff to engage in typical student drinking bouts with old friends) he finds
himself in a series of dead-end jobs, each marked by a new and more damaging
sexual encounter. A make-weight office job in his uncles business in Bristol sees
Carpenter involved with a pathological liar and shoplifter; teaching in Blackpool finds
him lodging with a sexually voracious fellow teacher; out of his depth in the
marketing department of a food company he is inextricably involved with a woman
who spins baroque fantasies of suicide attempts and rival lovers who kidnap her. It is
here, as he has to face his inability to cope with the marketing job and with his
increasingly bizarre lover, that Carpenter suddenly finds himself in Limbo. And it is
now, as the story reaches this point, that Carpenter finally bestirs himself: he takes
command of the situation, leads his fellow inmates in a successful break-out. But the
break-out leads not into the real world but into a mental hospital, where Carpenter is
at last showing signs of re-engaging with the world. Unlike Evanss previous novel,
an end to alienation does not lead to the grave.
How to follow this? In Limbo is a controlled, assured work of fiction which gave
every indication that this was where its author wanted to be. There could be little
reason to doubt that it would be followed by further austere psychodramas that would
take its author ever further into the mainstream. Certainly the quality of the prose in
In Limbo suggests that there would be where he belonged. Instead, there was silence
that would not be broken for another seven years, and what emerged from that silence
was a total change of pace and direction. Instead of heading off further into the
mainstream, Evans had embraced the fantastic with absolute commitment. Instead of
further chilly, alienated psychological investigations the new book was a
wholeheartedly communal work that celebrated engagement with society. Perhaps
most interesting of all, the new work marked a shift from the male to the female. The
first three novels were unfailingly narrated by male characters, viewed from a male
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perspective; the overwhelming voice in the next three novels, the most common
perspective, is female.
Chimeras (1992) is Evanss shortest book, a sequence of five independent
novelettes which together tell the story of an artist in a colourfully different, vividly
realised world; yet it seems to contain riches beyond anything he had written to date.
This is a world more extraordinary than any he has so far described, yet it is a world
more fully believed in, so that we the readers are confident that its reality continues
around the corner from those bits of action we happen to glimpse. How significant it
is that four of the five novelettes have women as their viewpoint characters is hard
to tell, but certainly the cycle of birth and love and death is here presented as
something to be embraced and celebrated, not to be feared and shunned as in the
earlier books.
Vendavo is the greatest of all creators of chimeras. From thin air he plucks elusive
particles which build into moving figures, figures that for a while seem to have the
breath of life until, at some indefinable point in the future, they freeze into eternal
statues (an elegant metaphor for writing). We witness his rise to fame, and the way he
has to deal with the various social, moral and political issues concomitant on his art.
It is an hierarchical society, but one which hides immense social discontents, and as a
great artist arisen from poverty he finds himself taken up by the aristocracy just as the
discontent boils over into open revolt, and then, having nimbly avoided a potentially
fatal situation, he must still make a place for himself in a new society where his art is
less readily accepted. This political background is, in broad outline, not too dissimilar
from that evident in all of Evanss books, but here it is more subtly portrayed and yet
more intricately entwined in the plot than in any of his previous novels.
But the real triumph of this book is that we are never told the story in a
straightforward manner; rather, we always glimpse Vendavos story tangentially in
the stories of other people around him: the old woman who discovered him and
prostituted herself to nurture his talent; his wife, from a poor background, who is
overawed by the aristocratic circles in which he moves and who finds herself
increasingly ignored as he beds other women and concentrates on his art; his brother,
a priest who is involved in the revolution and who tries to warn him of the danger
he runs; his assistant, trying to hold things together while Vendavo ignores official
delegations; the wife of his best student trying to understand why her husband has
assassinated Vendavo. The effect of all this is a kaleidoscopic vision of both the world
and the man. Vendavo emerges from all this as arrogant, opinionated, self-centred, a
man whose great redeeming feature is his artistic talent but who, in every other
respect, comes across as an unpleasant person to know. In fact, Vendavo is not unlike
the heroes of Evanss earlier novels, except for one important difference: he is at the
centre of a web of relationships, a man touched by humanity who cannot help but
touch humanity back.
Chimeras was a miniature, a sequence of small exquisite glimpses suggesting
something altogether greater and richer. Evanss next novel, Aztec Century (1993),
-- 169 --

had the feel of an epic, and even if he didnt quite manage to pull off the grand scale
he did achieve the sort of sweeping science fiction adventure that seems a world away
from the detailed delicacy of everything he had previously written, little wonder that
it was rewarded with the BSFA Award. Aztec Century is an alternate history, a
subgenre that allows a playful author to have a great deal of fun with small twists in
the familiar course of events, and Evans does play a lot of often subtle games: Archie
Leach as an international cricketer (as opposed to the actor Cary Grant that he
became), the Roberts supermarket chain (the novel was written not long after the fall
of Margaret Thatcher, ne Roberts). But these are small changes compared to the
grand ambition of the novel: Cortez changed sides, and the Aztecs, rather than being
swept from history by a rag-tag army, have now gone on to build the greatest empire
the world has ever known. In fact, they are already, as the novel opens, on the verge
of completing their conquest of the entire world.
Our narrator is Princess Catherine (another female viewpoint character), eldest
daughter of the King of England. The country has been conquered, but she, along with
her sister, her husband, and a few others, is in hiding in a remote Welsh valley.
Another sister is with the still independent Tsar in Russia, so any day they are
expecting rescue; instead it is the Aztecs who arrive. Catherine is captured and taken
back to London, where her brother, with a mental age way below his actual age, is
about to become the puppet king. As with every single one of Evanss books, there is
a concern with despotism, with the loss of power in the face of undemocratic
government, but here, where political issues are actually in the foreground of the
novel, he deals with it more subtly than ever. For here the Aztec ruler of Britain,
Extepan, the heir of the Emperor, is shown to be charming and civilized and if
anything more concerned for the well-being of people under his rule than his captive.
Catherine refuses to be charmed, remains adamant in her opposition to the status quo,
even when her Aztec master proposes marriage. She is, if anything, a female
equivalent of so many of Evanss male characters, at odds with her world, isolated in
a state of her own making; but where the men would have responded by withdrawal
into themselves, Catherine embarks on an energetic round of good works, of direct
engagement with the problems and fears of ordinary people. If there is something
vaguely condescending in all this, it is still the point that for Evans men seem to
represent isolation, women seem to represent community.
The Aztecs, we are told insistently, have converted to Catholicism long since and
abandoned their blood sacrifices. Catherine is wrong-headed to believe otherwise,
listening to false rumour and propaganda; yet she persists in seeing the skull beneath
the smiling mask. For most of the novel she is at war within herself. Personally she
is attracted to Extepan, who does seem a genuinely good man, but to follow her heart
would be, as she sees it, to betray her people. And then, when she follows Extepan to
Russia, where he is leading the conquest, she finds disturbing evidence that maybe
Aztec civilization is only a veneer. Even so, it is only when Catherine finally accepts
Extepans proposal and goes with him to the Aztec capital in Mexico, and there
-- 170 --

discovers that she has been betrayed both personally and politically by her husband
and her sister, that she finally learns the truth behind her fears. In one deeply
disturbing if mercifully brief scene we see exactly how much atavistic cruelty remains
in the Aztec system. If the betrayal at the heart of the novel has its echoes in earlier
novels, so too does the subtle twist with which Evans displays the corruption of
power: the Aztecs are not guilty for colluding in betrayal, but Catherine is guilty for
revealing it. In other words, the wronged person is the one identified as doing wrong.
In a development that neatly brings the story full circle, Catherine is exiled to the
Welsh valley where she began the novel, but in a parallel world, one that may actually
be our own, and one where she continues to wait for the coming of the Aztecs.
Aztec Century is a bravura performance, vivid, broad in sweep, bold in its use of
colour and action, but even so it never quite achieves the epic status it aims for. That
achievement is reserved for Evanss next (and so far last) novel, Mortal Remains
(1995). This truly is epic, both in scope and in effect, a vast yet tightly controlled
narrative that vividly reimagines the most familiar tropes of science fiction, giving
them a renewed vigour. We are given planetary romance, non-human sentience,
communication with the dead, space battles and, inevitably, a form of system-wide
dictatorship. Even in a distant future with humankind evolved beyond our wildest
imaginings, Evanss political unease surfaces. And though the narrative voice is male,
he sees most of the action through the eyes of female characters, and in the end the
boldest action and the greatest challenges are undertaken by his female companion
while he, a typically indecisive Evans male, dithers.
For much of the action, indeed, our hero is inert, a nameless man without a
history, slowly coming to awareness in a featureless room oddly reminiscent of
Limbo. But while he recovers from he knows not what, he dreams, and in his dreams
he sees Marea, a competent young woman on Mars, discover a strange egg near the
ruins of a crashed ship and instinctively hide it from the government forces who are
after it, even though her action costs the lives of her two husbands, the destruction
of her home, and her own imprisonment. He sees Tunde, a well-meaning but doubledealing associate of Marea, receive the egg from her and smuggle it to Venus, where
he sells it to a couple of small-time crooks. He sees a religious leader on Venus,
another strong woman, swindle the crooks out of the egg; he sees the religious
leaders daughter steal the egg in turn and deliver it to the moon of Pluto where she
in turn is murdered before her helpless lovers eyes. As our narrator grows stronger
he learns his name, Nathan, and discovers that he and another revenant, Nina, can
control what happens in these dreams. They also discover that the two of them are
key players in what is effectively a war for the soul of the solar system.
In this future everyone has a controlled lifespan of a hundred years, after which
their personality is uploaded into the Noosphere. The living can, at any time, consult
the dead within the Noosphere, with two people acting as intercessors between the
living and the dead. These two are subject to the same hundred-year lifespan as
everyone else, but the current intercessors have now lived well beyond their allotted
-- 171 --

span and show no signs of willingly surrendering their power. The egg contains their
successors, and it comes as no surprise to discover that these successors are also
Nathan and Nina, their personalities within the Noosphere somehow separated from
their bodies within the egg. As the current intercessors try to destroy the egg, and
foment a system-wide war in order to hold on to their power, Nathan and Nina must
help Tunde rescue Marea from her prison world, while at the same time helping the
daughters lover to protect the egg he now guards, and also helping the religious
leader confront the two demigod-like intercessors. It is a complex, multilayered plot,
made the richer and more demanding by the profusion of neologisms demanded by
this radically different environment, and Evans controls it all with admirable aplomb.
From intricate deceits and duplicities to vast set-piece battles, his characters are for
once not just observing the action but initiating it and taking part in it as well. Each
character has to play her part in driving the plot forward, and it is managed with such
assurance that we, the readers, are convinced at every step that this, and only this, is
the way things have to happen.
After giving the appearance, in his first three novels, of someone nervously shying
away from the implications and necessities of science fiction, someone whose more
comfortable home lay in the mainstream, in these last three novels Evans has
embraced the richness of the genre with growing confidence. By the time of Mortal
Remains it is clear that the vast vistas of the future hold no terrors, and he can
construct intricate and convincing human stories full of psychological insight and
literary finesse against the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring backdrops. Here is
a writer at the height of his powers ready to take the genre by storm, and
Just as there was a seven-year gap between In Limbo and Chimeras, so has there
been a seven-year gap since Mortal Remains. The good news is that Christopher
Evans is writing again, but after the chameleon-like change of colour during the last
break, the tantalising question must be: where will this new work take him?

-- 172 --

THE FURIES
For a writer who was to plough such a notable furrow through British science
fiction, Keith Roberts first novel was a singularly traditional piece of work. By the
time its first instalment appeared in the July 1965 issue of Science Fantasy more than
half a dozen stories had appeared under the names Keith Roberts, Alistair Bevan, and
David Stringer. Other than the three Anita stories with their fey, very British whimsy,
these had hardly created a recognisable voice for the writer, and The Furies slipped
easily into a well-established British form now long past its prime.
Historically, the cosy catastrophe, as Brian Aldiss calls it,1 was the format which
first gave British science fiction its distinctive voice in the post-war years. Since the
rise of pulp sf, the only regular outlet for British writers had been the American
magazines, and these had demanded an American tone from all their contributors.
Following the Second World War, however, British magazines such as New Worlds
began to appear, and leading British writers such as John Wyndham, formerly a
frequent contributor to the American pulps, started to develop a new style to meet the
demands of these new markets.
Wyndham and his fellows turned away from the technology-oriented, outwardturning sf that was, and has remained, most popular across the Atlantic. Instead they
turned inward, narrowed the focus, examined ordinary people in almost archetypally
English settings at a point when something monumental changes their lives forever.
An obvious response to the impact of the war upon decent middle-class English lives
and attitudes, the cosy catastrophe caught an echo of the loss of Empire and postwar austerity. Wyndhams The Day of the Triffids in particular struck exactly the right
chord. Triffid passed smoothly into the language, and the book remains the exemplar
of that whole style which was the staple of British science fiction throughout the
fifties and the first half of the sixties.
Writers such as John Christopher, John Lymington and J.G. Ballard followed in
Wyndhams footsteps, and in the decade and a half after The Day of the Triffids saw
print, the world (usually represented by a small corner of rural England) suffered a
host of natural and man-made disasters. By the early sixties, however, younger writers
were starting to chaff against the mild tone and safe, middle-class attitudes of these
stories. The New Wave was a deliberate reaction against all that the cosy catastrophe
represented. The young Turks who electrified science fiction in this decade wanted the
catastrophe it suited their mournful, romantic, angst-ridden vision but with no
cosiness attached though their rejection of technologically-oriented sf, their inward
turning, and of course their fascination with disaster, all hallmarks of the New Wave,
also demonstrate that this is very much within the same tradition.
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By the time Roberts wrote The Furies in the mid-1960s the New Wave was already
in full flood and the cosy catastrophe had, to all intents and purposes, been swept
away. Which is not to say that The Furies was the last gasp of an already dead
creature, for cosy catastrophe remains a traditional avenue of exploration for British
writers. Authors as diverse as Christopher Priest in Fugue for a Darkening Island, M.
John Harrison in The Committed Men, Richard Cowper in The Twilight of Briareus
and Emma Tennant in The Crack (also published as The Time of the Crack) have all
produced their own variations on the theme, though none have worked as strictly
within the format as Roberts did.
Roberts has acknowledged that The Furies was old fashioned when it was written,
quite deliberately so; it was designed, basically, to get me into print.2 As such it was,
of course, successful, but there was clearly much more to it than that. Aldiss has said
of Wyndham his most famous novels would carry memories of the country, either
wrecked or triumphing,3 and exactly the same could be said of Roberts work. Even
in such a notoriously fickle world as publishing one suspects that by the mid-1960s
there were surer ways of getting into print.4 But in turning to the cosy catastrophe
Roberts was not simply paying homage to a writer who had clearly influenced him,
he had also found the simplest and most direct means of expressing the themes and
obsessions that were to become the most characteristic features of his work: a
passionate ruralism and a horrified fascination with violence which sometimes, as
here, clashed in images of mutilated landscape.
The first by-blow of the format was, of course, that it allowed Roberts to strip the
landscape of its people. The famed pastoralism of his work tends to come out in rural
vistas from which all but a remnant of humanity has been removed, often, as in The
Chalk Giants and Kiteworld, by some catastrophe. In the case of The Furies this might
be considered as a new writer deliberately limiting his cast, though by the time the
action moves to the colony of prisoners Roberts is bold enough to attempt a larger
array of characters. It is more likely, therefore, that in this as in so much else his
fascination with old-fashioned technology, his frequently expressed anti-nuclear
stance Roberts finds in the enduring landscape a representation of values not extant
among the common run of humanity.

The Politics
What might those values be? It is true that Roberts work tends to look back rather
than forward, and his most evocative images and finest works Pavane, The Chalk
Giants, Kiteworld conjure rural or semi-rural societies at a low technological level.
It is easy and at times persuasive to see in such as this, suggestions that Roberts is a
right-wing libertarian, and in recent years that political perspective has gained some
ground. However, I believe that such a view is a limited and misleading approach to
his work. At various times he chafes against both the stultifying bureaucracy of the
left and the social injustices of the right, but running through all his work is a quest
-- 174 --

for individual freedom, coupled with a world-weary resignation towards the fact that
there are always other people around, inevitably hindering any freedom we may
aspire towards. Hence, perhaps, the depopulated landscapes pictured with such
affection throughout his work.
In The Furies we get a picture of rural England that is as unreal as anything turned
out by Hollywood at its most sentimental. The comfortable little cottages, evenings in
the pub, scenes of bucolic peace and plenty represent a concretisation of supposed
middle-class aspirations as much as they provide a contrast with the destruction to
come. And certainly the hero and narrator, Bill Sampson, suits those aspirations
ideally, for when he does come to describe himself it is in purely material terms: Id
got my own house, an XKl50, and a Great Dane, I was fairly comfortably off and I
wasnt quite thirty.' (p.5) It is a description which echoes that of the narrator in
Grinne, and Sampson and Bevan are tied even more closely together by the fact that
Sampson has worked in an advertising agency and is now making his living as a
freelance commercial artist, while Bevan has written a book and works in an
advertising agency. Both descriptions, of course, provide close echoes of Roberts own
life and career, which he was to call upon frequently in establishing characters and
settings during his early years as a writer.
The materialism, the dream of Little England, do support the right-wing view of
his work, but these are situations set up simply to be knocked down. And when the
world crumbles about him, Sampson is not the hero figure confidently and
competently setting it to rights again. Rather, he is that representative of English
ordinariness, the bumbler, sometimes effective, more often just getting by. When he
does finally find himself among a group in the prison camp and later even more
notably in the cave, he does not rise to the position of leader as would have been
expected.
At the beginning of the novel Roberts tries to suggest a universal terror at
increasing nuclear tests: Maybe the fears of terror-stricken worlds spread like ripples
into unguessable continuums, bringing their own retribution. (p.5) But it is an
attempt that doesnt ring true; terror doesnt belong in the safe little world that he
then presents. True he does suggest a concern about nuclear tests, but no more than
people worry about what is going on in the world around them in the normal way of
things. Roberts soon gives up the attempt and presents a view of the world that
chimes in more closely with his view of things: For most of us of course there was
nothing to do; we just sat around like saps and waited for the big bang. (p.13)
This is more typical of Roberts view of the world. The vast majority of us have
no say in what happens; we are not shapers and doers, and those are the people he
habitually writes about; not the figures who make their world, not the heroes, but the
ones who must simply live and make do in a world shaped by others. The powerbrokers appear only occasionally in his work, usually peripherally or, as in Molly
Zero, as a deus ex machina from which his heroine cannot in the end escape. Only in
such rare stories as Weihnachtabend and Corfe Gate do they occupy centre stage,
-- 175 --

and then not really as heroes. He does not accept the status quo, but regards it sadly
and wearily as one of the restrictions to the freedom he espouses. He might accept the
title libertarian, but would deny the charge of right-wing as vehemently as he
would a charge of left-wing. As for his opinion of our political masters:
From shortly after the signing of the first test-ban treaty it had been obvious
that despite the drum-banging of the politicians, the agreement did not mark a
new era in human development. For me the proverbial cloud no bigger than a
mans hand appeared when an American statesman declared that the signing
represented a challenge to the forces of peace. We must keep alert, he said, so
as to be ready to resume testing instantly if and when the enemy broke his
word. Whether Russia actually did explode a thermonuclear device in the
atmosphere is now, of course, of merely academic interest. American experts
claimed to have detected a sharp increase in the world level of radiation; notes
were exchanged between East and West, the United States protesting that the
treaty had been violated, Russia retaliating by claiming the whole thing to be a
Capitalist plot designed to shift the blame for what were in fact Western
experiments. Shortly after that seismographs recorded heavy shocks which
could have been and probably were underground trials in the vicinity of the old
testing ground, Novaya Zemla. America, thoroughly alarmed, warned the
Kremlin that she would not hesitate to continue her own experiments in the
interests of world peace. Great Britain supported her by announcing an
intention to stand firm, though how, and with what, was never made clear.
Russia stayed quiet. Shortly afterwards the West announced the full-scale
resumption of atmospheric testing. The event was efficiently publicised and the
Russians rapidly followed suit by beginning a new series of their own.
It was rather like a drug addiction; after a temporary abstinence both sides
returned to the habit with redoubled vigour. (pp. 13-14)

It is not a particularly original view of the great game that is politics, though it is
worth pointing out that Roberts is cynical and dismissive about all political
complexions. He was picking up the opinions that were widespread at the time,
throughout liberal Europe at least and among a significant body of Americans. The
alarm about nuclear weapons had been a strong undercurrent in Western society since
the end of World War Two, but had grown particularly strong in the days of the
Cuban missile crisis. Given the normal timescale involved in writing and publishing
a first novel it is likely that Roberts began work on The Furies in the immediate
aftermath of that crisis. Certainly it was a fear that found expression in many of the
science fiction books of the time, though Roberts was unusual in not having things
escalate into nuclear war, but rather having the tests themselves the cause of disaster.
Roberts was also unusual in that the nuclear fear continued to form an abiding dread
in his work, occurring again notably in The Chalk Giants and Kiteworld, this last
appearing long after nuclear threat had diminished in the popular demonology, and
-- 176 --

before it rose again in the wake of Chernobyl. Clearly for Roberts nuclear disaster of
whatever kind provides a haunting symbol for the helplessness of the commonality
with whom he so strongly identifies.
As an aside, it is also worth pointing out that Roberts has clearly considered the
consequences of the nuclear threat in a serious and unexaggerated manner. His brief
summary in The Furies of the immediate results of increased nuclear testing provides
an unsettling pre-echo of what did happen after Chernobyl:
At the beginning of the year radiation levels stood fifty percent higher than they
had done in the scare of the late fifties, and the best was still to come. In Great
Britain we saw a boycott of Welsh farm produce, and the Ministry of Health
attempted to calm the populace by making a hasty upward revision of all safety
levels. (p.14)

The Plot
Before going too far in finding arcane political ramifications in the novel, it is
worth looking at what actually happens in The Furies. The act of homage to John
Wyndham is obvious from the very beginning. In The Day of the Triffids one disaster,
near-universal blindness, paves the way for a greater disaster, the domination by
triffids. That basic structure is echoed in The Furies where massive simultaneous
nuclear tests rend the countryside and pave the way for the attack of the Furies.
Theres even an echo in the writing. Wyndham begins his second chapter:
This is a personal record. It involves a great deal that has vanished for ever, but
I cant tell it in any other way than by using the words we used to use for those
vanished things, so they have to stand.5

For Wyndham this uneasiness with the very words he uses is a reflection of the
major changes that have taken place. Roberts doesnt quite manage that subtle
overlaying of language and event, but he does express an uncertainty about
Sampsons skills as a narrator which bears some resemblance to Wyndhams words:
Ive shown that opening to three or four people and so far nobody has liked it.
They say its too fancy and in any case it cant be proved. I know it cant be
proved, and as for being fancy; well, this is my book and I reckon I can start it
any way I want. After all, I was asked to write it; I pointed out at the time I was
a cartoonist not an author, but nobody would listen. (p.7)

Of course, such disingenuous disarming of criticism is also something of a Roberts

hallmark. It occurs again, for instance, in Boat of Fate and The Lordly Ones: he even
applies it to himself, as opposed to a first-person narrator, in his introduction to A
Heron Caught in Weeds.
As to the plot of The Furies, it is a fast-moving adventure with the speed of the
-- 177. --

action distracting attention from any deficiencies in the writing. Even a cursory
reading is enough to show that bursts of frenetic activity occur whenever invention
flags.
After a brief, overblown Prologue, The Word their Word became flesh ... (p.6)
he settles straight into a rural idyll. The calm is barely disturbed by the first reports
of giant wasps, or by the escalation in nuclear weapons testing. But the wasp attacks
become more frequent and more vicious, and Sampson and Jane are soon the object
of attack themselves, our first sight of the Furies:
I got a glimpse of them clearing the hedge on the far side of the road. Six or
eight vast insects, converging on the house. I saw black and yellow armour, the
blur of wings. I slammed the door and something hit it with a crash that nearly
fetched it off its hinges. The wood was stout, it saved our lives. There was
another blow; a panel split and yellow legs came reaching and quivering
through, and black antennae thicker than the base of my thumb. (p.23)

Black and yellow armour, yellow legs reaching and quivering the description
of the Furies is noticeably cool. They are observed calmly, as an enemy, a threat, but
no more than that. Real wasps, real insects of any kind, do not appear in the novel
so we get no chance to see how the characters react to them. Somewhere along the
line one would have expected disgust or horror, it does not come. We do get maggots:
The counter fridges had failed, the meat behind their long glass panels writhed with
maggots. I tried not to look too closely. (p.112) But this sort of reaction is never
generated by the Furies. No one shies away from them, they are never described as
writhing, there is no attempt to make our stomachs crawl at the idea of them. Even
when Sampson witnesses them killing the sergeant the tone is detached.
There seemed no appreciable time-lag between my catching sight of the black
and yellow mask peering down and Ted grovelling at my feet with the thing
clipping away at his neck. (p.65)

The human is a sad figure grovelling on the ground, but the thing on his back is
simply an enemy, hardly different from a human enemy in time of war. Even the way
the Furies are apostrophised as the things or the brutes is no more charged than the
sort of term we would apply to a human opponent.
Alien invaders in the form of giant insects are hardly new one only has to recall
countless science fiction movies of the 1950s and they are almost invariably
associated with horror. Even when the Furies herd humans into camps we are not in
particularly new territory. A few years before, Claude Veillot had his aliens capture
human beings to lay their eggs in them, and the emotional reaction to the beasts is
clearly shown:
They have been compared to praying mantises too often. In fact, when its a
question of that praying mantis that has such an effect on us, standing upright
-- 178 --

on a twig, with its globular eyes and its armoured claws, we always have the
recourse of crushing it with a blow, at the cost of fighting back a spasm of
nausea.6

But there is no such nausea in The Furies. Roberts make no obvious attempt to
suggest sickening fear, disgust, horror, or even the sheer otherness of alien invaders.
Only Pete displays any emotional reaction to the Furies, when she captures a Queen
and torments it: Youre a colny. All on your own. Whole colny of big hairy black
and yellow bloody bastard wasps, (p.159) but this is a prelude to the key revelation
of her character, which we will come to later, and her identification of the Furies as
some messenger of fate.
This detached tone, the sense of a cool observer recording without emotion, is
applied to things other than the Furies, of course.
There were more corpses, I walked over and stood looking down at one. Oddly
enough I felt no anger or disgust, only a sort of numbness. I just wanted to see
everything, take it all in. (pp. 42-3)

This compares with the fascination with which Roberts has just described one
body: his face, staring horrified over a dark red bib. (p.43) Roberts rarely displays
anger or disgust at violence, but instead a keen, precise interest in its effects. As can
be seen in Brother John, he is not so much concerned with outright condemnation
of those who commit the violence, as with letting us condemn ourselves. This is
something he emphasises by the way he commits violence upon the things he loves,
especially the landscape, which is often torn apart within his worlds.
It is the tearing apart of the landscape which saves Bill and Jane from the first
attack by the Furies. The earthquake that follows in the wake of the nuclear tests pulls
Bills cottage down around them. Once they escape that, a number of encounters come
in quick succession, first with Lieutenant Connor and then with the sergeant who
accompanies them briefly before he is killed. Yet this section of the novel deals
essentially with Bill and Jane alone, witnessing the ruined landscape, wasp attacks,
and the futility or non-existence of human resistance.
They couldnt wipe us out, beat all our tanks and planes and guns. The human
race had had a million years to find out how to wage total war against anything
including itself, and it certainly hadnt wasted much of that time. (p.72)

These musings while Bill and Jane are trapped in the armoured personnel carrier
are no more than sheer bravado, since this human might never does come into play
against the Furies. Throughout the novel resistance is always fragmented, Roberts is
much more at home dealing with small groups and on a human scale. The big guns
may be contemplated, but no more than that. Considering his feelings about war it
would certainly be uncharacteristic if Roberts allowed his protagonists to be rescued
by superior firepower. So the big guns are left in abeyance, forgotten mostly, perhaps
-- 179 --

destroyed, incapacitated or hampered by the geological changes; or perhaps, as

Roberts goes on to say, Just how much did sheer persistence, and sheer numbers,
count in the push button age? (p.72) Mans developing concentration on mass
destruction is now a fatal weakness: I was pretty sure that for every wasp killed wed
wipe out a hundred humans. (p.72)
This plotless string of incidents and observations changes abruptly when Jane sets
sail for presumed safety on the Isle of Wight. It is as if all Roberts attention had been
focused on the relationship between Bill and Jane, isolating it against a bare
backcloth, with peripheral characters flitting by, never coming into sharp focus. Now,
seemingly all at once, we get a seriously considered picture of everyday life under the
wasps, a more controlled and directed plot line, and, perhaps most significantly, a
sudden influx of new characters.
Bill is captured by the wasps and taken to a community of what, by the end of
the book, will be known as symbos. This episode, in the spartan army barracks, is
strongly reminiscent of the prisoner-of-war movies that were popular at the time,
except for the presence of women among the prisoners; while the subsequent
passages following the escape to the cave have echoes of the resistance movies of the
same vintage. There is the cameraderie in adversity, the bringing together of
characters from across social and geographical divides, the celebration of fellowship
that is clearly important to Roberts though he more usually deals with couples rather
than larger groupings. And it is here that we are introduced to the strongest
characters in the book, Greg who assumes leadership of the group (Bill, the hero, falls
more naturally into a right-hand-man role), and Pete.
At the risk of hammering home too strong a point about Roberts attitude towards
violence, it is worth looking closely at Petes arrival. When she is brought into the
camp her face had been ripped open in a curve from the left corner of her mouth to
the hair. (p.114) They fix her up as best they can with limited facilities and note that
Bill is not the omnicompetent hero; it is Bill who is sent for water, needle and thread,
it is Greg who knows what to do, and does it. The wound is sewn up. Most of us ...
gathered round to watch. I dont think anybody wanted to but there was a sort of
ghastly fascination about it. (p.114) This ghastly fascination is here just a matter to
be noted, but it becomes a persistent element in Roberts perceptions of his characters
and by Brother John has acquired a moral weight of disapproval. Greg winces as he
drives in the needle, Jill passes out, and Bill feels like he would like to but couldnt
quite manage it. (p.114) However fascinating pain may be, it is never glorified, never
diminished, never something that is enjoyed. One page later the inhumanity of the
Furies is vividly contrasted with this when they kill something with their usual
disinterest. (p.114)
Not that the humans are presented in a totally favourable light. They are a mixed
bunch in the camp, with strengths, weaknesses, cowardice and bravery; when they
plan their escape some are browbeaten into joining them, while Pete ruthlessly kills
one man who opposes them. Hiding out in a cave system, they launch a series of
-- 180 --

guerrilla attacks upon the growing townships of the wasps. Although dramatic, these
are actually passed over fairly sketchily. This is something that is to become a familiar
feature of Roberts work: the vigorous action, the bloody conflict, the stirring scene
that other writers would put centre stage, are dealt with hurriedly and often clumsily.
It is the quiet moments between the action that interest Roberts, and though we know
there is violence and death at this time, a far greater proportion of the book, and of
the authors interest, is given over to the developing relationship between Bill and
Pete, and to the explication and explanation of Petes character.
Were it not for the periodic sallies against the wasps, this would be a rural idyll,
but it ends with a savage counterattack by the wasps, in which all but Bill and Pete
lose their lives. At this point the version of the story that appeared in volume form
differs considerably from the original serial publication. In Science Fantasy Bill and
Pete are captured by the wasps and taken to a bizarre confrontation with their Queen.
The wasp quivered. The recorder clicked, the spools started again. Listen carefully,
said the dead voice.7 The odd means of communication via tape recorder is hard to
take seriously, and there is no explanation for why Bill and Pete should be singled out
to hear the Queens story. In revising the story for volume publication Roberts cleared
up these problems by having Bill and Pete captured, instead, by symbos. It is the
symbo leader who tells them that the Furies (or Keepers as they call themselves) are
aliens who built their wasp bodies as the perfect solution for their needs in taking
over Earth. Throughout the book Bill has perceived the Furies as machines They
were machines, programmed to destroy us. They would wait like machines. (p.74)
but this has always seemed like the way one might describe an enemy. Now we see
that Bills descriptions were accurate in a way he couldnt have conceived.
But for the first time we also learn about their shortcomings. Again Roberts has
played fair with us:
After what Id seen it was hard not to credit them with a high degree of
intelligence; it occurred to me they might still be learning about us. I tried to
imagine how their minds were working but it was impossible of course. I knew
very little about insects but I remembered from scraps of reading that their
nervous system was very different from ours. There was a brain of sorts but it
was a minor affair, most of the actions were governed by motor centres and
ganglia scattered about the body. The volume of nerve fibre in those huge
things probably equalled that of a human brain; did that mean they were
potentially as smart as us? (p.61)

Only now, however, are the consequences of this apparent. As Harmon tells them:
It would seem that irrespective of size a worm or a gnat has little chance of
acquiring true intelligence. Too many... ah... inbuilt behaviour traits, the body
form conditions intelligence as the brain dictates the movements of the shell
that houses it. [...] Their wasp-brains defeated them, the ancient skills, the racial
-- 181 --

memories ... they were building their own new minds, had they realised it, as
they formed the exoskeletons. Once trapped inside them, they became wasps.
[...] A superb irony, dont you think? The Keepers could have come as golden
gods, had they chosen; but then of course they would have had the limitations
of gods. Which might or might not have been considerable... (pp. 202-3)

Both in the original version and in the volume version, however, the conclusion
of all this is the same. And it is perhaps the most original idea in the novel, an oblique
commentary on all the group-mind novels that had gone before:
I was wrestling with the huge absurdity of the concept Id been given. I could
see now the fatal drawback of the group mind. If one individual was a genius,
the race became a superspecies. But if one went mad (p.114)

It is only a pity that Roberts did not consider the same point when he was writing
his own group-mind novel, The Inner Wheel. However, in Science Fantasy the Queen
commits suicide; in the novel Harmon tells them that the Furies are dying. In a sense
it is an ending reminiscent of Wells The War of the Worlds. In that novel the invaders
were not defeated by man but, in a sense, by the world they had invaded:
A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines here and there within it, huge
mounds of material and strange shelter-places. And, scattered about it, some in
their overturned war-machines, some in the now rigid Handling Machines, and
a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in a row, were the Martians dead!
slain by the putrefactive and disease bacteria against which their systems were
unprepared.8

In The Furies, the invaders are similarly defeated not by man, but by another,
previously unconsidered enemy: their own nature. Wells suggested to use a term
that he wouldnt recognise that the biosphere was a victor. But for Roberts, despite
his love of landscape, it is not the world that wins: the world indeed is careless of
man and can turn against him, as we see in the earthquakes. The Furies lose because
they are a group mind, they have sacrificed their individualism, and time and again
in the works of Keith Roberts we see a celebration of the individual. I have written
before that I find this ending contrived, but on consideration it is clear that it fits his
view of things perfectly.9

The Characters
To Roberts the individual holds sway in all things, and throughout his work he
celebrates not necessarily the power but the rights of individuals to shape their lives
to their own whims. The Furies is far and away the crudest expression of this, though
it is far from being as straight-forward as freethinking humans versus regimented
aliens. Regimented humans, in the shape of the army, are similarly dismissed. The
-- 182 --

military appear at the beginning of the book, typified by Lieutenant Connor whose
manner of speech is clipped and whose actions are circumscribed, so that he is more
concerned with breaking old rules than he is with adapting to the changed
circumstances:
Weve broken enough Queens Regs as it is. Stocked up with grub at a little
village shop this morning. Nothing to stop us but God knows it was still looting.
(p.38)

This should, of course, be compared with the comment by Mrs Stilwell: Went
down to the shop yesterday, wasnt nobody there. Couldve helped meself for all it
mattered. (p.85) Again, in The Lordly Ones, a similar scene is used to encapsulate the
collapse of society, though the fact that Mrs Stilwell, by implication, does not help
herself; and the narrator in The Lordly Ones leaves money on the till of the deserted
supermarket, manages to place the looting Lieutenant Connor in a somewhat
disreputable moral position.
It is the military as well as the politicians, after all, who have caused the seismic
disturbances with their nuclear tests, and Roberts dislike of the breed is clear. After
their brief, futile appearance on the scene they disappear. They have no role to play
in the battle against the Furies, and it is only when the fighting is all over that they
reappear in the final pages of the novel. And the society that is established in the
wake of the Furies is an agrarian one in which the military seem to play no part
except, possibly, as a police force.
Still, Connors clichd manner of speech is not just satire, it is symptomatic of
Roberts poor command of character, at least this early in his career. We have already
seen how the first part of the book really presents only two characters, Bill and Jane,
centre stage. Once Jane leaves the book many more characters are introduced at
Swyreford camp, but most of them are only roughly characterised, distinguished by
broad vocal mannerisms. North Country Len Dilks, for instance: I drove t truck,
(p.104) or stuttering Owen Jones: B-bloody state to find a place, he said in a
singsong voice. Feed em for a week see, with a bit o c-craft an guile. (p.109) In
fact, only four characters occupy enough of the book to acquire any real depth. Bill
the narrator, of course, though he is so much the detached observer that, beyond the
initial account of his material possessions, we learn little of him; Jane, Greg and
Pete.
Greg is the man of action, the charismatic born leader who instigates their escape
from the camp, and their resistance war against the Furies. It is interesting that Bill,
as near as we have to the voice of Roberts, likes the man but does not share his
commitment to the guerrilla war. In fact Bill would have left on several occasions to
go in search of Jane if not held by a sense of responsibility to Pete. But Greg is no
conventional hero, as he says at one point: Anyway, what the hell does it matter?
Weve all got a death wish. Else why are we here ...? (p.168) He fights because, unlike
Bill, he has nowhere else to go and he sees no alternative. Also, as we will see shortly,
-- 183 --

he is driven by a vision of England and it is this, we can readily assume, that draws
Bill and Roberts to him.
Jane is the archetypal Roberts heroine:
She was tall, she might have been fifteen or sixteen. It was hard to tell. She was
neatly dressed in blue jeans and a check shirt; her face was round and rather
serious with a straight, stubborn little nose and wide-spaced, candid blue eyes.
She had a superb mane of dark hair, sleek and well brushed, caught up behind
her ears with a crisp white ribbon. (p.15)

Though any suggestion of youthful innocence is quickly undermined by an added

sophistication: I gave her a light. She blew smoke; then she leaned her head back
against the wall and closed her eyes. (p.30) Quite frankly, Jane is a nymphet, young,
dark and sexy, and her type is to crop up again and again in Roberts work. She is
the antecedent of the multi-girl, of Molly Zero and Kaeti; yet it is upon Pete that
Roberts has lavished the most care.
Most of the characters do tend to be stereotypes, or names filling predetermined
roles without much effort to add flesh to their bones. But Pete is different, and her
psychology, though painted with rather broad strokes, has a vital role in the plot. In
appearance she is another familiar girl/woman: a slim blonde in scruffy blue jeans
and check shirt, (p.113) which strangely echoes the description of Jane a hundred
pages earlier. Whereas Jane is feminine and erotic, Pete is a tomboy and blatant in
her sexuality, but with a darkness and bitterness in her nature that is to spur the
guerillas on to their foolhardy attacks. Bills exploration of; and eventual
understanding of, her character runs as a counterpoint to his discoveries about the
wasps.
I was a whore, Bill. Common muckin prostitute. Best ride in town... (p.161) she
reveals at last, and her bitterness, her suicidal death wish, is driven by this. She alone
of her family survived an attack by the Furies, but she was the one who least deserved
to survive:
She said: I were the old black sheep. Thats the laugh. I were the one that wadnt
no good. Dad used to tell me. Never come to no good you wont, my gal, that
were what he used to say. Never come to no good ... But when they come, they
took him orf instead. Him and Mum and the kids. Thats the joke, they left me
... (p.161)

As Greg says of her a little later:

Pete has a psychosis this wide. He held up his hands. Then he opened his eyes,
looked at me quizzically. Pete thinks she helped bring the Furies. She thinks
they are Furies. Come to harass mankind for the sins of the damned. She sets
herself among the damned ... (p.168)

And when she finally learns of the end of the wasps, Pete is morose. She is driven
-- 184 --

by guilt, or, as Bill puts it: You were sorry for yourself. Before the wasps ever came.
You were sorry for what youd turned into, you were sorry for what youd done.
(p.209) Its a simplistic analysis, but it is a clear first step towards the strong, welldefined female characters that are to become a significant feature in Roberts work.
And even here he treats his women with greater interest than his other characters, and
makes a big thing of not judging them by any male morality:
Im not confessin, [Pete] said. Nothin to confess. She paused. I saw a film
once on the Box. They were talkin to these kids, you know, tarts. Askin em all
about it, why they was on the streets, that sort o thing. They couldnt none of
em say. It were just the way they lived, that were all.
Do you know why you did it?
Yeah, she said. I know. She spoke carefully, squeezing the words out as if
each one was a little pain. I done it cause I liked it, she said. (p.208)

It is exactly the same realisation that Brother John will come to, the recognition
of pleasure taken in something that, objectively, should cause repugnance. Again,
talking about her first sexual experience, Bill asks:
But it wasnt all right.
She looked derisive. What? she said. First time? It never is mate. Only in the
story books. (p.208)

Typically, a Roberts heroine is derisive of a mans casual ignorance of the way

women work, as can be seen with Molly Zero, for instance, when she talks about her
period.

The Landscape
Despite all this the most important character, as in nearly everything by Roberts,
is the landscape. Greg puts it into words, after the destruction of the Chill Leer
community, as they huddle in the darkness deep underground:
What mattered to me was that this was England, this was happening in
England. Maybe there wasnt much of it left to be proud of. Not so many green
fields to babble over ... Wed developed it, raped it, built it damn near out of
existence. But it was still our own place, it was all we had ...
I used to have a vision of the whole country covered with nests. From
Scotland across the Pennines, across Wales and the Midlands, through the
south, through Dorset and Somerset right to the sea. Just nests, a porridge of
them, bellowing and booming everywhere, the black and yellow of the wasps.
Not a land any more, a scrap tip. A slum. A nursery for the horny bastards to
grow fat in. That could still happen and that was what I wanted to stop. It was
just emotion, I was trying to keep a bit of the old country clean, that was all ...
-- 185 --

Pete said with surprising gentleness, Did you ever ask anybody, Greg, why
they was keepin on? They might have told you just the same. You dint have
to twist no arms, they knew what they was doing ... (p.182)

Again and again, as a running theme throughout everything Roberts has written,
we see the same thing: an almost mystical association with the land, the one
permanent thing that remains no matter how much else might change. The novel
opens in rural Wiltshire, with Bill having escaped the city. It ends in the Mendips:
Were still fighting to re-establish ourselves, our towns are small and the roads
between them bad, we barricade our houses after dark. We dont know yet what
form our New World is going to take; but we know whatever we build from the
wreckage of a culture, in some way its got to be better. (p.220)

He spells it out more plainly here than he ever will again, but it is obvious that
this depopulated, back-to-the-land world is one that appeals to something deep
within Keith Roberts. The Furies have been just that, not quite as Pete believes them
to be, but nonetheless a judgement upon a world of cities and nuclear weapons. Now
purged, they can live a better life of small communities and self-sufficiency, and
presumably the same low level of alternative technology that will be so lovingly
described in Pavane and Kiteworld. Early in The Furies Roberts says: A Development
affected me like a blowsy London pub, it reminded me of the shortness of life. (p.7)
Perhaps the end of the developments makes life seem longer.
Yet, as the landscape assumes the quality of a character in his work, so it can
suffer violence. Violent images, and particularly a fascination with the violence, are
a persistent element, and as in Brother John it can be used in a self-condemnatory
way; violence to the landscape occurs frequently as a condemnation of mankind as a
whole. Thus, here:
In Britain the Great Glen was convulsed along its entire course from Inverness
to Fort William; Loch Lomond vanished overnight, and most of Herefordshire
became an inland sea.
The Thames Valley flattened into a flood plain; London was drowned. (p.26)

This is, of course, a familiar science-fictional device that would recur, for instance,
in Richard Cowpers The Road to Corlay (1978) and Christopher Priests A Dream of
Wessex (1978). It makes physical the disruption that is at the core of the story, casting
its characters into an alien world and making the cosily familiar into something
disturbing, frightening, catastrophic. Also, in simple plot terms, it sets up the situation
in which Bill and Jane are saved from the first wasp attack, though the extent of the
destruction is out of proportion to such a simple plot requirement. In saving Bill and
Jane, it also makes mankind especially vulnerable to attack, both in preventing the
use of heavy weapons and preventing easy movement, and psychically in taking
away roots and permanence. Greg is fighting for England, but England as they knew
it is no longer there.
-- 186 --

I dont think Id ever realised before what a big place England is. Like the rest
of us Id got used to thinking of it as an overcrowded, house-ridden little
country full of suburbs and traffic jams, with people standing on each others
heads for room. (p.80)

Roberts has not depopulated his world simply to deal with a limited, isolated cast.
He is expressing a revulsion at the way man has treated his environment, and the
worst treatment of all is the use of nuclear weapons that has literally torn the world
apart. Alone and exposed in the night, Bill and Jane still find time to stand and listen
appreciatively to a nightingale nature reclaiming her own and Bill wonders if, in
this battle for existence, humankind is worth a victory. (p.80) As Roberts has said: I
dont see how any sane person can be any other than an environmentalist and a
unilateralist.10 These sentiments clearly underlie The Furies, with the broken Earth in
a way getting its revenge and peace only returning when cities and nuclear weapons
have been wiped away.

-- 187 --

MAPS

LANDSCAPE

OF A

IN THE

CURIOUS SORT:

FICTION

OF

KEITH ROBERTS

The Hill is chalk and flint, the Hill is sure.

Tradition should be made of sterner stuff.1

So Keith Roberts ends his poem Sham Hill. In Robertss novels the weight of the
past is heavy, and is contained within the chalk and flint hills, the very land of
England. In Pavane, Jesse Strange takes Margaret up into the hills where he:
dug a fossil out of the rocks and made her put that to her ear as well; shed
heard the same singing and hed told her that was the noise the years made, all
the millions of them shut inside buzzing to get free. (Pavane, [P] pp.128/129)

The English landscape, buzzing with tradition, is a place that embodies the deeply
conservative (though not necessarily Conservative) tone of Robertss work. Though
practically all of his fiction was set in the future, it evokes the past (Brian Aldiss
coined the term future historic2 to describe this peculiar feel in Robertss stories).
And it is the landscape almost invariably carrying the marks of human history:
standing stones, old houses, rural pubs and, especially, ruined castles which
represents the past made solid. Throughout the stories, the most successful characters
are those who clearly see from whence they come, their awareness of the land, in the
most significant cases their marriage to the land, shapes their beliefs, their morality,
even the stories they enact.
The tradition inherent in the landscape is, of course, English: though Roberts did
very occasionally, venture outside these islands, he did so by my count in no more
than nine short stories out of his 120-plus stories and 10 novels.3 Other than those
few examples, practically everything Roberts ever wrote was set in England, or a very
clearly recognisable avatar of England, such as the Realm in Kiteworld and Drek
Yarman. In particular, in the three books which are central to any appreciation of his
work, the mosaic novels Pavane and The Chalk Giants, and the quasiautobiographical Grinne, it is a very distinct area of southern England, around
Purbeck and Corfe Castle, which takes centre stage. Corfe Castle, which is described
in Pavane as seeming to ride not a hill but a flaw in the timestream, a node of quiet
from which possibilities might spread out limitless as the journeyings of the sun (P
p.214) is thus the perfect place from which to explore the shattered histories of
Robertss most famous novels.
Appropriately, given how landscape plays a sacred role in shaping character
throughout Robertss fiction, these three books evoke an almost mystical connection
with this area. In The Chalk Giants he says: Driving through it was like driving
-- 189 --

through clouds, and the sun on top made it look like fairyland. (The Chalk Giants
[CG] p.15) And when Margaret Strange, in Pavane, considers looking for other gods
she thinks: Perhaps theyre still there in the wind, on the heaths and the old grey
hills. (P p.145) For Roberts, a country is its traditions, its mythology, and there is a
strong link between landscape and mythology. The old myths of Britain arose from
the countryside and are inseparable from it, touching it with magic as they touch it
with the physical signs of burial mounds, chalk figures, stone circles, all the scenic
devices that recur like a Greek chorus throughout Robertss work.
Rafe the Signaller, for instance, will have a direct experience of the old magic still
inherent in the land when he meets a fairy. Fairies are not fey, ethereal, insect-like
beings, the sanitised supernatural creatures of childhood, but a survival of the old
beliefs. They are a survival that in our world endured until the Reformation, which,
Roberts implies, was not just the sequence of religious upheavals initiated by Henry
VIII, but also the loss of old country ways and beliefs which are echoed in the bucolic
whimsy in Robertss sequence of Anita stories. As Rudyard Kipling explained in his
recounting of the Dymchurch Flit in Puck of Pooks Hill:
This Reformatories tarrified the Pharisees same as the reaper goin round a last
stand o wheat tarrifies rabbits. They packed into the Marsh from all parts, and
they says, Fair or foul, we must flit out o this, for Merry Englands done with,
an were reckoned among the images.4

To judge from the number of times Roberts refers to Kipling it is easy to see the
survival of fairies in Pavane as a way of illustrating the nature of the change in
history while also paying homage to Kipling himself.
In another early story also set around this familiar southern England, The Big
Fans, the narrator must also quit the country at the end for Theres no place in it
now for people like me. (The Big Fans p.171) In the light of the mystical union
with the land that is such a part of Robertss fiction, this divorce has a cataclysmic
finality unusual in his work.
But the fairies are not the only way that old beliefs are alive in the land. Even
before Rafe meets the fairy he experiences the antiquity of the land, an antiquity from
which traditions and beliefs must be born.
Their ploughs gnawed the bases of the markers, they broke the megaliths with
water and fire and used the bits for patching dry stone walls; theyd been doing
it for centuries now, and the rings were depleted and showing gaps, but there
were many stones; and the circles remained, and barrows crowning the windy
tops of hills, hows where the old dead lay patient with their broken bones. The
child would climb the mounds, and dream of kings in fur and jewels. (P p.56)

This is the same sense of the life of a people being necessarily and intimately
connected with their land that we get when Marck, in The Chalk Giants, describes his
dream:
-- 190 --

This was my dream, he said. That I was the grain, and earth, and creeping
things upon it. And mist and sky, the stones the Giants placed between the hills.
I was the land, Miri, and the land was me. In the dream I found a woman, who
was also the land; and we made children who would know the land, and live
out golden times. And this too was the dream. That we died, returning to
earth; but we were our children, and their childrens children, and the golden
grain again. It seemed a Mystery, a worthy thing. (CG p.245)

We are told specifically: the king must marry his land. This uniting of person and
landscape is more than simply primitive ritual (and Roberts, I am sure, would have
said there is nothing simple about primitive ritual), it is a fundamental part of
Robertss view of the world. The land is where the past resides, and in the past is
strength and purity while in the future is only mystery and terror5. And when the
marriage fails, it is reflected in the emptiness of the land. As Marck puts it: I rode to
the beach. But it was empty. The hills were empty, and the sea. You emptied them.
(CG p.252)
It is, incidentally, this holy marriage, the unity of people and land throughout the
fiction of Keith Roberts, which illuminates the tragedy that is the end of The Chalk
Giants. The whole book is the fever dream of Stan Potts, a fat, awkward failure
trapped in his attempts to escape the bomb. His visions, inspired, as so much else in
Robertss work, by the paintings of Paul Nash, see the country gradually raise itself
up from the nuclear aftermath to barbarism and the beginnings of a new civilisation.
Each vision, each piece in this mosaic novel, is a tragedy ending in death or apparent
death, an echo of the fate awaiting Potts himself. But the final section, Usk the
Jokeman, ends differently: from out of the blue rides an overking coming to unite
the land under one rule and one religion, which is cognate with Christianity. It looks,
perversely, like a happy ending. It is not: for the religion stems from a martyred man,
not from the land, and the new king is not married to his land; the hills and the sea
will be empty. Ahead lie the same patterns that have led Potts to this impasse in the
first place. Time and again, Roberts tells us that history is cyclic, that we are doomed
to repeat the same mistakes, commit the same horrors.
That the marriage with the land is so important in Robertss iconography is shown
by how frequently it recurs in his work. In Pavane, Lady Eleanor:
felt an odd sympathy with the fabric of the land itself; once she took a flake of
shale and pressed it to her throat and cried, and said that day she was made
right through of stone, dark and stern as the Kimmeridge cliffs and as
indomitable. (P pp.188-9)

Mata, the multi-girl of The Chalk Giants, experiences it during her first, orgasmic
period:
In time the endless, luminous-green vistas, the feathery grass-heads arching
above her, worked in her a curious mood. She seemed poised on the edge of
-- 191 --

some critical experience; almost it was as if some Presence, vast yet nearly
tangible, pervaded the hot, unaware afternoon. (CG p.96)

Grinne also whose name meant the Sun; though in the Munster dialect it
meant grain (Grinne [G] p.60) needed to lie on earth, which is described, as Marck
described it, as a Mystery. (G p.76) Curiously, Matas experience is repeated again in
Grinne, and in much the same language, when Robertss alter ego Alistair Bevan (a
pseudonym Roberts had frequently used early in his career) visits Ireland. On a
similarly hot afternoon, after exploring a ruined castle in the far west of the country
that is described in a way that makes it almost indistinguishable from the ruined Corfe
Castle, Bevan reports (speaking of himself in the third person as he does throughout
this novel):
He knew himself to be at rest; future and past in gentle, perfect balance and
yet his eyes were open. They marked the moving grass, dark waves that ran
across; in time its rustling returned. Yet now there seemed something more; a
Presence, in the brilliant afternoon. As if the stones themselves were focus for
some force. (G p.161)

I note, in passing, that this Irish castle seems to occupy the same node of quiet,
the same flaw in the timestream, that was ascribed to Corfe in Pavane. This sense of
Presence, an immanence or force emerging from the stones of the landscape and the
stones of mans ancient structures, is not just religious imagery, it is vitally important
to any understanding of Robertss characters, especially the women. Over and over
again, people are described in terms of the land and their relationship to it. In his first
novel, The Furies, we learn most about the character of the guerilla leader, Greg, after
the destruction of the Chill Leer community when he addresses the survivors huddling
in the darkness deep underground:
What mattered to me was that this was England, this was happening in England.
Maybe there wasnt much of it left to be proud of. Not so many green fields to
babble over... Wed developed it, raped it, built it damn near out of existence.
But it was still our own place, it was all we had... (The Furies [F] p.182)

People and place are consistently tied together, it is all that either ever has; so that,
for instance, the effect of death upon Eli Strange in Pavane has: ravaged the face but
left it strong, like the side of a quarried hill. (P p.15) Even when characters recognise
themselves, it is as part of the landscape. Monkeys dawning self-awareness in The
Chalk Giants positions him within the scene:
Ahead the road stretched away, its surface cracked and broken, bristling with
weeds. Across it lay the angular shadow of Truck, topped by the small
protuberance that was Monkeys head. Beyond, and far into the distance, the
land seemed to swell, ridge after ridge pausing and gathering itself to swoop
saw-edged to the vagueness of the sea. (CG p.69)
-- 192 --

Nowhere is this identification more clearly visible than in the case of Becky in
The White Boat who dreamed she saw the villagers, her parents, all the people she
knew, melt chaotically into the landscape till the cliffs were bodies and bones and old
beseeching hands, teeth and eyes and crumbling ancient foreheads. (P p.158)
Becky, herself slight and dark, lives in a village blackened by the coal that is in
the rocks they live on. The village is black, the church is black, the people too had
taken the colour of the place: an airborne, invisible smut had changed them all. (P
p.158) Amid all this black, the White Boat itself is not just a vivid contrast, it provides
a moral opposite. Here is freedom as opposed to the repression of her life, it is foreign
to her mundane reality, it is dream to her waking, it is male to her female. When she
swims out to the boat at night there is a sexual charge:
She nuzzled at the water, drowsily; but the first bayonet stab in her lungs
started something that was nearly an orgasm, she shouted and retched and
kicked. (P p.161)

And it is on board the boat that she has her first period. Roberts, with his love of
what he would call the P.H., the Primitive Heroine, the sexual but somehow still
innocent child-woman who received so much attention in his work from Pete in The
Furies to Kaeti, is fond of making the first period a moment of direct connection with
the Mystery. For Mata it is the moment that turns her into the Goddess, the strange,
often malevolent influence which hangs over the three central stories of The Chalk
Giants. For Molly, in Molly Zero, it is the moment she asserts her freedom from all the
restrictions that had been placed upon her. For Becky it is the moment that sows the
seed of her betrayal of the White Boat, when White Boat had been a dream; reality
was killing it. (P p.164) Even so, she springs the trap that has been laid for the boat,
allowing it to escape. This is a rare happy ending in Robertss work: she has not
escaped the blackness of her life, but the whiteness of the dream is somehow preserved.
Becky, incidentally, did exist. In an article in Vector, Roberts explained:
She was a barmaid at a Dorset pub I frequented. She later became what another
friend called the multi-girl of Chalk Giants.6

And with this identification, she is further identified with the land. Of Martine, the
Dorset barmaid in The Chalk Giants who will become, in Pottss turbid imagining,
Mata and Miri, he will say:
Every fact that touched upon the place touched, it seemed, on her, made him feel
fractionally less alone. So, increasingly, she towered in his consciousness; her
face glowed above the hills, her slender hands cupped bays and sea. (CG p.21)

Or as the multi-girl puts it herself when she appears in a vision to Marck:

I am the land and sea, snow on far hills; summer mist, the hot bright grain. I
am the reed-pool woman, sun on green water (CG p.230)
-- 193 --

But if Roberts identifies the land so closely with his characters, if he finds in it a
reflection of the roles they must play (as Marck finds in The Chalk Giants), an echo
of the moral choices they must make (as Becky finds in Pavane), a statement of who
they are (as Grinne finds) and what they stand for (as Greg finds in The Furies), why,
then, does he cause so much damage to the land?
Roberts certainly makes his characters suffer. Death is common and usually cruel,
from the bodily disintegration that Monkey suffers in The Chalk Giants to the long,
drawn-out death of the central character that encompasses the whole of Drek
Yarman. Throughout his work, as John Clute has remarked, a clear hatred of
violence and savagery sometimes emerges uncomfortably in images of pain and
mutilation.7 This horrified fascination with suffering is perhaps best expressed by
Brother John in Pavane. After feverishly drawing the workings of the Inquisition, the
bodies that distended and heaved in ecstasies of pain, he retreats to his Dorset
monastery where, in a fever of his own, he speaks only once: I enjoyed it, Brother,
he whispered. God and the Saints preserve me, I enjoyed my work (P pp.98-99)
And this horrified fascination applies particularly to the landscape, for his beloved
country is repeatedly racked and shattered as cruelly as any of the victims of Brother
Johns Inquisition.
In The Furies, the Great Glen was convulsed along its entire course from
Inverness to Fort William; Loch Lomond vanished overnight, and most of
Herefordshire became an inland sea. (F p.26) In The Chalk Giants, when Martine
heard the bombs, It sounded as if the country was breaking in halves. (CG p.50)
When Monkey, learning to read the maps in his Truck, finds the way blocked by sea
far too soon, His bright new world was shattered. He felt himself losing control. His
hands and limbs, wobbly at the best, refused to obey him. (CG p.73)
This loss of the body as the land is lost gives us a clue as to what is going on here.
Nuclear war is always the most potent horror in Robertss books, from The Furies
written not long after the Cuba Missile Crisis, to Kiteworld and Grinne and Kaeti and
the Shadows when the shadows of the Hiroshima victims reassure Kaeti: You are
not to blame, for us I am, I am, sobbed Kaeti. We all are (Kaeti and the
Shadows, p.40) These last were written long after we might have thought the threat
of the Bomb had been superseded by other equally blood-curdling horrors, but what
the bomb represents is a tearing apart of the land, and since we are so closely
identified with the land it is a tearing apart of us as well. Thus our suffering and the
breaking apart of the familiar landscape which contains our history, our identity, our
original source of belief, is the same thing: Robertss protest against the bomb.
Identifying with the landscape is a sign of wholeness, of intelligence. When
Monkey learns to read maps it is the dawning of a much greater sensibility that will
see him teach himself to read the books he also carries, maps of a curious sort. (CG
pp. 78-79) When he loses his identification with the rural landscape by venturing into
a town one of the black wastelands which even much later we are told cut the sky
like an edge of night (CG p.181) it brings about his own physical disintegration.
-- 194 --

The moral is simple and obvious: in terms of ethics, beliefs, self-identity, the more
closely we identify with the land the better. Roberts rarely makes this explicit. The
closest he comes is probably at the end of Grinne, the novel which comes nearest to
being a spiritual and imaginative autobiography, when the communities that
Grinnes supporters have created bury themselves under the hills and rocks. The
impression is rather that of King Arthur sleeping under the hill. In contrast, at the end
of Pavane, he writes: Feel sorrow for the passing of old things, but cleave to and build
for the new. Do not fall into heresy; do not grieve, for the deaths of stones. (P p.236)
This is a curious sentiment with which to end a book about the way things move in
an endless circle rather than moving on into the future. And Robertss fiction is all
about the deaths of stones, for it is all about the deaths of people.

-- 195 --

IN THE PICKLE JAR: APPLESEED OR MIMESIS

Only their story-nodes remained, fragmentary partials, digital echoes of longdead flesh sapients pacing up and down the prison yards of AI pickle jars.
(Appleseed p.1)

It was John Clutes colleague, Peter Nicholls, who spelt out in the entry on
MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edition,
1995) that Sf lies at the heart of the realist mode (p.770). However, though he
hasnt stated it so baldly, this is a position with which Clute clearly concurs; it lies
unstated behind most of his critical writing. It is a position, therefore, that one would
justifiably expect to find dramatised in Clutes first science fiction novel, Appleseed
(2001), particularly as that novel takes as its basis one of the most central forms of
science fiction: space opera. Certainly those commentators whose laudatory remarks
have been chosen to decorate the cover of the Tor edition of the novel identify it time
and again as space opera: Thomas M. Disch talks of Clute returning SF to its origins
in space opera; Neil Gaiman calls it a compulsively readable space opera; a reviewer
in Locus describes Clute as bursting through the confines of space opera; while
another reviewer, in SF Weekly, says that the book sits at the top of the mountain of
achievement in postmodern space opera. If we take these commentators at their word
(and certainly they should know the genre well enough for us to do so), then in
Appleseed we have a novel that sits at the heart of science fiction, which itself is at
the heart of the realist mode. What a surprise, therefore, to discover that the novel
can be most clearly read and understood as a prime example of the fantastic.
Nicholls backs up his identification of science fiction with realism by claiming:
its whole creative effort is bent on making its imaginary worlds, its imaginary
futures, as real as possible (p.770). But this seems an inadequate account of realism
or mimesis. Tolkien, for example, with his careful creation of myth and geography
and language, was engaged in exactly the same enterprise for his fantastic world.
Indeed, one of the things often said in praise of The Lord of the Rings is how real it
seems; but this sense of the real is not enough to count it realist. Realism, it seems,
involves more than simply making it seem real. Mimesis, with its suggestions of
imitation, implies that we should see the real, the world through which we or our
fellows move every day, reflected in the pages of the fiction. This was the enterprise
that early realist writers such as Balzac and Zola saw themselves as engaged in. If
science fiction is mimetic, then it is in the same way that J.G. Ballard claims that
writing about the future is the best way of writing about the present. Science fiction
may hold a mirror up to our world, but it is at best a distorted mirror, what Farah
Mendlesohn, in a slightly different context, has termed ironic mimesis, just as
-- 197 --

utopian fictions distort the view to show what ought to be or might be, or could be
or should not be.
Peter Ackroyd, in a lecture on The Englishness of English Literature, identifies
realist fiction, as promoted by academic champions such as F.R. Leavis and Raymond
Williams, with what he calls secular Protestantism:
They praised the communication of lived experience, the concrete expression of
moral truths, the subtleties and complexities of the individual consciousness
individuals who were of course necessarily part of a larger moral community.
And they explored these concerns with a vocabulary and emphasis which
effortlessly recalled the values of a Protestant hermeneutics. It is as if they were
looking for confirmation of their erstwhile religious values within a context
other than that of religion. For a certain kind of romantic or melodramatic
vision, for high-spirited heterogeneity, for theatricality, for spectacle, for
pantomimic humour, they had little if any time. (p.335)

Ackroyd does not use the terms, but the communication of lived experience, the
expression of moral truths, the subtleties and complexities of individual
consciousness are all readily identifiable characteristics of what we recognise as
realist, mimetic fiction. The romance, the melodrama, the high spirits, the
heterogeneity, the theatricality, the spectacle, the pantomime are characteristics we
readily identify in non-realist fictions, especially in works of the fantastic. Whats
more, this list reads like a checklist of characteristics in Appleseed; while the last
things that could be said about the novel are that it represents in any way lived
experience, that it is placed within a moral community, and while it is
overwhelmingly a work of hermeneutics its values are not those of traditional
Protestantism.
Above all, what makes Appleseed a part of the fantastic is its concern with Story.
The idea of Story has become a central part in Clutes developing aesthetic of science
fiction; flick through the pages of Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 (2003), for instance,
and you will find the word cropping up time and again. It is so integral a part of the
novel that if the idea of Story were removed from Appleseed there would be nothing
remaining. Story itself does not indelibly mark a work as fantastic, but its use can.
When, for example, Siri Hustvedt talks (in What I Loved, 2003) of letters that had the
uncanny weight of things enchanted by stories that are told and retold and then told
again (p.3) the use of words like uncanny and enchanted gives a sense of the
fantastic, but underneath this she has the realist sense that story is a way through the
mystery of the world. When John Clute speaks of Story, it is the world. There is no
world out there upon which we can temporarily impose the understandable pattern of
story; rather there are stories, any number of them, and the way they overlap and
intersect and feed off each other is all the world can be. This is the basic idiom of at
least one form of the fantastic, and it is the modus vivendi of science fiction, or at
least of the science fiction Clute presents in Appleseed.
-- 198 --

Therefore, in attempting to explore the fantastic as refracted through Appleseed,

I may be drawing attention to its high spirits, its pantomimic qualities, its
hermeneutics, but always these will be addressed through Story, through the various
myths and tales that Clute has embraced and adapted to construct the intricate theatre
of the novel.
One of the myriad ways we use Story is through symbols, representations that tell
us X means more than it says on the surface, that buried below one tale is another
that is richer or more important or possibly truer. Appleseed is a novel replete with
symbols. The very first sentence There had always been something about a planet
of cities that made Freer long for the sky (p.1) tells us more than the simple
statement that we are in the habitual realm of the space opera, a realm that allows us
to move between planets. Our protagonists name, Freer, is emphatically symbolic in
the context of a sentence about craving greater freedom; and the last word is either
a sign of unusual linguistic carelessness on the part of the author or a denial that this
is a mimetic quest. Sky tells us that this is a work written for and about those of us
who inhabit worlds and who look up and out at the sky; it is not a novel realistically
inhabiting the perceptions of a character such as Freer is supposed to be, one who
looks down on planets from the immensity of space, who would not therefore ever
see the sky. There is heavy symbolism also in the use of azulejaria, so carefully
chosen as a representative device that Clute feels the need to explain the word before
the novel even begins and which gives the name of Freers ship, Tile Dance. These
dancing tiles, each one bearing scenes from a story like the vertebrae of a
neverending story, long figurative dramas in azulejaria porcelain (p.87) as well as
containing the appearance of the AIs who people this novel more plentifully than any
humans, suggest the comic strip, the pantomime; not the copying of reality but its
exaggeration, its abstraction, its being made fantastic. So thoroughly are picture and
story identified that characters within the story become pictures: the face of Johnny
Appleseed drawn upon the planet Klavier when seen from the Harpe ship; the press
on Trencher who are referred to as toons (p.6), an abbreviation of cartoon that
became popular through the overtly fantastic film Who Killed Roger Rabbit? Such
creatures are just one variety of the fleshless inhabitants of this world: the Unfleshed
[are] sigilla and eidolons and toons ... freelance lifestory avatars (p.18); in other
words some of the inhabitants of this universe are signs and symbols and images,
they are written, their artificiality emphasised by the fact that they floated
everywhere ... some (being immaterial) by the power of thought (p.18). Clute is brazen
in laying on the unreal, in spelling out that these creatures belong in Story, not in
life; that this whole book is made up of symbols to be read, not realities to be
experienced.
The very language of the book therefore, clotted as it is with Clutes typically
profuse vocabulary, constantly throws us out of the surface story and makes us look
for the threads of other stories that loop and tangle just below the surface. On the
surface this is a trader game adventure filled with hairs-breadth escapes, secret
-- 199 --

identities, larger-than-life villains and epic battles. It is, as space opera so often is, a
grandiose melodrama that mimics not the reality we know but the thrills and spills of
popular fiction. But there is more going on than this would suggest, a notion that
Clute himself persistently nudges us towards. The ship Tile Dance is bigger inside
than out (p.81); lenses, the cure-all for the universal plague, are in a very real sense
... bigger inside than out (p.100); and when Mamselle is identified as the Predecessor
Queen: Within the proscenium arch of her ribs, she was larger than her outside
(p.308). This repeated image might be a knowing reference to Dr Whos TARDIS, or,
as Clute might prefer, to John Crowleys Little, Big, but it is also hammering home the
point that this novel itself is bigger inside, in the reading of its symbols, than it is
outside, on the surface.
The overarching story pattern for the novel is very familiar to anyone who knows
Clutes work on fantasy, for it follows the grammar, as he calls it, of wrongness,
thinning and healing first laid out in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (1997). Wrongness,
the apprehension of some profound change in the essence of things (WRONGNESS,
p.1038), is here represented by plaque. A disease sweeping across the inhabited
universe, plaque is described as a sclerosis, a starvation. It was shutdown (p.50) and
its effect is to seal a world into an unending cramp of darkness (p.53); it is, in other
words, death. Thinning, a reduction of the healthy land to a parody of itself [whose
agent is] ultimately in most cases the Dark Lord (THINNING, p.942), is here seen as
the work of the Harpe, monstrous self-eating beings (their symbol is a form of the
worm ouroburos). The Harpe, eventually identified with God, run immense arks whose
human inhabitants spend the final moments of their lives as living chips in a vast
computer, which means that the Harpe can literally be seen as the Dark Lord, Death.
Healing, what the story of fantasy wishes to tell, is the greening of the waste land
(HEALING, p.458) or, in the context of Appleseed, the quest for the lenses that can
cure the plaque. The lenses, significantly, are to be found on the mysterious planet
Eolhxir: Freer is seeking the elixir that will heal the world.
Having identified how neatly Appleseed fits within the shape of fantasy as laid
out by Clute, it is worth briefly asking whether that necessarily makes the novel
fantasy. The terms coined by Clute serve to provide a critical language for patterns
readily identifiable within works of generic fantasy. They are not defining terms; it is
not necessary for a fantasy to follow this pattern, nor is it sufficient that a work does
follow the pattern for it to be classified as fantasy. Nevertheless, it is interesting that
Clute, who coined the terms and remains their most committed user, should have
employed precisely this pattern in one of the most self-consciously made works of
fiction to have appeared in recent years.
It is also instructive to note how many of the stories used to make the story of
Appleseed are themselves fantastic. Clute is open about his appropriations. No
science fiction novel published at the end of a century of science fiction could stand
alone, and Appleseed is full to the core with borrowings (p.336) he acknowledges,
and it is impossible to read the book without picking up countless resonances. An
-- 200 --

overt mention of Neil Simons The Odd Couple at one point will be followed a few
pages later by a passing reference to Little Nemo in Slumberland. Later still, one of
the faces that appear at Klavier is wreathed in holly, [and] began to laugh. Vast oaten
chins dangled rune-rich beards of tile-bright yew (p.127). Surely this is Charles
Dickenss Ghost of Christmas Present, or perhaps an incarnation of Father Christmas?
And when Freer and Appleseed fall towards Klavier they pass a gondola held up by
a chevron of long-necked birds (p.206) specifically identified as gansas. This is an
overt reference to Francis Godwins ur-science fiction novel, The Man in the Moone
(1638), in which the narrator Gonsales is carried to the moon by a flock of gansas. Of
the stories fundamental to the iconography of the novel, however, one of the most
persistent is The Wizard of Oz. We see this most clearly on Klavier:
Then the toon caduceus in Freers hand took flight spinning like a small
tornado, as though it were mimicking Tile Dance and descended upon the
writhing necklace in the form of a small house made of wood. It landed on the
necklace. From beneath the house protruded a pair of red shoes. (p.226)

The betraying AI Vipassana, in the temporary form of the necklace, here meets the
fate of the Wicked Witch of the West. Clute rubs it in a few pages later when, having
made his speech, Appleseed led the way down the yellow brick road (p.240).
The Wizard of Oz has now achieved the status of a modern myth, a set of images
(owing far more to the Judy Garland film than the original L. Frank Baum novel) that
are called upon consistently by contemporary writers because they can effectively
evoke feelings without the need for too much explanation. But there is no need for
Clute to introduce the small tornado, the wooden house, the red shoe; they are here
not to evoke feeling but to remind us that what is happening here is fiction, that it
belongs within the realm of Story.
But if The Wizard of Oz has become a potent modern myth, an older and far more
potent myth forms a much greater part of Appleseed: the Matter of Britain, the
Arthurian Cycle. There is a hint of this once Freer escapes from Trencher, when he
discovers that Tile Dance also bears the name Ynis Gutrin Glass Island. More
commonly spelt Ynys-witrin, the Isle of Glass is one of the names traditionally
associated with Glastonbury, and is also associated with Avalon, the magic place of
death and eternal rebirth in Arthurian lore. Thereafter, references to Arthur, the
suggestion that Freer is once more playing out one of contemporary fantasys most
important myths of origin, come thick and fast. When we learn of data being washed
in the chalice of the lens (p.101) then the object of this quest becomes a grail. And
in the Predecessor throne room on Klavier a throne in the shape of a rune, and by
the throne a stone, and in the stone a sword (p.130) adds another powerful symbol
from the cycle. Later A mappemonde mask of Vipassanas mien unfolded into the
Matter of Britain (p.137) and Vipassana wore a Sangreal mask (p.138). Mamselles
son takes the name Arturus Quondam Captain Future which, while incorporating a
nod towards the pulp space opera hero Captain Future, is clearly a reference to
-- 201 --

Arthurs supposed grave at Glastonbury. When unearthed by monks in 1190, this

grave was said to bear an inscription to Arturius rex quondam rexque futurus, Arthur
the once and future king. As Freer is borne away by Vipassanas golem an
unidentified voice (the teller of the tale?) says: And ever, says Malory, Sir Lancelot
wept, as he had been a child that had been beaten (p.252). Finally there comes a point
when Appleseed turns his tin hat into a dish and says to Freer: Think of me as Grail,
sonny. Think of yourself as Knight (p.255), a playful misidentification since
Appleseed more nearly fills the role of Merlin than he is the object of the quest (which
is more correctly the lens, already identified as a grail), though it is important that at
this point Freer becomes the knightly FreeLance.
Each major character in Appleseed, therefore Freer, Appleseed, Mamselle,
Vipassana, Tile Dance (which can be said to incorporate the Made Mind, KathKirtt)
is assigned a role within the Arthurian cycle. Sometimes two or more will share the
same role, or one character will at different times take on different roles; but that is
typical of the book. Clute is prolific with his symbols, gleefully making each character
struggle under the weight of a host of different iconic roles as the presiding imagery
of the book varies. Appleseed, for instance, must be that archetypal American icon of
the taming of the frontier, Johnny Appleseed, at the same time as he is Merlin and
the Wizard of Oz. The characters change appearance at will, an easy enough task
given that most if not all of them exist in digital form, and also bear a variety of
names. They are not one, they contain multiples. Freer is familiarly known as Stinky,
but since Clute goes to extraordinary lengths to tell us that humans are smelly, a point
he makes every few pages, this is not a name to distinguish him from everyone else
but rather identifies him as an Everyman.
Of course, if Freer is Everyman, it raises the question of what is man, and the
novel suggests that Clute holds man in as much disdain as the soubriquet Stinky
might imply:
They were behaving as humans always behaved, individual males and females
engaged relentlessly (though always as part of a conversation, via comm net,
with invisible partners) in the unremittingly ingenious gestures of courtship
normally found in any of the rare surviving species where reproduction and
sexual intercourse might occur simultaneously. (p.19)

Note the satirical swipe at our contemporary mobile phone habits even as Clute is
saying how insignificant humans are in the scheme of this universe. Although not
itself a satirical novel, Appleseed uses satire whenever it talks about the behaviour of
human beings. They are smelly, they are shameless, they are driven by irrepressible
sexual urges, they are violent. No single homo sapiens spoke directly to any other ...
It had all worked very well for three thousand years. Homo sapiens now rarely killed
each other in public (p.52). This makes no pretence of being a real portrait of
humanity, we are not meant to see ourselves in what we are shown; it is an
exaggeration, a pantomime, a satire. That our knowing author does not take it
-- 202 --

seriously is made evident throughout the story. For instance, one of the clichd
symbols of sex on pre-liberal television was a train speeding into a tunnel, so when
Freer and Ferocity have sex Clute knowingly places it on an incongruous and oldfashioned train which at one point ... entered yet another tunnel (p.234). This is not
mimetic writing, nor is it meant to be taken seriously by the reader.
What is taken seriously is the world of story, and particularly the story about God.
In a review of Patricia Anthonys novel Gods Fires, Clute has already lamented the
growing importance of God in contemporary science fiction:
God, or golems, or vampires, or AIs, or UFOs, or virtual reality wombs, or the
Big Book of End Times. Any Dad will do. Instead of our visiting ourselves upon
the world, the world has begun to visit itself upon us. (Scores, p.147)

Curiously, just about every one of those avatars of God appears in Appleseed, and
the overwhelming story that draws together all the stories that make up this novel is
about the war against God. Freer is not just a hero freeing the universe from plaque,
he is freeing science fiction from the pernicious influence of God.
If humans do have a positive quality in this universe, it is their deafness to God
... [and their consequent ability] ... to answer back when the time came (p.238). This
is a novel all about answering back to God. God is a presence in the book right from
the moment we are told of the theophrasts who think that plaque is a scar left by the
departure of the gods from the universe [but] The theophrasts are wrong (p.86).
From that moment on it is impossible to deal with the immediate enemy, plaque,
without confronting the ultimate enemy, God, and Clute loads the book up with a
constant stream of religious imagery from the Made Minds who, Christlike, became
mortal, died of progeria, were reborn into the flesh (p.87) to Freer telling Appleseed
It was for this you descended into the flesh (p.312) to keep the issue clearly before
us.
The Harpe is first identified with God when the Insort Geront logo is described as
a fiery three-bodied snake emblematic of the trinitarian God Quorum of Harpe
(p.159) so the ouroburos also becomes the trinity. Nevertheless, although they are
setting out to battle God, it is Freer and his allies who are most identified with
religious iconography. Freer, for instance, is not only a Bit of a Lucifer (p.255)
which, presumably, he has to be if he is battling God but also the saviour of the
universe (p.260). Meanwhile, Mamselle and Artor become the Triple Goddess ... and
the son (p.328). Finally, Freer and Ferocity become Adam and Eve, their sex being
the mechanism that guides them through the Tree of Life that is Klavier (always
presented as a yew tree) and begins the war against God. Perhaps we should notice
how the Harpe is portrayed, as Cronos eating his sons: this may not be the death of
God, but merely the accession of a new generation of godhood.
The world of Story explored by Appleseed is a world of fantastical heroes, a world
of Arthur and of Oz, a world ultimately of gods battling for control of the universe.
It is not our world and makes no pretence to be. It is, perhaps, the world of science
-- 203 --

fiction (as Clutes remark in the review of Patricia Anthonys novel might suggest); in
which case, it is a story about stories about Story. When Vipassana attacks, his scythe
(symbol of time?) cuts through another billion nerve endings come together to tell
the story of another world. The skein of tiles writhed convulsively, crumbling
cartoon-swift into rock dust which was not rock dust but innumerable severed haikus
of memory and holy mime, the infinitely sweet attar of a thousand worlds (p.248)
stressing again that story is central, that all in this universe is pantomime. When Freer
launches his counter-attack it was Time to end the story of Vipassana (p.268). The
book is not about the real world, wherever and whenever that might be, it is about
the stories of the world. When Freer falls towards Trencher, stories unfolded in the
tile facings which lined the shaft (p.25). It is a book that plunders stories for the sake
of story, a book concerned not with the world but with how we imagine the world, a
book in love with the richness of the word, that frees the word to evoke as much and
as big and as strange as it can rather than slaving the word to the duties of what is.
It is a book that celebrates being fantastic, that could not be mimetic.
One final question remains: is Appleseed fantasy or science fiction? But the
question in the end is meaningless. Appleseed uses the language of one to tell the
story of the other; it explores and exploits the imagination in a way whose
melodrama and high spirits, whose hermeneutics and whose theatre could not be
encompassed in a realist mode. It partakes of both fantasy and science fiction, and so
it is both fantasy and science fiction.

-- 204 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

SECRET MAPS
... the generation of writers ... growing up with a television culture, the most
pernicious influence of which is not its inanity or even its visuality but that
visualitys want of metaphor, the niggling literalness of its archetypes. Weve
insisted on writing as though we expect never really to mean anything to anyone
again, as though with an unstated loathing for anyone who would value what
we say. Afraid of seeming sentimental, weve risked no passion; afraid of
seeming pretentious, weve risked no scope. Weve written little books that
masquerade as large ones, literature for the blackboards, appalled by its own
juices, that doesnt deserve to capture the imagination of the public because it
has none of its own to offer in return. (Leap Year [LY] p.43)

This is Steve Ericksons own generation, but his first four books the novels, Days
Between Stations, Rubicon Beach and Tours of the Black Clock, and that strange blend
of fiction and political journalism, Leap Year together represent an imagination
which has transformed the matter of our century with scope and passion.
It is what Erickson has called the nuclear imagination:
People with nuclear imagination not only conceive of the abyss and confront
it, but are liberated by it; everything they do is infused with the blood of an
armageddon with no god, a judgement day in which the guilty and the innocent
are damned with equal cosmic merriment ... In the process they force the crowd
to consider matters as they do, confronted with the truth that every moment is
potentially irrevocable. (LY p.42)

Others might call it postmodernism, that late twentieth-century cultural mode best
identified by the breaking down of boundaries between literary genres, between
fiction and fact, between author, character and reader. In Ericksons writing, barriers
are explicitly broken down, consistently undermining both the topographical and the
temporal landscapes of his work in ways which throw a vivid light upon the nature,
and in particular the identity, of twentieth-century humanity. These figures,
silhouetted against their own startling and distinctive horizons, are always in some
way special. (Days Between Stations [DBS] p.21) But they are also, in some way,
universal, standing proxy for the way our century has been shaped by our actions and
beliefs. As their personal and political morality is reflected in the distorted landscapes
they traverse, so who they are is a product of the way time has been twisted out of
any rational shape.
Ericksons characters are engaged in a constant struggle to understand and come
to terms with their uniqueness. On the one hand, there is the fate which drives them,
-- 207 --

which signifies the extent to which their identity is tied in with their time, so that
often they are shown to be waiting for things to happen rather than precipitating
action. On the other hand, there is the way in which they themselves seem to shape
their own time. Typical is the way Lauren, in Days Between Stations, is hurled into
her own time, when it was not one in the morning, or ten in the morning, or ten in
the evening, or midnight. (DBS p.9) This notion of a private time recurs throughout
Ericksons work.
Maps also figure prominently, culminating in the most important map of all, the
blueprint of the twentieth century which provides the central metaphor in Tours of
the Black Clock. Yet it is not as guides that they fascinate Erickson, but rather as
icons, representations of the real world which are as unreliable as fictions.
Ericksons first novel, Days Between Stations, opens with Lauren, who lived on a
secret street ... the street wasnt on Laurens map. (DBS p.4) This street is Pauline
Boulevard in San Francisco. When Lauren later moves to Los Angeles she lives in an
apartment also on Pauline Boulevard. When she tries to visit her old home in San
Francisco it has disappeared; no one can remember there ever being a Pauline
Boulevard. Like so many of Ericksons characters, Lauren has taken her landscape, her
world, with her. The reality of the past, he suggests, is exactly like memory, able to
dissolve and reform in surreal conjunctions, as if we are not deceived by memory, but
by the reality it purports to represent.
When Laurens husband telephones to say that he must be at the birth of his
mistresss child, even though he couldnt be present at the birth of Laurens son, she
flies to Los Angeles, believing she is going to Kansas, her childhood home (again the
world is inside us, not out there in reality). There she is picked up by an unnamed
man who will later turn out to be Michel. As he drives her up into the hills, It became
darker and, as she had hoped, more foreign, until even the moment was no longer
familiar to her. (DBS p.11)
As our world is defined by who we are, so who we are is defined by our place in
time. That Erickson links time and identity is made explicit at this point when there
is a sudden dislocation in the narrative, the first of the many such dislocations of time
and space which break Days Between Stations into distinct and disordered pieces:
He woke nine years later remembering nothing. Not his name, nor what he was
doing in a room in Paris, nor whatever it was that had occurred before he went
to sleep that blotted out his identity. That was what it was, the obliteration of
self-sense more than of mere memory. (DBS p.16)

Later than what? Who is he? As readers, we do not know. Erickson subjects his
audience to the same dislocations as his characters. This is more than an exercise in
alienation; it is a work of deconstruction and reconstruction. Erickson has broken
down time and in so doing has broken identity. The quest, in this novel and in his
work in general, is to put the two together again. Only when the pieces of personality
-- 208 --

have been picked up and glued into place will time run true. Only when we have made
rational sense of the twentieth century will we make sense of ourselves.
The person waking up with amnesia in a Paris bedroom nine years later is Michel.
His passport identifies him as Adrien, and this is the name he uses as he picks at the
secret of his own identity in France and back in America. Even as he comes to know
himself as Michel he uses the name Adrien when he meets Lauren again. This dual
identity is the first suggestion of the part twins will play throughout the novel, with
Michel himself coming to believe he is one of a pair of twins.
The sense that Ericksons characters live their lives according to a prewritten script
shaped by symbolic linkages is shown in the way Michels mysterious reawakening is
linked with the death of Laurens baby: He closed his eyes at the exact moment that,
thousands of miles away, another opened his to no name and white memory. (DBS
p.28) It is as if time has been deliberately distorted to make one a consequence of the
other. Michel also takes to wearing an eyepatch, which he changes from one eye to
the other, giving him access to differing but equally surreal perspectives on the world:
When the patch covered one eye he saw people all over the lawn: a nude
woman on a huge turtle riding into the swimming pool, and horses on the far
knoll screaming past in a herd. When he changed the patch over to the other
eye no-one was to be seen except the nude woman lying at the bottom of the
pool and the turtle by the side, and a bloodied white horse lying dead beneath
a tree. (DBS p.19)

Only when he encounters Lauren again does this change, for hers is the first face
Ive seen in two years that looks exactly the same from either eye. (DBS p.37)
Michel is seeing a truth, the person fated for him. So it is inevitable when Lauren
discovers Michel watching her during a blackout
a part of the night that had absorbed more light and was therefore exiled by the
rest of the darkness around it, cast into something more forbidden (DBS p.43)

that this should make Lauren invulnerable to mundane clocks. (DBS p.43) As
with the ghostly figure of Hitler who sits in a dark corner observing Jainlights
pornographic fantasies across two time streams in Tours of the Black Clock, identity
springs into focus within private time.
At the same time, we encounter the first of the topographical changes which mark
Ericksons late twentieth century. One night, when a power failure wipes out all light
in Los Angeles, Michel sees the first moonbridges being built. Though they are never
explained or described, the moonbridges are clearly linked with Michels own selfdiscovery: they are a psychological as much as a physical intrusion into the shape of
the world, an Earthbound reflection of the Moon landing. This is why all the bridges
were built in the same direction, because everyone watched the same journey; and
across the city people stepped in time to the slide of the moon across the sky. (DBS
p.26) Far more significant, though, are the changes wrought by nature awry, such as
-- 209 --

the sandstorms which coincide with the first meeting between Michel and Lauren and
which eventually bury the city. These sandstorms echo the subsequent freeze in Paris,
for there were frozen in the gutters people wearing heavy overcoats to protect
themselves from the sand; only their heads pivoted slowly. (DBS p.42)
There is always a specific link between changes in the natural world and in the
psychology of Ericksons characters. For instance, as Lauren lies in hospital and
realises her love for Michel, we are told that a thousand dusks had not been like this:
there she lay carved, gutted and stapled; and yet not quite ever had she felt this
whole, (DBS p.55) and when she leaves hospital with Michel:
She realised she didnt know where she was. Everything was still, as though in
the time she was away from the world, it had slowed considerably. (DBS p.57)

In fact the world is never still for Erickson; in a line ascribed to Einstein, the train
doesnt stop at Oxford, Oxford stops at the train. As ever, changes in the character are
projected upon their world. Topography is distorted because it is perceived to be
distorted; time is slowed because that is how it is perceived. Laurens recognition of
her love for Michel has literally changed the world. In the same way, Michel
demonstrates his love for Lauren by taking off his eyepatch. The distorted visions are
gone. Now he can look squarely at the world. Significantly, he looked much younger
without the patch, but for the eyes that always looked old. (DBS p.59)
To this point, the narrative has told the story of Michel and Lauren, starting apart
and coming together in contemporary America. Now there is another abrupt
dislocation as the focus shifts to Paris at the beginning of the century, and to the story
of Michels grandfather, Adolphe Sarre. Adolphe and his twin were abandoned as
babies by the Pont Neuf in Paris on the last June night of the nineteenth century.
(DBS p.74) The twin is lost, but Adolphe is found and raised by a prostitute, and
spends the first sixteen years of his life in a secret room within the maison prive, the
private brothel, at Number 17, rue de Sacrifice.
Growing up in this room he was left to perceptions and insights that developed
in isolation from the rest of the world ... he learned to peer past everything that
was immediate to and readily grasped by others ... his own comprehension
became circuitous, spiraling, lifted and carried in patterns of its own by hidden
currents, like the light in this room. Absolutely blocked off from any access to
the outside, the room nevertheless had a light that was from no lamp or candle.
(DBS p.80)

Again we can note the uniqueness of the character and the way his thought
patterns are identified with his environment, both as cause and symbol.
Such a mysterious light, which comes from no identifiable source, like the blue
light emanating from a bottle which plays an important part later in the story, is
important in Adolphes realization that everything he saw was a flat surface, like a
screen that in fact dimension was an illusion. (DBS p.81) It is significant as a
-- 210 --

metaphor for the unreliability of objective reality, another instance of the world being
physically changed by ones perceptions of it. Similarly, this notion of peering past
consensus reality finds an echo in the bombs that left the sky in tatters (DBS p.85)
during World War One, and the way D.W. Griffiths movie, The Birth of a Nation,
slashed a white rip across the world to reveal the other world hidden behind. (DBS
p.89) Thus screens that can be torn away, looked behind, shape Adolphes view of the
world, and lead directly to his eventual and very apt career as a film-maker. Adolphe
imagines a separate reality which is an entire realm of blazing sunfire, (DBS p.81)
and our own reality is made up of shadows from this realm cast upon a screen. This
analogy, echoing Platos famous Parable of the Cave, is central to the book, since the
kernel of the story concerns Adolphes efforts to replicate this situation, a determined
effort to create a film which is fully real and which eventually begins to affect the
crumbling consensus reality. Such a breakdown between the two realities is signalled
when Adolphe is temporarily blinded (a noteworthy wound for what it says about
perception) during the First World War and:
realised then that what was behind the screen was no better than what was
before it, and there was no purpose to waiting for the moment when he would
step through, to where he always figured he rightly belonged. (DBS pp. 85-6)

Following the war Adolphe goes into the movie business and finagles himself the
job of directing his own epic, La Mort de Marat. This film is another rip in time. Its
subject is the past, but when he moves his company to a village on the Atlantic coast,
Wyndeaux (whose name is too obviously symbolic to require any discussion), the film
people seemed to the townspeople like foreigners transported from another time,
even the train had a reflective metallic sheen in which were caught images of the
future. (DBS p.99) (One such image of the future is, presumably, the train which will
later carry Michel into Wyndeaux and then into a time loop which gives the novel its
title.)
But then, Wyndeaux itself is a place cut off from time.
If it was true that [the Black Death] halved time itself, slicing away the Middle
Ages from the Modern, then Wyndeaux was left stranded on the other side ...
enveloped in the curtain that world events could never lift. (DBS p.106)

Ericksons work is full of people and places being left stranded on the wrong side
of time. We will encounter the image again, for instance, with Jack Mick Lake in
Rubicon Beach and Banning Jainlight in Tours of the Black Clock.
The story of Adolphe is a shattered reflection of the story of Michel, for where we
have seen Michel come together with Lauren, Adolphe thwarts his own attempts to
come together with his leading lady, Janine. She is the daughter of the whore who
raised him, and though he has loved her since childhood he believes she is his sister.
Nevertheless, he gives her the starring role of Charlotte Corday in his film. In
Wyndeaux, the two visit a caf suffused with blue light which seems to come from all
-- 211 --

the bottles in the place. Adolphe disappears, and an old sailor makes a show of pouring
all the blue light into one bottle and handing it to Janine. Inside the bottle were two
blue eyes. They blinked at her. (DBS p.103) Here, also, Janine sees a young sailor who
is identical to Adolphe the lost twin brother and when she rejoins Adolphe they
briefly consider making Marat into a pirate with an eyepatch such as Michel, another
lost twin, will later wear. Janine drops the bottle into the sea and it drifts away.
Such symbols play an important part in all Ericksons work, often overloading his
fiction so that, on occasion, it can be difficult to interpret what is happening because
of the intricate web of references and symbols which cluster around each significant
event. Yet it is not for what they symbolise that Erickson employs them, so much as
for the simple fact that they are symbols. His shifting landscape of the twentiethcentury mind is signposted by these countless resonances while his plots jerk from
one coincidence to another with the strings often more clearly visible than the puppet.
The point he makes is that everything is interconnected; his characters move within
a network of preordained paths, and it is more important to see that there are
interconnections than it is to see where these interconnections lead. Such is the nature
of the map of the twentieth century which is, explicitly or implicitly, the blueprint for
his fiction.
Thus Ericksons film-maker chooses sets which are not realistic but which rather
match the proportions of the mind ...[because]... a strict reality was binding and, in
a sense, less real than an illusion which communicated more directly to the audiences
emotions. (DBS p.108) Adolphe, we are told no more than a page later, viewed things
from a different place on the abyss, where the view was dimensionally altered and
schematically dialectic. (DBS p.109) We can take this, with little more than a pinch of
salt, as a statement of Ericksons own place within the nuclear imagination.
The heavily-structured plot now has Janine giving birth to Adolphes son,
Jacques, then immediately becoming pregnant again: Co-ordinates of crisis and
conflict crisscrossed the landscape. (DBS p.115) Janine, meanwhile, is being pursued
still by Jean-Thomas, the son of the owner of the maison prive, who tracks her down
to the film set and lays claim to her. Adolphe at first refuses to give her up, but when
money for the film runs out, Adolphe agrees to his offer to buy the woman, only to
discover at the last moment that she is not, as he believed, his sister. This flaw in his
character makes it inevitable, as we subsequently learn, that his obsession with his
loss of Janine prevents him from ever completing the film. I was never worthy of
it, he finally declared. (DBS p.144)
Adolphe now contemplates suicide, once more symbolically presented as a way to
penetrate the screen: Staring at the water he waited for one splash of blinding light
on the surface. At that moment when he saw that light, then he would dive through
once and for all. (DBS p.125) There is then another dislocation in place, time and
character. These sudden shifts are often to an unspecified place where the central
character is referred to only as he or she for several pages, as though Erickson is
stripping them of identity, emphasising their anonymity, showing that even they have
-- 212 --

difficulty grasping who they are. If identity is one of the key themes in Ericksons
work, it is not something that comes as of right to any character.
He saw himself, rather, as destinys outsider, the one destiny had no use for; he
travelled outside the blueprint. (DBS p.164)

Clearly and intentionally disconcerting for the reader, these dislocations serve the
purpose of breaking down the barriers that separate times and places. If the twentieth
century is capable of being represented in a blueprint, then there can be no real divide
between any two moments in its history, or between any two actors within its story.
The nuclear imagination requires that it be encompassed as one whole.
This shift brings us to a boy named Fletcher Grahame in a more or less
contemporary Montreal, who becomes obsessed with a film called The Death of Marat
which is reputed to be the greatest silent picture ever, (DBS p.131) though it was
never released. (It is worth comparing this part of Days Between Stations with William
Boyds near-contemporary novel, The New Confessions. This too uses an obsessionally
unfinished silent movie on an eighteenth-century subject, in this case Rousseau, as a
symbol and a vehicle for the story of the twentieth century.)
Fletcher tracks down Adolphe to the secret room back at 17 rue de Sacrifice.
Although the two theoretically act together to restore the lost film, Adolphe, believing
himself unworthy, is forever finding excuses for never finishing a film which was
always nearly complete. But the film marked Marat. Finis which Fletcher finds in
Adolphes chest is actually Michels student film, featuring Adolphes daughter by
Janine. Just as shifting perceptions change the apparent topography of the world, so
shifting memories the core of personal identity in Ericksons work change the
chronology of the world. The flaw in Adolphes character becomes a flawed memory.
Adolphe mistakes the woman in the film for Janine and comes to believe he met her
again, even though he cannot quite remember the occasion. Adolphe was racked with
the memory he couldnt locate. (DBS p.150) Again, memory has become topography,
and it is deceptive. Ericksons characters are often tortured in this way. Something in
the past, some guilt, shadows them all and so their memories betray them. As they
trace through the distortions of a corrupted history they draw into themselves, guilt
giving rise to avoidance, coolness, lack of daring and drama.
Meanwhile, the landscape is being reshaped, as we have seen already in Los
Angeles. When the old sailor who may be Adolphes twin sails into Paris in October
he finds it in the grip of such cold there are Fires on the street corners, fires on the
bridges, fires in the buildings themselves: Parisians setting their furniture on fire,
diaries and family portraits, stale food, up in smoke. (DBS p.154) Notably, in fighting
the topographical changes wrought by this unnatural cold, the burning of diaries and
family portraits can be seen as the destruction of memories and the past. Under Pont
Neuf, where the babies were abandoned, the sailor known as Bateau Billy finds a
glowing fragment of ice (DBS p.154) which melts to reveal the bottle with the two
blue eyes, which in turn unlodges from the gravity of his deep-gone past a memory.
-- 213 --

(DBS p.155) Lauren happens by and, on the houseboat, dreams of her child, now dead,
as two intense, glistening blue eyes. (DBS p.158) Thus are links constructed across
the years. In a book as loaded with twins and doppelgngers as this, a typical device
in novels of the fantastic as well as in postmodern works, we can now see that Lauren
is an avatar of Janine, even to the hair like a golden fire. We can also see, as we will
in Ericksons other books, that the strongest emotional drives in his work are guilt
and betrayal. In Lauren the two drives are intermingled, with her own guilt at the loss
of her baby and Adolphes guilt at his betrayal of Janine. These emotions are
distanced, giving rise not to heated feeling but rather to avoidance, coolness. And
these emotions are closely associated with the landscape: the spires of the city were
in the shadows of her eyes, and the bridges on the Seine lay on her lips. (DBS p.162)
Erickson often uses emotions as a pivot about which to shift viewpoints. When
he took her, she was never sure whether she was his slave, or in fact he was hers. It
felt like both to him. (DBS p.164) It is as if, in this constant questioning of reality,
emotions are only real if they are shared, as if the sharing is all that breaks the
isolation, the alienation of his characters. And such alienation is reified in the surreal
landscapes within which Ericksons characters move:
Primordial Paris: empty, frozen, infernal, undetermined inhabitants scurrying
through its subterranean passages, the increasingly panicked sounds of more
furniture broken to feed the fires, the crackling of more pages igniting, more
incinerated mementoes. (DBS p.167)

Again there is the recurring image of the destruction of memories.

Just as Ericksons people have to sort out their moral position in order to clarify
their landscape, so they have to sort out their identity be true to themselves, as it
were in order to clarify their time. But everything is mapped in Ericksons work; as
we will see in Tours of the Black Clock there is even a blueprint for the Twentieth
Century. Who we are may be tied to our destiny, as if we are formed by our future
rather than our past, but that future is mapped out as rigidly as the past. The option
available to Ericksons characters, therefore, is to remake history, to devise their own
memories and so rebuild their own identities. Thus Lauren loves Michel
for the fact that something had cut so deeply into him, something had so shaken
his sense of himself, that the self vacated and he created himself anew. (DBS
p.168)

The maps and blueprints which crowd the books can be seen as the plans by which
Ericksons characters might rebuild and rediscover their world and their history. While
Michel asks:
Why spend that much time trying to find the exact geographic and temporal
latitudes and longitudes of the things we remember, when whats urgent about
a memory is its essence? (DBS p.173)
-- 214 --

it is patently not what Erickson himself believes. His books are all quests to
discover the temporal and geographic location of memories, which are the essence of
identity. Lauren and Michel, for instance, are bound together by a shared but
forgotten moment. And it is when his train journey takes Michel to the temporal and
topographic nexus of his memories, Wyndeaux, that it becomes the surreal and
elongated distortion of reality which gives the book its title.
The shattering of chronology affects the character in the books whose identity is
most severely dislocated. He has had temporal fugues which have wiped out
significant portions of his memory. He believes he has twin brothers, Adrien and
Michel, but when, at the end of the novel, he exhumes their coffins they are both
empty. Rather, we discover in a letter from Adolphe which Michel never sees, there
were no twins, just two children, the first of whom died very young, and both were
originally called Adrien. It explains why Michel took the name Adrien, but the
suggestion of a dead child trapped within the mind of the living Adrien/Michel is a
symbol of the fracturing of his identity.
The disjunctive nature of this rail journey is symbolised from the start, when
Michel dreams he hears the voices of his twin brothers from the next carriage as the
train leaves Wyndeaux. A few hours later, in a very hot night, he notices that the train
is pulling out of Wyndeaux station again, and again he sees the twins. Then Michel
finds his cabin is empty of its other passengers (an obvious symbol of alienation) and
it is no longer night but broad daylight, and outside he sees a couple making love and
believes he is witnessing either the conception of the twins or his own conception.
From the next compartment he observes his mother finding the bodies of the twins
and sees a large black rock covering the pit they lay in, a large black rock such as the
one Lauren and Billy have already found in Wyndeaux. It is not difficult to arrive at
an interpretation of these visions: the twins who never existed are the different parts
of Michels own personality, and witnessing the events which bracket their lives is a
way of remaking his life. It is a long, hard process. The train journey takes subjective
decades, and when Michel finally arrives in Venice his hair is white, his eyes are
ancient. Thus, in this one extended sequence we have all the oft-repeated symbols of
this novel brought together: temporal and topographical dislocation, doppelgngers,
alienation, and the shifting connections of identity across the twentieth century.
Topographical change is now growing more extreme, as if to show that we are
coming towards the emotional climax of the book. The Atlantic has withdrawn from
Wyndeaux, the canals of Venice dry up, the Adriatic disappears, the cyclists who
gather in Venice for a race disappear into a fog from which they do not emerge for
days. Feelings and thoughts are explicitly equated with the landscape, so that for
Lauren Everything inside her that she was thinking and feeling ran together like the
corridors of the city. (DBS p.215) When she faces the agony of indecision as she tries
to choose between Michel and her husband, Julian, Lauren glimpses a future with
Michel in the far north where veins of blue light trickled across the dark fjords with
their odd streaks of red cast from no sunlight ... [A place where] ... it was never noon
-- 215 --

or night or dawn. (DBS p.228) This is a private time, but with their renewed sense of
identity it could not be for them. It foreclosed part of his future: for a man without
a past this might be unbearable. (DBS p.229) She chooses Julian.
Michel returns to his mothers home at Wyndeaux where he finds a sailors caf
which gives off a blue glow, and where he exhumes the coffins of his twin brothers
who are named Adrien and Michel. Both coffins are empty. His stutter returns, and
the sea returns, as if both, psychology and landscape, are affected by the discovery
of the twin parts of his identity. Lauren, meanwhile, returns to Kansas and grows old
looking after disturbed children. As the final link with the landscape, a bottle
containing two old blue eyes is found in the Kansas dust many years later.
Steve Ericksons second novel, Rubicon Beach, continues the themes and devices
which we have already considered in Days Between Stations. Here again there are
doppelgngers and dislocations, and from the begining there is an explicit linking of
topography and identity. The narrator, Cale, is released from a prison where it was
the intention of my jailors to jettison my sense of time and place. (Rubicon Beach
[RB] p.9) Once more we can see Erickson stating the familiar importance of time and
place in determining the identity of his characters.
As ever, it is guilt which drives Cale, and which isolates him. He has been released
because, by chance, in the telling of a joke, he has betrayed his colleague. I knew
from there on out everything was going to be a windowless metal truck, wherever I
went and for as long as I lived, (RB p.10) he says, and is later described by the federal
inspector, Wade, as a man who takes his prison with him. (RB p.16) Because the
landscape is so closely associated with character, to be cut off from the world in this
way is to be a non-person. Erickson is, once again, writing about the empty and
featureless night of the soul.
In this novel the landscape is different, right from the start. The political map of
America appears to have changed dramatically, as suggested by talk of the MontanaSaskatchewan annex or the Northwest-Mendocino frontier. Physical changes are
represented above all by the music of Los Angeles, the rhythm which everyone in the
city hums and sings:
The sound was the sea, seeping in under the city and forming subterranean
wells and rivers. The rivers made a sound that came up through the empty
buildings, and the echoes of the buildings made a music that came out into the
streets. (RB p.13)

An image which might otherwise be quite beautiful, a singing city, is thus made
into a symbol of physical and moral desolation. There is a subversive element to
sound, for radios are banned in this Los Angeles, or as Wade puts it, In a town where
music is the topographical map, radios are compasses of anarchy. (RB p.18)
Of course, our physical world is always a way of mapping our mental world. Since
Cale is always out of step with the allegiances of others, it may be that this visionary
-- 216 --

America does not exist, is some sort of mental afterlife; as the detective Wade asks:
can a man hate himself so much hes not even alive any more? (RB p.27) Whatever
the explanation, this disordered world is a symbol of his disordered identity.
Once I supposed I recognised my own voice when I spoke to strangers; it was
something to know your own voice, to know it as well when you finished
speaking as when you began. How is it Im so old now I dont know my voice
anymore. (RB p.20)

Just as screens and windows were abiding images in Days Between Stations, so
voices and music echo throughout Cales story. As Adolphe tried to find his identity
in film, so when Cale attempts to escape from Los Angeles an attempt jumbled in
his mind with vague ideas of suicide, the destruction of his identity the voices
around me stopped; I felt stricken by the stillness. (RB p.21) And it is in this soundless
moment that Cale has the first of his redemptive visions: an unrecognisable man
kneeling on a beach with a young woman standing over him.
In the moment I saw her I stopped grieving for my losses. It seemed impossible
to see her eyes from the boat or to know her face that well. I despised the guy
at her feet; I would have told at that moment any lethal joke that would have
hanged him too. (RB p.22)

And at that the woman decapitates the man with a two-foot-long blade. This
vision of the Latin woman and the sacrifice will haunt Cales quest for identity. In the
end, he will discover that the man who was killed, the man he instinctively despised,
is himself. The moment of self-recognition is the moment his identity starts to become
whole, while the tableau of execution exorcises his self-loathing and guilt.
Although light will have an important symbolic role, pictures are not seen to be
dangerous. When Cale wanders into a bar after this first vision of the Spanish woman
beheading a kneeling man, he sees a woman with a camera: I decided cameras
werent on the blacklist with radios; unlike sound, the images of the earth were not
in conflict with the images of men. (RB p.27)
One of these images of earth with which Erickson is concerned is self-image, both
in terms of his perpetual theme of identity, and in questioning what it is to be
American. In identifying himself, temporally and topographically, Cale says: They
were borders of land and borders of years, but wherever and whenever they were,
clearly, in that time and place I was born, it was America. (RB p.31) But this
questioning approach to his own nationality, a questioning which, as we will see in
Leap Year, arises from Ericksons own discomfort in and dissatisfaction with the
moral landscape of Reagans America, is certainly ambiguous:
I heard later it was an American river, but I knew that was a lie. I knew there
was no such thing as American rivers or foreign rivers; there were only
waterrivers with waterborders of waterland and wateryears.
-- 217 --

Believing such a thing was my first step in the direction of danger, I never
believed in American skies either. But it never meant I did not believe in
America. (RB p.31)

The landscape distorts around Ericksons characters, reflecting in its agonies the
shape of their personality. But that is a protest at any political attempt to say that a
country is its physical being rather than the sum of the people who make it up. In
distorting the world Erickson is illustrating that it cannot be distorted other than in
our eyes, in what we are. With this book, far more than with Days Between Stations,
Steve Erickson becomes a writer with a distinctly political agenda.
Again, however, any political dimension only reflects a human landscape of guilt.
The murder which is central to this story is that of Jarry, executed by the authorities
following accidental betrayal by Cale. Cale feels like a murderer, and wants to shift
the responsibility, which is also why he imagines Jarry as the man being killed in his
vision. He is convinced that if he can save Jarry from the woman next time he will
achieve the redemption he seeks. The twist is that he must rescue himself from being
the victim of his memories, his guilt:
I have to live forever with the fact that one moment of stupidity and
indiscretion on my part hung a guy. But I dont have to live with the idea that
it was a political act or that because of it Ive assumed a political role I never
chose. (RB p.29)

Cale sees himself as an apolitical creature: I had never been one of anything. I
distrusted being one of something; I knew it wasnt real, I knew the only oneness that
was real was my own. (RB p.40) This lack of commitment is an attitude to which the
story puts the lie, for Erickson is concerned to show that having crossed any Rubicon
it is impossible to escape or deny the consequences of ones act. Cales attempts to
escape are shown to be futile by the way his landscape becomes distorted and also by
his curious researches within the library where he lives and works. He begins to
sequester manuscripts relating to stories of murders: I was studying the distinction
between murders that are acts of martyrdom and those that are acts of redemption.
(RB p.33) It is a curious distinction which shifts responsibility, suggesting that
murders are willed or committed by the victim, but then it is one of Ericksons
common tricks to distort our perceptions by inverting the sequence of cause and
effect.
Cale sees himself as a victim and sets up his story as a search for redemption, but
again and again he is shown to be in a prison, real or self-imposed, and will not
escape into the freedom of redemption until he recognises that with it comes
responsibility. Thus, when he goes to see the photographs of the woman with the
camera Janet Dart or Dash the clanging doors, windowless corridors and high cold
rooms of the abandoned warehouse where she lives remind him of prison. As for the
photographs themselves, they are black. Janet is taking photographs without flash
-- 218 --

because she is seeking a face which gives off its own light. A redeemers face, we
might take this to be. Cale remembers that the face of the victim executed by the
Spanish woman in his recurring vision gives off light. He also remembers that the
Spanish woman was there when the cops searched the library after the second vision,
but remained unseen. Hanging unstated over the text is the implication that the real
redeemer, the one handing out just punishment for guilts accepted, is not the one with
a halo. The topography of such a notion is explored by Cale: At night I read the white
maps of a woman as charted by a phantom poet, and in my head I carried the black
spot of her photograph. (RB p.59)
A broader guilt, which forms a constant theme in Ericksons work, is the national
guilt of America, and of the twentieth century, as we will see in both Tours of the
Black Clock and Leap Year. The century has inflicted dislocation and alienation upon
humanity, and Erickson writes about this by inverting it, by writing about the
temporal and topographical distortions in the map of the century. When Cale visits
the island in the lagoon he first encounters a woman with a light who travels in a
boat with no motor or oars, a mythical figure, part Lady with the Lamp, part Lady of
the Lake. She can sail the boat because she knows the water, as, later, we will be told
that Catherines father knew the mazes of the river as he knew the mazes of the trees.
(RB p.96) In the same way, some of Ericksons characters know the century and can
make their way through its intricacies; most, though, are adrift.
The islands in the lagoon represent an America which is no longer whole. There
is unsettling talk of an undefined America 1 and America 2, denying any notion of
a unified national identity. Cale alone, the American Everyman, insists repeatedly that
he was born in America. But if he bears the nations guilt for the century, we soon
learn one representation of that guilt. When Cale visits a mysterious near-deserted
hotel we discover, in a roundabout way relating to his collection of legends of murder,
that it was the scene of Robert Kennedys assassination. This event takes on, for the
purposes of this novel, a pivotal role within the American moral psyche, and Erickson
recapitulates it here. In the kitchen where Kennedy died, Cale discovers a headless
body, his vision of execution made flesh. By association it is Kennedy; Cale believes
it is Jarry; it is, in fact, himself. He is arrested and placed in a prison cell, he has come
full circle. The Spanish girl of his visions visits him mysteriously in the cell, and we
learn that the man he had watched being beheaded time and again was himself. Guilt,
punishment and redemption come dramatically together.
At this point Erickson stages one of his most startling narrative dislocations. There
is a shift of viewpoint, from first to third person, from male to female. There is a shift
in location, from an alternative America to somewhere vaguely Amazonian. And
there is a shift in time, signalled by the first word of the new story which begins in
classic Ballardian fashion: Later, in a Malibu hospital listening to a Malibu sea, she
dreamed of the night of the shipwreck. (RB p.93) The shift is not forward in time but,
one begins to guess from internal evidence, backwards or, possibly, sideways. Sound
continues to be a key symbol: she was listening to the sea. And time continues to
-- 219 --

indicate dislocation, for instance in locutions such as: Many years west of her. (RB
p.94) It would be easy to assume that this is a completely different story, unrelated to
Cales narrative. Gradually, however, we see that Erickson has planted some subtle
topographical shifts within this landscape. When the sailor is shipwrecked, for
instance, in what we assume to be Amazonia, we learn that, contrary to South
American geography, on a continent in which every other river ran east, this one ran
west. (RB p.109) It is tempting to assume that this is meant as no physical river, but
a psychical one, a tributary, perhaps, of the massive uncrossable river which appears
later in the book.
At the centre of the story is Catherine who might be the Spanish woman
executioner and might be the light-emitting redeemer sought by Janet. Like Cale, she
starts the story without identity, even her name is not her own: the speechless beauty
of her face so resisted naming that the relative banality of Catherine was the best
anyone could give it. (RB p.95) Note, also, that in this novel of voices and music the
word speechless operates as another indication of alienation. Catherines power is
illustrated on the night she averts a shipwreck:
She had taken her long ferocious hair and wrapped it around the tree where it
held like a band of wet rope. There shed signalled all night to the ship with a
light no rain could extinguish, the incandescence of her eyes. (RB p.100)

The magical eyes recall the blue eyes in the bottle in Days Between Stations, as
well as giving her a redemptive quality which is also emphasised by the ritualistic
way in which her invisibility is accounted for:
They took her eyes to be the large fiery insects that buzzed among the reeds of
the river. They took her mouth to be the red wound left by hunted animals or
perhaps their own women each month. They took her chin to be the bend of a
bough and her hair to be the night when there was no moon. (RB p.130)

This is a description whose ritual nature is emphasised by being repeated word for
word on several different occasions.
Inevitably, Catherine leaves her nameless jungle where there is no identity for her,
teaming up with a shipwrecked sailor and con-man who exploits her until she gets
her revenge and continues a magical journey which brings her to a place where: The
huge white map looked like this: HOLLYWOOD. America? she said to the driver,
unconvinced. (RB p.139) Hollywood, in this part of the novel, plays the traditional
role of dream factory:
In a town that exalted self-invention one struggled to reinvent oneself properly;
what dismayed and destroyed people here was to find they had no control even
over their processes of self-invention, to find they created themselves all over
again only to fuck it up the second time even more than the first, and with
fewer excuses. (RB p.159)
-- 220 --

Those who play with self-invention find themselves in a trap: they cannot
reinvent themselves on Hollywoods terms without taking control of their lives, but
to play the game on Hollywoods terms is to surrender control. Thus the washed-up
actor, Richard, recognises that his life didnt belong to him anymore but rather to his
dreams, which had been repossessed by age. (RB p.161)
Links with Cales story proliferate. Catherine goes to work for a Hollywood writer,
Llewellyn Edgar, who uses the pen-name Lee Edwards (as with Michel/Adrien, his
differing names suggest a split identity). She gets the job through the intervention of
the actor, Richard, who lives in the Ambassador Hotel, and who is the same actor,
waiting for a man named Lee, whom Cale encountered in the hotel where Robert
Kennedy was shot. The assassination again figures as a symptom of the moral and
political dislocation of America. When Lee first came to California to support Robert
Kennedy he waited the twenty-four hours it took Kennedy to die; as a result he never
returned to New York and instead became a Hollywood scriptwriter, thereby giving
up his self-respect.
He had changed his whole fate and betrayed his own destiny ... Whos to say,
Llewellyn asked himself, how many others made such choices and betrayed
themselves, not with choices that in themselves might have been meritorious
but with choices that were wrong for the individuals who made them, with
choices not in the spirit of those who made them? A country is different today
because of it, because Im different, and everyone is different. (RB p.162)

Once again the personal and the political are intimately connected.
As Adolphe and Michel echoed each other across the century, so Llewellyn and
Cale are avatars of the same character, an identification confirmed when Christine
dreams of beheading a man on a beach. In the first story, the person watching her
from a boat was Cale; in this story she recognises him as Llewellyn. And when
Llewellyn writes the poems about Catherine which Cale reads in the library, They
were poems about a face that was ignorant of its own image, and a man whose
cognizance of that image divided his life in two. (RB p.197)
For Llewellyn, Catherine becomes a symbol of his youth, and hence of his hopes
and of the time when he had self-respect. He is obsessed with her, and gets Crow, a
photographer, to take pictures of her early one morning. One is spoilt and comes out
as a large black spot, and it is this which Catherine, a woman with no identity,
chooses as the true likeness of herself. This picture echoes the photographs by Janet
Dart in the first story and will reappear at Angeloak in the third. Llewellyn, on the
other hand, has abandoned his identity. He had been a poet in New York before
following Kennedy to Los Angeles and finding himself a screenwriter. Now he returns
to poetry, an attempt to recapture that early life, to reinvent himself and escape the
prison of his screenwriting career, inspired by Catherines tabula rasa. But it is
madness: he has already made his decisions and Erickson will always insist that to
know themselves fully, his characters must always accept and live by the decisions
-- 221 --

they have made. Again a split in identity is linked with a split in topography. When
his obsession with Catherine grows to the point of him searching for her, Llewellyns
world makes it impossible for him. His own home changes its shape to frustrate his
efforts to break out of the life he has made and to reach Catherine.
Finally, in a dream Catherine identifies Cale and Llewellyn as the same person.
They confront each other in the Ambassador Hotel where Catherine attacks Llewellyn
with candles as if attempting to behead him, and sets the hotel ablaze. In a symbolic
climax to this story, those who escape the fire are blinded. Catherine alone can see,
and the survivors attack her eyes. Those unable to create their lives in the artificial
atmosphere of Hollywood are seeking revenge on the one person whose blank past
allows her to make her own identity how she will. At the last she disappears from her
hospital bed into her vision where she sees a ship not foundering on the reefs of her
childhood but rather sailing past, teeming with the blind of paradise. (RB p.223) Plot
and symbolism have come full circle.
The dislocation that marks the shift into the third section highlights its
relationship to the previous two narratives by opening with an italicised first-person
passage which leads in turn into a third-person narrative:
It is in the land the dreamers dream that dreams of justice and desire are as
certain as numbers. It is in the land of insomniacs that justice and desire are
dismissed as merely dreams. I was born in the first land and returned to the
second: they were one and the same. You know its name. (RB p.227)

The name, of course, is America; the two lands being perhaps the America 1 and
America 2 of Cales story. And in this statement of intent we find expressed the
overwhelming shape and purpose of the novel, for it seeks to reconcile how America
has been imagined to be since the founding fathers first gave it birth with the way it
is in fact. The split between the two, the sense of moral loss, is more vividly expressed
in Leap Year, but it is no less urgently present here.
Each of the three stories in Rubicon Beach contains the others as a dreamscape
within it; there are parallels and echoes that tie them all very closely together, but
which are we meant to take as real? This final story, of Jack Mick, covers the entire
twentieth century, the universe which all of Ericksons novels have explored, and its
twin narrative technique, shifting from first to third person, subsumes within it the
literary techniques of the other two. But does that give it any precedence? Although
the three realities are actually incompatible, in a postmodern antihierarchical way
each is meant to be taken as equally real.
As the three notes of a chord the stories resonate with one other to create a
questioning portrait of the moral weight of being an American. Jacks newspaperowning father, for instance, is presented as an archetypal American: a liberal though
he would reject the label, and a self-styled patriot. Indeed there is a sense that
identity and patriotism mean the same thing, involvement with others, so that Jacks
intellectualism comes across to his father and perhaps to us as luxurious and
-- 222 --

irresponsible. (RB p.235) Thus an expression of alienation and loneliness (typical

feelings in Ericksons work), of inadequacy in the social shadow of his father, comes
out as an instantly regretted political statement: I dont give a damn about other
people. (RB p.235)
For Jack, people are replaced by numbers:
From out of the ground came a music, cool and hazy and windy like the light,
and in the music were a hundred numbers, sixes and sevens and threes waving
back and forth in the sound of the light. (RB p.231)

This scene, proof that voices and music will continue to be of as much symbolic
value throughout the third part of the novel as they were in the first two, echoes the
music of LA in Cales story. The plot concerns a mental dislocation as great as any of
the physical dislocations which mark Ericksons books, for Jack Mick Lake is a mathematical genius who while still a student discovers a new number between 9 and 10:
Not nine and a half or nine and nine-tenths, not the asteroids of ten or nines
missing moon, but a world of a number unto itself ... It was the number of an
altogether different promise made from an altogether different place. (RB p.238)

Jack can compute numbers and equations for autumn and for sexual thrill, so it
is enough to show his uncertain identity that in all things relating to his humanity,
to who he is, his mathematical exactitude should desert him. Thus his mothers death
at the age of forty-one or two, when the son was twenty-two or three. (RB p.228)
Jack identifies the new number with his passion for the radical Leigh. I was the
anarchist of passion in an age when passion was a country, (RB p.240) he says: again
we see this linking of nationality with a personal, passionate involvement with others.
It is a theme which will sound strongly throughout this story. Thus we are given the
story of Jacks great-grandmother, Jane Shear, who bears the child of a married man
whom she then pursues:
He had made the mistake of toying with a girl who did not understand that
passion was a country where there were definite borders. She did not see the
borders; she crossed borders as though crossing an empty avenue at midnight.
(RB p.255)

This last phrase is oddly reminiscent of Catherines entry into America, when she
crosses a boulevard in Los Angeles believing she is crossing a border. The theme
recurs when Jack says:
my great-grandfather and great-grandmother lived in a country they each
called passion but which was in fact two different countries; each crossed into
the country of the other without knowing it. When they did not honor each
others borders, they believed each other to have committed treason; for each,
treason was the same crime by a different law. (RB p.256)
-- 223 --

We see that personal relationships are as susceptible as Cales America 1 and

America 2 to multiple divisions and unsuspected betrayals.
Like Cale and Llewellyn before him, Jacks troubled identity stems from a mistake.
Cale, who reappears in this story as an old American living in exile out on the Cornish
moors, still in a self-imposed prison, sums up his mistake:
He was standing on the banks of a river listening to something from the other
side, something he had never heard but had always known. And instead of
crossing the river, he listened for as long as he could stand it and then turned
his back and returned the way he had come. And hes never heard it again. He
should have crossed that river. (RB p.272)

The river, physical and metaphorical, is the river of time, the river of the twentieth
century, the river of America, which sweeps through all of Ericksons books. The
sound Jack heard is the music of numbers, the singing of Los Angeles. And by turning
away from it he is, like all Erickson characters, turning his back upon his opportunity
to take his own destiny into his hands, to behave according to the personal morality
which will ripple outwards from the individual into the national morality upon which
America has turned its back.
[H]e loved, as does every man who is born to a vision, that unseen future that
his courage once failed. He hated, as does every man who is born in America,
that irrevocable failure that his heart wont forget. (RB p.282)

Cale had washed up on the Cornish coast thirty years before, in 1923, and still
talks of America 1 and America 2. His story fits in with fragments of Catherines story,
and when she does not in fact kill him at the conclusion of the first part of the novel,
the two are pursued by the policeman, Wade, into a railway tunnel. In the darkness
they are aware of other tracks in tunnels running parallel to theirs:
It was a wary exhilaration that Id come to the geographical and temporal
longitude where and when anything was possible, and that the accompanying
latitude was in me: I was a walking latitude, finding its conjunction with the
worlds lost longitude, out there beyond America. (RB p.268)

The worlds lost longitude, like the twentieth centurys lost blueprint in Tours of
the Black Clock, is a personal rather than a geographical or temporal place and time.
It is beyond America because it is where personal morality supersedes the failed
national morality, and anything is possible because it is the first place where he can
follow his own dreams.
When Cale and Catherine emerge from the tunnel they see the track continuing
over water on wooden pillars until it disappears into fog; they are on the shore of the
endless river Jack will cross later. They sleep among trees and when Cale wakes the
landscape has changed: I was not growing old; my memories were growing old. My
memories were becoming my dreams. (RB p.270) They travel on this patch of ground
-- 224 --

like a floating island, and although it is not stated it is implied that the island is
steered by Catherine in the same way that the woman with the lamp steered the boat
among the islands of Los Angeles, by knowing the water. But Catherine disappears
before Cale is washed ashore in Cornwall.
Jacks extra number helps Cale to find Catherine again. Jack and Cale see the light
of twenty-eight steeples shining out over the moor though there are only twentyseven churches, and track down the extra light to Catherines eyes. This part of the
novel is full of healing; things once torn asunder are put together once more. Cales
identity is whole when he dies. But then Catherine disappears again, and Jack is
driven to distraction trying to find her, for she is his redemption as she was Cales and
Llewellyns. His search takes the form of a frenzied attempt to disprove the number
he discovered. For fifteen years of madness he scribbles equations which disprove
everything else (for he knew the equations for autumn and for sexual thrill), but he
cannot disprove the number. Everything else is relative but at the core of his being
there is something ineluctable and real, as was the soul to a medieval theologian. If
we equate the number with his identity, it remains secret yet whole no matter how
unstable everything else might be.
Eventually, Jack returns to America, and in Chicago boards a train west: One train
that left at no particular time; one had to wait for it at the station. One train with no
signs of destination on the side; one had to know the particular train. (RB p.287) Like
the endless train journey in Days Between Stations he embarks on a magically
extended journey across a river that appears to have no further side a journey west
towards the myth of Americas birth, towards the modern American mythmaker,
Hollywood. At last he is going to the place he turned his back on when younger, to
the place of self-identification, across the river he had once been afraid to cross.
In the huge tree-station of Angeloak where Jack is stranded he discovers
photographs which are just black spots, the blank photographs of Catherines unmade
personality. Then he finds Catherine herself and they make love, a fulfilment for both
of them. Finally, as remorseless and inevitable as the story of Gawain and the Green
Knight, as the natural culmination of a novel with all the ritualistic linguistic
formulae of myth, Catherine cuts off Jacks head. He hears the knife singing to him,
the musics return signifying his redemption.
Ericksons first two novels primarily used topographical dislocation and distortion
as metaphors. His next novel, Tours of the Black Clock, possibly his best work, added
temporal dislocation and distortion to this mix. The Black Clock of the title is the
twentieth century:
the century in which another German, small with wild white hair, has written
away with his new wild poetry every Absolute; in which the black clock of the
century is stripped of hands and numbers. A time in which theres no measure
of time that God understands: in such a time memories mean nothing but the
fever that invents them. (Tours of the Black Clock, [TBC] p.168)
-- 225 --

The white-haired German is Einstein, whose theory of relativity wiped the clock
of the century clear of anything absolute or certain. In such an emptiness, free of
anything which might call itself a country, the nuclear imagination rules, gazing into
the abyss which is our century. The nuclear imagination being
poetry that Einstein conceived and compelled us to accept in the face of
empiricism, in the way that Einsteins enigmas of time and space are accepted
without anyones having the slightest certainty theyre actually true. (LY p.41)

Relativity, along with other twentieth-century theories such as the Uncertainty

Principle and chaos theory, has changed the shape of our century, robbing us of old
absolutes and hence of what we might grasp in order to make sense of it all. The only
thing left is identity, made and remade in the malleable fever of our memories.
Whoever controls these memories controls the world; as Erickson has Josef Goebbels
say: Germany rules half the world today for one reason more than any other. And
that is that we seized control of peoples myths. (TBC p.177) This is a point which
Erickson makes again, explicitly, in Leap Year:
The riddle of the Twentieth Century is that, in its scientific break with so much
religious faith, it created the vacuum of belief that ideology filled, even as the
very nature of that break belied ideology ... A small hole was punctured in a
temporal latitude marked 1945, and through that hole rushed the black future,
curving around on the horizon like a boomerang and then threading the
present. Einstein was the Great Anti-ideologue, because in the way he refracted
the past and present and future, he as well subverted any destiny to which
history might pretend. When history is revealed not to be destined, the lie of
ideological faith is exposed. (LY p.156)

In Rubicon Beach we saw how individual moral responsibility fed into the national
morality; here Erickson is making the point that individuals need to step into their
own imagination as a way of providing certainty, of taking charge of their own lives.
It is lack of this courage, lack of faith, which opens the way to control by those who
can furnish this courage, this faith, as the Nazis did.
As in so many of Ericksons novels, there is, in Tours of the Black Clock, the
magical secret which holds the key to the soul of modern man, in this case the
blueprint of the twentieth century which reveals within it a hidden room (like the
secret room in which Adolphe Sarre is raised and to which he returns). There are, also,
the personal quests of his numerous characters, Marc and Jainlight and Dania, each
pursuing personal grails across a distorted time and space. These quests overlap in
ways which tie them inextricably to each other, constructing a nation of their desires.
This provides the dramatic shape of the novel, in which the century is split in two by
the imagination of one of the central characters, Banning Jainlight. This is explained
metaphorically:

-- 226 --

The moment was a different moment, of a different now. What I saw from my
window was the other Twentieth Century rolling on by my own, like the other
branch of a river thats been forked by an island long and narrow and knifelike:
the same river but flowing by different shorelines and banks. (TBC p.167)

And this metaphor is reflected physically in the opening scene of the novel.
Here, like the closing scene of Rubicon Beach, we are on the shore of a river so
broad that the other side is invisible and unknown. Splitting the river, narrow and
knifelike, is Davenhall Island. A ferry links the island to the shore, and at some
point between the two the ferry will enter a bank of fog which shuts it off from
the world. There was nothing in this moment but his boat in the fog on the water;
there might as well have been no sun in the sky or anything that called itself a
country. (TBC p.13) It is an instant which is outside any map, a classic description
of the pre-arcadian chaos, a perfect foundation for the construction of Ericksons
worlds.
Marc is born on Davenhall to a woman we will later discover is Dania, the only
white woman in Davenhalls Chinatown, and a whore. During his childhood she
makes rare gestures of motherhood, warming milk and reading to him: the milk and
reading were acts by which she stepped into her own imagination and took part in it,
with conviction. (TBC p.15) Like Catherine in Rubicon Beach and Sally in Leap Year,
Dania stands somehow outside the struggle for redemption which is the lot of
Ericksons male characters. She is, rather, an observer, temptress, goad and innocent,
the still point around which the other characters are whirled. Here, by stepping into
her imagination, by engaging with her own identity, Dania has, in Ericksons terms,
already achieved redemption.
Not so Marc. At 19, he sees a dead man at his mothers feet and runs away. He
gets no further than the ferry and, like Herman Hesses Siddhartha, finds himself
turning into the ferryman. For fifteen years (as long as Jack spends on disproving his
equations), he travels back and forth through the blank spot on the map, unable to
step ashore on the island yet unable to leave it, until he meets Kara on the day his
life split in two. (TBC p.31) Kara transmitted a frequency of destiny which was
unnameable, in a century that tried to name everything that was particularly
unfathomable, (TBC p.33) (one is reminded of Catherines similarly nameless quality).
Kara disappears onto the island and Marc follows her. Though he doesnt find her, he
does return to his mother and together they hear the voice of the old man who came
to die at her feet fifteen years before; the voice, we will later learn, of Banning
Jainlight, whose story takes us into the body of the novel. Jainlight recounts his story
as a ghostly voice, yet he recounts it in the present tense, while his narrative is full
of comments on the future made from outside the narrative present and glimpses or
visions of the future which are experienced within the narrative present. It is a
complex, almost unfathomable temporal structure which, from the outset, breaks
down the common concept of time.
-- 227 --

In this moment, both looking back upon and foreshadowing the fatal moment of
the book, we are told:
It changed the world, my seeing you ... Maybe it only changed my world. It only
changed my Twentieth Century. Your world, your century, thats another story.
(TBC p.42)

As Cales America was multiplied, so is Jainlights century. And as Cales story was
of individual responsibility for the shaping of a nation, so Jainlights is of individual
responsibility for the shaping of an age. Jainlights story is littered with such
references to a dislocation of history, notably the moment when he first sees Dania:
the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle. (TBC p.122)
Significantly, Jainlight glimpses her through a window; throughout the book
windows serve to frame alternative times. The nine windows of his childhood room
open onto different moments of his life. It is through a window that Jainlight sees the
other Twentieth Century. And it is through a window that his child is thrown and his
wife jumps to her death, the brutal moment which rips Jainlight from our century into
his own.
The windows, like the screens in Days Between Stations, reveal the measure
against which the self-made world is to be judged; but Jainlights world is the realm
of his imagination. Damn the consequences of my acts, its the consequences of my
words I love and loathe, (TBC p.79) a sentiment which shows through in the plot.
Raised in a loveless ranching family, Banning Jainlight is huge and clumsy, the butt
of family jokes. At sixteen he is misled by his half-brothers into nearly raping his
natural mother. In rage he kills one brother, badly injures his father, stepmother and
remaining brother, and burns down the family home. This act of violence precipitates
his movement through the underworld of Depression America, fleeing the retribution
which shadows him for so much of his story. He becomes a bum, is taken up by a
gangster-cum-club owner, and starts to write pulp fiction. His editor puts him in
touch with an Austrian, Kronehelm, for whom Jainlight writes pornography, and
when investigators come to arrest him for the murder of his brother he flees with
Kronehelm to Vienna, where he discovers that his pornography is written for a little
cripple high in the German government. The real shape of his life and his century is
dictated not by his acts but by these stories. In a significant touch, the names
Jainlight gives to the two heroines of his pornography are Lauren and Catherine, the
heroines of Ericksons two previous novels.
On the fringes of a scuffle initiated by Nazis in a Vienna street, Jainlight first
glimpses Dania:
This is, after all, the moment that razors the Twentieth Century down its middle,
this simple afternoon youre leaning out your window, all of fifteen years old
Id say, while below you men are scuffling in one of historys countless shards.
(TBC p.122)
-- 228 --

Again history is broken, like America in Rubicon Beach a world is shattered by

the individuals who make it up. It is at this moment that we enter clearly into an
alternative history though, as in so much of Ericksons work, it is as much an
alternative topography. When Jainlight attempts to find the place where he glimpsed
Dania he cannot: I walked up one road and down the other, ... I scoured maps, (TBC
p.126) but like Laurens Pauline Boulevard in San Francisco it has disappeared from
his history. Nevertheless, his memory of Dania becomes the heroine of his
pornography (which, it is now revealed, is being written for the private satisfaction
of Hitler, a substitute for his niece and former love, Geli), and the pornography
becomes both the bridge between worlds and the pivot around which history turns.
Jainlights stories literally shape the world, for they are used to distract Hitler from
the ill-judged invasion of Russia, before he pushes history farther than it can be
pushed. (TBC p.165) Consequently, Russia is not invaded but England is, Japan picks
off British colonies in Asia instead of attacking Pearl Harbor, and America is not
drawn into the war.
Later, it has a more direct effect on Jainlights life when Goebbels comes to
believe the pornography is sapping Hitlers will to lead. Goebbels has Jainlights
wife and daughter killed in a bid to stop Jainlight writing, but Jainlight kills
Goebbels in revenge, and Hitlers leadership deteriorates anyway. In the empty years
that follow, Jainlight discovers again the lost street where he first saw Dania, only
to learn that she and her father were relocated to Russia five years before. He is
dead inside.
And on that note there is another of Ericksons abrupt dislocations, in history to
the other Twentieth Century, in geography, in focus, and especially in time. In fact
within the chapter of transition, only three and a half pages long, we get: three years
later, (TBC p.187) fifty-six years later, after the century has long since run out of
numbers, many years before, three years before, (TBC p.188) in the final months of
the year 1917, (TBC p.189) and six years later (TBC p.190) time has become fluid,
difficult to grasp.
We encounter Danias father, a Russian escaping from the Revolution who: means
to ride into history as the agent of chaos, believing that if history has a will at all, it
is owned by no man for more than the moment it takes to change it forever. (TBC
p.189) Once again we learn of the necessity to seize control of our history, to impose
our will upon it; history is there to be remade by every one of us. This is a point which
is emphasised again in the ghostly sex which links Dania and Jainlight across their
different timestreams.
Danias father carries a blueprint of the century with him to a colony of European
exiles in Sudan. This symbol for building ourselves, this map which, if it can be read
properly, will show the maze-like route to the conscience of the age, will form the
central metaphor for the novel. But the colony is devastated by a herd of short-haired,
silver buffalo, an elemental force unleashed by a distorted nature which had first been
glimpsed by Marc on the shores of the mythical river.
-- 229 --

Dania and her father move to Vienna. There, on the morning after Jainlight first
spotted her, she was conscious only of the way she was enflamed between her legs
from the lover who had come that night. (TBC p.202) The lover is Jainlight, visiting
her in his imagination, just as we have already learned that his pornography is
described as an account of his own activities with the phantom woman he had
glimpsed only the once, while a spectral Hitler watches from a dim corner. Their
dreams are leading an entirely separate existence; it is thus that stepping into ones
own imagination is important. As Dania tells herself:
if there indeed was a floorplan to the Twentieth Century with a secret room,
then it was not a room in which the conscience dwelled but rather this room
here, hidden in the capital of a country that no longer was, where she fucked
history and owned him. (TBC pp. 110-11)

Again there is this notion of owning history, part and parcel of the central theme
in which remaking history and remaking our own identity are one and the same
thing. The notion recurs when Erickson defines the line which divides past and future
as that between the history that was determined and the history that could be undone
by a single man if he chose to undo it. (TBC p.211) And when Jainlight resumes
writing his pornography in a world where Hitler is still alive, if senile, in 1967 and
the war apparently continues, he compelled the landscape of history to readjust to
my visions. Ive done it from a blind spot where no one sees me yet my presence
cannot go unacknowledged. (TBC p.249) The blind spot links this creation of
Jainlights own history to the blank place on the river between Davenhall and the
shore and hence also to a blank place in this particular stream of time. It is the secret
room on the blueprint, reference to which now occurs with increasing frequency.
After the Second World War, Dania moves to America as a dancer for whom men
kill themselves, until, at last, she flees across the country to Davenhall, choosing exile
after all, without any map of a geographic or temporal residence. (TBC p.245) She is
pursued by Blaine, the large, good-hearted investigator, now a detective, who allowed
Jainlight to escape to Europe. When Blaine comes close Zeno, the old Davenhall
ferryman, tries to protect Dania by burning her pursuer to death in a shack over the
river. In Blaines death, the secret room in which hed always lived burned to a size
much smaller than a man, (TBC p.242) a suggestion that the secret room they all seek
on the blueprint of the century is actually in ourselves, in the way we make our own
history.
In a different timestream Jainlight, living in a flooded Venice, uses his story to
make Dania pregnant by Hitler as a revenge upon the now senile dictator: he intends
to present a hope for the future in the form of an heir, whom he will snatch away (as
his own wife and child were snatched away) by making the child a monster
representing all the evil that Hitler has perpetrated. In the other timestream and this
is where the barrier between the two parallel rivers begins to break down Dania
realises that her mysterious pregnancy is being manipulated. She dreads bearing a
-- 230 --

monster, but the only way she can fight is by loving the child, though this seems such
a pitiful weapon:
Its love marked, wounded, suffered and doubted and denied by the humanity
that attends it. Its nothing before such a huge evil. But in the pit of this last
scream its all there is. (TBC p.276)

At the same time, the child is another way of discovering that secret room: Later,
shed wonder if it really lay there inconspicuous and unthreatening on the barren
floor of a small secret room. (TBC p.275)
Dania has given birth to Marc, and Jainlights plans have gone awry. He flees with
the mumbling, incontinent Hitler, scheming to take him to the other Twentieth
Century he still sometimes glimpses: The Twentieth Century that doesnt exist, except
in the sense that one needs to believe in it, as one used to believe in God. (TBC p.288)
Their escape is mysteriously eased at every turn, until a sea captain tells them of a
ship they can take from Wyndeaux, in which French port they visit a caf that glows
like a lantern. (TBC p.291) They have, for a moment, stepped into Days Between
Stations, but as Wyndeaux served as an opening between realities in that earlier novel
(the name, of course, relevant to the window motif which runs through this novel),
so it does again here. Their sea crossing is an extended journey It seems as though
the seas become much wider or the world more distant from itself (TBC p.292) a
voyage through a stretched and distorted world which all of Ericksons characters
have to undertake in order to reach that precise latitude and longitude of topography,
time and the imagination in which they truly belong.
Out of his time and his world, Hitler is shorn of his identity, at least as far as
the personification of evil is a part of that identity. Instead he is seen as just a
helpless old man who wins the sympathy and the help of escaping Jews, of Mayan
guerillas fighting the German occupation of Mexico, of all who should be expected
to hate and despise him. Only Jainlight, who knows his identity, continues to see
him as a figure of evil, and in so doing is in turn looked upon as evil by those they
encounter. It is as if moral responsibility only exists as long as we are able to shape
our world.
Eventually, Jainlight brings Hitler to New York and takes him to the rooms where
he first wrote his pornography. He finds, instead, the office which Blaine left to follow
Dania twenty years before. On the desk is a blueprint which has faded with age,
revealing a secret room in the basement. As the plot reaches this circular moment,
Hitler dies. If time comes together in this blueprint, if it is a plan of the true shape of
the century, then Hitler who belongs only in the world as shaped by Jainlights
imagination cannot exist here. Jainlight traces Dania to Davenhall Island, following
Blaines trail of blank postcards, which recall the photographs of Janet Dart, and there
he lives like a ghost in the hotel, unseen for seventeen years, unable to bring himself
to beg forgiveness of her. Only when he dies at her feet does he achieve the
redemption which brings him fully, visibly, into this world.
-- 231 --

Curiously, Jainlights narrative continues after his death, as if it is not oblivion.

He expects damnation but it doesnt come:
In a century when time and space have liberated themselves of all reference
points, perhaps one small good thing owns a universe unto itself, and a
thousand monstrous worlds of evil must submit themselves to its love. (TBC
p.313)

This taking responsibility for ones personal moral and imaginative life so that it
might shape a greater political world is at the heart of Ericksons fourth book. Leap
Year is a curious animal. It purports to be a journalistic account of the 1988
presidential election, yet its effect is achieved more by imaginative constructions and
outright fantasy. The tone is set by the opening words, which sound a significant echo
of Rubicon Beach and Tours of the Black Clock:
Sally speaks to me. I cant live with the things you feel she says its enough to
live with the things I feel. Its enough to live with the feeling of the country
flowing through me. (LY p.9)

And as Tours of the Black Clock carried with it the secret room within which the
conscience of the century was to be found, so Leap Year contains an extra day which
does not necessarily fall on the extra number ascribed to it. The book contains, as a
thread running through it, the quest for this day which somehow will make manifest
the moral identity of America, the year all insignificant memories vanish in a
twenty-four-hour phantom. (LY p.35) Of course, American elections always occur in
leap year.
Typically, even the forever-impending California earthquake is drawn in: the
earth is moving in precognitive fashion, along the buckled temporal fault lines of
Leap Year. (LY p.11) The vision Erickson presents of Los Angeles after the earthquake
is remarkably similar to the distorted landscapes of his fiction. The frozen Paris of
Days Between Stations, for instance, is evoked as:
residents will live a quasiprehistoric existence, travelling by foot on undriveable
roads, bartering goods in the absence of functioning bank computers, fleeing
the fires that roar from the earth and then returning to hover around them on
cold unsheltered nights. (LY p.11)

Other echoes of his fiction are invoked when he talks of the people of East Los
Angeles who:
according to the City of Los Angeles and the United States of America do not
exist. They live on the other side of the Los Angeles River, which nobody can
find and which runs from no point of origin that can be determined but which,
according to the City of Los Angeles and maps of the environs, does exist. (LY
p.20)
-- 232 --

Once again we are on the wrong side of an imaginary river. Like the empty
swimming pools and crashed planes which Jim encountered in Empire of the Sun and
which provided a context for so much of J.G. Ballards earlier fiction, so these
glimpses can provide a resonance for the maps and rivers which form such a
tantalising and unreliable foundation to Ericksons fiction. We encounter this again
when he reports: When Im sleeping with my head pointing toward the front of the
train, I feel as though Im being pulled further and further into the country of my
dreams. (LY p.17) So we are given, translated from fiction into something at this point
more approaching memoir, the notion that Erickson makes his country from the stuff
of his dreams. As this is expanded within the novels into a moral point, so this book
follows the same trajectory when Erickson reveals himself:
as someone who has distrusted politics in its mass form and the prospect of
joining demonstrations even for causes with which I agree, because the
demonstration by its nature must reduce the cause to a shared axiom which can
be collectively held, which is to say the cause must be shorn of the very
ambiguities that make morality real. (LY p.25)

The moral and political impetus of Ericksons novels is here spelled out: in a
nuclear world, the world of the black clock, examined by the nuclear imagination, we
must constantly re-examine and rebuild our moral beliefs. In the absence of the
absolute there is only the uncertainty, the relativity, of all our individual moral
consciences building a political reality upon necessary ambiguities. Without our
imaginative engagement with our own moral consciences, without acceptance of
individual responsibility for events in the greater political arena, then the political
world we build is necessarily corrupt. The secret room, the conscience of the century,
has to be found in each and every one of us. So it is that this journey into the greater
political arena of an American election becomes embedded within the personal moral
choice of Sally Hemings, Thomas Jeffersons slave and mistress, who becomes
Ericksons imaginative companion on this exploration.
It is in New Orleans, one of those places and times where north might be any
direction at all; across the river beyond the banks on the other side is a void the
extent of which no instinct can determine, (LY p.26) in a landscape which could have
been lifted from any of his novels, that he first encounters Sally. And after that she
crops up in many places, in moments that dont always align themselves with the
place so perfectly. (LY p.29)
Leap Year is a book which drifts and shifts, wandering from idea to image, often
falling short of resolution. It does not have the crystal-sharp pattern of Ericksons
earlier novels but rather gives a sense of an author following where events and
imagination might lead him. Thus Erickson might wander from a concert by John
Cougar Mellencamp to the campaign against the sexual content of rock records by
Tipper Gore, wife of Democratic contender Al Gore, to Thomas Jefferson rewriting
John Locke when he composed the American constitution, to the sexual torment of
-- 233 --

the founding fathers. But always the narrative impulse finds itself dragged back to the
same basic points:
The invention of America by these men [Jefferson, George Washington, Patrick
Henry, Thomas Paine] was meant to spring them lose from the bonds of afterlife, it redefined us not as instruments of God or heaven but rather as the
incarnation of our memories of our own selves. (LY p.33)

From this perspective, America becomes a postmodernist archetype and the book
becomes a quest to see how it has lived up to the ideal. Again and again, as they are
throughout Ericksons books, time, memory and identity are specifically linked:
America is where only memory divides the present from the future, and where
the unconscious dreams of the people who live here understand that the
Declaration of Independence was signed after Hiroshima, not before, and
neither has yet happened. (LY p.33)

And in America such dreams and memories are as likely to be manufactured as

they are reflections of true identity. This invention of identity and memory reached
its apotheosis in the election of Ronald Reagan, whose own memories were a
construct of the Hollywood films he made and watched, though they appeared
perfectly genuine to him. We elected those memories because theyre ours too; they
mark our clocks more than any mere numbers. (LY p.37)
Hence in setting out to study the election which will end the Reagan era, Erickson
is embarking on a quest to discover America and whatever function its determined
to perform in the evolution of moral time. (LY p.11) And on such a quest it is, perhaps,
inevitable that his guide should be the timeless representative of a choice America
once made, which set the country on the course it has followed ever since. Sally
Hemings was the fourteen-year-old slave of Thomas Jefferson who became his lover
and chose to remain a slave when she had the chance to be free. It is a moment of
choice which defines her identity but it also defined the character of America, for
Jefferson, the great moral force behind the making of America, did not then
relinquish his slaves. As Sally describes it:
In freeing America ... he of all men could not have kept his slaves and without
slavery he could not have kept me ... Thus when I chose to go back to America
with him as his slave I chose for all slaves in America. I gave him his darkness
and allowed him to corrupt his vision: I changed America. (LY pp. 90-91)

Thus Sally spoiled the dream of America, but, as was the case with Hitler, history
has kept her alive beyond her time in a perpetual search for her Thomas, making her
a symbol of redemption. And redemption, as we have seen in all of Ericksons books,
is achieved on the brink of the nuclear abyss, not by following religions or ideologies
but by recreating oneself, by making ones own identity.
In Tours of the Black Clock he has already examined this nuclear moment in
-- 234 --

fiction. Faith has been blown apart by scientific theory, which throughout the century
has concentrated on undermining certainty, on destroying absolutes. At the same
time, history has been shattered. The ideologues who have tried to own history, Hitler
in Tours of the Black Clock and Reagan in Leap Year, have had to remake history
according to their own imaginations. The result was evil in the case of Hitler, pure
fiction in the case of Reagan, but in both cases time has closed around the wound to
heal it.
In this postmodern age, which Erickson apostrophises as the nuclear age and the
television age:
The two in tandem had the effect of transforming human memory, since
memories are the psychic increments of time; in the face of an abyss that blew
the hands off our clocks and set our compasses spinning wildly, where all
experience is rendered by television technologically communal, memory
becomes first literalized, then reduced to vivid moments not necessarily
threaded to anything else. (LY pp. 168-9)

In the face of such an abyss we therefore make our own memories, create our own
characters. In the face of such an abyss it is perfectly natural that a woman two
hundred years dead should be alive and searching still for her lover and master. And
that she should find him, on the Leap Years secret extra day, in the mystical
surroundings of an old Indian pueblo. There, where the past has not been tampered
with, it is easier to be true to oneself, as Sally was true to herself in her fateful
decision.
The flip side of this engagement with dreams to discover moral truth is the
unreliability of the world; the moment of truth is a myriad of fictions. Hence this
book, which purports to be a work of political journalism, features a ghostly modern
avatar of a slave girl more than 200 years old. Hence real people are removed from
their context: Tipper Gore becomes a drunken blonde listening to 60s songs on a
jukebox, who follows Erickson back to his hotel room; Al Gore becomes a jealous and
vengeful figure pursuing Erickson in his journeys across America.
Ericksons argument proceeds by such oppositions. America was born in
contradiction, and so contradiction has become an inescapable part of its character.
America is split apart in Rubicon Beach but only a man conscious of his own moral
failing can see it, can be aware that the compass is spinning. The individual who
engages with his own dreams, with his own moral truth, has the power to shape
history, but in Tours of the Black Clock even history has fragmented. In our nuclear
age we have torn apart the certainties with which we built our understanding of the
world, and replaced it with a chaos of information [which] nearly defies policing. (LY
p.157) Without such building blocks of understanding then the microscopic world of
personal morality and the macroscopic world of nationhood and politics which reflect
each other have nothing to reflect. Light is broken into prismatic patterns, the
topography of our world is stretched and distorted, time twists and turns, and even
-- 235 --

identity becomes fragmentary except in the personal, secret, self-made world of our
dreams.
The buckled temporal fault lines of Leap Year (LY p.11) do not lead to redemption,
as they might have done through the twisted frameworks of Ericksons novels. But in
his world they can lead to identity, to a recognition of how we make ourselves.

-- 236 --

EXHIBITS
This is a love story.
Like all love stories, it is hard to say where or why it began. Suffice it to say that
something happened, a connection was made. In this instance the affair probably
began in a book store. Why do we ever pick a book off the shelf? What prompts us
to open, for the first time, an unknown work by an unknown author?
I knew the name, Steven Millhauser, or thought I did. Had I come across it once
before, perhaps within the pages of F&SF? If so, I have not since been able to identify
the particular story or issue (though there is something about his curious fantasies
that would have been perfectly at home within that eclectic magazine).1 The Pulitzer
Prize was possibly an attraction, though I have hardly made a point of picking up its
prizewinners before. The blurry cover shot was intriguing, so was the subtitle: The
Tale of an American Dreamer, though there was an air of pretension about it also that
might just as easily have put me off. And the blurb, which echoes in abbreviated form
the opening paragraph of the book:
There once lived a man named Martin Dressler, a shopkeepers son, who rose
from modest beginnings to a height of dreamlike good fortune Although
Martin Dressler was a shopkeepers son, he too dreamed his dream, and at last
he was lucky enough to do what few people even dare to imagine: he satisfied
his hearts desire. But this is a perilous privilege, which the gods watch
jealously, waiting for the flaw, the little flaw, that brings everything to ruin, in
the end.

Maybe it was the prose, or the sense of fantastical aspiration followed by the fall
of fate (all of which, I have since discovered, are typical of his work).
I dont know what it was. In all likelihood, nobody does at such a moment. But I
took Martin Dressler by Steven Millhauser off the shelf, carried it to the desk, bought
it and (this is the rare thing, given how many books languish unread on my shelves)
I read it.
That was when I fell in love.

PHANTATROPES In the gift shops of the Barnum Museum we may buy old
sepia postcards of mermaids and sea dragons, little flip-books that show flying
carpets rising into the air, peep-show pens with miniature colored scenes from
the halls of the Barnum Museum, mysterious rubber balls from Arabia that
bounce once and remain suspended in the air, jars of dark blue liquid from
which you can blow bubbles shaped like tigers, elephants, lions, polar bears, and
-- 237 --

giraffes, Chinese kaleidoscopes showing ceaselessly changing forms of dragons,

enchanting pleniscopes and phantatropes, boxes of animate paint for drawing
pictures that move, lacquered wooden balls from the Black Forest that, once set
rolling, never come to a stop, bottles of colorless jellylike stuff that will assume
the shape and color of any object it is set before, shiny red boxes that vanish in
direct sunlight, Japanese paper airplanes that glide through houses and over
gardens and rooftops, storybooks from Finland with tissue-paper-covered
illustrations that change each time the paper is lifted, tin sets of specially
treated watercolors for painting pictures on air. The toys and trinkets of the
Barnum Museum amuse us and delight our children, but in our apartments and
hallways, in air thick with the smells of boiling potatoes and furniture polish,
the gifts quickly lose their charm, and soon lie neglected in dark corners of
closets beside the eyeless Raggedy Ann doll and the dusty Cherokee headdress. -

The Barnum Museum2

A GAME OF CLUE Look, here are four people playing Cluedo or, as Americans
call it, Clue. We are looking down upon them: two brothers, their sister, the girlfriend
of the elder brother. It is the birthday of the younger brother; he is excited by the
gathering of the family for this occasion, and also aroused by the presence of the
girlfriend. Outside the night has drawn on. Look closer: it is an old game; the board
is now tatty, some of the pieces are missing. Closer still: Colonel Mustard has Miss
Scarlet trapped in the library of the old house, he practically rapes her. Mr Green,
formerly the Reverend Green, hovers uncertainly outside the library, wanting to burst
in and confront his fears but hampered by terminal embarrassment. But it is an old
board, and the fabric that once bound the two halves together has become worn and
is giving in places; Professor Plum, taking the secret passage between the lounge and
the conservatory, has found other passageways opening from it, a new world
accessible through a break in the fabric of his reality.
This story is almost archetypal. The shifting levels of reality, the sense of worlds
below worlds. The parallels drawn between these worlds that are never precise
parallels. The resolution that somehow doesnt resolve things at all

STEVEN MILLHAUSER Steven Millhauser was born in 1943, the same year as
the hero of his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse: The Life and Death of an American
Writer, 1943-1954, by Jeffrey Cartwright, which won the Prix Mdicis, Frances most
prestigious literary award for foreign novels. He has written three other novels,
Portrait of a Romantic, From the Realm of Morpheus and Martin Dressler: The Tale
of an American Dreamer which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. He has also written
four collections of short stories, In the Penny Arcade, The Barnum Museum, Little
Kingdoms and The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, and a novella, Enchanted Night.
His story, The Illusionist (collected in The Barnum Museum as Eisenheim the
Illusionist), won the World Fantasy Award. He is a Professor of English at Skidmore
College and lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
-- 238 --

ICE AND FIRE It was said that to descend into the world beneath the world
was to learn the secrets of heaven and hell, to go mad, to speak in tongues, to
understand the language of beasts, to rend the veil, to become immortal, to
witness the destruction of the universe and the birth of a new order of being;
and it was said that if you descended far enough, down past obsidian-black
rivers, past caves where dwarves in leather jerkins swung pickaxes against walls
veined with gold, down past the lairs of slumbering dragons whose tails were
curled around iron treasureboxes, past regions of ice and fire, past legendary
underworlds where the shadowy spirits of the dead set sail for islands of bliss
and pain, down and down, past legend and dream, through realms of blackness
so dark that it stained the soul black, you would come to a sudden, ravishing
brightness. - Martin Dressler3

HISTORY Stories, like conjuring tricks, are invented because history is

inadequate to our dreams,4 Millhauser wrote in Eisenheim the Illusionist, yet one
way of looking at his stories is as an attempt to bring history in line with our dreams.
History is always there in his stories. Martin Dressler opens with a lyrical yet detailed
description of New York as it was at the turn of the century, Balloon Flight, 1870
describes a courier escaping by balloon from the besieged city of Paris during the
Franco-Prussian War, The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne is set in the
newspaper offices of Cincinnati and New York around the time of Prohibition. There
is a strong sense of the past that runs through so many of Millhausers stories, always
captured with a few simple strokes of the pen and an eye for the telling detail. A hot
summer morning in the New York of 1881 could not be more vividly conveyed than
when the nine-year-old Martin Dressler looked out from the window of his fathers
shop and saw the sunshot ripple of muscles in the shoulders of the horse and a lady
with green feathers in her hat who had stopped to look at the window of the silk and
ribbon shop. A gleaming wet clump of horsedung lay steaming in the sun.5
Yet, vividly and accurately as the past might be portrayed, always the period is
made to seem as if it is part of a fairy tale. In Martin Dressler, even before we are
presented with vignettes of turn-of-the-century New York, the novel opens as all
good fables open: There once lived a man named Martin Dressler.6 In Balloon Flight,
1870, although there is detailed knowledge of Parisian defences and the placement of
Moltkes besieging forces, still the balloon takes us, for a moment, out of time and
place. The land spread below might be occupied by French or Prussian troops, but it
is the land itself that becomes unknown: We drift higher, above the unknown forest.7
Conversely, when Millhauser writes an overt fairy tale, as, for instance, in The
Eighth Voyage of Sinbad or The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon, where he is
careful to explain that the spiral stairs within a medieval castle turn to the right so
that a sword might be more easily wielded by a right-handed defender than a righthanded attacker, it is made to seem as if the story is part of history.
The dividing line between history and dream is illusion.
-- 239 --

INFLUENCES There is something entirely his own in the warp and weft of
Millhausers prose, in the sudden flurry of invention that will create a wild list of
unknown wonders, in the patient way in which even within the world of a story
nothing is taken for granted and contradictory theories for events are raised and
considered and sometimes never resolved. Yet, for all that makes him a unique talent,
there is a wealth of influence that runs through his fiction. It is tempting to point to
Millhausers career as an English teacher; certainly he has read widely and absorbed
manners and approaches from all sorts of writers, particularly in the literature of the
fantastic (and other sources also: the influence of Little Nemo in Slumberland is made
clear in The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne). The dark and romantic
imagination of nineteenth-century writers like Edgar Allan Poe is there in the love of
underground places and exotic monstrosities in Paradise Park or The Princess, the
Dwarf, and the Dungeon, for instance, while Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of
Edmund Moorash (1810-1846), which seems in many ways a catalogue of
Millhausers influences, contains specific references to the work of Poe and also E.T.A.
Hofmann and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Jorge Luis Borges is another clear influence, in
part in the use of fictional authority within Millhausers work. The Borges of The
Lottery of Babylon is there in the slightly distanced yet all-embracing account of the
communities of The Sisterhood of Night or Beneath the Cellars of Our Town while
The Circular Ruins finds its echo in The Invention of Robert Herendeen. The
Vladimir Nabokov of Pale Fire is there in the way events and places are examined
from contradictory yet revealing stances in The Dream of the Consortium or The
Barnum Museum, and Franz Kafka is there in the inexplicable and often threatening
transformations of Rain or The Way Out.
Sometimes, of course, the references are deliberately overt. In Alice, Falling,
Millhauser takes a prismatic look at Alices fall down the rabbit hole, considering all
she sees on her descent, returning again and again to her drifting off to sleep beside
her sister on the riverbank, looking suddenly and sharply at the Reverend Dodgson
taking Alice Liddell and her sisters on a picnic. In the end, one brief introductory
episode from Alice in Wonderland is expanded to become a commentary upon the
character of Alice within the book, upon the character of the real Alice, upon Lewis
Carroll and the writing of the novel. Again, in Klassik Komix #1, we are treated to
a frame-by-frame description of a comic book which gradually reveals itself to be the
story of T.S. Eliots The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, though from an oddly
skewed perspective. (This story first appeared in the late 1980s, and so predates
Martin Rowsons similar transformation of Eliots The Waste Land into a noir-ish
comic book.)
There are occasions, however, when Millhauser wears his influences too openly.
The Sepia Postcard does little that was not already there in its obvious precursor,
The Mezzotint by M.R. James. The eponymous postcard is found in a rundown book
shop in the sort of out-of-season seaside resort which featured regularly in Jamess
stories, while the tale of ill-defined horror which is revealed in successive glimpses of
-- 240 --

the scenic view advances no further (and elicits less of a chill) than Jamess original.

LEGEND It is precisely because of our ignorance that we see [the castle] across
the river with such precision. We know the precise carvings on the capital of
each stone pillar and the precise history of each soul: they are transparent to
our understanding. On our side of the river, even the most familiar lanes bear
surprises around well-known bends; we see only a certain distance into the
hearts of our wives and friends, before darkness and uncertainty begin. Perhaps,
after all, this is the lure of legend: not the dreamy twilight of the luxuriating
fancy, in love with all that is misty and half-glimpsed, but the sharp clarity
forbidden by our elusive lives. - The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon8

A VISIT We are on a visit to see an old friend. In fact, Albert was our best friend,
though he was always a little unconventional and we havent even been in touch for
nine years. But now a brief, scribbled note has revealed that Albert has taken a wife,
and invites us to visit. Albert lives in a remote town in upstate New York, and when
we stop to ask directions we get a very strange reaction. Still, we reach him in the
end. He hasnt changed much, and we quickly re-establish our old easy relationship.
Until Albert introduces us to Alice, his wife: a large frog, perhaps two feet high,
which sat with its throat resting on the table edge. Is this a joke? But we play along,
until the obvious affection that exists between man and frog becomes a disturbing
reflection upon the lack of affection within our own life.
An odd story, this, one that doesnt really fit comfortably within the canon of
Millhausers work. Yet that oblique and uncomfortable twist in the fabric of our
reality is precisely what we come to expect from his stories.

FATHERS AND SONS There are a lot of father-son relationships within

Millhausers fiction, and they all seem to follow more or less the same pattern. The
son, at a very young age, becomes obsessed by the detail, the mechanics, of the
fathers occupation, and in later life develops it beyond what the father might have
managed but in a strangely different direction.
In August Eschenburg, for example, the young August is captivated by the fine
detail of his fathers work as a watchmaker. He quickly learns the mechanics of the
business, but then applies it in an unexpected way, making a career for himself as
the creator of incredibly detailed clockwork automata. In The Little Kingdom of J.
Franklin Payne young Franklins abiding memories of his father are in the
darkroom, helping to make pictures appear mysteriously out of white paper. He is
quickly doing all the necessary mechanical work of moving the paper from one
chemical bath to another, but the career it leads him into is first of all drawing
newspaper cartoons and then making animated films. Even Martin Dressler follows
this pattern. As a child, Martin helps his father in his cigar shop, and is soon making
suggestions that improve the business, but this start leads him on to running and
eventually owning his own hotel.
-- 241 --

It is, perhaps, significant that all accounts of father-son relationships in

Millhausers stories are written from the perspective of the son as hero of the story,
unlike

CHORUS OF NIGHT VOICES Come out, come out, wherever you are, you
dreamers and drowners, you loafers and losers, you shadow-seekers and orphans
of the sun. Come out, come out, you flops and fizzlers, you good-for-nothings
and down-and-outers, days outcasts, darks little darlins. Come on, all you
who are misbegotten and woebegone, all you with black thoughts and red fevervisions, come on, you small-town Ishmaels with your sad blue eyes, you plain
Janes and hard-luck guys, come, you gripers and groaners, you goners and
loners, you sadsacks and shlemiels, come on, come on, you pale romantics and
pie-eyed Palookas, you has-beens and never-will-bes, you sun-mocked and daydoomed denizens of the dark: come out into the night. - Enchanted Night9

FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS There are fewer father-daughter relationships in

Millhausers work, but they are generally written from the point of view of the father
(as in The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne). Stories in which the girl provides the
viewpoint, as in A Protest Against the Sun, are very much the exception.
Whatever the perspective, however, the nature of the relationship is always the
same. Father dotes on daughter, daughter is unquestioningly loving and supportive
towards father. There is a closeness in these relationships, a sense of sharing and
complicity, far greater than in any other type of relationship in Millhausers work. The
closest he comes to questioning this relationship is in the one story written from the
point of view of the girl, A Protest Against the Sun, in which a family on the beach
on a hot day see a youth pass by, wrapped up as if for winter. The girl proclaims it a
protest against the sun, which seems to upset the father: the first crack in the faade
of their relationship.
Certainly the father-daughter relationship is much closer than that between
husband and wife in which, typically, the husband displays little real understanding
of the wife until she leaves him, as happens in The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin
Payne and Martin Dressler among others.

CHILDHOOD Whatever their external relationships, however, childhood is a time

of dark mystery. In his first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, Millhauser tells the story of two
eleven-year-old boys, Edwin and Jeffrey, trapped in an uneasy friendship because
both are alienated from their fellows. But what, at first, seems an insight into the
curious rituals and imaginations of children of that age becomes ever stranger and
more threatening as the boys appear adult in all but age. Edwin is a child of
enthusiasms, forever questing after novelty, and one newness he discovers is to write
a novel (we are told it is a good one). Jeffrey is a follower, the faithful lieutenant
forever adjusting his own desires to suit the mood of his fellow. But, curiously, it is
Jeffrey who is the one with ambition, and it is in Edwin that he sees his own glory.
-- 242 --

For Jeffrey will write the biography of the great eleven-year-old author, and the
biography will outshine the novel. Alas, life does not always conform to the needs of
art, so the artist must sometimes shape life to his own pattern: there is a suggestion
that the darkest mystery of this strange childhood is the convenient death of Jeffreys
subject.
Millhausers second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, might be accounted a direct
sequel to Edwin Mullhouse, if one of the two central characters in the earlier novel
had not murdered the other, but the focus and narrative duty has shifted from the
realist to the idealist. Arthur Grumm, our new protagonist, is in his early teens, and
he is not a writer, but he shares the dreaminess and the romantic aspirations of
Mullhouse (by contrast Grumms best friend, William Mainwaring, is a plodding
realist who shares many characteristics with Jeffrey Cartwright, Mullhouses
biographer and murderer). As in the earlier novel, Millhauser creates a detailed picture
of childhood, with all the dreams and the boredom and the routines of that time in
our lives. His genius is to equate adolescence with the Romantic era of Poe and his
contemporaries, so that childhood in small-town America in the 1950s is tricked out
with dark, mysterious chambers, thoughts of suicide, lingering illnesses. Once again,
childhood is a death-haunted time.

THE SNOWMEN The snowmen had grown more marvelous. Groups of snowy
figures were everywhere. In one back yard I saw three ice skaters of snow, their
heels lifted and their scarves of snow streaming out behind them. In another
yard I saw, gripping their instruments deftly, the fiercely playing members of a
string quartet. Individual figures had grown more audacious. On a backyard
clothesline I saw a snowy tightrope walker with a long balancing stick of snow,
and in another yard I saw a juggler holding two snowballs in one hand while,
suspended in the air, directly above his upward-gazing face But it was
precisely a feature of that second day, when the art of the snowman appeared
to reach a fullness, that one could no longer be certain to what extent the act of
seeing had itself become infected by these fiery snow-dreams. - The

Snowmen10

AUTOMATA In August Eschenburg, Millhauser tells the story of his eponymous

hero, who lived in Germany in the latter years of the last century. Eschenburgs father
is a watchmaker and young August learns his craft with great diligence, but after
witnessing a magic show he becomes fascinated by the idea of clockwork figures. His
first figures are used in the window of his fathers shop, attracting customers, but his
work soon comes to the notice of Preisendanz, the owner of a massive store in Berlin,
who lures August away to work for him. Here August creates a number of ever more
complex figures, who patrol the windows of the store, acting out repetitive tableaux
to intrigue the citizens of Berlin. But his success inevitably brings imitators, and a
new store opens across from Preisendanzs, with displays of automata that are cruder
than Augusts but sexier. August, like so many of the artists who frequent Millhausers
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stories, is driven by a quest for perfection, a desire to make his artificial figures evermore humanlike, and it is not long before he is sacked to make way for his more
commercially-minded usurper, Hausenstein. August is happy enough to return to the
obscurity of his fathers shop where he can work on his figures free from the demands
of the story. However, it is not long before Hausenstein shows up. Recognising genius,
Hausenstein wants to set up a theatre displaying Augusts figures. For a while the
theatre is a success as August sets his clockwork figures moving in ever more subtle,
more convincing, more lifelike tableaux. Again, success breeds imitators. A new
theatre opens up in which the figures are far cruder than those August creates, but
they are enacting pornographic scenes. August continues to attract the connoisseurs,
but the majority of the custom goes elsewhere, and at last August discovers that
Hausenstein is behind the other theatre also. Once more, August retreats into
obscurity; the day of the automata, the day of the sensitive artist, is past.
Millhauser returned to this interest in automata in a later story, The New
Automaton Theatre. Here, although the setting has a distinctly Germanic feel to it,
the story is far less precisely located in time and place. Our city is justly proud of its
automaton theatre, the story begins.
By this I do not mean simply that the difficult and exacting art of the
automaton is carried by our masters to a pitch of brilliance unequalled
elsewhere and unimagined by the masters of an earlier age. Rather I mean that
by its very nature our automaton theatre is deserving of pride, for it is the
source of our richest and most spiritual pleasure.11

The masters of this city, like August Eschenburg, measure their skill against the
ability to recreate humanity. In this society emerges Heinrich Graum, who might be
the greatest master of all. Like August, he is the son of a watchmaker, and he is a
talented student. Millhauser traces his career through his training, his early success,
his acclaim as a master at the early age of twenty. It was noted that Graums figures
seemed more and more to be pushing at the limits of the human, as if he wished to
express in his creatures not only the deepest secrets of the human soul but emotions
that lay beyond the knowledge of men. In this he is typical of Millhausers heroes,
pushing art ever more obsessively towards some sort of extreme achievement, some
excess of knowledge, that is in the end fatal. Then Graum falls silent, for ten years;
no more automata appear from his workshop. His return, the long-awaited
performance of his Neues Zaubertheater, is stunningly controversial for rather than
create figures that grow ever closer to their human model, his new creatures are
clumsy, jerky, almost amateur. In the classic automaton theatre we are asked to share
the emotions of human beings, whom in reality we know to be miniature automatons.
In the new automaton theatre we are asked to share the emotions of automatons
themselves The new art is not a gentle art; its beauties are of an almost unbearable
intensity.12
For once the radical artist survives, for once a failure to compromise in the pursuit
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of a lonely and unique vision does not lead to ostracism, to madness, to death or
oblivion, but at the cost of all that is familiar in the city of the automaton theatre.

IN THE PENNY ARCADE You are twelve years old and venture, for the first time
alone, into the penny arcade. Once, when you visited the arcade with your parents, it
was a place of mystery and excitement and daring; but you have not been back for
some years, and older, alone, on the verge of adolescence, you see it differently. The
wooden fortune teller is cracked and faded and no longer exudes a sort of terror. The
cowboy, against whom you test your quick draw, is creaky and slow. Even the picture
machine, in which once, with a sort of dread, you glimpsed a woman partially
disrobed, now reveals a tame film of a circus act. I felt caught in an atmosphere of
decay and disappointment. I felt that if I could not find whatever it was I was looking
for, my entire life would be harmed. Then, in a dark, roped-off area, you discover a
cluster of machines covered in cloths, and it feels as if this is the real penny arcade
with all the machines of your memory that have been banished from the fake arcade.
In that moment a strange silence falls, one of those accidental hushes that will
sometimes descend upon a crowd, but in that hush anything might happen. You find
the cowboy, and now he is bright and quick, falling dramatically as your bullet
pierces him. You sense secret signals passing between the fortune teller with her
piercing blue eyes and the other creatures of the penny arcade. The circus film now
runs on, and the bareback rider now performs a seemingly endless striptease. At last
you understand the secret of the penny arcade.
I understood with the force of an inner blow that the creatures of the penny
arcade had lost their freedom under the constricting gaze of all those who no
longer believed in them I recognized that I myself had become part of the
conspiracy of dullness, and that only in a moment of lavish awareness, which
had left me confused and exhausted, had I seen truly. They had not betrayed
me: I had betrayed them. I saw that I was in danger of becoming ordinary, and
I understood that from now on I would have to be vigilant.13

It is a story which seems to sum up much of what Millhauser is about. The magic
is there, not in another world but in the way we perceive this world. Failure to see
the magic, failure to pursue the dream, is to lose the better part of our world.

PARAGRAPHS A technique that Millhauser turns to again and again throughout

his short fiction (the earliest appearance is in Cathay in In the Penny Arcade, though
it is used again in A Game of Clue, Klassik Komix #1, The Princess, the Dwarf, and
the Dungeon, The Sisterhood of Night and elsewhere) is to divide the story into
discrete paragraphs, each with its own heading. Occasionally (The Barnum Museum,
Beneath the Cellars of Our Town) the paragraphs might be numbered rather than
titled, and sometimes (The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad Alice, Falling) there is neither
heading nor number. What all these stories have in common is that the separate
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sections do not advance the story in a linear fashion. Rather, they will move across
time, space, levels of reality, perceptions, until they build a mosaic within which a
story, or a number of stories, might be perceived. But the construction of the story,
the decision as to which viewpoint is true, which story is real, is left to the reader.
In The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon, for instance, we are told the fairy
tale of the Prince who allows his jealousy to destroy his happy marriage, of the
Princess who does not know how to lie and in her very truthfulness finds herself
betraying a friend, of the innocent margrave imprisoned for years within the deep
dungeon, who stages an epic escape aided by the Dwarf. Alongside this, we are told
the story of the people who live in the little town across the river from the castle,
people who know nothing of what really happens within the castle but who make up
stories about it. We are also told about the fairy stories that have attached themselves
to the castle, and how there are many different versions of the tales. We discover, as
perspectives flicker from one tale to the next, that the Princess is always spoken of as
having golden hair, but on the one occasion she was seen by the people of the town
her hair was black. We learn that no one knows for sure how the story ended, or even
if it has yet ended. We find that the different stories we are being told are set in
different times, but it is not altogether certain whether the stories are set in the
present, the past or even the future. And so we have a fairy story about the loss of
innocence, whose own innocence is destroyed by what we discover about the nature
of the fairy story.
At times this prismatic technique might be used to tell a story with one consistent
viewpoint and through an established sequence of events from beginning to end, as
for instance in The Sisterhood of Night; yet by breaking the story up in this way,
Millhauser can raise doubts, can propose alternative interpretations. The Sisterhood
of Night tells of a small town rocked by the discovery that all the adolescent girls of
the town sneak out of their homes at night to take part in secret rituals. What are
these rituals? No one knows, but the narrator puts forward the different theories that
have been propounded, the perversely sexual, the purely innocent; he records the
contradictory testimony of those that have allegedly taken part in the ceremonies, and
the arguments used to support or undermine these witnesses; he relates the debates
that have raged through the town, the evidence that has been accumulated, the course
of events known and supposed. In the end we trust the narrator (Millhauser is far
more subtle than to use an unreliable narrator as a way of casting doubt on any of
his stories) but we are not sure what we know about the Sisterhood of Night, or
whether it was indeed anything more than a case of mass hysteria among some or all
of the towns population.

CIRCUS WAGONS We passed among dinner plates with pictures of blue

windmills on them, footed glass dessert dishes filled with wax apricots, brightly
coloured ten-cup coffeemakers with built-in digital clocks. We wandered past
glittering arrays of laser printers and laptops, past brightly painted circus
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wagons, rolls of brown canvas and bales of hay, through mazes of pale green
bathtubs, onyx sinks set in oak cabinets, pink water closets carved with cherubs.
In the depths of the toy department, which covered most of the eleventh and
twelfth floors, there was a sub-department that sold full-sized Ferris wheels,
merry-go-rounds and roller-coasters. Nearby we discovered an alcove of scale
model cities, including precise wooden and plaster models of Victorian London,
Nuremberg in the age of Drer and Manhattan in 1925, each containing more
than sixty thousand separate pieces and capable of being assembled in a frame
the size of a sandbox. In the bargain basement on the second underground level
there were alcoves and sub-departments selling imperfect mannequins,
discarded display-window props, and selected marked-down items from the
more popular plazas and restaurants: trompe-loeil vistas painted on cardboard,
cobblestones made of fibreglass, papier-mch bricks. New departments
appeared to be springing up everywhere, as if to keep pace with our desires; and
it was rumoured that somewhere on the fourteenth or fifteenth floor, in a small
department with a desk and a catalogue, corporations with fabulous sums at
their disposal could order full-sized replicas of entire ancient cities. - The

Dream of the Consortium14

MUSEUMS, SHOPS AND HOTELS It is curious how much of an overlap

Millhauser seems to find between museums, shops and hotels and how often they
seem to crop up in his stories. As early as Portrait of a Romantic, for instance, a
museum is specifically compared to a department store. Occasionally, just
occasionally, these are presented in a relatively straightforward way. Preisendanzs
department store in August Eschenburg, for example, stocks none of that plethora of
wonders that seems to be common in most of Millhausers stores. More often,
however, each museum, shop or hotel seems to partake of some of the characteristics
of the others. The monumental department store at the centre of The Dream of the
Consortium stocks far more than might ever be fitted into any rationally sized shop,
and presents its goods as though they were wonders in a museum. Similarly there is
a shop within The Barnum Museum that sells items which would not be out of place
among the weird exhibits of the museum itself.
In both of these instances the primary curiosity of the place is its size. The inside
of the store or the museum contains far more than could possibly fit within the
outside of the building. Here are cityscapes and monstrosities aplenty, listed with a
casual invention so that an exhibit barely glimpsed in passing on a lightning tour of
The Barnum Museum might provide material enough for a full novel by many
another writer.
The size and the profusion of the marvellous is given its finest expression in
Martin Dressler. This is the story of a man whose ambition knows no bounds. From
humble beginnings in his fathers cigar store, Martin goes to work at a nearby hotel,
rapidly rising through the ranks until he becomes the manager. At the same time he
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takes the opportunity to buy the cigar store in the hotel lobby, running it in a way
that makes it much more popular and profitable. Before long he is branching out,
opening a chain of restaurants which, by skilful use of the new craft of advertising,
he turns into the most popular venues in New York. So far this is little more than a
story of the entrepreneurship that was such a feature of American life around the turn
of the century, but Martin goes on to build his own hotel. Only this is more than an
hotel: rooms, entire floors, are devised in extravagantly different period styles, there
are shops within the hotel that sell far more than most department stores, there are
experiences, theme parks, amusement rides buried within the bowls of the hotel. On
one basement floor it is possible to lie on a sandy beach beside a sea with its own
waves, on another you might at any time of the day or night take a moonlit stroll
through genuine woodland. This is more than an hotel, it is our imagination at its
most fervid and wild made concrete. And even this is not enough for Martin, who
builds yet a greater hotel, specifically located in one of the newly fashionable streets
of upper Manhattan though the contents of this extraordinary extravaganza would
take as much space as the entirety of Manhattan Island were it to be made in reality.
Here, descent into the lower basements of the hotel would be literally like descending
into a realm of dwarves and monsters and devils. Of course, ambition brings Dressler
down, but he has already shown that artists and for Millhauser that category
includes hoteliers and shopkeepers as well as painters and snowman-builders must
set out not simply to replicate life but to encompass the entire universe, to make real
what our imaginations invent.

TRANSITIONS Where Millhausers first novel, Edwin Mullhouse, was built upon
a non-realist premise (a serious and pedantic literary biography of an eleven-year-old
novelist) its presentation was firmly realist (a very detailed and convincing portrait of
childhood). His second novel, Portrait of a Romantic, still held at its core a detailed
and realist portrait of adolesence, but by following the imaginings of his protagonist,
Millhauser began to project into the outside world the subtle fantasies that would be
the hallmark of his later writing. His third novel, and the last he would publish for
some dozen years, From the Realm of Morpheus, is almost entirely fantastic in its
content. Moreover, though it has a single narrative thread, the odyssey of our firstperson narrator through the strange realm guided by the gross and larger-than-life
figure of Morpheus, its structure took the form of a sequence of stories, some
involving the narrator but many simply told to him. It is here, in this curious and not
entirely successful work, that the impetus of Millhausers subsequent career can first
be distinguished.

BEHIND THE BLUE CURTAIN You are, as so often in a Millhauser story, a child,
and throughout the summer your imagination is encouraged by regular visits to the
cinema. This is part of the enchantment of childhood. Then, one day, circumstances
dictate that you should see the film alone; you are delivered to the cinema and will
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be collected afterwards, but the whole of that sacred time within the magical darkness
is yours, and yours alone. But when the film is over you are struck by a strange
lassitude, you cannot quite accept that it is over, you cannot bring yourself to drag
yourself outside into the summer brightness where your father is waiting. You linger,
not quite intentionally, in the rest room, and when the cinema is deserted you return
to the soothing half-dark. There you discover a door hidden behind the curtain that
shuts off the screen. You go through the door and there, at the end of a long corridor,
you find them, all the characters from the screen, taking their ease, huge and in gaudy
costumes. They are all there, knights and queens and pirates, and in one red room you
encounter a dramatic actress pacing and muttering. She faints, a performance you are
sure was done for effect, and you cannot resist the desire to touch, but when you lean
forwards you find your hand meets no resistance. You overbalance, and for a
disorienting moment you are actually inside the actress, then you pick yourself up
and are surprised to find no parts of you littered casually about the room.
This is another of those stories which seems to capture, quietly and without too
much dramatic effect, the strange hinterland between reality and the imagination. As
we have seen with In the Penny Arcade, it is belief that matters.

EYELIDS The art of illuminating the eyelid is old and honorable, and no Court
lady is without her miniaturist. These delicate and precise paintings, in black,
white, red, green, and blue ink, are highly prized by our courtiers, and especially
by lovers, who read in them profound and ambiguous messages. One can never
be certain, when one sees a handsome courtier gazing passionately into the eyes
of a beautiful lady, whether he is searching for the soul behind her eyes or
whether he is striving to attain a glimpse of her elegant and dangerous eyelids.
These paintings are never the same, and indeed are different for each eyelid, and
one cannot know, gazing across the room at a beautiful lady with whom one has
not yet become intimate, whether her lowered eyelids will reveal a tall willow
with dripping branches; an arched bridge in snow; a pear blossom and
hummingbird; a crane among cocks; rice leaves bending in the wind; a wall with
open gate, through which can be seen a distant village on a hillside. When
speaking, a Court lady will lower her eyelids many times, offering tantalizing
glimpses of little scenes that seem to express the elusive mystery of her soul. -

Cathay15

ECHOES Just as there are echoes between stories like August Eschenburg and
The New Automaton Theatre, so there are echoes also between Paradise Park and
Martin Dressler. Very close echoes, for Charles Sarabee shares Dresslers biography:
his father sold cigars in the shop of a small Manhattan hotel, by the age of nine he
had not only mastered the bewildering array of names, prices and cedar-wood box
covers, but had begun to arrange cigars in eye-catching displays, at thirteen he went
to work as a bellhop at the hotel and worked his way up to become assistant manager
and later manager-owner, at which point he entered a partnership in a new downtown
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department store (again the department store and the hotel are identified). Here, while
Dressler goes on to build bigger and bigger hotels, whose complexities share
something of the character of a department store and an amusement park, Sarabee
goes on to build bigger and bigger amusement parks. In fact, Sarabee is the proprietor
of Paradise Park, the biggest, the most successful, and in the end the most
controversial of all Coney Island amusement parks. Like Dressler, Sarabees fate is to
seek ever greater size and innovation, and as with Dressler the greater the size the
more it becomes equated with the fantastic, with the quest for a realm of imagination.
At first, Paradise Park is much as any other amusement park, except for a wellearned reputation for introducing a succession of completely new rides. Then, in
preparation for the 1915 season (and like so many of Millhausers stories, this one is
firmly rooted in a stated historical setting), a great cavern is found under the
amusement park, and suddenly the nature of Sarabees enterprise changes. He builds
an underground amusement park, but over successive seasons, as he digs ever deeper,
the nature of the rides and of the other attractions on offer becomes progressively
more sinister.
Even taking exaggeration into account, what are we to make of a Childrens
Castle in which girls ten and eleven years old are said to prowl the corridors
costumed as Turkish concubines, Parisian streetwalkers and famous courtesans
and lure small boys and girls into hidden rooms? What are we to think of deep
pleasure-pits into which visitors are encouraged to leap by howling, writhing
devils, or of a Tunnel of Ecstasy, a House of Blood, a Voyage of Unearthly
Delights?16

There are even public suicides, which provoke howls of moral outrage but
continue to attract visitors. (In other stories, such as The Knife Thrower, in which the
entertainer of the title maintains his popularity by inflicting ever greater wounds
upon the volunteers who stand against his target, Millhauser has suggested an
insatiable popular appetite for the cruel, the outr and the crude.) In the end, Paradise
Park is destroyed by fire (there are dark hints of arson), and we are left only with the
memory of ambition, of daring, of imagination:
Sarabee, himself the inventor of a classic park, was driven by some dark
necessity to push beyond all reasonable limits to more dangerous and disturbing
inventions. He comes at the end of the era of the first great American
amusement parks, which he carried to technological and imaginative limits
unsurpassed in his time, and he set an example of restless invention that has
remained unmatched in the history of popular pleasure.17

Sarabee is, in other words, the archetypal Millhauser hero.

THE UNDERWORLD It is crude to equate the underworld with Hell, or at least

with the realm of the dead. Yet, despite the wonders invariably encountered there, as
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our hero discovers throughout In the Realm of Morpheus, there is something devilish
about it as it recurs in Millhausers fiction. The deeper into the earth he goes, the more
extreme become Sarabees amusements, while Dresslers more exaggerated attractions
are situated in cellars below cellars below cellars. In A Game of Clue it is in the
underground secret passage (and possibly in the worn binding between the two halves
of the board) that Professor Plum finds entry to a curious other world. And in
Beneath the Cellars of Our Town a maze-like network of passageways that have
wound beneath the town for at least the entirety of its recorded history enchant the
inhabitants of the town so that they find themselves more and more drawn into its
labyrinth and away from the world of light.

LIBRARIES I turned now into the next winding aisle, where I saw several halffamiliar names which I could not quite place. I had picked up a volume of poems
by the vaguely familiar Jeffrey Aspern, and was reading one called Venetian
Impressions, when Morpheus handed me a slim volume by Tonio Krger: bound
in morocco and printed on fine paper, it bore the date 1899. I was still unable
to grasp the nature of this section of the library, and my perplexity only grew
when, happening to turn to the shelves across the aisle, I saw a great number
of novels by David Copperfield Why, look thee, blinking lad, canst not see?
Here hast thou the works of all those sweet scribblers, whom scribblers in thy
realm have wantonly imagined. And now among writers whose names I did not
recognize I began to find familiar and less familiar ones, as well as odd, elusive
names that hovered between the half-familiar and the unknown; and among the
many writers of that aisle were Enoch Soames, Gustav von Aschenbach, Seamus
Earwicker, Pierre Glendinning, Arthur Pendennis, Hugh Verecker, Stephen
Dedalus, Edwin Mullhouse, Sebastian Knight, Martin Eden, Pierre Delalande,
Roman Bonavena, Edwin Reardon, Mark Ambient, and Bergotte. - From the

Realm of Morpheus18

ORIGINS There are patterns, recurring themes, devices that run through
Millhausers work in such profusion that it seems at times we are constantly reading
the same story from another perspective. There are the stage magicians and other
performers who appear in Eisenheim the Illusionist and The Knife Thrower among
others. There are the artists, such as the darkly romantic American artist, Edmund
Moorash, whose life and death is recounted through the detailed description of his 26
surviving pictures in Catalogue of the Exhibition: The Art of Edmund Moorash (18101846). There are the museums and shops and hotels which gather together fantastic
and impossible curios. There are the stories, always tentatively offered, always
qualified with other interpretations or alternative readings, which form the core of
Alice, Falling and The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad and so many others. Yet in many
ways the story which seems central to Millhausers work, which gathers together so
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many of his influences, is The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne. This is far from
being an early work (it was first published in his 1993 collection Little Kingdoms),
nor, beyond a brief epiphany at the end, is it fantastic in the way so much of his work
extends beyond the real, nor does it build within itself the catalogues of wonders that
Millhauser seems to enjoy so much. Nevertheless, it seems to tell the story of the
wellspring from which so much of his fiction emerges.
J. Franklin Payne is a typical Millhauser son. His earliest memories are of helping
his father in the dark room; his fascination is not with the art of photography but
with the mechanics of the various chemical baths by which the complex picture
emerges from the paper. Black was nothing, and white was nothing too, but in
between in between was the whole world. But Franklin does not go on to be a
photographer; rather, he makes worlds emerge from a combination of black and white
in a different way, as an artist. He leaves his rural home in Plains Farms, Ohio, to
study at the Commercial Academy in Cincinnati, and it is in Cincinnati that he
discovers his first inspiration: Kleins Wonder Palace on Vine Street, one of the
museums of curios that had flourished in America before the advent of the cinema.
This is the sort of place that runs through Millhausers work as much as through
Franklins, the sort of dimly-lit and dusty hall that houses Dee-Dee the Dog-Faced
Boy and George Washingtons childhood axe. Before long, Franklin has taken over
from the quick-sketch artist he was amused by quickness but didnt much admire
it, like so many perfectionist Millhauser artists which leads in turn to working for
the Wonder Palace, producing advertising posters. This in turn leads him to the art
department of the Cincinnati Daily Crier, where he learns to draw editorial cartoons
and then his very first comic strip, Dime Museum Dreams, in which the sad, oldfashioned Wonder Palace becomes transformed into a place of phantasmagoric
marvels. (Franklin Payne is clearly modelled on Winsor McCay, who worked as a
poster artist at Cincinnatis Vine Street Dime Museum and as an editorial cartoonist
on the Cincinnati Commercial Tribune.)
At this time, also, Franklin meets and, inarticulately and hesitantly, woos Cora
Vaughn who has little understanding of or appreciation for his art. Nevertheless they
marry and have a daughter, Stella. When a syndicate purchases one of Franklins
strips, Cora tells him, Im glad for you, Franklin, but you know I never understand
these things, and the matter is never discussed again. When Franklin is offered a
position on the New York World Citizen, Cora abandons her childhood home only
with great reluctance, and is unhappy in New York until they move to a many-gabled
old house in Mount Hebron, an hour north of the city. Franklin, on the other hand,
is excited by the big city, and by the variety of strips he draws for the World Citizen.
These, like so much of Millhausers fiction, are based upon precise observation from
unusual angles, but with elements of fantasy intruding on the reality. (One of his
strips, mentioned only in passing, is a very thinly disguised version of McCays
greatest triumph, Little Nemo in Slumberland.) Franklins closest friend is fellow
cartoonist Max Horn, and when Franklin introduces Max to Cora it is obvious that
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the two are attracted to each other, though Franklin himself remains blissfully
unaware of this.
Meanwhile, Franklin has started to draw an animated cartoon, working
painstakingly at night, drawing each of the thousands of cells by hand. Typically (for
a Millhauser hero) Franklins satisfaction is in the craft and he disdains the new
innovations in cartoon animation in which figures move against a separately drawn
(and hence static) background. Max arranges for the finished work, Dime Museum
Days, to be made into a film and distributed, and it is an immediate critical success.
It takes some time, however, before Franklin returns to animated films, but as the
seasons change, as Stella sits loyally beside him but Cora spends more and more time
with Max, he again locks himself away in the attic at the top of his house to work on
the 12,000 painstaking images that will make up Toys at Midnight. If Dime Museum
Days is based on the sort of catalogue of wonders that feature in so many of
Millhausers stories The Barnum Museum, The Dream of the Consortium Toys at
Midnight features dolls that come to life (as in The Invention of Robert Herendeen),
fanciful department stores (The Dream of the Consortium), fanciful journeys
underground (Beneath the Cellars of our Town) and a host of other recognisable
tropes. Max, who has by now been fired from the World Citizen and has gone to work
for the film distributor, again arranges for the film to be made and released, and again
it is a smash hit. (There is a suggestion of growing renown when Franklin goes to one
of Maxs parties and a guest says: That J. Franklin Payne?)
But now Cora has left him for Max, his employer has forbidden him to make more
films, and only Stella, like a good Millhauser daughter, remains loyally by his side.
Still, after a time he cannot resist embarking on one more film, Voyage to the Dark
Side of the Moon, his most ambitious yet.
He sank back into his black-and-white world, his immobile world of inanimate
drawings that had been granted the secret of motion, his death-world with its
hidden gift of life. But that life was a deeply ambiguous life, a conjurers trick,
a crafty illusion based on an accidental property of the retina, which retained
an image for a fraction of a second after the image was no longer present. On
this frail fact was erected the entire structure of the cinema, that colossal
confidence game. The animated cartoon was a far more honest expression of the
cinematic illusion than the so-called realistic film, because the cartoon reveled
in its own illusory nature, exulted in the impossible indeed it claimed the
impossible as its own, exalted it as its own highest end, found in impossibility,
in the negation of the actual, its profoundest reason for being. The animated
cartoon was nothing but the poetry of the impossible.19

Recast that as being about fiction rather than film and you have the clearest, most
straightforward statement of everything Millhauser is doing with his stories. And
Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon presents that vividly by working only because
of its own nature as a cartoon, using a succession of visual tricks such as characters
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erasing lines within the film. In this way Voyage to the Dark Side of the Moon debates
within itself the very nature of film, just as Millhausers fiction debates within itself
the nature of fiction. And when, finally, through heartache and hard labour, the film
is complete and Franklin shows it privately to Stella, into the back of the room come
the ghosts of all those, living and dead, who have shaped his life: Max and Cora and
his editor and parents. Does Franklin die at this moment of epiphany? The story ends.

DA CAPO All of which explains nothing.

It gives you a taste of some of the things I like about Steven Millhausers work, a
glimpse of some of the ideas that excite me, the themes I have identified and followed,
the intricate tracery of influences. But a love story? Perhaps that cannot be explained.
Perhaps it is something to do with a prose style that delights me, a profligacy of
invention that astounds me. All I know is that in any archaeology of Millhausers
writing I have barely turned the surface, rich layers of intrigue lie buried yet. All I
know is that his ideas, his invention, seem limitless and I shall not exhaust the
pleasures they present to me. All I know is that I could read his stories forever and
always find myself discovering them afresh.
This is a love story.
Like all love stories it is hard to say where it might end.

-- 254 --

ENTERING

THE

LABYRINTH

1: The Man
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was born on 24 August 1899 in
Buenos Aires. His family called him Georgie. Georgies father came from a military
line Borges ancestors played a significant role in the liberation of Argentina
though he also had literary ambitions and published a short novel in Majorca in the
1920s. His mother was of English descent, and inculcated in her son a love of all
things British that was to last a lifetime. Throughout Borges work there are explicit
references to a wide range of British writers, notably H.G. Wells, G.K. Chesterton,
Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. The family was comfortably off, and in 1914 they
came to Europe for Georgies education. Borges spent the years of the First World War
in Geneva, then went on to Spain.
It was in Spain that Borges became involved with the experimental literary
movement known as the Ultraists and began writing poetry. Back in Argentina in the
mid-1920s, he was a leading figure in that countrys small literary world, both as a
highly acclaimed poet and through his involvement with a succession of small
magazines Martn Fierro, Nosotros, Megafino and most successfully Sur which
typically lasted a few issues then folded.
He was not what you might call robust, and it was while convalescing from a
severe illness that he started experimenting with fiction instead of poetry. The result
was a story called Police Tale which was published pseudonymously in 1927. It was
republished several times under several different titles over the next few years before
finally appearing under Borges own name (and under yet another title, Hombre de
la Esquina Rosada, later translated as Streetcorner Man) in 1933. A couple of years
later it was included in his first collection of stories, Historia Universal de la Infamia
(A Universal History of Infamy).
Most of the short stories on which his reputation is based were published over the
next 15 years, but already he was starting to suffer from the poor vision that was
hereditary, and which left him blind for the last half of his life. Politically, he tended
to be critical of the various regimes that ruled Argentina throughout most of this
century, though his literary fame served as his protection. However, he received little
public notice in his own country until 1955, when a change of regime allowed some
official recognition and he was appointed to the prestigious position of Director of
the National Library, essentially a sinecure but particularly appropriate for a writer
who had written so much about libraries. International fame came later still. Although
Borges writing had been reduced to no more than a trickle by then, his stories were
-- 255 --

first translated into English in the late 1950s, and it wasnt until the early 1960s with
the collection Labyrinths that his work received both popular and critical renown
around the world. His last years were spent largely travelling the world collecting an
impressive array of literary honours and awards.
Jorge Luis Borges remained unmarried for most of his life (there was a brief and
unhappy marriage in the late 1960s), until he married his former student Maria
Kodama in 1986. Eight weeks later, on 14 June 1986, he died.

2: The Ideas
The first collection, A Universal History of Infamy, really gave very little clue as
to what was to come. Streetcorner Man was a fairly realist account of the knife
fighters who were the legendary figures of the Buenos Aires underworld, and Borges
was throughout his life enamoured of the romance that attached to this underworld,
though it had largely disappeared even before he was born. This is the predominant
mood of the other stories that made up the collection, consisting in the main of
romantic accounts of the lives and careers of notable villains from around the world.
In another early story, The South, collected in Ficciones, he writes: in the discord
inherent between his two lines of descent, Juan Dahlmann (perhaps driven to it by
his Germanic blood) chose the line represented by his romantic ancestor, his ancestor
of the romantic death. (Ficcionies [F] p.167) The echo of Borges own heroic ancestors
sounds clearly through such stories.
Nevertheless, even in an early story such as The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv we
get lines that reflect the sort of image that obsessed his work: The world we live in
is a mistake, a clumsy parody. Mirrors and fatherhood, because they multiply and
confirm the parody, are abominations. (A Universal History of Infamy, p.83) Only a
few years later, in the story that perhaps best defines Borges style, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis
Tertius, we get an almost identical sentiment ascribed to the idealist other world of
the story: Then Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had
declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the
number of men. (Labyrinths [L] p.27)
Two things are worth examining about these curious sentiments. In the first place
there is the reference to Adolfo Bioy Casares, himself a writer of note in the Argentine
literary world of the 1930s and a lifelong friend of Borges (the two would
subsequently collaborate on a number of projects, including the comic essays that
make up Crnicas de Bustos Domecq). This is a device that Borges used frequently
throughout his ficciones, giving them authority by using real people or quoting from
genuine texts by historical writers (or, more often, quoting playfully from spurious
texts, whether or not ascribed to real authors, knowing that the vast majority of his
readers would have no way of knowing if they existed or not). It is a central
characteristic of his work that the stories are, in the main, presented as essays, an
analysis of event or of text that we are made to assume is genuine. By this technique
-- 256 --

he can distil the essence of his stories down to a very short measure, without the usual
fictional concomitants of scene building, characterisation and the like. That he does
so without losing our trust, our involvement, or our conviction is a measure of his
skill.
The second is the multiple image cast by the mirrors, and the distrust they
engender. The most frequently used image in all of Borges fiction is the labyrinth.
Mirrors, parallel worlds, logical puzzles, complex buildings, intricate schemes are all,
essentially, the same labyrinth which is the nature of human existence. We are in a
maze which allows us to glimpse, to comprehend, only a fraction of our surroundings.
Our life is regulated by the strict pattern of the labyrinth, yet it is a pattern that
necessitates wrong turnings and digressions and an overall lack of understanding.
When we work out the puzzle, when we finally realise which turnings to take in order
to reach the heart of the maze, it can lead only and inevitably to death. This is what
Lnnrot, the detective, realises all too late in Death and the Compass. In the manner
of Borges favourite fictional detectives C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, Father
Brown Lnnrot ignores the obvious explanation for a crime in order to construct
an elaborate intellectual puzzle. Slowly, as apparent murder follows apparent murder,
he puts together the various clues he has constructed and creates a pattern. He has
found his way through the labyrinth and it leads him straight to the isolated, deserted
and labyrinthine villa of Triste-le-Roy, only to find that the clues have been laid to
flatter him by his arch enemy, the master-criminal Red Scharlach, who waits there in
order to kill him.

3: The Change
However, even if it is possible to find traceries of Borges later ficciones in early
stories such as The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv, it is impossible to over-emphasise
the sea change that occurred between the relatively straightforward narrative of
Streetcorner Man and the intricate, intellectual essay-stories that followed upon
Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. This change represents a sudden shift in focus, in narrative
technique, in dramatic intent, in literary arsenal, that, to be honest, I have not found
satisfactorily explained in any of the biographies or studies I have read. The essay
that comes nearest is James E. Irbys introductory essay in Labyrinths:
Borges stories may seem mere formalist games, mathematical experiments
devoid of any sense of human responsibility and unrelated even to the authors
own life, but quite the opposite is true. His idealist insistence on knowledge and
insight, which means finding order and becoming part of it, has a definite moral
significance, though that significance is for him inextricably dual: his traitors
are always somehow heroes as well. (L p.20)

At the heart of Streetcorner Man we can find that duality of traitor and hero which
places that story in the same moral continuum as the later ficciones. But Irby doesnt
-- 257 --

even mention Streetcorner Man in his essay, and there is no reference to any of the
more realist early stories, so that it seems the curious academic formality of his best
work sprang into being fully formed. There is no sense of process, no notion of an
acquired or a developed style, but in fact the tone of voice that is instantly recognisable
in his work from the 1940s onwards was something that didnt come all at once.
My own theory is that this was linked with the onset of his blindness. In a later
story (The Other) he writes of it thus:
When you get to my age, you will have lost your eyesight almost completely.
Youll still make out the colour yellow and lights and shadows. Dont worry.
Gradual blindness is not a tragedy. Its like a slow summer dusk. (The Book of

Sand [BS] p.10)

This slow dusk probably first began to creep up on him during his thirties, at the
time he was beginning to write stories. He had been a voracious reader ever since his
rather sickly childhood and in later life visitors were constantly being pressed into
service to read to him. He read everything from Anglo-Saxon studies to modern
novels, and appears to have had a remarkable memory for everything he did read. As
he became gradually less able to make out the world around him, it would have been
no hardship for him to enter more fully into the world of books and of memory. And
this, quite naturally, would have become an increasing source of inspiration and ideas
for his own writing.
He was always, even in the poetry he wrote in Spain, a very intellectual writer,
writing to express ideas rather than emotions, and always very conscious of exactly
what it was he was doing. He was very well aware of the devices he was using and
the effects he was aiming to achieve. As Irby puts it:
Borges once claimed that the basic devices of all fantastic literature are only
four in number: the work within the work, the contamination of reality by
dream, the voyage in time and the double. These are both his essential themes
the problematical nature of the world, of knowledge, of time, of the self and
his essential techniques of construction. (L p.18)

I am not so sure that the whole of fantastic literature does distil quite so neatly
into so few categories, but these four divisions do describe most of his great work
exactly, and so provide a useful way into looking at his ficciones.

4: The Work within the Work

It has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is
atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar
works the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say attribute them to the same writer
and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de
lettres (L p.37)
-- 258 --

There seems to be an element of autobiography in all of Borges stories. This can

be deceptive: most are written by a first person narrator who might very well be
called Jorge Luis Borges, live in Buenos Aires, teach, write and work in a library, read
voraciously and be friends with such people as Adolfo Bioy Casares and Victoria
Ocampo. Such at least are the clues that are dropped tantalisingly in various of his
ficciones. But even though they share so much of their life and character, it isnt
necessarily the case that the Borges who narrates the tale is the same as the Borges
who writes it. They inhabit parallel worlds which have much in common but one of
them and it is not always easy to know which inhabits a world constructed
entirely of words. Thus, while the critics of Uqbar imagine the vast and contradictory
character of the one person who produced every possible work of literature, the critics
examining Borges find themselves imagining a whole array of different authors
responsible for a very narrow range of stories. This is only reasonable, for Borges
litters his stories with allusions to and direct quotations (real and imagined) from
writers as diverse as Poe and Kafka, Pliny and T.E. Lawrence, Lewis Carroll and the
authors of the Icelandic Eddas. In one sense all these diverse authors (and more)
actually did write the stories we ascribe to Borges, or at least his ficciones are further
and oblique explorations of the literary worlds first created by all these authors either
separately or in their collective body of work as it constitutes Borges library.
A work of fiction is never finished, but goes on endlessly creating its world anew
and in slightly different form with every reader. Borges himself is simply one more
artisan along the way, adding a further brick to the construction. Thus, in one of his
most curious essay-stories, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote, he adopts the tone
of a dry, precious pedant sorting through the literary relics of a late minor author,
Menard, whose greatest yet unfinished and unpublished work is Don Quixote. At the
beginning of the twentieth century Menard set out not to transcribe the Quixote but
to create it again from scratch, to imagine himself into the time of Cervantes, into the
mind and experiences of Cervantes, and then to create afresh that masterpiece. He
concludes: Cervantess text and Menards are verbally identical, but the second is
almost infinitely richer. (L p.69) It is a bold claim, a bold idea, but Borges goes on:
This technique, whose applications are infinite, prompts us to go through the
Odyssey as if it were posterior to the Aeneid and the book Le jardin du
Centaure of Madame Henri Bachelier as if it were by Madame Henri Bachelier,
This technique fills the most placid works with adventure. To attribute the

Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand Cline or to James Joyce, is this not

sufficient renovation of its tenuous spiritual indications? (L p.71)

Borges, in the persona of Pierre Menard, is suggesting yet again what the critics
of Uqbar have already proposed.
Borges ficciones are full of books. In The Library of Babel the universe (or at
least the universe knowable to the narrator) consists of a library composed of books
of identical size and pagination, whose pages are filled with every possible
-- 259 --

combination of 22 letters, two punctuation marks and a space. It is a matter of faith

among the librarians that everything is inscribed somewhere within these books, the
past and the future alike, yet only one comprehensible sentence has so far been
discovered, everything else is nonsense. Books contain the world in this instance,
books are the world but it is up to us, as readers, to discover and interpret it. Again,
in The Book of Sand we are presented with what seems like an ordinary octavo
volume, but it contains an infinite number of pages; it is impossible to find the first
or the last page, impossible to turn a second time to any page already seen. I had
only a few friends left; I now stopped seeing even them. A prisoner of the book, I
almost never went out any more. (BS p.91) If the book does not contain the world, it
absorbs the world. We wander through books as through a labyrinth in The Garden
of Forking Paths an old Chinese novel is revealed to be a labyrinth, composed of
infinite parallel worlds in which each moment of the characters lives is a forking in
the path and we follow the consequences of both possible decisions.
If entire worlds are found within the pages of a book, of course there is a logical
consequence: that the worlds may flow out of the book and take over our own reality.
It is this that Borges explores in his finest story, Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, in which
we are gradually and playfully led ever further into a labyrinth of realities. It starts
straightforwardly enough: Bioy Casares mentions an entry on the curious land of
Uqbar that he found in an old encyclopaedia, but when they examine other editions
of the same encyclopaedia they find no reference to Uqbar at all. One of the facts
about Uqbar revealed in this article is that the literature of Uqbar never refers to the
real world, but only to the imaginary regions of Mlejnas and Tln; then, in the effects
of a passing acquaintance, Borges discovers one volume of A First Encyclopaedia of
Tln. Here more is revealed about this world, in which the language contains no
nouns, everything is based on an absolute idealism which denies the concrete reality
that we all assume, and metaphysicians do not seek for the truth or even for
verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch
of fantastic literature. (L p.34) Eventually, the mystery of Tln is revealed: in the early
seventeenth century a secret and benevolent society arose to invent a country. Its
vague initial programme included hermetic studies, philanthropy and the cabala. (L
p.39) But slowly, as the mood of the story darkens in its final pages, the imaginary
world of Tln begins to intrude upon our own world:
The contact and the habit of Tln have disintegrated this world. Enchanted by
its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters,
not of angels Then English and French and mere Spanish will disappear from
the globe. The world will be Tln. (L pp. 42-3)

5: The Contamination of Reality by Dream

There is nothing so contaminated with fiction as the history of the Company. A
palaeographic document, exhumed in a temple, can be the result of yesterdays
lottery or of an age-old lottery. No book is published without some discrepancy
-- 260 --

in each one of the copies. Scribes take a secret oath to omit, to interpolate, to
change. The indirect lie is also cultivated. (L p.60)

Just as the fiction of Tln starts to take over our reality, so throughout Borges
work we find a hesitation, an uncertainty, about what reality is, what we can trust.
As soon as people begin to dream, either literally or in the form of writing fiction, so
their dreams acquire a curious solidity, they seep into our consensus reality and start
to take it over. We can never know how real our reality is, Borges tells us, the best
we can do is beware of what dreams we allow to infect it. Time after time in his
ficciones we are warned of the way dreams can affect things for the worst. There is,
for instance, that doomed conclusion to Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, and the same
message lies behind The Lottery in Babylon. Here the entire society, every aspect of
the lives of its citizens, has come to be decided by the Lottery. You might find yourself
spending a term as a slave, or with instructions to murder a stranger, or as the ruler
of the state; nothing that happens within Babylon does so except by the dictates of
the Lottery. But the whole rule is a fiction, for it distorts the history of the Company
that runs the lottery as it distorts the history of every citizen, until it has become
impossible to know if there even is a Company, if there is in fact a Lottery. The
innocent introduction of the Lottery has eventually destroyed the reality of the state
and its inhabitants.
In Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote we have already seen that fiction does
dictate its own reality which subsumes the author:
To be, in the twentieth century, a popular novelist of the seventeenth century
seemed to him a diminution. To be, in some way, Cervantes and reach the
Quixote seemed less arduous to him and, consequently, less interesting than
to go on being Pierre Menard and reach the Quixote through the experiences of
Pierre Menard. (L p.66)

And elsewhere, in The Aleph, Borges comments: as a boy, I used to marvel that
the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight, (The Aleph [A]
p.27) though in fact all his ficciones are in some way just such a scrambling. In The
Aleph also we get an example of words and reality being scrambled together as a
self-important writer (Borges himself cast, as usual, in an unflattering light) meets a
would-be poet whose interminable verses are meant in some way to capture the entire
planet. Eventually the poet introduces Borges to the source of his inspiration, the
Aleph, a point in his own cellar from which the whole planet, past and present, can
be glimpsed at the same instant. It is a moment of glory, but achieved only at a cost:
I was afraid that not a single thing on earth would ever again surprise me; I was
afraid I would never again be free of all I had seen. (A pp. 28-9)
The most notable example of the way dreams grow into reality, however, is
presented by The Circular Ruins. A stranger arrives at night at the ruins of an ancient
temple. He has no obvious past but a clear plan for the future: He wanted to dream
-- 261 --

a man: he wanted to dream him with minute integrity and insert him into reality. (L
p.73) That is precisely what he then proceeds to do, after a number of false starts: it
is a brief recapitulation of the story of Frankenstein, of Jewish tales of the golem, of
even earlier stories:
In the Gnostic cosmogonies, the demiurgi knead and mould a red Adam who
cannot stand alone; as unskilful and crude and elementary as this Adam of dust
was the Adam of dreams fabricated by the magicians nights of effort. (L p.75)

But where Mary Shelleys novel, where the Jewish legend, are concerned with the
relationship between man and his creation, are an examination of the way we might
take on the role of God, Borges takes his brief tale further, for he leaves us tantalised
by the question: which is reality, which dream? And, more tantalising, more
devastating: is there any difference between them? For, Borges concludes, With relief,
with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere appearance,
dreamt by another. (L p.77)

6: The Voyage in Time

He deduced that the Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible
combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which,
though extremely vast, is not infinite): in other words, all that it is given to
express, in all languages. Everything: the minutely detailed history of the
future, the archangels autobiographies, the faithful catalogue of the Library,
thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy
of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the
Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on
the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of
every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books. (L pp.
81-2)

There is a corollary to all this, the way that fiction creates worlds, the way that
our dreams insinuate themselves into our waking existence, the way that our reality
and our knowledge are endlessly open to question. The corollary is not that time is
infinite, nor that there are infinite possibilities available to us. On the contrary, time
is limited, it is part of the rigid pattern of the labyrinth whose branching arms we all
explore, it is pre-set, prescribed in the shape of the labyrinth itself, and though this
might be vast, though it might be unknown, it is neither infinite nor unknowable.
Ignorant people suppose that infinite drawings [of the Lottery] require an infinite
time; actually it is sufficient for time to be infinitely subdivisible (L p.59) as he puts
it in The Lottery in Babylon. If you could see the pattern, you would see, as he says
in The Library of Babel, the true story of your death. Lnnrot traced the pattern of
his own labyrinth, constructed of course from his own imagination, in Death and the
Compass; it led to his death.
-- 262 --

Time, therefore, when it does appear in Borges stories, does so as one more
instrument of confusion, of duplication, of mystery, one more element of the
multifarious labyrinth which winds its intricate way through all his ficciones. For all
his admiration of H.G. Wells, Borges could not be the author of The Time Machine;
such a relatively straightforward voyage through time would not be a part of his
pattern. In an essay called A New Refutation of Time he concludes:
Our destiny (unlike the hell of Swedenborg and the hell of Tibetan mythology)
is not horrible because of its unreality; it is horrible because it is irreversible and
ironbound. Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river that carries me
away, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is
a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, alas, is real; I, alas, am
Borges. (Other Inquisitions p.187)

The voyages through time of Borges fantasies, therefore, are rarely physical
voyages though he will frequently explain in patient detail the story over many
centuries of how the Lottery of Babylon came to be, or the sequence over decades of
what Pierre Menard wrote. These voyages through time are more static, confronting
for example the various courses one life might take as in The Garden of Forking
Paths. During the First World War the Chinese narrator of this tale has been working
for the German secret service in Britain. When his contact is captured he knows he
has only a short time before he, too, is caught, so he has to find a way of getting a
key message to his superiors in Berlin. He goes to a house in a remote village where
he encounters a man called Albert. By coincidence, this Albert was once a scholar in
China, and has studied a curious, chaotic book written by the narrators ancestor, a
book that no one previously has understood. Albert has interpreted it: the novel is in
fact a labyrinth of alternate histories.
In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives,
he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Tsui Pn, he chooses
simultaneously all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse
times which themselves also proliferate and fork. (L p.51)

We understand the nature of this labyrinth, but we are still trapped within it: in
our reality we must still choose only one of the forking paths. So our narrator kills
Albert, the story appears in the newspapers after his capture and the German High
Command learns that a key British emplacement is in the city called Albert.
In Borges stories it is time, irreversible and ironbound, that makes the labyrinth
into a trap. Another form of the trap is that experienced by Funes the Memorious
who is afflicted with a perfect and detailed memory:
He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his half-dreams. Two or three times he
had reconstructed a whole day; he never hesitated, but each reconstruction had
required a whole day. He told me: I alone have more memories than all
-- 263 --

mankind has probably had since the world has been the world. And again: My
dreams are like you peoples waking hours. And again, towards dawn: My
memory, sir, is like a garbage heap. (L p.92)

In a way, Ireneo Funes seems to combine within himself the whole of Borges
agenda. The incredible detail of his memories is enough to make us wonder whether
our own blurred, generalised and abstracted memories count as any sort of measure
of reality. And that linking between his dreams and you peoples waking hours is
one more suggestion that the division between dream and reality is tenuous in the
extreme. But, as always, there is a physical price to pay for finding your way so far
through the labyrinth of time, as Borges discovers after talking with Funes throughout
the long, dark night:
Then I saw the face belonging to the voice that had spoken all night long. Ireneo
was nineteen years old; he had been born in 1868: he seemed to me as
monumental as bronze, more ancient than Egypt, older than the prophecies and
the pyramids. I thought that each of my words (that each of my movements)
would persist in his implacable memory; I was benumbed by the fear of
multiplying useless gestures. (L pp. 94-5)

Funes memory is like a mirror, as abominable as the mirror of The Masked Dyer,
Hakim of Merv for the way it endlessly duplicates the useless gestures of humankind.
Another trap of time involves a similar duplication to extend mans life is to
extend his agony and multiply his deaths (L p.136) as is considered by Borges in
two very similarly titled stories, The Immortal and The Immortals. Echoing the
image of hell in his New Refutation of Time, Borges offers this thought:
To be immortal is commonplace; except for man, all creatures are immortal, for
they are ignorant of death; what is divine, terrible, incomprehensible, is to know
that one is immortal. (L p.144)

The Immortal concerns a Roman soldier who follows a rumour of a City of

Immortals. After many hardships and adventures he finds himself in a community of
troglodytes who dont even seem to have language. Eventually, however, he realises
that these are the Immortals:
No one is anyone, one single immortal man is all men. Like Cornelius Agrippa,
I am god, I am hero, I am philosopher, I am demon and I am world, which is a
tedious way of saying that I do not exist. (L p.145)

Having found immortality, our narrator spends the next several centuries seeking
an end to it. The narrator flees at the end of The Immortals also, a later and slighter
story which begins, as so many of Borges stories begin, with an extract from another
work, in this case the story of a Don Guillermo Blake who concludes that the five
senses obstruct or deform the apprehension of reality and that, could we free
-- 264 --

ourselves of them, we would see the world as it really is endless and timeless, (A
p.170) to which end he ensured his own newborn son was blind, deaf, dumb and
unaware of his own body. (A p.170) This fictional horror is then echoed when the
narrator visits his doctor and finds four boxes which are all that remain of people
from whom all that is perishable has been removed: the body can be vulcanized and
from time to time recaulked, and so the mind keeps going. Surgery brings immortality
to mankind. (A p.173) In The Immortal immortality is achieved at the expense of
human language, sympathy, understanding; in The Immortals it is at the expense of
ones very physicality. In either case, horror is the only result of seeing the shape of
the labyrinth.

7: The Double
It would be too much to say that our relations are hostile; I live, I allow myself
to live, so that Borges may contrive his literature and that literature justifies my
existence Years ago I tried to free myself from him and I passed from lowermiddle-class myths to playing games with time and infinity, but those games
are Borges now, and I will have to conceive something else. Thus my life is
running away, and I lose everything and everything belongs to oblivion, or to
the other one. (Dreamtigers p.51)

In a brief fable of 1956, variously translated as Borges and I or Borges and

myself, Borges (noting precisely that change in his writing I referred to earlier)
presents himself as a doppelgnger, the literary being (either as writer or as character)
shadowing the real Borges though it is notable that he does this in a way in which
the real Borges exists as a character in a ficcione, so the mirror reflects the images
still further, the borderline between fiction and reality is stretched more thinly yet. He
returns to the theme again in a later fable, The Other (1977), in which the elderly
Borges in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1969 sits down on a bench beside the younger
Borges in Geneva in 1915. The meeting frightens them both All this is a miracle,
and the miraculous is terrifying (BS p.9) says the younger Borges but the elder
reflects later:
The meeting was real, but the other man was dreaming when he conversed
with me, and this explains how he was able to forget me; I conversed with him
while awake, and the memory of it still disturbs me.
The other man dreamed me, but he did not dream me exactly (BS p.10)

So, the double is a dream that affects reality, an abominable reflection in the
mirror of The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv, and a reflection all the more abominable
because it is not precise. As Borges has already concluded in The Circular Ruins:
With relief, with humiliation, with terror, he understood that he too was a mere
appearance, dreamt by another. (L p.77)
Doubles crop up constantly in Borges ficciones, sometimes literally as in Borges
-- 265 --

and I but more often allusively: the detective Lnnrot (note how the name contains
the German for red, rot) is the double of his eventual killer Red Scharlach; there is
the doubling of The Circular Ruins in which one character makes himself in an
endless reduplication; there is Pierre Menard, making himself into the double of
Cervantes; there are the doubles of his story The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths
in which an ancient king of Babylon humiliates a rival king by leaving him in a
labyrinth, the second king then overruns Babylon and takes the first king, now
captive, out into the desert:
In Babylon you lured me into a labyrinth of brass cluttered with many
stairways, doors and walls; now the Almighty has brought it to pass that I show
you mine, which has no stairways to climb, nor doors to force, nor unending
galleries to wear one down, nor walls to block ones way.
He then loosened the bonds of the first king and left him in the heart of the
desert to die of thirst and hunger. (A p.90)

Doubles are like mirrors, part of the endless labyrinth. Everywhere there are
doubles reflecting away to infinity, but to recognise them is part of understanding the
pattern of the labyrinth, and that is death.

8: The Books
Borges stories have been collected in many different books, and the same story
will crop up many times. Borges and I, for instance, is included in A Personal
Anthology, Dreamtigers, The Aleph and Other Stories and Labyrinths. Because most
of his finest stories were written during the 1940s but didnt become known to an
English-speaking audience until the 1960s, most of the collections have additional
stories that did not appear in the original Argentine or Spanish editions, and some,
such as Labyrinths, were intended to introduce his work by bringing together stories
that had appeared in a variety of earlier collections. Now, however, the best
introduction to his work is provided by a triptych of books from Allen Lane: Collected
Fictions, Selected Poems, and The Total Library. As for books about Borges, there are
always more biographies promised, but for now those which, in their different ways,
seem to offer the best account of his life are Monegals Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary
Biography, Woodalls The Man in the Mirror of the Book and Williamsons Borges: A
Life.

-- 266 --

EMPTINESS GETS INTO YOU

Writing this now I have the sudden crazy notion that everybody at birth is
issued a little box of images, music, words and a few other things that will
appear and reappear in varying combinations all through life. (Amaryllis Night
and Day)

There are certain things that we know are going to be drawn from the box in each
new Russell Hoban novel. The novel will be composed of short, staccato chapters
(Hoban once explained to me that he would lay out all the manuscript pages of a
novel across the floor of his room and run up and down to see if the rhythm was
right). Ordinary, everyday objects will talk to us: Sometimes a thing that Ive seen
comes up in my memory and wants to talk to me, as he puts it in Mr Rinyo-Clactons
Offer. This is a device he used prominently in Kleinzeit (1974), so far the only one of
his novels to deal directly with insanity, though all his fiction seems to have edged
uncomfortably around obsession and skewed perspectives on the world; but it
continues to some degree even into his most recent novel (the rails always cry,
Wheats-yew! Wheats-yew! as the trains approach). One suspects that Hoban does not
inhabit a landscape so much as a soundscape. This suspicion is strengthened by the
knowledge that Hoban tends to work at night, constantly retuning his short wave
radio or listening to an eclectic selection of CDs whose titles keep emerging in his
books (even Fremder, ostensibly set in 2052, is full of quotations from Dory Previn,
Jagger and Richards, Rogers and Hart, Billie Holliday). Hobans is a very cultured
world: the villainous Mr Rinyo-Clacton is an habitu of the opera, especially Pellas
et Mlisande, Harold Klein in Angelicas Grotto is an art historian, Peter Diggs in
Amaryllis Night and Day is a painter. In these novels there are constant references to
other books (John OHaras Appointment in Samarra in Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer,
Oliver Onions stories in Amaryllis Night and Day, and Orlando Furioso in practically
everything Hoban has written); and especially to paintings. Vermeers Girl with a
Pearl Earring goes from being the cover image in The Medusa Frequency (1987) to
being a robot in Fremder, Durers Melencolia is the significant frontispiece in Mr
Rinyo-Clactons Offer, even his futuristic dystopia, Riddley Walker (1980), was directly
inspired by and features the 15th century wall painting of the legend of St Eustace at
Canterbury Cathedral. In particular Hoban, himself once a painter, seems fascinated
by Odilon Redon who crops up in all four of the books under review, and in particular
his illustration of a scene from Orlando Furioso, Angelica and Ruggiero, which
provides the title of Angelicas Grotto. The characters will often visit these works of
art in Londons galleries and museums, because one of the other universal features
about them is that they inhabit London. Harold Klein lives in a large Victorian
-- 267 --

terraced house overlooking that stretch of the District Line where it runs overground
towards Wimbledon. This is identifiably Hobans own home, which crops up in
several of his other books such as The Medusa Frequency and, slightly disguised, as
Zoes place in Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer. But beyond that his world is London, the
underground lines and tube stations, the streets and public buildings are named with
obsessive attention to detail. You can follow the peregrinations of his characters as
easily as with a gazetteer. London is a character in his books as real and as vital as
any of his human characters, whether it is in the realistic Turtle Diary (1975) or the
space-operatic Fremder, which is, to all intents and purposes, a re-imagining of Alfred
Besters Tiger! Tiger!.
Fremder, which is, chronologically if for no other reason, the place to start in this
brief survey, was a novel that ended a strange silence in Hobans career. He had
followed the critical success of Riddley Walker with Pilgermann (1983), but after that,
at what might have been the peak of his career, came only The Medusa Frequency, a
conflation of short pieces that barely cohered as a novel. Then nothing. In 1992 The
Moment Under the Moment collected a libretto, and a handful of essays and short
stories, and in 1994 his opera with Sir Harrison Birtwistle, The Second Mrs Kong, was
premiered at Glyndebourne. But it was near-enough ten years without a novel when
Fremder finally appeared. In his Foreword to The Moment Under the Moment, Hoban
had offered the following thought:
Reality is ungraspable The real reality is something else only the strangeness
of it can be taken in and thats what interests me: the strangeness of human
consciousness; the strangeness of life and death; the strangeness of what the
living and the dead are to one another; and the strangeness of ideas.

It was in Fremder that these strangenesses, the flickering of seen and unseen
actualities, began to find a plot. As is the way with so much science fiction, the
metaphor he had offered in The Moment Under the Moment is made concrete in
Fremder, the flickering actualities become the flicker drive, a mode of instantaneous
travel between the galaxies. And as the novel opens our hero, Fremder, (the name
means stranger in German) is lost in space like Gully Foyle. He has flickered into
actuality but the ship in which he travelled, and the rest of the crew, have not.
Hoban clearly cares little for the science fictional trappings of his novel. Set in
2052, this is nevertheless a world so transformed that there are no recognisable
landmarks in London, the social structure he hints at is no conceivable continuation
of the society of the 1990s, and mankind is out travelling between galaxies which
seem to be little more than solar systems. It is not so much that this world is skimpy
in comparison to, say, the post-apocalyptic landscape of Riddley Walker, as that it is
really little more than a blank screen upon which he can project the strangeness of
reality. You can disappear as M-waves and reappear as supposedly the same person
but after a while the deep-space emptiness gets into you he says at one point; it is a
novel about emptiness. In fact, the deep-space emptiness seems to have got into
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Hoban, because all his subsequent novels have explored the same barren emotional
and psychological landscape, but Fremder is by far the most loveless and isolated of
these landscapes. From the moment Fremder first appears, tumbling in the black
sparkle of deep space with no space suit, no helmet, no oxygen, it is clear that he has
no real connection with his world, nor has he ever had. Father unknown, mother dead
before he was born, raised artificially, the closest he comes to engagement is with a
super-computer. He is the most alone person Ive ever met, as the psychologist,
Caroline, tells Fremder. Caroline herself, one of a string of confessor-figures who will
appear throughout these novels (Katerina in Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer, Dr DeVere in
Angelicas Grotto), tries to fill the emptiness with sex, but despite the uneasy
fascination with pornography that surfaces in all these books sex alone is never
enough to do anything. Even Fremders interrogation by Pythia, the 23.7 billionphotoneuron Data Evaluator which also seems to contain the soul of his dead mother
who was responsible for the invention of the flicker drive, turns out to be positively
orgiastic, and discovers nothing.
In the end Fremder is too alone. He flickers out to the fourth galaxy once more as
the novel ends, bringing the story full circle but not reaching any satisfactory
conclusion. Too much of the emptiness has seeped into it. As Katerina tells Jonny in
Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer, quoting Schiller: Only fullness leads to clarity / And in the
abyss dwells the truth. Wherever Hobans characters are alone (Fremder, for instance,
and Harold Klein in Angelicas Grotto) they have nowhere to go but to their doom.
Wherever they are connected by something other than sex, as Jonny in Mr RinyoClactons Offer and Peter in Amaryllis Night and Day, there is hope of redemption.
And more than that there is a sense of fullness, of completeness to the novel; Hoban
my be fascinated by strangeness, but it would seem that it is the opposite, emotional
engagement, that is the way out of the abyss.
Jonny Fitch begins Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer as cast-off and alone as Fremder. His
girlfriend has walked out on him, within a very few pages he will lose his job, we
meet him first adrift not in space but in Piccadilly Circus underground station. Here
he is picked up by the enigmatic Mr T. Rinyo-Clacton. Again it is clear that we are
not meant to take this too seriously. Rinyo-Clacton, as we are told, is a type of
Neolithic pottery, while the story itself is a slight variation on the typical Faustian
bargain, in this instance Jonny sells his death for 1,000,000. This potty Faust
concentrates increasingly upon sex, as Hobans later novels have progressively done:
Jonny finding his emptiness exacerbated by homosexual rape on the part of Mr
Rinyo-Clacton, and his self-disgust eased by bedding the old concentration camp
survivor, Katerina, who tells his fortune. But his lust and eventually his love are
directed primarily at Serafina, the girlfriend who has just left him. Knowing that by
selling his death he has but one year left to live (and convinced anyway that Mr
Rinyo-Clacton must have infected him with AIDS) Jonny concentrates on winning
Serafina back, realising along the way how much she fills his emptiness. Eventually
Mr Rinyo-Clacton is killed in a freak accident occasioned by coming face-to-face with
-- 269 --

Katerina, who turns out to be his mother, and the Faustian bargain is broken. It turns
out that Jonny does not have AIDS, and he and Serafina are able to live happily ever
after. It is a contrived ending to a story that is altogether too flimsy to bear the weight
the strangeness of what the living and the dead are to one another that Hoban
intends it to bear.
Both Fremder and Jonny are characters whose take on reality is not altogether
secure, but Harold Klein in the next novel, Angelicas Grotto, rushes at the madness
of the world with an abandon ill befitting his age. But then, part of the madness of
the novel is that Klein is aware throughout that he should not be behaving the way
he does, but it is a way of filling the emptiness. He is lonely and old and his career
as an art historian no longer seems enough. His particular interest is the work of
Odilon Redon, and especially the painting Angelica and Ruggiero inspired by
Orlando Furioso. When he comes across a pornographic web site that draws on the
same inspiration, Angelicas Grotto, he finds himself drawn ever more obsessively
into a series of humiliating and threatening sexual encounters orchestrated by the
owner of the web site. Eventually, with a logic that leaves no other way out, Klein is
led to murder and his own death.
Like Fremder before him, Klein is alone, and sex alone is not enough. The only
one of these books with no element of the fantastic about it, Klein cannot flicker into
another reality but only die in this one. It is a sad book which leaves a sour aftertaste.
However, Hobans most recent novel, Amaryllis Night and Day, is clearly meant as a
companion to that book, the other side of the same coin. The central image of the new
book is, significantly, the klein bottle, and like that curious device Hoban turns the
story inside out. A sad tale of sexual obsession that proves self destructive becomes
a happy tale of sexual love that proves redemptive: one of Hobans weakest novels is
converted into one of his strongest.
We are told, very deliberately, that this novel is set shortly after the events of
Angelicas Grotto: Harold Klein and Peter Diggs were colleagues, and Peter is still
pondering the mystery of Kleins disappearance. But Peter seems to be recapitulating
Kleins journey, not with a girl met through a pornographic web site, but with a girl
met in a dream. Peter first sees Amaryllis at a bus-stop marked BALSAMIC waiting
for a bamboo and rice-paper bus that will take her to FINSEY-OBAY. The second
time he sees her it is in the Science Museum, looking at a klein bottle display (not
just a reference to Angelicas Grotto but also a representation of the narrative shape
this plot will take), and they recognise each other. From this point on the story
concerns their attempts to control their dreams so that they might get to the end of
the bus route, to FINSEY-OBAY, which they feel will provide some revelation.
Along the way, the novel displays all the tricks and obsessions we have come to
expect of Hobans work: the quoted song lyrics, the importance of paintings and
books, the familiarity with London, though a London often seen through the
distorting (or hyper-real) lens of fantasy, and the urgency of sex. But it does have one
fairly surprising twist: America. Hoban began writing childrens fiction before he
-- 270 --

moved to London, but all his adult fictions from The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and JachinBoaz (1973) onwards have been written in and imbued with London. He has
apparently never felt the need to fictionalise America as he has fictionalised London,
his characters do not visit that country and it receives no more than a passing
mention. That America should appear in this new novel, therefore, even as a
dreamscape, is curious, that it should in the end prove the origins of and the answer
to most of the questions that plague our narrators psyche seems to indicate a looking
backwards previously absent from Hobans work.
As with so much of Hobans recent work, this is a novel about the emptiness of
reality and the ways we try to fill it. At one point our artist-narrator says:
[T]hose of us who think about the empty spaces tend to paint pictures, write
books, or compose music. There are many talented people who will never
become painters, writers, or composers; the talent is in them but not the empty
spaces where art happens.

Peter is working on a picture he calls The Beckoning Fair One, a title taken from
a story by Oliver Onions. It shows a mysterious woman leading the viewer towards
the edge of a cliff, a not unfamiliar figure in Hobans work, in Fremder, for instance,
he wrote of Out There whispering and beckoning like the Erl Kings daughters. As
Peter falls victim to his own temptress, the art student Amaryllis who comes to him
in dreams, so the figure in the painting changes to become that of Amaryllis. The pair
turn dreams and waking inside out, they tread mazes both real and symbolic, and the
landscape of mystery and nightmare that they find themselves visiting again and
again is not England but New England, a place that both know from childhood visits
but which holds bad memories for them. There, in the dream New England, an old
woman like Katerina from Mr Rinyo-Clactons Offer waits for them, to offer advice
and point the way if they can but understand it. Eventually, as they come to
understand the reality of their dreams, the flickering ungraspable actuality of them,
Peter discovers that Amaryllis is the one heading for the cliff and at the last minute
he is able to save her. At the same time he is able to confront and disperse the dark
shadow that has been hanging over him since his American upbringing. It results in
the most unequivocally happy ending that Hoban has written for some time.

-- 271 --

FOREVER HALDEMAN
In the mid-1970s, Joe Haldeman won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for his
first novel, The Forever War. In the late 1990s he repeated that coup with Forever
Peace, a novel he was careful to deny was a sequel to its predecessor though the two
novels were undoubtedly linked thematically. As the millennium turns it is hard not
to see another Forever novel from Haldeman, this time an overt sequel to The Forever
War, as a calculated assault upon the awards. Unfortunately, though it shares the
same central characters, Forever Free has far less to do with The Forever War than
Forever Peace did, and it doesnt match either novel in its sensibilities or its qualities.
Read now, twenty-odd years later, The Forever War seems dated. The drugs and
the sex are distinctly of their time; though Haldeman uses drugs and sex just as much
in Forever Peace there isnt the right-on-man, post-hippy sensibility behind them that
makes bits of The Forever War seem far more jejeune than it ever did at the time. And
the book is so clearly and blatantly about Vietnam that at times the high-tech sf
paraphernalia is jarring and out of place. Having said that, it remains a damned good
book; the way it is structured, the way Haldeman uses relativity effects as a way of
representing the alienation of the Vietnam vet, is powerful and involving. The fact
that the war is a blunder that should never have happened is an interesting twist, as
is the fact that the humans are not exactly the good guys, and though the anti-war
sensibility was not exactly unusual at the time, it was virtually unheard of in hard sf.
The Forever War ended with an end to war that is achieved by surrendering our
humanity, or at least part of what it is that makes us human. Those post-humans (as
we would call them now) who make the peace do so by becoming a group mind, a
population that is effectively one individual. That Haldeman has moral qualms about
this is indicated in the way he has his vets choose exile to a remote world so they
may retain their humanity. In Forever Peace he explores those moral qualms further.
The war at the heart of this novel is different; it is a human war against human
enemies (though the fact that it is clearly not Haldemans war is shown by how
clumsily he handles it; he seems not to know the difference between a terrorist war,
a guerrilla war and a war on the model of Vietnam, and at times this conflict seems
to have some of the characteristics of all three). But the war is not fought by humans,
at least not on our side. It is fought by robotic soldier boys who are controlled by
operatives who are plugged into them at a remote base, and who are also plugged in
to their fellow platoon members. Fortunately, it is discovered that being plugged in
to other people for an extended period cures all warlike impulses, so an end to war is
found by a means very much like the group mind of The Forever War. And again, just
as in The Forever War, the novels protagonists are excluded from the group mind and
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hence retain their humanity. So Haldeman once more suggests that war can be ended
only by ending the differentiation between us, by making us one being, and once
more he backs away from going wholeheartedly along this route. Forever Peace is not
a great book, it is rather flabby in the first half though it picks up tremendously in
the second half, but it is interesting to see that America is again painted as more
villain than hero, and that the book is suffused with liberal or even left-wing
sympathies. Few American sf writers, and virtually none who write hard sf or
militaristic sf, share such sympathies.
If there is a theme developing through these first two books it is that war is an
aberration of our very humanity, a consequence of the differentiation between us as
individuals. The moral argument against war is emphasised by making those who
fight the wars not competent heroes but frail and fallible individuals, but this only
makes more overt the greater moral dilemma: is it worth losing that individuality to
find an end to war? What makes Forever Free a heart-sinkingly inappropriate
conclusion to this sequence is that Haldeman does not attempt to answer that
question, nor does he take it any further; rather, he simply announces that it is
irrelevant. Nor does he even sustain the liberal sensibilities that sustained the earlier
books. This is hard sf reverting to a knee-jerk Heinleinian norm, and it is a sad thing
to see. One wonders whether Forever Free was even written by the same Joe
Haldeman who fought in Vietnam and poured his fears and his excitements, his
frustrations and his doubts, so movingly and effectively into The Forever War: there
is little of them left here.
William Mandella, once the iconic ordinary Joe who went right through the
Forever War being impelled by events over which he had no control whatsoever, has
suddenly become a super-competent libertarian hero, always ready with the bright
idea or the brute force necessary to shape events to his will. And where both earlier
novels presented the individual and the group mind as two sides of a moral argument
about the cost of ending war, now they are simply two sides of a war. All subtlety has
fled in the face of simple oppositions.
Mandella, his wife Marygay and his two children are among the leaders of the
bunch of vets who have settled on Middle Finger. Its a hard life, closer to the pioneer
existence of the American West than anything we might imagine in the fourth
millennium, and the vets seem to have acquired a ghetto mentality, feeling threatened
by the ubiquitous post-human Man. (To be fair, nothing done by Man in this book
seems to justify such a feeling of threat; it is simply a given and the issues it raises
are never explored.) Mandella, who has been translated into an action-man simply by
surviving the war, conceives a daring plan: he and a bunch of other vets will seize a
spaceship and fly off with it to the edge of the galaxy, then return when time-dilation
effects have rendered Man extinct. The logic of this plan is something else that is
never explored. Even should Man be extinct there is no reason at all why this farfuture universe should be any more welcoming to the vets. Surprisingly, when news
of the plan gets out, Man agrees to it, then suddenly changes their mind again so
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Mandella and his fellows can perform their daring seizure after all.
To this point the novel has been little more than a routine far-future adventure,
but now the hard sf ideas that added such a spice to the earlier Forever novels seem
to hot up this story too. Barely has the journey begun when strange things start to
happen, concluding, against all the laws of physics, with the sudden complete
disappearance of all their fuel. Even if the interesting moral issues have been quashed,
it looks like there is at least going to be an intriguing scientific mystery, because we
know that Joe Haldeman, hard sf writer, is not going to play fast and loose with the
laws of physics. And the mystery does deepen when the survivors take to the lifeboats
and make it back to Middle Finger. A few years have passed, but not enough to make
the changes they find there, for the planet has become a Mary Celeste, with no
humans or human remains left. It looks as if everyone left without warning or without
a struggle in mid-meal. More intriguing still, they are able to calculate that this
disappearance happened at exactly the same moment that their fuel disappeared
aboard the ship.
Now the book is shaping up to be a really good mystery: unfortunately, this is the
moment that Haldeman chooses to blow it big-time. By great good chance there is a
ship at Middle Finger, which Mandella and his fellows take to Earth, where they
discover that all the things that have happened elsewhere have happened on Earth as
well. But all is not quite devastation: barely have they landed at the space port than
they encounter a representative of a race of long-lived shape-shifters who have coexisted on Earth throughout the entire long history of humankind without once being
found out. By this time, I feel, Haldeman has painted himself into so many corners
the laws of physics blatantly defied, the universe wiped clear of life in an instant, an
unknown life form that exists right here on Earth that the only way he can get out
is by using a deus ex machina. So he does. Our hero has a face-to-face meeting with
God, the scientific mysteries are shown to have no scientific rationale, and the
universe is saved in a climax which seems to have absolutely nothing to do with the
sensibilities or the moral hesitation that made the earlier novels so interesting.
I wish Haldeman was a bad writer, because then it would be easy to dismiss this
book as a piece of worthless rubbish. But he is not a bad writer; at times he is a very
good writer. It is just that in this novel he seems to have wilfully thrown away all the
care, the sensitivity, the moral questioning and the plain good sense that made his
other books worth reading.

-- 275 --

A MODE

OF

HEAD-ON COLLISION:

GEORGE TURNERS CRITICAL RELATIONSHIP

WITH SCIENCE FICTION
To write about George Turners criticism is to step into an unexpectedly crowded
arena. There are, for instance, significant papers by John Foyster and Bruce Gillespie.1
In what follows I will not be disagreeing with either of them, but I will be taking their
criticisms further than they seem prepared to do, and I will use those criticisms as a
basis for exploring Turners entire relationship with science fiction. Both Foyster and
Gillespie have a curiously uncertain tone: they are not comfortable with the content
of Turners criticisms. Foyster indeed devotes a goodly portion of his essay to showing
how comprehensively wrong Turner was in his infamous attack on Alfred Besters The
Demolished Man. They are nervous in the face of Turners swingeing style, but they
are still primarily in the business of praising the man. I dont know if they really liked
George Turner if his autobiographical writing is anything to go by, he was not an
easy person to like but boy, were they proud of him.
They were proud, I suspect, because he was their discovery. During the 1960s
Australia had very little contact with the world of science fiction. American and
British books arrived late and were expensive, and Australias indigenous publishing
industry could not support much in the way of science fiction. There were a handful
of writers in the field Wynne Whiteford, A. Bertram Chandler but they were
dependent on overseas publication or a handful of eccentric and usually short-lived
presses. As Turner later put it: Australian science fiction lacked stamina, talent and
a public [SFA, 47]. Science fiction fandom in Australia was similarly thinly spread
and largely incoherent, a Lilliputian Wars of the Roses [SFA, 46] Turner would call
it. But in 1966 John Bangsund, with the active involvement of other Melbourne-based
fans such as Lee Harding, Damien Broderick and John Foyster, began to publish
Australian SF Review (ASFR), a fanzine which provided just the focal point that
Australian fandom needed. At the time, Bangsund was working as a sales
representative at Cassells and when a colleague pointed out that Turner called himself
a science fiction addict on the jacket of his new book, Bangsund approached Turner
and persuaded him to write a piece for ASFR. Turner was an acclaimed mainstream
author, joint winner of the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, so he could be seen as
a real catch for science fiction. Furthermore, the resultant robust criticisms of science
fiction from an older man somehow legitimised the fledgling iconoclasm of Foyster
and Gillespie and their confreres, and brought Australian criticism and later
Australian science fiction to international attention. Bruce Gillespie tells a story of
Turner being swamped by fans at the 1975 Aussiecon even though he had yet to
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publish any science fiction, and this attests to the international fame his reviews
generated2.
The rather proprietorial pride of Australian commentators is easy to understand,
therefore, but reading Turners criticism en masse provokes two responses. First: a
certain shell-shocked weariness at the relentless bluster and pugnaciousness of his
attack. In a typical article, published in 1970, he declares: I suggest that the real artist
finds the SF genre too constricting, and that SF has never since Wells said anything
that hasnt been expressed as forcefully, and probably more perceptively, in the
mainstream. Anybody want a fight? [GAPA, 32]. Second: a conviction that Turners
relationship with science fiction wasnt all it is made out to be.

1: WANTING

FIGHT

Let me start with the famous story of Turners return to the fold, as everyone
including Turner seems to characterise it. In Turners Profession of Science Fiction
piece for Foundation, in 1982, he notes that Bangsund was working for the publisher
which was in process of putting paid to my literary career. [NTS, 8] Cassells were at
that point rejecting what Turner believed would be his magnum opus, Transit of
Cassidy (eventually published in 1978); as Bruce Gillespie puts it: The George Turner
career had stopped in mid-sentence. At the age of 49, it seemed, George was on the
skids [Four Careers, 4]. Later, in that curious combination of memoir and polemical
history of science fiction, In the Heart or in the Head, Turner sums up this literary
career at this point: I had produced six novels, all but one commercial failures, and
if I had learned my trade as well as was in me, that was not well enough. [IHIH, 108]
Actually, up to this point Turner had published five novels. The first, Young Man
of Talent, based on his wartime experiences in New Guinea, came out in 1958 and
received respectable if not ecstatic reviews. It went on to be published in Britain and
America, and received sufficient sales for his publisher to support four more books,
which were set in the fictional town of Treelake: A Stranger and Afraid (1961), The
Cupboard Under the Stairs (1962, which shared the Miles Franklin Award), A Waste
of Shame (1965) and The Lame Dog Man (1967). This last appeared in the same year
as Turners first science fiction criticism. There was hardly a long period of mourning
between the end of one career and the move into another. But in fact, despite the
Award, none of his books had been a commercial success, and the last two were only
published in Australia. The rejection of his sixth manuscript had been on the cards
for some time. This was not a figure of towering literary respectability following his
heart into the despised ghetto of science fiction; it was a failure suddenly being
offered a new way to turn, a small pond where he could be a very big fish indeed.
And even in that, his embrace of science fiction was not sudden and wholehearted. I
want to suggest that George Turner was never comfortable in science fiction;
wherever his head took him, his heart remained forever in the mainstream.
This word, mainstream, is one that particularly upsets Turner; he returns to it
-- 278 --

again and again in his pieces. SF has never left the mainstream, merely played a few
creative variations and not so many, at that [NTS, 8] he says by way of explaining
why he finds the term mainstream offensive. Nevil Shutes books were really of what
science fiction fans call, with such self-conscious snobbery, the mainstream. As
though science fiction ever really forsook the mainstream of fiction! [SFA, 47] And
Turner speaks of his own time in what science-fictionists so snottily call the
mainstream. [NTS, 7] The mainstream is invariably in quotation marks; generally
this might suggest a word he was uncertain about, but I think it is more that he does
not trust the use of the word. Among science-fictionists it indicates a snotty or
snobbish attitude towards where he came from. He is offended by the term because
that is where he still sees himself Judith Buckrich quotes one reviewer as
complaining that Young Man of Talent was littered with literary allusions and
literary words [81]; even at the start of his career he was trying desperately to be
a serious writer and would carry on doing so throughout the rest of his career.
Turner picked up the language of fandom with remarkable speed, and wrote with
great insistence of being a fan, of contributing to fanzines, of being a part of the
culture. Yet there is a moment in his novel Brain Child where a character says of sf
writers and fans: They didnt like science! It was intrusive, obscure, boring and
unimaginative got in the way of real creativity! [58]. The speaker is one of the
villains of the book, though in a work where no one is admirable that doesnt
necessarily count for much, and anyway its an attitude towards the whole culture of
science fiction that Turner expressed in his own voice often enough. In In the Heart
or in the Head, for instance, he tells of being at a convention where he suggested
Genesis as a precursor for sf: Nobody laughed; they thought I was serious. I havent
attempted deadpan satire with fans again, [IHIH, 32] and again: For the science
fiction fan, however, rational thought is not enough. [IHIH, 33] These are the attitudes
of someone who saw himself as outside the community, for all his protestations. And
he anticipates, perhaps even invents, a similarly antagonistic response from within
the genre.

2: DEMOLISHING BESTER
Turners debut for Bangsunds ASFR was an attack upon Alfred Besters The
Demolished Man. He summarises his cause for attack thus: the nonexistent realism
of its presentation of telepathy (riddled with inconsistencies), the quality of the
presented cultural background (close to non-existent) and the depth of
characterization which was no more than the skin depth required by the plot. [NTS,
9] These are all issues concerned with how the novel does or does not connect with
the mainstream. Characterisation has always been an issue about which mainstream
and genre fiction have been seen as differing, and Turner is doing no more than
stating a truism for mid-century sf. In fact, when he points out that they are very
striking characters, admirably suited to the uses to which Bester puts them [DS, 19]
-- 279 --

he is actually suggesting that the depth of characterisation is greater than the norm
in science fiction of that period. The cultural background the familiar twentiethcentury milieu with some technological trimmings [DS, 19] as he puts it is, as so
often in science fiction, foregrounded as part of the plot rather than explored as part
of a landscape through which the characters move. That this is a novel which Turner
repeatedly says is an ingenious thriller constructed and plotted by an ingenious man
[DS, 18] would suggest the background is well enough constructed to make the tale
work, but this is not how it is done in the mainstream, or at least not the mainstream
from which Turner came. He repeatedly describes his own writing method as creating
a setting then letting his characters loose in it until such time as he has to draw the
narrative thread to a close. If the setting is necessarily a part of the plot, this is not a
method that will work very well, and Gillespie notes that Turners criticisms of science
fiction became noticeably less strident when he had started to write science fiction
himself.
The bulk of Turners attack on Bester, however, is concentrated on the use of
telepathy. John Foyster notes that this is focused on three specific incidents in the
novel, and Turners claim that Bester recognized the flaws but ignored them is
undermined by the fact that in two of the cases he details the techniques Bester uses
to draw attention away from the problem [5]. Let me take one specific issue: when
Turner attacks Bester for the telepathic game of building sentence figures because
[t]his commits Bester to the admission that his telepaths think in words, not in total
impressions [DS, 18] it is the attack of someone who wants sf to follow exactly the
rules and conventions of literary realism. But if you consider that sf is doing something
other than what realism is doing, Besters ploy becomes not only excusable but a valid
deployment of the tools of the genre. If you consider science fiction as a language, as
for instance Samuel Delany has suggested, then Besters device is part of the figurative
function of the genre. In attempting to convey an experience that his readers can never
share, straightforward realism would be inadequate; but the sentence figures can be
used to represent something of the speed, complexity and efficiency of using telepathy,
words thus standing figuratively for the total impressions Turner demands. Turners
adherence to the idea that science fiction must be rigidly realistic actually gets in the
way of presenting something impossible, something neither author nor audience can
have known, in a way that lets both share the sense of it.
But to do this, Turner argues, is not to write science fiction but fantasy: a work
of SF must be consistent within the bounds of the speculative ideas embodied in it,
and those speculative ideas must hold up under scrutiny. If they do not, the work is
no longer SF but fantasy or daydream, and loses validity accordingly. [DS, 18] To put
it another way, if The Demolished Man is science fiction, then SF will be, for the
majority, never more than a titillation of the emotions. [DS, 19] Such flawed science
fiction appeals to the heart, he seems to be saying, but it should appeal to the head.
This deliberate demolition job on one of science fictions icons brought Turner, or
so he says: cheers, catcalls, fanfares, furies, staunch supporters and others who would
-- 280 --

have had me turning over a slow fire [NTS, 9; IHIH, 127]. So convinced is he of this
response that he repeats it word for word in his Profession of Science Fiction and In
the Heart or in the Head. But the letter column in the subsequent issue of ASFR
hardly bears that out. Sgt R.F. Smith is typical when he says the article was rather
like a bucket of refreshingly cold water Mr. Turners axe job in no way makes me
irritable. I still like the book [48] Robert Bloch wrote: Im grateful for the
incisiveness demonstrated by George Turner in his disquisition. [43] The nearest thing
to an attack comes from John Brosnan who, significantly, links Turners piece with a
review by John Foyster in the same issue. As Brosnan characterizes it, Foyster said of
Samuel R. Delanys Babel-17 that as mainstream writing it stinks but as sf it is good
[44] (Foysters review is actually more subtle and considered than that, but he does
complain of mainstream writing that gets in the way of sf ideas), and Brosnan is
annoyed by Turner and Foyster because they were both condescending towards sf.
[44] This is significant because it shows that what Turner was doing was no more than
what other contributors to the magazine were doing, and had been doing for a year
before Turner joined their ranks, (at the time Foysters review appeared, Delany was
already being hailed as an important figure in the American New Wave), and also
because it suggests that the readers responded to it in just that way. None of the
letters, for instance, responded solely to the Turner article, dealt with it first above
other matters, or spent any longer on it than they did on responding to anything else
in the issue. Most simply ignored it.

3: DENYING FANTASTICATION
Meanwhile Turner insists his own science fictions are better understood, better
appreciated, by those outside the genre, by the mainstream. Of his first sf novel,
Beloved Son, for instance, he says: the non-SF reviewers were quicker to observe the
actual theme and were in general happy with it. Make what you will of that. [NTS,
11]
The reason there is this conflict between his supposed engagement with science
fiction, in all its manifestations, and this disparagement of those who are involved
with the genre is contained within that comment that rational thought is not enough.
Time and again he runs into the notion that, for sf writers, critics and fans,
fantastication is required, a peering at reality as it is not and probably could not be.
So the identity of this addiction (he more than once talks of fandom as an
addiction, an interesting echo of his own claim of an addiction to science fiction
which first brought him to John Bangsunds notice) becomes further blurred by
emotional demands. [IHIH, 33]
As his criticism of The Demolished Man suggests, fantasy, any form of the
fantastic or what he calls fantastication, is anathema to George Turner. So much so
that though he repeatedly credits Alice in Wonderland, read to him when he was
three, as the source of his love of science fiction, he reports that it was a shock to the
-- 281 --

system when I was weaned to the idea that (it) was fantasy, not real. Meaning that a
work which has held English-speaking humanity enchanted for 116 years deals in
unrealities? [SUW, 13] That thought seems too much for him to bear, and he goes
through extraordinary contortions to claim that Alice contains no fantasy. Lewis
Carroll, rather, extrapolated received knowledge and theory to points beyond the
edge of reason. [IHIH, 15] That sounds pretty much like fantasy to me, but here, and
in a number of other places where he discusses the relationship between fantasy and
science fiction, Turner seems to be tying himself in syntactical knots that might
signify his own emotional turmoil. Alice, the beloved book, is fantasy but at the same
time it cannot be fantasy because, for Turner, that is a denial of all that is rational
and real. Fantasy in its pure form depends on the denial of physical likelihood or
even possibility [IHIH, 15] he says at one point, and later makes plain his disdain for
the fantastic with an aside: There are other fantasy approaches; the reader is welcome
to all of them. [IHIH, 213] He insists that fantasy operates in spite of reality while
the sf writer must at every step relate firmly to the real world. [SUW, 15] It was an
attitude he maintained stoutly throughout his career. As late as 1990 he was writing:
Let us by all means read fantastic literature for pleasure and speculation but let
us also not permit its fabulations to cloud the realities of logic and knowledge
with which, willy-nilly, we must confront the world and the future. Historically,
attempts to follow fantasy to its logical conclusion have plunged the world
into bloodshed and misery. [ASFR23, 21]

Fantasy is not just a reprehensible literary form which feed(s) uncritical minds
with garbage [ASFR23, 21], it is an outright danger to the world. Turners early
definition of science fiction was primarily concerned with placing sf in a relationship
with the mainstream:
Sf is a generic term covering fiction which is concerned with today as well as
tomorrow, with where we are and what we have as well as where we are going
and what we will find when we get there and ultimately with personal and
general visions of mankind, of intelligence, of philosophical directions and
psychological fumblings and even of God. It is in fact concerned with the
common preoccupations of literature, but where fiction has in the past probed,
described and discussed, sf attempts to extrapolate the results of human
behaviour. The literary basis remains unchanged but the approach is different.3

This is a definition which could allow in fantasy visions of psychological

fumblings and even of God though I am not sure how much Turner was aware of
that opening. His main concern, however, stated twice within this definition, is to
explain that science fiction is a part of the mainstream sf is concerned with the
common preoccupations of literature and [t]he literary basis remains unchanged.
The tone is notably less polemical than in many of his other pronouncements on
science fiction, and I think this can be traced back to its original appearance, in a
-- 282 --

literary journal outside the genre. When writing for an sf audience, Turner could be
a big noise, an iconoclast, safely attacking the genre from within in order to
proselytise for his vision of (re-)engagement with the mainstream. For a non-genre
audience, however, his tone was always noticeably more defensive; here he is always
the mainstream figure justifying his move into genre by extolling literary virtues. It
is the same argument, but presented in two different ways for two different
audiences.
Central to this vision of union is an insistence that science fiction should be a
realist literature on exactly the same terms as mainstream literature. He came to see
any incursion of the fantastic as a threat to this ideal, and so his definition of science
fiction became steadily more polemical and precise: the fiction of altered conditions
treated as reality rather than fantasy, by extension of known fact instead of simple
postulation of arbitrary change which he says has the virtue that [a]t least mine
removes fantasy from the stew. [NTS, 10] To an extent this is the same perception of
science fiction as a mode of realist fiction that has been common among critics such
as John Clute and Peter Nicholls, who began their critical careers around the same
time that Turner began his. But in Turners case he wouldnt just insist that science
fiction was realist, he would insist that it was, that it had to be, an attack on anything
that was remotely non-realist.
This is an attitude he carries across into so many of his reviews. Philip K. Dicks
Ubik is criticised because the sense of all possible reality vanished, became a shifting
thing [BC, 39] and [t]he metaphor fails because it cannot stand against the weight
of reality as we know it [BC, 40]. Ursula K. Le Guins The Left Hand of Darkness, on
the other hand, has all the earmarks of a mainstream novel using the SF method
merely as a framework [BC, 44] and his ultimate praise for Gene Wolfes Peace is that
it is utterly realistic [RTP, 73]. In his 1983 piece for the mainstream magazine
Overland Turner makes a claim for science fiction with reasonable claims to literary
and intellectual excellence [SUW, 13], by which we can safely guess he is referring
to Le Guin and Wolfe and his other favourite writer, Thomas M. Disch, though it still
has the feel of the standard defensive posture we all adopt when faced with the
incomprehension or the disdain of outsiders. But even here he feels compelled to
point out science fiction is not basically a product of fantasy but is opposed to the
purely imaginative method of fantasy. [SUW, 13] It is always necessary to point out
that science fiction can only have a claim to be literature when it completely eschews
anything that is not pure and unsullied realism. Now, however good Le Guin and
Wolfe may be, however bad Bester and Dick may be, their relationship to realism is
not the only nor even the best way of assessing their work. But it was the one
standard that Turner applied throughout his critical career.
The dichotomy inherent in this position was highlighted in two significant critical
debates in which Turner became engaged, the first involving Stanislaw Lem, and the
second Lucius Shepard.

-- 283 --

4: A HOPELESS LEM
In 1973, as Solaris became the first of his novels to receive widespread
distribution in the West, Stanislaw Lem had a long essay in a special triple-issue of
SF Commentary. Science Fiction: A Hopeless Case With Exceptions was a
polemical attack on the worst examples of the genre, couched in predominantly
economic terms: sf is a clinical case of a region occupied exclusively by trash,
because in kitsch, the culturally and historically highest, most difficult, and most
important objects are produced on the assembly line, in the most primitive forms, to
be sold to the public at bargain prices. [17] The exception of the title is Philip K. Dick,
whom Lem praises for the way he makes trash battle against trash [19], and in an
appendix to his article he specifically takes issue with George Turners critique of
Ubik. In an argument that prefigures the one Shepard will later use against Turners
brand of realism, Lem argues that the writers of contemporary novels do not describe
the principles that underlie the functions of refrigerators, radios, and cars. [35] If
nothing else, this illustrates that Turner and Lem were approaching science fiction
from diametrically opposed positions.
Though Turner was a champion of Solaris, he rounded on Lem in the next issue
of SF Commentary in an essay that parodies Lems original in title (S.L.: A Hopeless
Case With No Exceptions), structure and length. This is actually a forensic
examination of Lems piece that lands many telling blows: My intention in treating
this section in such detail has been to point out the nature of Lems critical method,
which poses argument (seeking some sort of assertiveness) instead of dialectic (which
seeks truth) [SL, 13] one notes only in passing that argument rather than dialectic
was Turners own more usual mode. The trouble is that, cranky and curmudgeonly as
Lems essay is, in rising to the bait Turner doesnt actually say much different. When
Lem asks, for instance, why sf cant get rid of the trash for good, Turner replies: Lem
knows the answer as well as you and I do. While there is a market for rubbish and
there always will be rubbish will be manufactured in quantity. [SL, 16] Well, yes,
Lem does indeed know that answer, because that is precisely what the bulk of his
essay is devoted to arguing, and he uses precisely the economic terms markets,
manufacturing that Turner applies.
Predictably, Lems claim that sf is a special case which bridges the two spheres
of culture, the trashy and the Realm of Mainstream Literature [9], is what rouses
Turner to most indignation. Turner makes some very valid points: dont all forms of
fiction belong to both realms? So what makes sf a special case? But then he goes on
to claim that by this division Lem is arguing if its good then it isnt sf [SL, 17] which
isnt exactly what Lem is saying. Turner has to overstate the case because he and Lem
are effectively saying the same thing: that there is a scale of sf that stretches from the
reprehensible to the literary. Turner presents us (here if nowhere else) with many more
points on the scale, but this is not as definitive a difference with Lem as he seems to
imagine. Nor do they really differ on what constitutes the literary end of the scale; if
-- 284 --

Lems list is more Eurocentric and Turners more Anglophone, they still seem to agree
on Wells and Stapledon, for example (though Turner, in a curious misreading, seems
to believe Lem dismisses Stapledon as part of the trash, which patently he does not).
They differ mostly in what constitutes the reprehensible. For Lem this is primarily an
economic category writing for hire, a production line of cheap texts. For Turner, it
is fiction that strays too far from the mainstream; indeed his dismissal of Lems
argument revolves around the statement that sf now produces work of quality simply
because it has ceased to be a genre. [SL, 20]
The half of Lems essay devoted to Philip K. Dick, and the appendix in response
to Turners views on Ubik, are dismissed by Turner in the four short paragraphs of his
own appendix: I have no intention of re-reading a not particularly outstanding novel
to discover whether or not the plot can be made to work by having the reader do the
authors job for him. [SL, 30] Thus does Turner airily pass over Lems sense that
science fictional assumptions constitute an understood background to an sf story. It
is a clash about the nature of science fiction that would recur in Turners later debate
with Lucius Shepard.

5: AT WAR

WITH

SHEPARD

Late in Turners critical career, realism and warfare, the two things he thought he
knew about, came together in an attack upon Lucius Shepards Life During Wartime:
I could not see that Shepard was writing about war at all, sensitively or
otherwise; he was writing, it seemed to me, about the human ego naked,
stripped down to its basic, murderous selfishness. What knowledge he showed
of war and soldiers would leave a wide margin if written on the back of a
postage stamp. [SFPF, 15]

Typically, his assault upon the novels lack of realism focuses upon
characterization or, as he sees it, lack of it: The fact is that in any group of soldiers
you will find as many varieties of speech as you would expect in an army where rich,
poor, educated and ignorant exist together. [SFPF, 15] The interesting thing about this
is that it echoes a criticism of Turners own debut novel, Young Man of Talent (1958)
which was based on his wartime experiences in Borneo. Frank Kellaway was a friend
of Turners at the time he wrote that book, and later wrote his own autobiographical
novel, Bills Break (under the pseudonym, Alistair Skelton). In it Turner appears as
Jimmy who writes a novel identifiable as Young Man of Talent which the Kellaway
character criticizes for lack of naturalism and for its stylized and one-dimensional
characters:
The only thing thats wrong with it is that its fake. Lifes not like that: its much
more untidy. People arent as consistent as that either. And another thing,
Jimmy plays at being God himself. Hes his own smart arse young man
-- 285 --

Jimmy always knows exactly how his ruddy characters think and feel and
precisely what they do. Nobody ever knows that much about anybody else4.

Whether or not Turner was criticizing Life During Wartime for his own perceived
failings, his article drew an immediate and stinging response from Lucius Shepard,
who counterattacked on precisely the ground that Turner staked so much of his
critical perspective: naturalism. That Mr Turner attempts to invalidate my perceptions
by doing nothing more than banging the gavel of his Experience smacks of a
curmudgeonly refusal to admit that there may be other truths, yea, even other realities
apart from those with which he is familiar. [ASFR(2nd)21, 27] In other words, Shepard
is accusing Turner of exactly the same thing that Kellaway did: believing that there
is only one reality and that he alone can know it precisely. Shepard and Kellaway
both argue that reality is much more untidy, a more ambiguous approach that Turner
is unable to accept, as he demonstrates when he reacts to Shepards letter: I agree
with Shepard that wars decades apart do not resemble each other but the men who
fight them change little. [SHK, 31] This draws another response from Shepard,
pointing out that Turner was, in effect, insisting that his impression of the behaviour
of men in World War II be taken as a template for the behaviour of men who were
fighting against guerillas, who were plagued by drugs, by a hapless chain of
command, and whose morale was afflicted by strident vilification on the homefront.
[ASFR(2nd)23, 22] So Turners absolutist beliefs and Shepards view of human nature
as a more malleable thing clash in mutual incomprehension.
Underlying this dispute about their experience of war and how it might be
understood, however, was a more fundamental dispute about the nature of science
fiction, and one that goes right back to Turners attack on Bester. In the original
review Turner criticizes Shepard strongly for using psi in his novel: Psi in all its
forms is the refuge of the unoriginal mind It may be argued that a writer can
introduce a fantasy element to describe or suggest a truth but he may not, in my
view, plaster it on to a background of savagely realistic narrative and expect it to be
accepted as a truth in itself. [SFPF, 16] In his final response, Shepard makes a point
that is telling because of what it reveals about Turners attitude towards science
fiction:
Such props are there to be used, they are the furnishings of our genre. FTL, psi,
alternative worlds, and so forth are things we depend upon our readers to
understand, just as a mainstream author depends upon his readers to
understand the basic furnishings of a city street without having to describe
them in minute detail and explain how they came to be. [ASFR(2nd)23, 22]

This is the same point Lem was making about the workings of refrigerators and
radios. As there was in the difference between Foyster and Turner over The
Demolished Man, so there is between Shepard and Turner over Life During Wartime
a fundamental disagreement about the nature of science fiction. On the one side is a
-- 286 --

view that certain devices, which may or may not be fantastical, are there to provide
background, and what would be the background in a typical mainstream novel is
consequently brought into the foreground. For Turner, the background remains the
same whether it is a mainstream or a science fiction novel, SF has never left the
mainstream as he insisted in 1982.

6: BRIEF EXHILARATIONS
There was one significant difference between the Turner who attacked Stanislaw
Lem in 1974 and the Turner who attacked Lucius Shepard in 1989. In 1978, the same
year that his last mainstream novel, Transit of Cassidy, finally appeared in Australia,
his first science fiction novel was published. Beloved Son went on to win a Ditmar
Award in Australia, one of several awards his science fiction novels would win. The
eight novels that followed (Vaneglory (1981), Yesterdays Men (1983), The Sea and
Summer (1987), Brain Child (1991), The Destiny Makers (1993), Genetic Soldier (1994)
and Down There in Darkness, published posthumously in 1998) earned wider
publication, better sales, greater acclaim and more awards than his mainstream
fiction. But though he would incorporate science fictional tropes in these books
depopulation linked with a genetically engineered quest for greater intelligence or
longer life were persistent themes these aspects of the stories tended to be treated
stiffly and solemnly, as if he were more concerned to establish the reality underlying
the idea than to explore the consequences of it. He was at his best in the work that
was least science fictional, most notably The Sea and Summer, which Peter Nicholls,
in The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, hails as a genuinely distinguished and deeply
imagined story [1246] of the social underclasses in a near-future Melbourne slowly
drowning through the effects of global warming. It is, in all but setting, a mainstream
novel.
Perhaps the most interesting of the science fiction novels, in the light of Turners
attack on Shepard, is Yesterdays Men, which effectively plundered his first novel,
Young Man of Talent. It shifted the wartime experiences in New Guinea into the
future, but the view of how men behave in wartime is virtually unchanged from the
earlier novel. Clearly there was only one reality and, already approaching 70, Turner
was not about to change his views for the sake of science fiction.
Let us recall for a moment that Turner was horrified to discover that Alice in
Wonderland was fantasy, that it was not real. That discovery was made about the time
he discovered the mainstream. No, it was not a discovery, it was a Pauline conversion,
for he describes it like a religious experience: the blinding revelation that the world
is people and attitudes and ideas, not manipulated things. [IHIH, 61-2] What this says
about science fiction is interesting but, in the context of the 1920s, hardly surprising.
But it seems to have fuelled his attitudes towards the two literatures ever after. A
great gap opened between brief exhilarations in imaginary universes and the life-long
satisfactions of the literary world I wanted to join. The gap remains; the satisfactions
-- 287 --

have had to be cut to fit the wearer. [NTS, 7] Science fiction would remain,
throughout his life, a place for brief exhilarations, it is a place that Turner elsewhere
characterizes as noisy but impotent [SFA, 47]. Or, as he says in Foundation, SF had
a foolishly false image of itself, a pose of self-importance which would flicker out at
the snap of a reality switch. [NTS, 9]
This tenuous, tenebrous world that is science fiction as Turner characterizes it
is not a place anyone would choose to stay. Not, at least, when compared to the lifelong satisfactions of the mainstream. I think, when Turner says that the satisfactions
have had to be cut to fit the wearer, he is not saying that they no longer have the
same attractions, but rather is tacitly admitting that he is slumming it in sf because
he could no longer make a go of it in that more satisfying literary world. And though
he will admit literary qualities within sf Le Guin, Wolfe, Disch for, after all, it
would be too painful to admit that he had turned his back completely on the literary
world, yet those qualities are few and far between and largely unrecognized by the sf
world itself. In reviewing Dischs 334 he uses the word art then hastily adds its a
word Ill use for precious few SF writers. Ballard, occasionally Aldiss and and ?
[TSW, 67] In contrast, Turner is quick to attack all those qualities in which science
fiction usually prides itself: originality of ideas, for instance. SF has never since Wells
said anything that hasnt been expressed as forcefully, and probably more
perceptively, in the mainstream. [GAPA, 32] And talking of Wells, another of that
rare breed of science fiction writers Turner admires for his realism, he says that where
the modern sf writer piles on the fantasy, Wells relates to home. Its the difference
between a novelist and a hack. [GAPA, 33] The sf writer who employs the fantastic,
it would seem, is condemned forever to be a hack; he can never be a novelist, as
Turner himself, of course, had once been.
What does all this amount to? George Turner, through his criticisms, perhaps even
more than through his fiction, was an iconic figure in Australian science fiction. The
current explosion of science fiction coming from Australia and we must never
forget that Turner loudly and repeatedly promoted a native strain in Australian sf
clearly owes a debt to the critical atmosphere fostered by Bangsund and Foyster and
Gillespie and others in Australian Science Fiction Review and SF Commentary. And
though these critics were more than capable of making a stir in their own right, they
held up George Turner as their figurehead. So George Turner can be seen as playing
a fundamental role in the development of Australian science fiction over the last
thirty years.
But whatever benefits flowed from his work, I contend that George Turner was
actually antagonistic towards the genre. He certainly judged it by one standard and
one standard only: how it stacked up against the realist literature of the mainstream.
The critic with the whole body of literature threatening his judgement, he said at one
point, has no multiple standard to help him out. [OWSF, 21] I think he felt himself
forced out of the mainstream, where he consistently stated that the best and most
interesting work was being done, and took to science fiction as a refuge. As he put
-- 288 --

it: science fiction is to me just another aspect of fiction writing; I am not a genre
devotee. [SFA, 45] If there is no difference between science fiction and the
mainstream, then Turner could pretend to himself that he had not moved elsewhere,
that he was still firmly rooted where he wanted to be. But because it did not match
his views of the mainstream it could not, it was, after all, doing something other
than the mainstream science fiction was doomed forever to fall short of his
standard. That, I believe, is what lies behind the ferocity of the attack, the pugnacious
attitude, in his reviews. When he described his style of reviewing as a mode of headon collision [SFA, 47] it was more true than I think he imagined: it was a genuine
clash of cultures between what he still wanted to be and where he now inadvertently
found himself.

-- 289 --

HETEROTOPIC BORDERS
What is it we are talking about here? Postmodernism is a cultural mode which has
developed since the Second World War. First identified by the French philosopher
Lyotard, it is a reaction to, and development from, the modernism of James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf. It can be seen in the music of John Cage and Talking Heads, in the
performance art of Laurie Anderson and the rise of improvisation comedy, and in the
fiction of Borges and John Fowles. Among its characteristics, it is anti-hierarchical,
what Michel Foucault called a heterotopia, where there is no authority, no absolute,
no clear ordering within a list. This results in the breakdown of boundaries between
genres, and between author, character and reader.
Cyberpunk is a mode of science fiction which developed during the 1980s. First
named by Bruce Bethke in response to the fiction of William Gibson, it is identified
by a detailed interest in the surfaces of the worlds described, in the interface between
computer/machine and human, in low-life and urban decay, in the glossy, glamorous
conflict of low-life hero and multinational corporation It is a form of romance which
builds on traditional sf formulations (cyberpunkers acknowledge debts to Alfred
Bester, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Delany among others), salted with some influences from
the edges of the mainstream (cyberpunkers also acknowledge debts to William
Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon). Since these latter are clearly identifiable as
postmodernists, does that make cyberpunk postmodern?
That is what Larry McCaffery believes, and what he sets out to demonstrate in this
fascinating and entertaining book, which bears the slightly unwieldy subtitle A
Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction. The problem is that my
opening paragraphs are closer to a definition of terms than you will find anywhere
in this book. Maybe definitions such as this run counter to the heterotopic grain of
postmodernism, but one cant help feeling that McCaffery is stretching boundaries as
much as possible in order to shoehorn in his thesis.
Let us begin with what the book contains. After an introduction and a checklist
there are twenty-nine short stories or novel extracts, followed by twenty essays or
extracts from longer critical works. The authors of the fiction are impeccable: Acker,
Ballard, Burroughs, Cadigan, Delany, Delillo, Gibson, Pynchon, Rucker, Shepard,
Shiner, Shirley, Sterling. Theres good straight-down-the-line postmodernism here,
straightforward sf, clear no-doubt-about-it cyberpunk, and a few which hover in
between, but they dont all cross boundaries in a way which fits the thesis. Delanys
tale of a homosexual encounter recounted with a thread of fantasy fits the
postmodern mould, but cyberpunk it aint. And what about Lewis Shiners Stoked,
which isnt cyberpunk, isnt sf, and is no more postmodern than Catcher in the Rye,
-- 291 --

which it closely resembles? In fact the only story here which unequivocally fits
McCafferys case is Bruce Sterlings Twenty Evocations.
As for the non-fiction, there are some of the best critical essays I have seen on
cyberpunk, especially by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr and Veronica Hollinger. There are
also extracts from longer works by Fredric Jameson and Jean-Francois Lyotard,
which are clear and informative on postmodernism. There is little of the turgid and
impenetrable prose you might expect from such a gaggle of academics. However,
Timothy Leary (yes, that Timothy Leary) is far too precious for his own or anyone
elses good. And there is one infuriating instance of pretentiousness, when Arthur
Kroker and David Cook disguise an interesting premise (about TV [as] the processed
world triumphant) in statements such as TV functions by substituting the negative
totality of the audience with its pseudo-mediations by electronic images for genuine
sociality, and the possibility of authentic human solidarities. (p.232) Yet, these articles
hardly seem to touch upon the presumed central link between postmodernism and
cyberpunk.
McCaffery tries to set the agenda in his introduction, when he equates the
postmodern world with post-industrial capitalism, where information has become the
key global resource. In so far as cyberpunk deals with the human and societal
problems of information overload and other aspects of our information age, it can be
seen as an outgrowth from post-industrial society. But does that lead us to infer the
identification between cyberpunk and postmodernism?
Part of the problem is that McCaffery speaks of terms that were previously
speculative abstractions suddenly become literalized. (p.6) This may be a
phenomenon of postmodernism, yet it is also the backbone of all science fiction.
Cyberpunk may literalize the abstract in this way, but as science fiction has always
done rather than as postmodernism is now doing. Cyberspace has bled outward from
sf into postmodernism, rather than, as McCaffery would have it, from postmodernism
into sf.
And this is a point which is backed up by one of the few essays in the book which
directly addresses the question of the relationship between the two modes. Brian
McHale, in POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM, points out that the growing legitimation of
science fiction, and especially of cyberpunk, is part of a general postmodern
phenomenon, the collapse of genre distinctions between high and low art, between
pop culture (sf) and serious fiction. In fact, this feedback between high and low is
a universal of our cultural history. The only thing which makes postmodernism any
different from the rest is the speed of the feedback loop, which has allowed
postmodernists such as Pynchon to feed on the sf of their youth in their own fictions,
for cyberpunkers to feed on Pynchon for inspiration, and for Pynchon to feed in turn
on cyberpunk in his most recent novel.
There is a relationship between postmodernism and science fiction, though the
blinkers imposed on this book do not allow it to be properly explored. But cyberpunk
is not, in and of itself, a purely postmodern phenomenon, nor is it the only part of
-- 292 --

science fiction which could be so identified. The result is a readable, fascinating book
well worth reading whether you are interested in postmodernism or cyberpunk
but it consistently manages to miss the one target it has set itself.

-- 293 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

IMAGES

OF THE

FALL

Operation Ares, published in 1970, was Gene Wolfes first novel. It came at the
beginning of a period which was to establish his reputation The Island of Doctor
Death and Other Stories came out the same year, The Fifth Head of Cerberus a
couple of years later yet it shows none of the complexity of plotting, the carefully
controlled use of language evident in these contemporary works. As an apprentice
work it takes a stock situation, heroic pro-science rebels rising up against a
hidebound, repressive authority, and advances the plot by sudden unheralded shifts
and convenient coincidences. Often a plot line will be raised and discarded within a
couple of pages, while preposterous situations are presented with little thought for
how they might logically arise or be sustained. Yet within this awkward adventure
story, in many ways so untypical of what we would come to recognise as Wolfes
work, there are glimpses of themes that will weave their way through so much of his
later fiction. Most notably, there is the messiah figure here robustly named Castle
who makes his way innocently through a landscape of the Fall. As with Latro in
Greece or Severian on Urth, Castle in near-future America is often ignorant of his role
as healer, and indeed finds that the role is chosen for him by others rather than
embraced by himself.
Right at the start of the novel there is a moment which directly echoes The
Shadow of the Torturer. Castle, immediately cast in a semi-heroic light, is a tall figure
making his way through an elaborate barricade in a dust-blown wilderness, in
defiance of a curfew which is due to start shortly. He is, it transpires, part of a
ramshackle conspiracy in contrast to Castles tall, straight, heroism, the others are
dismissively described by fellow-conspirator Japhet Tree as A girl and a kid and a
wakey like me, (p.8) as a result of a medical experiment Japhet endures life without
sleep, his body wracked by waking dreams until he is hunchbacked who gather in
a remote farmhouse to listen to illicit radio messages from the colony on Mars.
In the parlor of the old house, set at the focus of the room like an altar, hung
the smiling photograph of a man in a bubble-helmet and a bulging, ungainly
suit which trailed wires. (p.8)

Though the language is considerably less allusive, this clearly prefigures the
moment in The Shadow of the Torturer when Severian, on an errand to an unfamiliar
part of the Citadel, comes upon a picture cleaner.
The picture he was cleaning showed an armored figure standing in a desolate
landscape. It had no weapon, but held a staff bearing a strange, stiff banner. The
-- 297 --

visor of this figures helmet was entirely of gold, without eye slits or ventilation;
in its polished surface the deathly desert could be seen in reflection, and
nothing more. (The Shadow of the Torturer p.49)

The photograph of the astronaut that hangs in a long-defunct spaceship is an

iconic figure serving as a representative of a spiritual fall, a forgetting of the past that
stands in stark contrast to the flawless memory of the saviour Severian. The
photograph of the astronaut that hangs in a rundown farmhouse serves a similarly
iconic function, but the fall is more real economic, political, physical than
spiritual. We turn from this image of our aspirations for the future to a landscape of
decay. In Operation Ares space is literally the future hope of mankind.
Earth all of Earth apparently, though only North America seems to have suffered
real economic decline has lost contact with its Martian colonies. The colonies
represent science, advancement, but America has deliberately turned its back upon
Mars, science and the future. On the pretext that the colonies were an unnecessary
drain on their resources with no recompense, a reactionary movement has displaced
the legitimate government and established a Government Pro-Tem which has ruled
undemocratically for some twenty years and virtually outlawed science. That Castle
is a science teacher therefore gives him an intellectual legitimacy as the hero of a
science fiction novel. Meanwhile, in a move which emphasises the low-tech character
of this fallen America, the Martians are calling on Earth to contact them by blinking
the lights of your city in three short flashes. (p.9)
Throughout Operation Ares there is a curious and often uncomfortable global
blindness, as if America stands for the whole world. Later in the novel Maoist China
and Soviet Russia will both have significant parts to play in the action, and neither
seem to be suffering from the anti-science decline brought on by the Government
Pro-Tem. Yet it is assumed that nowhere will have the wherewithal to contact Mars
by anything other than a city-wide signal light; or that Mars could have no interest
in contacting anyone other than America. Again, at the end of the novel there is a
similar colonial arrogance in the assumption that Mars will simply provide additional
senators and representatives for a revivified American Congress. But, of course, this
Mars is not a real place but a mirror which allows Wolfe to reflect the landscape of
the fall that is his near-future America.
If Castle is the messiah figure, his alter-ego is the Captain, the unnamed
functionary whose rise within the hierarchy of the Government Pro-Tem exactly
balances Castles rise to lead the opponents of the regime. Whereas at the beginning
of the book Castle is a humble schoolteacher with mildly rebellious inclinations
though it is obvious that the isolated dissident group that consists of Castle, the boy
Nonny, and Japhet and Anna Tree would be incapable of mounting a rebellion that
presented any real threat to so much as a Parish Council the Captain is the leader
of the local peaceguards. The peaceguards are another component in the curious
political morality behind the novel: they are an unarmed body that seems to have
-- 298 --

taken the place of police, national guard, militia and army. The fact that they do not
carry weapons (beyond a sort of refined cattle prod) fits in with the political
philosophy of the Government Pro-Tem which, as it is revealed later, is almost
impeccably if ineffectually liberal President Pro-Tem Boyde is an ex-social worker
whose principal concern is for the welfare of the poor. Castles first demand is the
restoration of the right to carry arms, and the lack of weapons is seen as another
symbol of the fall. Midway through the novel, when Castle leads the mission to rescue
the constitutional president, Huggins, it had been decided not to press firearms upon
the Hunters, who like almost all Americans had lost all traditions of their use. (p.139)
As if, after no more than twenty years, they would be incapable of learning their use.
The relationship between Castle and the Captain is a strange one. It is, in fact, the
Captain who is largely responsible for boosting Castle to the role he eventually fills.
This is a process which begins with their first encounter, when the Captain clearly
warns Castle of an impending raid upon the Trees. Although it is too late to do
anything about it without breaking curfew, the Captain obviously expects some act
of heroism on the part of Castle. Why the Captain should warn Castle at all is never
explained; though it is not spelt out in the text it is as if the Captain is inflating Castle
into a hero in order to provide the adversary he believes his own stature demands.
There is always a difference between descriptions of Castle and his actions.
Though he does set out to warn the Trees, he succeeds through resourcefulness rather
than heroism. When he is attacked by the wild animals that have taken over the
American countryside he flees until he is able to distract his attackers by sacrificing
the entire livestock of poor dirt farmers (that the bony workhorse (p.20) subsequently
escapes is hardly down to Castle) not what might be expected of a hero. His
resourcefulness is more in the manner of a typically competent hero when he is
picked up by the peaceguard and tips them off about a minor legal infringement by
Japhet Tree, so they will get to him before the raid. Nevertheless, he is at best an
unheroic hero.
We see the Captain propelling Castle into his messianic role again when ARES is
first mentioned. Martian-inspired propaganda is starting to appear, government
broadcasts are being interupted, all of which is put down to a shadowy organisation
called ARES. As we eventually learn, ARES is no more than propaganda at this stage,
an invention of the Martians, a banner to which they hope the discontented will
eventually flock. That so few do actually flock to the banner suggests that the
government isnt really as unpopular as all that. But the invention clearly means more
to those it opposes than to those it is meant to aid, and it is obvious that the Captain
believes Castle is somehow involved. Within a short space, this belief is transformed
into a conviction that Castle is actually the leader of ARES the belief eventually
creates the reality.
A government-sponsored Education Team is in town on a thinly-disguised
propaganda exercise, using an old truck from the 1980s to demonstrate how well
people are living. It is not a very convincing exercise, as Castle says:
-- 299 --

People today live worse than they did twenty years ago. Do they actually think
they can hide that by parading a repainted truck? (pp. 30-1)

Nevertheless, the Captain fears sabotage by ARES and blackmails Castle into
inspecting the truck for a bomb. Castle finds no more than a pile of stones, but when
the truck blows up next day Castle is arrested and convicted of sabotage.
After the trial there is a significant meeting between Castle and the Captain in
which we learn that Castle has been knowingly convicted of a crime he didnt commit.
Castle claims the moral high ground I have done nothing morally criminal (p.43)
as he will do several times during the book; though it is interesting that when the
Captain accuses him of being an avowed enemy of the state? Of the people? Of the
poor? (p.43) Castle does not protest his innocence despite the fact that most guerrilla
leaders would normally automatically claim to be defending at least the last two. Now
we learn that the Captain thinks he is a leader perhaps the leader of ARES (p.43)
and again Castle does nothing to protest. He is being imagined into the role of hero,
but he seems to welcome it. And the Captain is certainly conniving: he offers Castle
privileged treatment through the Penal Reformatory Establishment for Social Tasks
(PREST) which gives educated convicts better treatment in exchange for educational
and social work. That education is so rare is another sign of the fall, and that PREST
exists is a symbol of the social conscience of the Government Pro-Tem.
The Captains assumption of Castles role within ARES follows Castle as he is
marched cross-country to New York. When a minor functionary seeks him out in an
effort to save his own skin by allying himself with ARES, Castle even demands: And
just what talents do you offer us? (p.52) Though he does then demur I am not a
member of ARES; like you I would join if I could, but I like to think my motives would
be better (p.53) he has implicitly accepted membership of ARES, and again claimed
the moral high ground in doing so.
It is worth noting that Castle is employed to teach his fellow prisoners to read. It
is strange to think of this as any sort of priority among a group of prisoners in transit,
yet we are presented with a situation no more than twenty years after the fall in
other words, in the first decade of the next century in which illiteracy is apparently
rife. Lieutenant Harper who is in charge of the prison detail doesnt even expect Castle
to know the name of West Point. In Wolfes first excursion into the landscape of the
fall, realism is quietly dropped in order to stress the sorry state into which Castle has
come as Messiah.
Castle has his first taste of the Messianic role when a Martian craft buzzes the
column of prisoners. He shows himself to be quick-thinking and brave when he
dodges bullets to escape. More than that, the ineffectualness of the Martians is
revealed; the Martian thinks he can exhort the prisoners to revolt by proclaiming:
It is mathematically demonstrable that over short distances the more numerous
group of combatants will have a low casualty rate in assaulting where the
proportions in opposition are as one to five or greater. (p.58)
-- 300 --

This ridiculous speech makes them out to be like H.G. Wells Martians a cold,
inhuman intelligence while we already know Castle is a more accessible, domestic
type of intellectual, a teacher, and hence practical. Castle automatically takes
command, deferred to by Martian and prisoners alike, acting decisively and making
a snappy, extempore address to the militia.
Yet for a saviour, Castles morality seems dubious. When Castle proposes an attack
on the militia the Martian protests:
But someone could be killed.
I sincerely hope so! (p.59)

Time and again as we will see, Castles statements make him out to seem callous,
uncaring, unheroic. Yet his actions never chime with his statements. In this instance
he leads the assault and when it is beaten off he rescues the wounded prisoner,
Stennis, and ensures that he escapes in the one place available in the Martian plane.
Up to this point we have been given little reason to be concerned about the
militia; they have been presented as virtually untrained, equipped with long-outdated
weapons, unsure how to look after them properly and inclined to panic. Yet in this
brief conflict they acquit themselves well, seem disciplined throughout and somehow
emerge the victors. Immediately afterwards, however, Castle is able to slip back
unseen into the group of prisoners. He is not recognised despite his involvement in
the firefight, and though he broadcast twice to the militia his voice is not recognised.
So the incident slips by without adding anything to the development of the novel.
In New York we discover that the United Nations has abandoned America an
image not just of declining political fortunes and geopolitical status, but also of a
moral fall, New York being now more physically dangerous than the new UN
headquarters in Cairo and the old UN Building has been taken over by PREST. Here,
Castle learns that being a PREST man will give him the freedom to roam through New
York aiding a clutch of social welfare cases while institutionalised graft will give him
the chance to make a relative fortune. It is hard to remember that this is supposed to
be some sort of punishment. Of course, Castle takes a moral stand on this:
He could no more remain a model prisoner, busily defrauding poor people while
the Martians wrestled the Pro Tem Government, than he could have stayed
comfortably in his room knowing the Captain was going to raid the Trees farm
in the morning. (p.69)

Though Castle hardly lives up to this claimed moral superiority when, tending a
drug addict, he is asked:
Dont you care if he gets pneumonia?
No, not much. (p.72)

In other circumstances, such a philosophy of robust self-reliance might seem like

a return to American pioneer values, which would be in line with Castles espousal of
-- 301 --

the right to bear arms. But Castle is being shaped as a Messiah figure and despite his
pronouncements his actions are always those of the caring hero, so that within
moments of this exchange he is asking how to look after the addict. Again he quickly
reaffirms his moral opposition to PREST:
I think it is better for me to go to prison than to pretend to help my clients with
one hand while I help pull them down with the other. In the long run, for the
sake of my soul or character or whatever you want to call it, I think thats
shrewd. (p.80)

Here, for the first time, Castles moral position is given a religious gloss he has
not previously given any indication of caring for his soul, but the saviour must, of
course, be seen to be pure. This important development in the moral underpinning of
the book is, however, instantly overshadowed by one of the most jagged and awkward
plot-shifts in the whole book. Here, if any were needed, is clear evidence that this is
an apprentice work, for the plot undergoes an abrupt volte-face that is not
foreshadowed and which seems to catch even the author unaware. Castle meets
Japhet and arranges another meeting which he gives every indication of expecting to
attend, yet later that same afternoon, though nothing further has happened in the
interim, Castle resigns from PREST knowing this will send him back to prison (the
exchange quoted above). This is instantly topped by the revelation that he has
anyway been remanded back to prison, but then he is summoned to help one of his
clients who is threatening suicide and so is presented with a convenient opportunity
for escape all of which happens in just three pages.
This suicide includes a back-handed compliment to Castles goodness: the drug
addict is threatening to throw himself from the roof of a building and wants to take
his woman and Castle with him because both of you [are] only ninety-nine percent
rotten (p.85) and everyone else is one hundred per cent rotten. Castle sacrifices
himself to save the woman; the addict falls, taking Castle with him; the addict is killed
but Castle, though badly injured, survives and somehow manages to escape his
guards.
Castle now begins a string of picaresque but disconnected adventures. He spends
time with an urban tribe known as the Hunters, led by a woman called Tia Marie. The
powerless constitutional president, Charles Huggins, visits the Hunters for no readily
explicable reason and Castle is deputed to welcome him an abrupt honour thrust
inexplicably upon him. This reunites him with Anna Tree who is part of the
presidents bodyguard and, through her colleague Sarah, a member of ARES. Castle,
of course, wants to join and Anna is not only sure the Martians will take you unless
theyre crazy, (pp. 101-2) she is also so certain he would want to join that she has
fixed up a rendezvous.
Castle goes to the rendezvous, hears helicopters, backs into a darkened doorway,
and finds himself in a nightclub so decadent and exclusive that it has no bouncer, no
doorkeeper, no ticket booth, no one to say that he doesnt belong there. We are, of
-- 302 --

course, meant to see Castle as a hero figure who fits in easily wherever he goes. A
performance by two scantily clad girls and a deadly electric snake is meant to be
exotic and erotic, though it is neither. Wolfe cant really seem to capture decadence,
and this episode, which is presumably meant to demonstrate that the economic and
political decline of the United States is reflected in a moral fall, is fumbled badly.
The entire episode is overloaded with symbolism. The nightclub is primarily used
by the Russian advisers who are helping the Government Pro-Tem. During the
performance Castle can hear gunfire and explosions outside but no one else in the
club appears to be aware of them, just as they are unaware of what is happening in
the world around them. Then the whole building is destroyed, with Castle emerging
miraculously unharmed from the rubble though all the degenerates in the club are
killed.
Now, at last, Castle is taken to the Martian HQ and after a scant three hours of
psychological testing is given the role which other peoples expectations have claimed
for him all along, chief of ARES. The Martian leader, Lothrop, reveals that the once
fictional ARES now has 150 agents in the field, and given what it would take to be
an undercover agent in these circumstance it seems that any one of these would be
at least as qualified as Castle for the role he doesnt even have the advantage of a
recogniseable name to which others might rally. Nevertheless, a paper hero now finds
himself in charge of a paper organisation.
At this point there is another example of the curiously narrow world view that
guides the novel. Lothrop reveals that the Martian force is small, less than a hundred,
and that they are aided by 500 Chinese troops, and despite being outnumbered by the
Government Pro-Tem and their Russian allies they are resisting increasing the number
of Chinese. As Lothrop explains:
I could have a hundred divisions of semi-literate Orientals armed with burp
guns and hand grenades if I wanted them and could find some way to get them
here. You are an Earthman, and youre from this part of the country. Would you
like to see a force like that turned loose here? (p.131)

This is a revival of the yellow peril that is out of place in a novel written as
recently as the late 1960s, and it is significant that Earthman is once more
unconsciously equated with American though the use of Chinese troops does allow
for the war between the Government Pro-Tem and the Martian invaders to acquire a
strange echo of the American Civil War: the leader of the Government troops is
General Grant, the Chinese leader of the the pro-Martian forces is General Lee. The
similarity extends beyond the names: at first the Martian forces are successful, but
eventually the superior numbers under General Grant will count.
Before that happens, however, Castle in his new guise as head of ARES must
embark on another picaresque adventure, the rescue of Huggins from a Russiancontrolled prison camp. Castle develops an elaborate plan which depends on severing
the power lines to the camp, and which therefore nearly comes unstuck when he
-- 303 --

makes the elementary mistake of ignoring the possibility of there being a generator
in the camp. Nevertheless, despite events rapidly running out of control, the raid is a
success and before too long Castle is being lauded as a hero and appointed Secretary
of Defence in Huggins government in exile. The appointment may be excusable given
the paucity of people to call upon the entire high command of the
Martian/Government forces seems to consist of Lothrop, Huggins, Castle and General
Lee but though Castle has displayed personal bravery on a number of occasions this
hardly amounts to a display of even so much as competence as a leader of men. Castle
is on the fast track to being a saviour and once again what he is made out to be is
far more than he is. As Castle says of Huggins, though he could be unconsciously
speaking of himself: Its simply that its insane for us to give any real importance to
somebody of no special ability, selected by chance. (p.153)
The big test of Castles ability comes with an ARES raid on the Government ProTems capital, Arlington. One of the strange things about the fall is that it seems, at
times, to be very superficial. The Government Pro-Tem is portrayed as turning its back
on all science and technology, so determinedly backward that in the light of the
Martian invasion it has had to de-mothball apparatus it had been happily forgetting
for twenty years (p.160) twenty years in which, we have already been told,
Americans had lost all tradition of the use of firearms. Yet with out of date and illmaintained equipment, with poorly trained forces, and in the face of considerable
technological superiority, the Government Pro-Tem is winning. America, in its fallen
state, still seems to have a lot going for it. And in the light of reverses on all fronts,
Castle sends his forces into what is supposedly a poorly defended capital, only to see
them roundly beaten.
The all-too-brief one-page description of this battle gives little on which we can
base a judgement of Castles abilities, beyond the result, yet he is again made into a
paper giant when Lothrop praises him as the finest tactical and strategic mind this
war has yet produced. (p.169) Thereafter, however, Castle is given little opportunity
to display any of these qualities. He is taken along as part of the Martian delegation
to Peking but, despite his supposed importance, is allowed to play no part in the
negotiations. The resultant treaty forces the allies into a gamble as great as any in
history, (p.171) but it is not Castle who sees the significance of this, nor is it he who
conceives the desperate plan they then have to follow. Lothrop, it seems, is the one
who is really doing the strategic thinking, though it is Castle who receives the praise.
Consciously or not, realistically or not, Castle is being shaped into the hero of the war.
The gamble that builds into the climax of the novel is an elaborate confidence
trick that will fool Russia and China into believing that each is about to be invaded
by the other. By removing these allies from the scene, the situation in America will
suddenly be skewed in favour of the Martian invaders. Predictably, as with every
ARES scheme throughout the novel, the plan goes wrong and Castle with a large
quantity of gold is captured by his old adversary, the Captain now elevated to
General. In what follows Castle does, for the first time, display all the qualities of a
-- 304 --

hero: personal bravery, coolness under stress, quick thinking. But at no time does he
initiate action; the events that turn things in favour of ARES come from outside,
Castle can only react. The Generals convoy is held up by lack of fuel then cut off by
local bushwhackers after the gold, and finally a small ARES force that happens to be
in the area intervenes on its own initiative and Castle is able to take the General
hostage.
During all this the Martians have withdrawn to Mars, but the scam has worked
and Russia and China are now at each others throats. Suddenly, with one illogical
bound, Castle is able to negotiate with President Pro-Tem Boyde and everything
comes right in the end. The novel ends with Castle having to communicate with Mars
by flashing the lights of Arlington things have turned full circle and we are back
with the fall.
Operation Ares is a poorly conceived and scrappily plotted novel, but it is
precisely because the mechanisms of the novel are so obvious that it provides such
an interesting illustration of the way Wolfe constantly tries to force his protagonist
into the role of saviour despite the fact that the plot as such fights against this.

-- 305 --

WE JOKE

FOR

GODS

Gene Wolfe is not a comic writer. He has shown, throughout his career, a delight
in punning titles like The HORARS of War, and in the word play that followed The
Island of Doctor Death with The Death of Doctor Island, but such playfulness has
tended to have a deeper and more serious level. The Book of the New Sun focuses
upon a character who remembers everything, and is written in such a way that names
have baroque layers of meaning derived from arcane language. It is mirrored by
Soldier in the Mist, in which the central character has no memory, and in which
names are reduced to a demotic that conceals as much as the hieratic of the New Sun.
Such reflections may suggest that the author is playing with his talents as a writer
and with the possibilities offered by his mastery of the language, but that hardly
makes these light or amusing works.
Nevertheless, Wolfe has written two comic novels, Free Live Free and There Are
Doors as well as a handful of comic stories. These are hardly to be ranked with the
work of more accomplished humorists such as P.G. Wodehouse or Thorne Smith; even
so, Wolfe does manage to achieve both comic heights and depths in the work. And
by making his playfulness central to the books he does, perhaps inadvertently, reveal
much about his writing.
Free Live Free, providing almost an entracte between the precision and complexity
of The Book of the New Sun, and its near mirror-image in the similarly demanding
sequence initiated by Soldier in the Mist, might perhaps best be seen as a jeu desprit
that did not require such attention to detail. It is a much more loosely structured novel
than those that bracket it. Rachel Pollack has concluded: Wolfe has found an
innovative response to questions of genre and clich ... through the daring technique
of simply not making sense.1 I dont agree with her entirely on this, and I shall seek
to show later that the central quest does achieve an entirely satisfactory resolution, but
that the McGuffin which brings about that resolution is wrapped in a confusing
explanation which does not make sense. One gains a distinct impression that Wolfe
was having fun spinning the story of his four central characters, but wasnt really
concerned with how he was going to tie it all together at the end. The McGuffin (as
Alfred Hitchcock called any object placed in his films simply as a device to drive the
plot) is there simply to serve the purpose of bringing the novel to its preordained close.
But, as Pollack says, the lack of sense is not really a handicap. The biggest
problem is that the book was written intentionally as a comedy. Wolfe has simply
tossed in, with the same carelessness with which he used the McGuffin, any and all
comic forms and devices that occur to him, with the result that the strings controlling
his puppets are on constant display, but the book itself is only intermittently funny.
-- 307 --

In line with this simplicity, Free Live Free uses that most basic of plot devices, a
quest. This is not an unusual form for Wolfe both Severian and Latro are pursuing
quests of one sort or another although it is unusual for Wolfe to take as the basis
for his quest someone elses model, and then to point this out so determinedly
throughout the book. The model is L. Frank Baums The Wizard of Oz, or perhaps
more accurately the Judy Garland movie, since there are many other film allusions
throughout the book.
The first of these occurs right at the start of the novel when Candy Garth and
Stubb meet in the hallway of Frees house. The rest of the household are watching
Hellcats of the Navy on TV, a film which gains significance as they board The High
Country later in the book, but Candy wishes it were The Wizard of Oz. In a sense she
gets her wish as the oddball quartet pursue the wizard, Free, in hope of achieving their
ill-defined wishes. Other references come at regular intervals through the book. Candy
approaches Mde Serpentinas room at the hotel with: Were off to see the wizard;
(FLF p.92) Nimo pastiches another song from the film: I-I-if I only had a lipstick, they
could not think me a dipstick. I would not be thought insane! (FLF p.274) and the
black saxophonist at the Flying Carpet asks Barnes, You see The Wiz? (FLF p.322)
Yet the most obvious and persistent reference lies in the reflection of the magic
land in the name, Ozzie Barnes. All the names in the book are weighted with blatant
symbolism: Candy Garth, at one point mis-named Girth, the fat woman who loves
sweets (Wolfe extracts a lot of cruel humour from her size, but then he extracts cruel
humour from the shortcomings of all his characters); Stubb, who attributes his failure
to his shortness, and who comes up against the towering success of Cliff; Mde
Serpentina, snake-like and hard to pin down, but who is also called Marie, or Mary,
and her gullibility and yearning for enlightenment indeed give her a virginal
quality.2 And, of course, Ben Free, B. Free, whose name is not only an exhortation to
the characters, but a reminder of Wolfes own freewheeling approach to the story.
Just as their names are symbolic, so are their roles. Four losers and outsiders
drawn together by Frees offer of free accommodation in his condemned house, they
form an uneasy alliance to set off, like their analogues in The Wizard of Oz, to find
whatever it is each desires and to overcome their deficiencies. Not so obvious as tin
man, straw man and cowardly lion, their deficiencies are still pretty clear, while their
desires, awakened by Frees hints about The High Country, are very different.
To Serpentina, Free suggests mystery: You think this here me thats talking to you
is all there is. (FLF p.17) To Stubb, its a ticket to the good life: There wont no bus
take you there, but I have my ticket, (FLF p.24) while Serpentina presents it to Barnes
as treasure: crowns and orbs, regalia more than earthly. (FLF p.32)
The four also serve as comic grotesques: a fat woman; a short, short-sighted man;
a man who writes to lonely-heart columns, and whose artificial eye is the most
natural thing about you; (FLF p.42) and a witch. And then theres Free, who appears
to have magical powers of his own, as we learn in a manner which illustrates one of
Wolfes favourite narrative techniques.
-- 308 --

Free and Serpentina are talking on the roof of his house when one of the tiles of
the coping slipped under the witchs feet. She nearly fell before it shattered on the
pavement two floors below. (FLF p.18) It is only later, when Stubb complains that the
tile almost hit him, that we learn that the slippage was engineered by Free: Im
responsible, the old man said, Youve got it. I was trying to show the girl
something. (FLF p.22) As Serpentina later tells Barnes: In the end, he could not
resist a small demonstration of his power. (FLF p.31) Only these later conversations
illustrate the significance of the events on the roof. But if we learn that Free has
power, like a wizard, we also learn that he has not foreseen the consequences of his
act (that the tile might hit Stubb); he is not a wise and all-seeing wizard. It is typical
of Wolfe that he should describe an incident from one angle, but only later allow his
readers to see it from a different angle, one that allows a very different interpretation
of events.
It is a trick he plays, on a wider scale, with The High Country in this book. It
sounds like a clich, evoking in the sf reader visions of so many fantasy novels in
which people leave this world of compromise to follow magical quests in places called
something like The High Country.3 Indeed, though never visited, The High Countrys
analogue in There Are Doors, Overwood (a name which has very similar resonances),
follows almost precisely this role. But in Free Live Free Wolfe is playing with his
readers expectations, for The High Country, when we are finally given the correct
angle from which to see it, is an immense plane of World War II vintage and the
source of the sf McGuffin used to tie the story together.
In their quest for The High Country, the four characters embark on a rite of
passage like a roller-coaster ride, in which they are by turns raised up and dashed
down by forces beyond them. At the same time they begin to work more closely
together, finally triumphing, in a way, because of their personal growth. Though Free
is careful, early in the book, to point out that each of them does have strengths, they
are ambiguous, not readily recognisable until the quest brings them out. Candy, for
instance, has got things you could win prizes for, if they gave them. Maybe they
dont, but youve got them things, and thats what counts, (FLF p.38) while Barnes is
a bigger man on the inside than on the outside. (FLF p.42)
Whatever virtues they might have, however, Wolfe still uses the foursome as the
butt of jokes throughout the book, almost as if such humiliations are part of the rite
of passage they must endure. There are frequent scenes that cruelly skewer their most
obvious failings, such as Candy proving almost too large to be dislodged from the car
at the military base; or where Stubb, the failure who imagines he still has strings to
pull, debts to call in, phones the Commissioner to save Frees house I believe we
did meet last summer at the picnic ... No, no I was just in the audience (FLF p.49)
and is led on a comic goose chase where Charlie tells him to phone the Commissioner,
who tells him to phone Charlie.
As anyone familiar with Wolfes work might expect, wordplay is a frequent source
of humour, though in the main he seems to have eschewed subtlety in favour of very
-- 309 --

bad puns. The level of such humour is amply displayed on the first page of the book
with the chapter title: Four Roomers of War, and isnt much improved with such later
titles as Bakers Dozin. This reaches its nadir in the character of Mrs Baker, a Mrs
Malaprop who seems to have been tailor-made to display Wolfes deftness with
words, but who instead twists language in ways that are remarkably uninventive and
unfunny. One could, surely, expect better of Wolfe than: A bird in the hand is worth
two in the brush, (FLF p.97) or, referring to government agents who come a-tap, tap,
tapping like the poor raving. (FLF p.166) When she misidentifies the four, and misnames Serpentina, Miz Snake, a scene of baroque complexity seems to have been set
up purely to allow Candy to make the atrocious pun: Im afraid youve made a Miz
Snake, Mrs Baker. (FLF p.96) And it can be little other than carelessness which allows
a spoken malapropism that could only work when written down: overhereing. (FLF
p.160)
Such jokes are forced and unnatural, but, thankfully, most of the comedy is
nowhere near so crude. Sandy Ducks magazine, Natural Supernaturalism, and the
Middle Colonial Double Dutch style at the Consort Hotel both get by without an
elbow being jammed too savagely into the ribs.
Elsewhere, a staggering range of comic modes are deployed, from the neat
incongruity of Serpentina using a word processor to produce spells, to the Keystone
Cops farce of the storming of Frees home. This latter is the first big comic set-piece
in the book, the bumbling police made the more ludicrous by their defensive macho
manner asked if hes married, the aptly-named Sgt. Proudy replies: I look like a
fairy? (FLF p.54) and by the low-key subversions of Frees defenders. Barnes, for
instance, summons a horde of salesmen who plague the police and grow like a Greek
chorus around the scene, while Candy resists eviction by smearing baby oil over her
body. Typically, however, Wolfe does not sustain the comic momentum, preferring to
bring the scene to a jarring end amid the white of bone and the gush of blood (FLF
p.65) when Proudy is injured. Such grim realism does not sit easily with the light
fantasy that comedy occupies, suggesting a lack of balance on the authors part.
Wolfes footing is much more assured when the core of the comedy shifts to
illogic. His rational development of a situation to an irrational end is a style that suits
Wolfes writing precisely, and these scenes, especially the superb set-piece in Belmont
mental hospital, represent his most successful comedy. At first this illogicality shows
the influence of Joseph Heller, as, for instance, when Barnes visits Dr Makee and is
greeted with: Well, if you dont have an appointment, I guess you can come in. (FLF
p.182)
But this is just a prelude to the Belmont scene, in which the influence of Thorne
Smith is clear. Smiths comic technique, shown to great effect in novels like Rain in
the Doorway, often involves conversations in which the participants both misinterpret
the others role, so that the dialogue starts out at cross-purposes and progresses from
there through a lunatic internal logic. When Wolfe contrives to bring his four
protagonists to Belmont, he employs the same sort of technique.
-- 310 --

The scene is set when, contrary to what he has done with Frees house and the
Consort Hotel, Wolfe ascribes a personality to Belmont itself, and editorialises:
Belmont was psycho, of course, but it was possible it was also correct, as so many of
the mad are at last discovered to be. (FLF p.189) From there on, no conversation
within Belmont runs true. Candy asks to see Sgt. Proudy, and ends up being detained
as a patient. When Little Ozzie is interviewed by Doctor Bob, it is the doctor who
insists on talking like a child, the child who is adult.
It is Barnes who suffers most, however. Tricked into an empty room by Reeder, he
is knocked out, robbed of his clothes, and when he is finally brought to a doctor he
is nave enough to think theyll believe him and let him out. But in the way of all
conversations at Belmont, the more Barnes protests, the more convinced the doctor
becomes that he is indeed a patient. It is indicative that when Stubb warns him not
to make that kind of joke here recognising that the doctor will take the joke literally,
or as a sign of madness Barnes responds innocently: What kind would you make?
(FLF p.262)
The relatively long Chapter 40, A Crowd Insane, that concludes the Belmont
sequence, is a tour-de-force. The archetypal Thorne Smith characteristic
conversation which starts with misinformation and builds upon confusion is here
taken to its logical conclusion. Told almost exclusively in unattributed dialogue,
featuring a large crowd, with some of the speakers new to the reader, and some of
them liars, it works to tremendous comic effect. Embedded within it is Wolfes finest
conceit: in a world inverted by the blackout the asylum is the sanest place to be,
rather than amid the sirens, looting and collective madness of the lightless city.
Typically, if bathetically, the scene concludes with an outright (though oddly
sophisticated) joke by the schizophrenic clown, Nimo: Why is ... the door youre
looking for like Samson? ... Because theyre both unlocked! (FLF p.272)
The escape of the quartet from Belmont is like a rebirth. An attempt to loot a caf
becomes, in the medias interpretation, an heroic defence against looters. And
suddenly the four are transformed. Barnes, so ineffectual in Belmont, turns into an
aggressive and successful fighter in the brawl in the lobby of the Consort Hotel.
Stubb, previously a no-hoper who had phoned Cliff to beg for a job, is brash and
confident when Cliff first approaches him with a job offer. Candy, setting out on a
date with the aptly-named Sweet, forgets her lies, her avoidance of the truth. Even
Mde Serpentina can rail eloquently against Illingworths doctrine of wealth, power
and long life, then reflect: I have been inspired, she thought. I myself sought power
and never knew a word of that (FLF p.317)
But in each case the ascent holds the seeds of the subsequent fall. Individual
desires, for women, for standing as a detective, for food, and for power, are used to
entrap the quartet and bring about their lowest ebb. Here the novel takes on a darker
quality. The untypical contemporary setting has enabled Wolfe to make occasional
satiric asides throughout the novel, but there is little to match the ferocity of the
Generals account of the growth of America into a consumer society, which concludes:
-- 311 --

You arent Americans either. His voice grew angry and a little deeper. There
isnt one of you, not a God-damned one, that owns a designer sheet. Or a set of
matching towels. You dont wear anybodys jeans, and you dont jog. Youre
shit. Youre just shit. (FLF p.355)

The quartet have no role in modern America, despite their efforts to seek such an
Oz; they are outsiders because they are losers. And the theme of treachery, raised in
that tirade, is continued on the steps of the plane when their weaknesses are
mercilessly pointed out to them in just such terms.
Barnes didnt care so much about [Little Ozzie] a couple of hours ago (FLF p.364)
when the naked girls at the strip club were able to entrap him so easily. Stubb would
have dropped her for me any time I wiggled a finger (FLF p.364) when he was being
tempted with a high-paying job. Candy, as Serpentina points out, would give up Mr
Stubb or any other to follow her belly. (FLF p.364) And as for Serpentina:
Youve followed every lying spirit, no matter how wilful or how weak. When
you were at the end of your search for the ultimate truth, you were utterly
deceived by that silly old man we sent to your King, a few actors in costume,
and some coloured lights in a hanger. He paused. We tried to take all of you
down as far as we could. You, Marie, were the only one who never reached a
point beyond which we could make you go no further. (FLF p.364)

Or, as Stubb puts it, All of us got what we wanted, and we couldnt handle it.
(FLF p.370)
Here, one senses things going somewhat awry. Wolfe has set his characters upon
their yellow brick road, and we have seen them to be, in the main, gentle, humane,
well-meaning but fallible human beings. Each, for instance, at some point engages in
petty larceny, but this is always presented in a manner designed to amuse rather than
incite moral disapproval. But their fallibility has been at the core of the novel: it has
been a constant butt of humour, and it has provided the goal for this quest by Wolfes
latterday tin man, scarecrow and lion. Their debasement, therefore, leaves a sour taste
precisely because it seems out of step with The Wizard of Oz, out of step also with
the lighter tone that has preceded it. Little wonder, when they are on the plane taking
them up to The High Country, that Stubb thinks theyre in the wrong movie.
To pull this particular trick out of the bag, Wolfe produces the time-travel gizmo
that explains The High Country, Ben Free, the quest of the four heroes, and the tests
and temptations to which they have (apparently intentionally) been exposed. Of
course it does nothing of the sort. The more one tries to follow the convolutions, the
more obvious it becomes that it makes no sense whatsoever. It is impossible to draw
from the text a coherent explanation for why the foursome has been treated the way
it has. Free, or at least a version of Free since time travel seems to have created many
out of one, is both eminence gris and deus ex machina, literally looking down from
the eminence of The High Country and directing events on Earth to some previously
-- 312 --

witnessed end. The best we can get out of this farago is that the four have been
tormented and rewarded simply because that is what has been seen to happen. Free
is the Wizard, and the time-travel device, for all its science-fictional qualities, is really
no more than a magic wand he can wave to set things to rights.
From out of the gobbledegook Free offers them their hearts desires, without a
second thought for Stubbs all-too-true observation that they couldnt handle it.
Theres no reason to suppose that they could now, but all such doubts are forgotten.
Similarly, their desires are granted with a time machine, though how simple travel
through time could do anything to bring about the changes that are wrought is never
considered.
The miraculous redemption that concludes this long allegory of temptation and
fall is reduced to a very brief coda. The four come together again in the ruins of Frees
house, but some things are different. Barnes is in rags, but he is with his son, whom
he had abandoned to succumb to temptation earlier. Stubb is taller, Candy is slimmer,
and the two now appear to be a pair. And Serpentina is now addressed as Glinda. In
The Wizard of Oz, the Wizard himself is a powerless faade, the real power is being
wielded by Glinda. The implication, surely, is that Serpentina, if not the one really
manipulating events from the start, has at least achieved real magic. Her words, the
final words in the book, are: The quadrumvirate is complete. (FLF p.399) Earlier in
the Consort Hotel she had foreseen a quadrumvirate attaining real power in the world
it would seem they, at last, are the ones.
Free Live Free is not a slight work, but Wolfe clearly used it as an opportunity to
relax with a lighter topic between two major and demanding works. And perhaps
that position, overshadowed by its neighbours, explains why the book hasnt
received the same intensive critical consideration. Much the same is clearly true of
There Are Doors, which occupies a similar position between his return to the New
Sun and his second visit to ancient Greece. Both The Book of the New Sun and the
Latro sequence, with their religious overtones and dense, interwoven structure built
upon allusion and erudition, make study fruitful, but such a critical excavation
seems unnecessary for the two comedies, partly because they are lighter works which
carry their references clearly on the surface, and partly because Free Live Free seems
to lead to an open-ended senselessness, while There Are Doors seems to lead to
closure.
Wolfes typical method of storytelling, as I have already remarked, is to describe
a scene from one perspective, but as the story progresses he will shift perspective, or
allow us a glimpse of things from another angle, so that we can look back upon the
scene and realise that it meant something entirely other than we had thought at the
time. In There Are Doors, however, the perspective seems to shift constantly as Green
moves between the two worlds, and the reader is clearly invited to question Greens
sanity. However, we are never prompted to review what has gone before. Everything
we learn during the course of the novel is signalled in advance. It is as if, by not using
his normal techniques of deception, Wolfe is hiding something.
-- 313 --

One key to the novel can be found in Free Live Free, because the two books share
the same sort of relationship that The Book of the New Sun and Soldier of the Mist
share, in that they mirror, echo and resonate with each other in a complex way.
Sometimes these resonances are on a fairly superficial level: both have a modern
setting, take place in winter, and have a quest as their basic format. Other resonances
are on a deeper level. Ben Free, the object of one quest, appeared at the start of the
book then disappeared from most of the action until he emerged once more, in
slightly different form, to perform his conjuring trick at the end. In There Are Doors
it is the goddess who has many names (Lara, Lora, Marcella) who appears at the
beginning, disappears throughout most of the book except for occasional fleeting
glimpses of her avatars, then reappears at the end. And just as Free had the General
to perform his bidding on Earth, a general whose very existence seemed oddly
dependent upon Free, so the goddess has K, and again, as we learn at the finish, Ks
existence in the other world is dependent on Lara.
And there are yet deeper resonances. Madness, employed for comic effect in Free
Live Free, is used similarly here, but also has a more important role to play, for the
key action always hovers around asylums, and the sanity of Green, the hero of There
Are Doors, is constantly questioned. Moreover, as Free Live Free follows what Rachel
Pollack calls: the aesthetics of dream4 so, as I will show, the rhythms and patterns
of dreams provide the fundamental structure of this book.
There is another echo which could well provide a significant key. Both books
spring, to some extent, from the work of another author. Free Live Free, as Wolfe
himself is at pains to point out, follows The Wizard of Oz; yet within that work I have
already drawn attention to the Thorne Smith-like dialogue that provides the most
successful comedy in the Belmont scenes. And, I would suggest, it is Smiths Rain in
the Doorway that forms the foundation stone for There Are Doors.
The two novels follow a very similar pattern. A mild man, in some respect at least
a failure (Green has been unsuccessful with women, Smiths Mr Hector Owen is a
lawyer whose business is going down), passes through a doorway to another world.
The new world presents to the characters, literally or symbolically, a release: There
was an immediate dropping away of anxiety and responsibility, a sort of spiritual
sloughing off of all moral obligations.5 Owens new world takes the form of a vast,
comically-inverted department store; Green is escaping from a department store
where he works, and which constricts his mind so much that virtually every metaphor
he employs is drawn from the goods sold by the store.
There are other parallels: Owen is escaping a dreadful and unfaithful wife, Lola;
Green is chasing his sexual dream, the similarly named Lara. Owens new world is one
in which the shop girls are sexually aggressive, and there is none of the puritanism
about sex current in the USA of the 1930s. Wolfe, too, has made his other world one
of sexual inversion, both in the macroscopic sense that sexual nature is different, as
Lara explains: ... and then the men die. Always. She holds his sperm, saves it, and
bears his children, one after another for the rest of her life. Perhaps three children.
-- 314 --

Perhaps three dozen; (TAD p.2) and on the microscopic level. As a result of this,
Green becomes sexually attractive not only to Lara and her avatars, but also to Fanny.
And, of course, the doorways are significant in both books, Lara makes a great point
of this to Green, and Larkin points out to Owen that the door he was dragged through
is not an exit.6
In each instance, once the protagonist passes through the door he is pitched,
willy-nilly, into a breakneck sequence of adventures and misadventures. Green passes
several times from one world to the other, for Owen it is only at the end of the book
that The other past was now his present. Once more he was plunged back into it.
Raindrops splattered his hot face as he gazed down the glittering reaches of Sixth
Avenue.7 But in each instance the end is the same. Green, in the other world, jumps
into a taxi and sets off to find Overwood; Owen, in this world but accompanied by
the girl he picked up in the other world, also jumps into a taxi: Just start in driving,
the girl sang out. And keep on going. We might hire you for life.8 They escape from
reality into their dreams.
Indeed, there is only one significant difference between the books. Although Owen
is continually imputing madness to the characters he meets in the other world, there
is no suggestion that they actually are mad. In fact, real madness does not intrude
into any of Smiths novels. Wolfe, on the other hand, doesnt just set much of the
action of his book in mental hospitals; the book turns on the question of Greens
sanity. (It may well be, of course, that in this homage to Thorne Smith, Wolfe is
recalling that Smith ended his life in a mental hospital.)
As I have pointed out, Wolfe has made his book a sex comedy, or at least a
comedy with sex at its core, in a way that little else of his work has been. Thus the
typically Wolfean word play is employed for sexual innuendo: He was groping [for
words]. So was she, a hand in his pyjamas. (TAD p.1) In the same way that Wolfe
made the shortcomings of his heroes the butt of much of his humour in Free Live Free,
in There Are Doors he derives a lot of his comedy from the fact that Green doesnt
pay attention to Laras explanation of the crucial sexual difference between the
worlds, and so misinterprets much of what happens to him. Thus the reader recognises
what is going on in the soap opera on TV in the hospital, but Green only thinks of it
as enlivened by contemporary role-reversal. (TAD, p.28)
In a sense, in fact, this instance shows up the whole book as a work of rolereversal. I have already pointed out that Wolfes common technique is to hide the true
explanation of events from the reader, but here we have an example of the reverse,
he gives the reader the explanation but hides it from his characters. Its a technique
he uses on other occasions in the book. For instance, when he acquires the doll Tina
the shopkeeper tells him: Its the kind you wet with a salt solution. Thats what
provides the electrolyte. (TAD pp. 9-10) But when, much later, his tears bring her to
life it comes as a shock to him.
The incident of the play has a similar aspect. Green is ushered into the back
entrance of a building, made up, and then pushed into: a brilliantly lit room ... [that]
-- 315 --

... was a great deal larger than it appeared, ... only this end of it (which was perhaps
much less than half) was lit, and ... there were watchers in the darkness beyond the
light. (TAD pp. 90-1) The reader recognises pretty quickly that he has been thrust out
onto a stage but Green is the one mystified. Later Wolfe gives this one more twist:
He felt that his first impression had been correct, that they were in a basement room,
that it was the theater that was illusion, not the play. (TAD pp. 95-6)
Indeed, the idea that this is a reversal of the usual Wolfe novel does make a lot of
sense. Everything here is on the surface. Unlike The High Country in Free Live Free,
we know what things are right from the start, we are just disinclined to believe. And
while Ben Free is very mysterious about himself, Lara makes no secret about her own
origins, and everyone else quite naturally calls her the goddess. The mystery is never
about what is happening, or why; it is about whether we trust the central character.
Wolfe works hard to sow distrust. There is no doubt that Green has some form of
mental disturbance; this is obvious right from the start when he seeks out Lara at the
Downtown Mental Health Center and the woman there says: Im glad that youve
come back to us, Mr Green. I was getting rather worried about you. (TAD p.7)
From that point on, all the major events in the story revolve in some way around
mental hospitals. It is not just the pivotal point of the plot as in Free Live Free (and
the occasion for some of the best jokes), it is the plot. Green begins his quest at the
Downtown Mental Health Center, crosses into the other world and almost immediately
finds himself incarcerated in the United General Psychiatric Hospital, where he first
meets most of the people who are going to populate his adventures, and upon his
return to our world is again committed to a mental hospital. It turns out that the Lara
he seeks is Lora Masterman (the name is significant: if we are to assume that the other
world is a delusion, then it might have fomented the idea of sexual inversion in
Greens mind; if it is not a delusion, then it is a representation of the role Lora/Lara
plays in that world), and Lora is the secretary of his psychiatrist. Lora explains to
Green that she left him because he was blocking things from his memory (this is one
example among many of the ways in which Wolfe undermines the credibility of his
hero), and adds: Im afraid youre going to start it again. Youre constructing a
delusional system, with me inside. (TAD pp. 267) However, within a few pages she
comes to accept the other world, and leads Green through for his final visit, testimony
either to the reality of the other world, or the strength of Greens delusion, depending
on ones interpretation of the book.
Another way in which Wolfe persists in undermining his characters reliability is to
suggest that his experiences might be a dream. After speaking to one of Laras avatars,
the film star Marcella, Green reflects: But Marcella had telephoned him, waking him
from sleep, if the call itself had not been a dream, (TAD p.81) and the resonances set up
by such a suggestion echo throughout the book. Again, while at the theatre, he thinks:
Even if it was just a dream, Ive got to look. (TAD p.95) Of course, madness and dream
are not mutually exclusive interpretations, but they do suggest that Wolfe is trying to
find as many ways of doubting Greens experiences as possible. Even if there is no
-- 316 --

specific reference to dream, there is a distinct air of unreality about his experiences in
the other world: He felt that he himself was only a ghost, riding a ghostly elevator in
a phantom hotel, that this building had fallen to the wrecking ball long ago. (TAD p.114)
Eventually, Green sees it like a movie: It seemed to him after a time that he was no
more than a bit player in an old movie, an old black-and-white movie; (TAD p.131) a
metaphor that is later glossed: He might be dead now at home, dead and rotting as he
sat before the television in the chair he had bought so cheaply; but he was alive here,
his crimson blood proved it, even if this was the last reel. (TAD p.133)
This allusion to film is interesting, because Wolfe does punctuate the book with
references to old films and television programmes, from the throwaway: So, Colonel
Hogan (TAD p.106) which calls to mind the TV series Hogans Heroes, to his first
description of Fanny, like the maid in some old movie starring Cary Grant. (TAD
p.118) Back in our world he thinks of Dr Pille, on a different channel, in another
show; (TAD p.172) and he goes on to try to describe the relationship between the two
worlds as TV or radio stations whose frequencies are close together. Indeed the other
world, in its architecture and costume, constantly has the feel of an old black-andwhite movie, perhaps a reference to the 1930s when Thorne Smiths work was set,
perhaps creating in the other world a place thats as innocent and simple as that age
was made to seem by Hollywood. Its an innocence that is ironically offset by
references to our own world: the sane and sober reality in which Richard Milhous
Nixon had twice been elected President. (TAD p.73)
Nevertheless, despite these obvious filmic references, it is as dream that the other
world appears most vividly. Rachel Pollack, as I have noted already, speaks of the
aesthetics of dreams in relation to Free Live Free, but they are even more apparent
in There Are Doors. This is most readily seen in the rhythm of the story. Once Green
is in the other world events happen at a precipitous rate. Within the first twenty-four
pages of the book, for instance, he has lost Lara, had the encounter at the Mental
Health Center, crossed into the other world, bought the doll, stolen a map, been
chased down an alley, escaped via the Chinamans cellar, joined the procession,
experienced an ambiguous run-in with the girl on the float, knocked himself out
while escaping, and woken up in the Psychiatric Hospital. Clearly this is, in part, for
comic effect. It has much of the flavour of a slapstick film after the manner of the
Keystone Cops, but it also has the pattern of a dream, in which one incident leads
directly into the next, and the most outlandish characters or events the Chinaman,
the procession are never questioned.
This dream-like state persists throughout the scenes set in the other world, and is
highlighted in countless subtle ways. The initial rush of events, for instance, is
succeeded by a strangely elongated night at the hospital in which Green appears to
sleep and wake several times. And only in a dream could one really accept the
sequence of events that has Green pushed on stage to perform in a play without
warning, and without even being aware that it is a play. We are then presented with
a conspiracy that becomes a play, but which is broken up by police in a hail of bullets
-- 317 --

just as if it were a real conspiracy, and then, the true lunacy, Green and North escape
through a magicians cabinet, as if that illusion were in fact real. They end up, of
course, back in the basement of the Chinamans shop it is a characteristic not only
of dream, but of the closed world of Wolfes comedy, that any character who appears
once in the story, reappears later to play some significant part. Thus the nameless
figure who appears briefly by Greens bedside in the United General Psychiatric
Hospital to give him a message, crops up again to play chess with him in the mental
hospital in this world, thus tying the two worlds together.
The two worlds are much closer than is apparent. If we are meant to suppose that
the other world is no more than a dream, then this world is not much better. When
Green returns to this world the sequence of events that leads to his incarceration in
the mental hospital is every bit as fast-moving as his first few hours in the other
world. The twisted logic that led to him being classified, in the United General
Psychiatric Hospital: Concussion, multiple bruises, alcoholism, (TAD p.30) is echoed
in this world by the casual, almost friendly brutality of the ambulancemen who
deliver him to the hospital and the interview at cross-purposes with a weary-looking
bald man (TAD p.203) who is not immediately identifiable as a doctor. When he does
return to work in the store, three Christmases came (in October) and went (in early
December), (TAD p.210) but they are empty years, passed over without detail as they
would be in a dream.
Yet if the other world is a dream, it does have tangible effects. There are the
clothes, for instance, even if, when he examines the sweater-vest in this world its
label says Made in Toronto. And above all, there is the doll. It is clearly significant
that the only time we see the magic of the other world, as represented by the doll that
comes to life, it is in this world. Tina, the doll, clearly awakens the child in Green, but
more than that she represents the changes that the other world has wrought in him.
These changes are hinted at elsewhere: He tried to recall what they said in Better
Dresses accessorized, that was it. It occurred to him that Lara would never have used
that word and would not have liked it, and he realised that he himself did not like it
now. (TAD p.173) Green has been a creature of the store, his ideas and his way of
looking at the world shaped by the products around him; this is the first suggestion
that he is beginning to think for himself.
Another change is signalled when he gets his coat from the basement: The
custodian tugged at a large suitcase, and after a moment he helped, moved by pity
for the old mans feebleness. As they shifted the suitcase, it struck him that it had
been a long time since he had felt pity for anyone except, perhaps, himself. (TAD
p.215) Green is growing (from an author like Wolfe who loves significant names, it is
not surprising that his protagonist is named in a way that reflects ironically upon his
colourlessness, that reveals his innocence, but which also signifies his eventual
growth) and Tara is the symbol of this, steering him through a metaphorical
childhood. Inevitably she dies at the moment of maturity, when the antique desk
returns Lara to him in the form of her portrait and the Captains letter.
-- 318 --

The point of it all, of course, is love, as is clear when one examines the three
occasions on which Green passes into the other world. While he is with Tara there is
a brief moment when he crosses into the other world in a shopping arcade, a moment
which makes him happy. This clearly implies that he was otherwise unhappy, but to
assume from this that he makes the crossings at times of unhappiness would be a
mistake. In fact, on this occasion Tara, an avatar of Lara, has reawakened his feelings
of love, and it is that which provides the key. Just as, on the first occasion he went
through the doorway in pursuit of Lara.
Previously he was a depressive, a lonely man who rejects love, because he
believes that anyone who offers it wouldnt be a lover worth having. (TAD p.277) But
Lara has ended that, and his experiences in the other world, his sentimental
education, have taught him maturity. The Green who passes through the doorway a
third, and permanent, time, once more in pursuit of Lara, is not the same as the Green
who first entered the other world. He knows now that she, the goddess, is immortal,
and that he is not; maybe he has learned to cope with the risks and impermanence of
love. Anyway, he has achieved his quest, even if the last scene still leaves him on the
move.
But there is one last thing we must remember: There Are Doors, like Free Live Free,
is a comic novel. And as Sheng the Chinaman reminds us: We joke for gods. Relax,
enjoy, laugh too. Do not do mean. Mean not belong joke. Die, drink wine with gods,
laugh more. (TAD p.100) It is advice we should bear in mind when trying to analyse
either of these novels.

-- 319 --

FALSE DOG
Nineteen seventy-two was an exceptional year for short science fiction stories.
Stories such as Euremas Dam by R.A. Lafferty, Hero by Joe Haldeman, Painwise
by James Tiptree Jr, Nobodys Home by Joanna Russ, along with most of the
contents of Again, Dangerous Visions edited by Harlan Ellison, show that this was a
vintage season. But one novella stood out. The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe
was almost immediately recognised as a classic, establishing Wolfe as one of the key
authors of the decade and setting a tone of mysterious reminiscence that he would
repeat at the end of the decade in The Book of the New Sun. The Fifth Head of
Cerberus is a much anthologised, much discussed work; what I want to do in this
essay is pick at the layers of artifice in which the story is wrapped.
Artifice is clearly one of the primary impulses in the novella; its dramatic climax
rests on the revelation that the narrator is a clone, one in a series, a family of clones,
that he is a made being. Throughout the story there have been questions raised about
the narrators individuality: we are repeatedly told how much he looks like his
father; when he kills the slave during the abortive robbery attempt he sees his own
face in the surgically-debased slave; indeed earlier during the break-in he sees his
own reflection in a mirror and felt the momentary dislocation that comes when a
stranger, an unrecognised shape, turns or moves his head and is some familiar friend
glimpsed, perhaps for the first time, from outside. (Orbit 10, p.45) In other words he
is a stranger to himself: we know little about what individualises him (we arent even
told his name), but we learn a lot about how he reflects others (all we are directly told
about the name is that it is the same as his fathers). But these hints as to the
narrators reality are only part of a complex web of artificiality which runs through
the story.
There is the matter of the narrators name, for a start. We are given hints early
in the story: the narrators home at 666 Saltimbanque (the number presumably a
conscious reference to the number of the beast) is popularly known as La Maison du
Chien after the statue of Cerberus which guards the door and which may have been
a reference to our surname as well. (p.10) Much later he makes this reference more
explicit when he speaks of the iron dog with his three wolf-heads: (p.62) We can
guess he is called Wolfe. This is backed up (though less clearly than is sometimes
assumed) in the library where the narrator seeks out books by his father. There, in
the highest recesses of the dome, presumably at the end of the alphabet, he finds
none, only a lone copy of Monday or Tuesday leaning against a book about the
assassination of Trotsky (p.6) or thus it appears in the first version of the story, in
subsequent editions this is amplified to add a misplaced astronautics text, The Mile-- 321 --

Long Spaceship, by some German and a crumbling volume of Vernor Vinges short
stories that owed its presence there, or so I suspect, to some long-dead librarians
mistaking the faded V.Vinge on the spine for Winge.1 These references to Kate
Wilhelm and Vernor Vinge, both writers who had appeared with Wolfe in previous
volumes of Orbit, despite references to one volume being misplaced and the mistake
in the name of the other, tend to put the narrators surname closer to WI in the
alphabet than the WO of Wolfe. As to his forename, all we know is that when Mr
Million calls the roll, my own name always [comes] first, (p.7) and since his brother
is David we might assume that, alphabetically, the narrator is neither Gene nor
Eugene.
It has tended to be popularly assumed that Gene Wolfe hid his own name in The
Fifth Head of Cerberus but, as we can see, Wolfe is both more ambiguous and more
complex than that. By hiding the narrators name he indicates that lack of
individuality is important to our reading of the character; by misdirecting the
reader towards his own name, he subtly suggests that this is a work about creativity
and that what is being created within the story as much as by the author is the
narrator.
The big question, of course, is how much more of the story can be accepted.
Artificiality runs right through every aspect of the story: the setting, the family, even
the very people who flesh out this narrative. Wolfe either author or narrator has
created a densely visualised account, one that demands belief by the very weight of
detail, by the solidity of the minutiae, yet the more we examine the account the more
we are led to question its reality. Nothing is quite what it seems, everything is
artificial. The setting, for instance, is Port-Mimizon, a prosperous town which may be
the main city on the planet Sainte Croix, which is twinned with the planet of Sainte
Anne. They are former French colonies, but the French are no longer there and what
remains, beyond the names, has no trace of their presence. This may not be surprising
since we learn that the planet has been inhabited less than two hundred years, (p.32)
a remarkably short time for a colony to be established and for the original colonists
to leave, but Dr Marsch notes how all the buildings seem old and the narrator
responds that there are less people here now than there were fifty years ago. (p.32)
In other words, the colony appears to be both recent and long established, to be
successful and failing.
These contradictions are seen elsewhere also: the narrators mother from five
generations before is seen in a sepia photograph; the library, as we have seen,
contains volumes by Kate Wilhelm and Vernor Vinge as well as a book about the
assassination of Trotsky. This is what we might expect of a story set here and now,
not some hundreds of years in the future. Of course, this apparent stasis is significant:
as Dr Marsch explains, cloning leads to what is called anthropological relaxation:
cloning does not progress. The whole of the society on Sainte Croix reflects the stasis
within the Wolfe family but it is only the Wolfe family in which successive
generations are cloned.
-- 322 --

But if the setting shifts in and out of reality so it is difficult to grasp how much
we might accept, how much more must we struggle with the family the narrator finds
himself a part of. The first person we meet, other than the narrator and David, is Mr
Million, whose artificiality is blatant: he runs on large wheels, his face is a screen. Yet
the name is deceptive names so often are in Wolfes fiction, and in The Fifth Head
of Cerberus particularly and it turns out he is really M. Million, a ten nine
unbound simulator, (p.32) a simulation of the narrators great-grandfather, or in fact
himself, the original from which the narrator is the fifth-generation clone. So what
starts out as a robot is revealed to be in some ways the progenitor of the narrator.
Then there is the aunt who is also sister or daughter cloning over generations in
this way disrupts relationships, and the way we can speak about them, which is the
point of course who moves on some sort of anti-gravity device:
When we reached the stairs, however, this smooth gliding became a fluid
bobbing that brought two inches or more of the hem of her black skirt into
contact with each step, as if her torso were descending each step as a small boat
might a rapids now rushing, now pausing, now almost backing in the
crosscurrents of turbulence. (p.16)

When they descend the spiral staircase she floats down the central well, so that
she is a flesh-and-blood person whose movements are curiously suggestive of a
machine. And again there is trickery over the name, for when the narrator first meets
her they talk about Veils Hypothesis yet it is only later, when Dr Marsch visits, that
we learn the aunt is herself Dr Veil, author of this Hypothesis. Then there is the father
who is, of course, the narrator himself since the one is cloned from the other. Here,
again, there are contradictions: a severe, apparently private man who runs so vital
and sociable an enterprise as a brothel. That the elder Wolfe conducts biological
experiments, changing the appearance and character of his girls to suit the desires of
his clients, is an early hint that he will experiment upon his son, the narrator; and
these experiments are echoed in the narrators own experiments in cloning animals.
How much this echo is in fact repetition only becomes clear when the narrator visits
his father intent on murder, only to discover that the father nursed exactly the same
intent towards his own father. Whether this intent was actually carried out is never
explicitly stated, but we are left to assume that it was, that the narrator is blindly
following in the footsteps of his earlier self, that Marschs relaxation has condemned
the cloned family to live within a closed loop. Certainly by the end of the story the
narrator, released from prison, has set out upon exactly the same path followed by
his father.
At every stage, therefore, both in the wider world of Port-Mimizon and in the
narrower confines of La Maison du Chien, there is the suggestion of artificiality, of
nature denied, of things that have been made to be not quite what they seem. This,
of course, is most dramatically seen in the character of Dr Marsch. He arrives midway
through the story as an anthropologist from Earth, here to consult the authority of Dr
-- 323 --

Veil. As with so many characters in the novella, something is not quite right about
Marsch from the start: he wears inappropriately heavy clothing, a full beard that is
not in the current style, and his face is so colorless a white as almost to constitute a
disfigurement, (p.29) though these could be no more than the mark of an off-world
stranger. The narrator has heard that a star-crosser from Sainte Anne had splashed
down in the bay yesterday (p.29) and assumes Marsch was aboard, which Marsch
denies though if a star-crosser from Sainte Anne was such an event, one from
Earth would have been even more noteworthy and it is curious that the narrator has
not heard of it. The reason why becomes clear late in the story when it is revealed
that Marsch is, in fact, a shape-changing aborigine from Sainte Anne, passing himself
off as human.
This is not just another deception, another artificiality, it is a significant revelation
about the nature of this world. The original inhabitants of both Sainte Croix and
Sainte Anne are supposed to have disappeared, but the first explorers descriptions
differed so widely and some pioneers there had claimed the abos could change their
shapes. (p.19) If Marsch is, indeed, an aborigine it proves that they are not extinct
and also proves the supposition about their shape-changing abilities. If so, this
suggests that Veils Hypothesis might be correct.
Veil, the narrators aunt:
supposes the abos to have possessed the ability to mimic men perfectly. Veil
thought that when the ships came from Earth the abos killed everyone and took
their places and the ships, so theyre not dead at all, we are.
You mean the Earth people are, my aunt said, the human beings. (p.19)

This suggestion is made early in the story and immediately undermined: The
imitation could hardly have been exact, since human beings dont possess that talent
and to imitate them perfectly the abos would have to lose it. (p.19) Thereafter it isnt
mentioned again until the climactic revelation about Marsch: the characters all think
as humans, behave as humans, to all intents and purposes they are humans. But that,
of course, does not negate the Hypothesis. And if no one in the novel is what they
seem to be, if the whole world is mimicking humanity, it would explain the social
stultification, the lack of cultural referents, the failure to advance that has bound the
whole world. It also explains the artificiality that Gene Wolfe as author and as
narrator has been at pains to point up throughout the novella.
And if this artificiality provides the key to the story, then the enclosed, encircling
trap which condemns the narrator to recapitulate his father becomes more than a
personal tragedy it becomes a metaphor for the tragedy of the entire world of Sainte
Croix.

-- 324 --

ATTENDING DAEDALUS
When a writer consistently returns to the same furrow throughout her career it
can repay the critic to turn back to that writers first book. Crude as it may be,
possibly even disavowed by the author, the first novel often displays, in simple, the
roots of the ideas that are pursued with increasing complexity through subsequent
works. Gene Wolfes first novel is a carelessly written, clumsily plotted near future
adventure that has received virtually no critical attention, but at the core of Operation
Ares (1970) we find a myth that affects the real world though it has no reality (there
is no such secret organisation as ARES, but because everyone assumes it exists ARES
ends up overthrowing the government) and we find a man transformed into a saviour
though he neither desires nor deserves such status. It is a pattern we see again and
again in Wolfes subsequent work, most notably in The Book of the New Sun which
is a far more mature and stylistically rich working out of the same ideas. Peter Wright
bows towards the way fiction reshapes consensus reality (p.35) in Operation Ares in
this exhaustive (and, at times, exhausting) critical reading of Wolfes Urth Cycle, but
I think we arrive at different conclusions from the evidence. Severians story is a
fiction reshaping reality, and the fiction is written by the Hierogrammates (sacred
scribes), so much we agree on. But my reading of Operation Ares leads me to
question how much veracity there was in their story, while I think Wright trusts their
tale as the bedrock upon which he can construct his own reading of the sequence.
Such esoteric disagreements this is truly a minor point, a matter of
microscopically fine distinctions whose resolution one way or the other could make
not one jot of difference to the sublime achievement of the original are typical of
the critical reaction to The Book of the New Sun (1980-83) and its pendant, The Urth
of the New Sun (1987). As Wright points out, John Clute, a writer more noted for short
reviews than long essays, has devoted one of the longest pieces of his career to the
question of who was Severians mother. Wolfes sequence is, like chess, a work of
astounding simplicity that becomes ever more complex the more one knows it.
Wright devotes a significant portion of this book to looking at the way other
critics have read the Urth Cycle. He is concerned with the artifice of the work, the way
it has been devised to open itself or close itself depending on how it is read, so variant
readings are his basic tools. His thesis is that the five novels of the sequence were
carefully and intentionally structured to fool the reader, to send them off after a
variety of false leads. Wolfe creates a text organised specifically to be understood, or
at least appreciated, only by those readers who are willing to question their own
literary assumptions (p.166) he says in what is actually one of the least
confrontational statements of this position. Despite the fact that The Book of the New
-- 325 --

Sun can be, and indeed has been, appreciated by countless readers who may have
been aware of only the top one or two layers of this multilayered work, it is true that
different understandings of the text are available the more one penetrates the book.
Any critical response, therefore, is likely to express only a partial understanding of
the work, though that is not to say, as Wright does, that every other critic is simply
wrong (p123). Attending Daedalus is an excellent examination of Wolfes novels; I
must say this before my quibbles and hesitations make it seem as though I am intent
on undermining everything that Wright says. Quite the contrary, there is a huge
amount here that is valuable to anyone coming to the Urth Cycle. Nevertheless, there
is a whiff of elitism that comes out from time to time, a sense that if every other critic
is simply wrong then Wright alone is right. But though deception is one of the tricks
that Wolfe uses throughout the Cycle, clearly taking great delight in misdirection and
sleight of hand, acknowledging this does not necessarily mean that Wolfe wrote five
books purely intent upon fooling every reader. In fact, The Book of the New Sun is a
remarkably democratic work open to many possible readings and I doubt that any of
them, not even Wolfes own, are wholly right or wholly wrong.
There are times, for instance, when Wright seems to forget that the five volumes
of the Urth Cycle were works of fiction, written over a period of years, rather than an
intricate metafictional treatise created entire in one moment. When he says, for
instance, that the title of The Urth of the New Sun serves to remove any
indeterminacy concerning the possibility of Severians success [in bringing the New
Sun] (p.122), he ignores the fact that anyone reading The Shadow of the Torturer in
1980 would not have the consolation of that final title in the sequence for another
seven years, but would probably still not be in much doubt as to Severians eventual
success. The success in bringing the New Sun is never really an issue (which is why,
to my mind, The Urth of the New Sun is a tying up of loose ends that didnt
necessarily need tying), the drama we are watching in The Book of the New Sun is
how the myth takes shape and how it shapes Severian and the world through which
he moves. Thus other issues (such as who was Severians mother) are attendant rather
than central questions, their solution might shine a fraction more light upon the
mythopoesis but do not materially affect it.
Gene Wolfe creates his myth by misdirection, and Wright provides a valuable
series of chapters examining the tools of deception used. These are, in the main, likely
to be familiar even to casual readers of the Urth Cycle: the intentionally arcane
vocabulary, the use of what Wright terms Intergeneric Operations and Metafictional
Devices. Severians perfect memory is itself deceptive and the occasion for Wright to
make some particularly interesting points not only about the usual suspects Frances
Yatess The Art of Memory, Jorge Luis Borgess Funes the Memorious but also a
genuine case history of a mnemonist. Just because Severian remembers everything
there is a tendency to assume that all he tells is correct. But Wolfe has a history of
using unreliable narrators, and Wright points out not only the significant gaps in
Severians tale but also the occasions when he may not be telling the entire truth. But
-- 326 --

these deceptions and misdirections hang from one continuous thread that runs
throughout Wrights reading of the Urth Cycle: mythopoesis. The central myth created
in the novels is the story of how Severian brings the New Sun to Urth. This myth,
especially as it is rounded off in The Urth of the New Sun, has tempted many critics
to read Severian as a Christ figure, an image that Wolfe does little to discourage by
loading his narrative with images of resurrection, raising the dead, eating the flesh,
and a host of other references to Catholic doctrine and worship. This reading is helped
greatly by the otherworldly figures who gather around Severian and eventually carry
him off to the heavens and arrange his rebirth with the rebirth of the Sun, figures
whose names translate as sacred scribes (Hierogrammates) and sacred slaves
(Hierodules), figures who transport him to a final judgement before the angelic
Tzadkiel (Ezekial?). Ah but we critics who have made this identification of the Urth
myth with Christian myth (for I am indeed one of them) are roundly condemned by
Wright. This is no religious analogy, he insists, Hierodule and Hierogrammate are
not cognate with the angels but simply alien beings pursuing their own selfish
survival agenda. This pursuit temporarily benefits the people of Urth, but is not done
for that reason. In this reading he is right, despite the fact that Christian references
shroud the Urth Cycle and Attending Daedalus. But the reading stops short where it
should go on; by showing that the myth of Urth is based on something selfish and
decidedly non-sacred, there is no reason to assume that Wolfe is not intending a
religious analogy. Those who seek to challenge God seek to become God an idea
becoming increasingly popular in fictions such as Appleseed by John Clute and His
Dark Materials by Philip Pullman (and Wolfes fascist celestial order (p.73) seems
very close to Pullmans in that respect) and it is easy to imagine Wolfe asking us to
consider what were the true motives of the Christian celestial order. That Wolfe is a
Catholic does not preclude him asking testing questions.
Having spent considerable energy trying to convince us that Wolfe wrote the
whole of the Urth Cycle with the deliberate intent of bamboozling us, a thesis that is
not beyond the bounds of possibility though I cant help feeling that Wolfe used
deception techniques in order to guide our discoveries rather than to hamper them,
Wright then goes on to suggest that everything Wolfe has written since then has been
an attempt to explain the Urth Cycle. So far, Wright has provided a fascinating
excavation of different layers of The Book of the New Sun in order to arrive at
conclusions I quibble with but dont necessarily dispute. Now, however, I think we
part company. It is clear that the two Latro novels bear a significant relationship to
The Book of the New Sun, as if it is seen through a distorted mirror. The misty past
replaces the distant future, a reliable narrator with a faulty memory replaces an
unreliable narrator with a perfect memory, a confusingly hieratic vocabulary is
replaced by an equally confusing demotic. Nevertheless, I see no need to read the one
as an overt commentary upon the other. When Wright offers the following perception
Those who stare at the sun go blind, Latro warns, and his words imply that if the
reader wishes to understand Severians story fully then he or she must look beneath
-- 327 --

its surface or risk being dazzled by its extravagant complexity (p.196) I admit to
seeing no such implication. A reference to Apollo in a book set in Ancient Greece and
beset with gods does not have to be read as a crib to The Book of the New Sun.
Having said all that, if we glide over the last chapter of this book (and the
occasional infelicity of language: Naturally, if the reader perceives Wolfes
recontextualisations, the inclusion of Severians hypothesis of textual construction
confirms that his intention was, in reality, to obfuscate information in a manner that
reveals it to be obfuscated (p.174)) we are still left with perhaps the keenest and most
consistently interesting examination of the narrative techniques employed by Gene
Wolfe in the Urth Cycle that I, for one, have read.

-- 328 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

BY-WAYS

OF THE

SHINING PATH

This is a double first for me. Before this book arrived through the post I had heard
of neither the author nor the publisher. The publisher appears to be one of the small
operations, like Salamander, Carcanet and Bloodaxe, which have been springing up
very impressively over the past couple of years. And, in the light of the Arts Councils
current disregard for literature, are likely to disappear just as rapidly in the near
future. In this case it would be a major disaster, since Backwoods seem to have a bold
and innovative approach that is obvious from their initial list. Concentrating
exclusively on translations from European and South American literature, they are
offering a previously unknown novel by Brecht, a collection of short stories from
Nikos Kazantzakis, a volume of poetry from Nabokov that was apparently written
even before he went into exile, and this novel.
Nuez, as I said, is a new name to me, and this novel, first published in 1981, is
apparently the only work of his to see print so far. Nevertheless, his impact on South
American literature is clear from the fact that this volume is complete with a brief,
one-page introduction by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a twenty-page preface by
Jorge Luis Borges. Both praise the novel almost to excess. Marquez finds in it echoes
of the fantastic elements in Shakespeares comedies and Goethes tragedies. Borges,
on the other hand, highlights the strong realism of the novel, and places it very firmly
in the contemporary Latin American tradition.
After such a curtain-raiser, of course, it would be a surprise if the novel itself did
not prove something of an anti-climax. Indeed, I found the first hundred pages or so
very slow and heavy-going until, almost imperceptibly, I became aware of what was
happening. Nuez is a writer of almost too much subtlety. At no point does he
actually tell the reader what is going on, leaving us to draw our own conclusions from
the often ambiguous clues that are scattered throughout the text.
What we are presented with is a small peasant village in the remote Andes of the
writers native Peru. It is a poor place, almost entirely removed from the twentieth
century, and the largely Indian population scratches a meagre living from the barren
soil. Much of the novel is taken up with a minute examination of their day-to-day
struggle for existence, written in a beautiful and vivid prose, but which is almost too
heart-rending to be taken in such concentrated doses. In particular, we are caught up
in the lives of the Baptista family mother, son and two sisters as they face such
everyday occurrences as love, loss, hunger and anguish. I think that this must count
as one of the most remarkable group portraits in modern literature.
Yet the crumbling adobe of the village and the parched fields that surround it are
also crossed and recrossed by the warring factions that divide Peru today the
-- 331 --

guerilla forces of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) rebel movement, and the
military forces of the government. The two are presented as being indistinguishable
in their fanaticism and casual cruelty.
Both groups, villagers and warmakers, play out their destinies upon the same
stage, yet hardly seem to affect each other. When the two do touch a wounded rebel
sheltered and tended by one of the two Baptista sisters, then betrayed to the
government by the other; a neighbour tortured and killed by members of the Sendero
Luminoso it is with a sense of shock and unreality that seems wrong. After all, it is
the lack of interaction that should seem unreal.
Then, slowly, you realise that though the two sides occupy the same territory they
are not actually in the same world. Nuez himself does not use the term, and I suspect
that he would strongly disapprove of it, but I can think of no better way of putting
it than to say that one of the two is actually in the land of Faerie. And it is not the
one you might expect.
The current style of South American literature has been given the soubriquet
magical realism. It is intended to betoken a heightened sense of the real, but in the
case of By-Ways on the Shining Path the painstaking reality of the text actually
disguises a flight of startlingly original fantasy. Those who, like me, have found the
dividing line between fantasy and reality too crudely drawn in too many novels will
welcome the freshness of Nuezs work. There is almost no dividing line here; novel
and reader slip back and forth between the two, often without any awareness of the
transition, and in such a way that the two become inseparably intertwined. The
denouement of the principal love story in the real world is absolutely dependent upon
events in the land of Faerie. The escalating war that rages in the fantasy land could
not reach the conclusion it does without intervention from reality.
This is a remarkable novel, by turns touching and very funny, yet in the end it is
the sheer scale of Nuez imagination that leaves me gasping in admiration. There are
few undisputed masterpieces in the history of literature, but this novel is surely
destined to take its place among them. It is a tremendous novel that I cannot begin
to recommend strongly enough.

-- 332 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

NOTES
What it is we do when we read science fiction [p.3]
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.

13.

Peter Nicholls, Trapped in the Pattern, in The Fantastic Self, p.30

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, I 13
J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, p.104
Nancy Kress, Beggars and Choosers, p.9
Gary Westfahl, The Words That Could Happen, in Extrapolation 34.no4, p.291
Ibid., p.290
Greg Egan, Wangs Carpets in The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirteenth
Annual Collection, p.304
Karel Capek, R.U.R., p.3
George Turner, Down There in Darkness, p.35
Robert A. Heinlein, Beyond This Horizon.
Harlan Ellison, quoted in Samuel R. Delany, About 5,750 Words, in The JewelHinged Jaw, p.34
Robert Silverberg, Who Is Tiptree? in Warm Worlds and Otherwise, p.xi; and
checking this quote I find that Silverberg is actually quoting from an article
by Tiptree herself, in Phantasmicom 9.
George Turner, Down There in Darkness, p.64

On the origins of genre [p.13]

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.

Darko Suvin, Narrative Logic, Ideological Domination, and the Range of

Science Fiction, p.4
Margaret Drabble, ed. The Oxford Companion to English Literature, p.906
Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, p.1
Quoted in Gary K. Wolfe, Critical Terms for Science Fiction and Fantasy, p.110
Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p.8
Alexei & Cory Panshin, The World Beyond the Hill, p.1
Gary Westfahl, The Mechanics of Wonder, p.8

Mistah Kurtz, he dead [p.49]

1.
2.

3.
4.
5.

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, pp. 109-12

science fiction was born in the heart and crucible of the English Romantic
movement in exile in Switzerland, when the wife of the poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley wrote Frankenstein, Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History
of Science Fiction, p.2
David G. Hartwell, ed., The Science Fiction Century, p.19
Kingsley Amis, New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, p.128
Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p.335
-- 335 --

Mirrors, doubles, twins [p.107]

1.

2.
3.
4.

The omnibus edition contains a new piece which serves as linking material
though it hardly amounts to a story in its own right. A sixth story, The
Discharge, was first published in France in 2001.
Paul Kincaid, 'Throwing Away the Orthodoxy,' in Vector 206, p.5
Ibid, p.6
Ibid, p.5

Islomania? Insularity? [p.141]

1.
2.
3.

Alan Burns & Charles Sugnet, eds. The Imagination on Trial, p.29
Richard II, Act 2, Scene 1.
Peter Ackroyd, Thomas More, p.167

Touching the Earth [p.157]

1.
2.
3.
4.

Robert Holdstock, Eye Among the Blind, pp. 83-4

Geoff Rippington, Robert Holdstock Interviewed, in Arena SF 9, p.22
Robert Holdstock, Earthwind, p.160
Robert Holdstock, A Small Event in In the Valley of the Statues, p.59.

The Furies [p.173]

1.
2.
3.
4.

Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p.335

In a letter to Paul Kincaid, 28 April 1987.
Brian W. Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p.332
Though this hardly takes into account the American publisher who, confronted
with the manuscript Roberts had spent some years completing, responded: We
can take six of these a year.
5. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p.25
6. Claude Veillot, The First Days of May in A Century of Science Fiction, p.243
7. Keith Roberts, The Furies in Science Fantasy 76, p.113
8. H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, p.179
9. Paul Kincaid, The Touch of Phantom Hands: The Science Fiction of Keith
Roberts, p.10.
10. Paul Kincaid, Of Men and Machines, in Vector 108, p.11

Maps of a Curious Sort [p.189]

1.
2.
3.

Sham Hill, in A Heron Caught in Weeds, p38

Brian W. Aldiss, Trillion Year Spree, p479
By my count: The Lake of Tuonela and The Trustie Tree are set on the planet
Xerxes, but it is a world of rural canals almost indistinguishable from the
English countryside. The Grain Kings is set aboard gigantic harvesters
scouring the plains of Alaska, but the real focus is almost entirely on the world
inside these vast machines where his characters discuss Kipling. Two stories,
-- 336 --

4.
5.
6
7.

Coranda and The Wreck of the Kissing Bitch, are set in the frozen Matto
Grosso of Michael Moorcocks The Ice Schooner (a book Roberts had edited for
serial publication). The Passing of the Dragons is also set on another world,
The Deeps is set under water, Tremarest on a tropical island and The Silence
of the Land takes Kaeti to the First World War battlefields of France.
Rudyard Kipling, Puck of Pooks Hill, p210
See my essay Future Historical: The Fiction of Keith Roberts for a more
detailed examination of his fear of the future.
The Chalk Giant, Vector 132, p7
Clute, Keith Roberts, in the first edition of The Encyclopedia of Science
Fiction, p500. Curiously, the remark was not included in the second edition.

Exhibits [p.237]
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.

In fact, I had come across a handful of Millhausers stories in Ellen Datlow and
Terri Windlings annual Years Best Fantasy and Horror anthologies.
Steven Millhauser, The Barnum Museum in The Barnum Musem, p.87
Millhauser, Martin Dressler, p.273
Millhauser, Eisenheim the Illusionist in The Barnum Musem, p.217
Millhauser, Martin Dressler, p.2
Ibid. p.1
Millhauser, Balloon Flight, 1870 in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories,
p.131
Millhauser, The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon, in Little Kingdoms,
p.136
Millhauser, Enchanted Night, p.34
Millhauser, The Snowmen in In the Penny Arcade, p.129
Millhauser, The New Automaton Theatre in The Knife Thrower and Other
Stories, p.76
Ibid. p.93
Millhauser, In the Penny Arcade in In the Penny Arcade, p.144
Millhauser, The Dream Consortium in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories,
p.117
Millhauser, Cathay in In the Penny Arcade, p.152-3
Millhauser, Paradise Park in The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, p.166
Ibid. p.173
Millhauser, The Realms of Morpheus, p.125
Milhauser, The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne in Little Kingdoms, p.107

-- 337 --

A Mode of Head-on Collision [p.277]

1.

2.

3.

4.

John Foyster, George Turner, critic and novelist (1984), reprinted in SF

Commentary 76: The Unrelenting Gaze, October 2000, pp.4-6, and Bruce
Gillespie, The Good Soldier: George Turner as Combative Critic, Foundation
78, Spring 2000, pp6-17, to both of which this article owes a debt of gratitude.
That it is Gillespie telling this story lends it credibility; Turner too readily
embroidered the stories he told about his life, and his biographer, Judith
Buckrich, tends to take his assertions at face value and does not question them
enough.
Turner first used this definition in an article entitled SF: Death and
Transfiguration of a Genre in Meanjin Quarterly, September 1973, which he
describes as one of those highbrow journals which does not notice sf, but he
was clearly pleased with the definition because he repeated in in his attack on
Stanislaw Lem, S.L.: A Hopeless Case with No Exceptions, Science Fiction
Commentary 38, September 1974, p.14.
Quoted in Buckrich, op. cit., p.79. Buckrich gives no publication details for
Bills Break, and it may not have seen print.

We joke for gods [p.307]

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.

Rachel Pollack, Free Live Free, in Foundation 35, p.102

Pollack, p.100
Pollack, p.100
Pollack, p.101
Thorne Smith, Rain in the Doorway, p.28
Smith, p.58
Smith, p.359
Smith, p.364

False Dog [p.321]

1.

Gene Wolfe, The Fifth Head of Cerberus in The Best Science Fiction Stories of
the Year #2, both quotations from page 49.

-- 338 --

SOURCES
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Anatomising Science Fiction
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How Hard is SF?
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-- 339 --

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-- 340 --

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By-ways of the Shining Path
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Everything else is original to this volume.

-- 341 --

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-- 350 --

THEORY : I
PRACTICE : II
CHRISTOPHER PRIEST : III
BRITAIN ... : IV
... AND THE WORLD : V
GENE WOLFE : VI
1 APRIL 1984 : VII
NOTES & BIBLIOGRAPHY : VIII
INDEX : IX

About 5,750 words (Delany) 9

Absurdist SF 27
Acker, Kathy 291
Ackroyd, Peter 143
Albion 142
on realist fiction 198
The Admirable Crichton (Barrie) 144
The Affirmation (Priest) 16, 99, 100, 102-5, 127, 147-8
connection to The Quiet Woman 119
on deception 107
islands and identity 89-90
secondary worlds 112-115
After London; or Wild England (Jefferies)
56, 146, 149
Albion (Ackroyd) 142
Aldiss, Brian 288
Billion Year Spree 15
The Brightfount Diaries 57
cosy catastrophes 146, 149, 173, 174
defining SF 15
the future historic 189
Report on Probability A 16
Shelley as pioneer 13, 49
The Aleph and Other Stories (Borges) 266
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 281-2, 287
All the Hues of Hell (Wolfe) 34, 37
Alter et Idem (Hall) 143
Alternate history
Civil War fiction 62-74
defining 61-2
see also counterfactual fiction
Amaryllis Night and Day (Hoban) 267, 269, 270
Amazing magazine 75
American Front (Turtledove) 66
American science fiction
development compared to British 53-60
landscapes of 141-2
origins of 50-1
Amis, Kingsley
New Maps of Hell 52
Amnesiascope (Erickson) 141
The Amphibians (Wright) 53, 56
An Infinite Summer (Priest) 108
Analog magazine 29, 75
And Still She Sleeps (Costikyan) 82
Anderson, Poul 28
Genesis 45
Kyrie 36-7
politics and 44
Angelica's Grotto (Hoban) 267-8, 269, 270
Anthony, Patricia
God's Fires 203, 204
Antibodies (Stross) 81
Apollo 13 (film) 18
Appleseed (Clute) 197-204, 327
The Art of Memory (Yates) 326
Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars
(Robinson) 45
Arthurian legends 142-3

The Artificial Cloud (Tussing) 84

Ascent of Wonder (ed. Hartwell & Cramer) 29-39, 41
Asimov, Isaac
Campbell and 154, 155
The Caves of Steel 19
as hard SF 31
The Last Question 36
Nightfall 38
representative SF 26
Asimov's magazine 75, 82
Astounding magazine 29
Attending Daedalus: Gene Wolfe, Artifice and
the Reader (Wright) 325-8
Austin, J. L.
How to Do Things With Words 4
Australian science fiction
landscapes of 141-2
Turner and 277-8
Australian Science Fiction Review 277
Turner and 279-81, 288
The Author of the Acacia Seeds (Le Guin) 35-6
The Awakening (Clarke) 154
Aztec Century (Evans) 169-71
Babel-17 (Delaney) 281
Bacon, Francis
The New Atlantis 141, 143
Ballantyne, R. M.
The Coral Island 144
Ballard, J. G. 49, 55
The Cage of Sand 32-3
Concrete Island 53, 141, 145
Conrad's influence 52
The Crystal World 52
cyberpunk and 291
disasters 173
The Drowned World 56, 146
Empire of the Sun 233
hard sf and 30, 31, 32-3, 41
on the island 141
New Wave 58
postmodernism 27
Prima Belladonna 32-3, 37-8
scientific romances 149
Turner on 288
Bangsund, John 277, 278
Banks, Iain M. 60
The Wasp Factory 141
Banville, John
Doctor Copernicus 35
Kepler 35
The Barnum Museum (Millhauser) 238
Barrie, J. M.
The Admirable Crichton 144
Barth, John 27
Basic Black (Dowling) 81
The Battle of Dorking (Chesney) 143
Baum, L. Frank
The Wizard of Oz 201, 308, 310-11

-- 353 --

Baxter, Stephen 60, 79

Gossamer 46
On the Orion Line 46, 78
Sheena 5 78
The Time Ships 60
The Wire Continuum (with Clarke) 153
Beauregard, General P. T. 71
The Beautiful and the Sublime (Sterling) 38
Beep (Blish) 32
Beggars and Choosers (Kress)
language of 5-6, 7, 10, 11
Beggars in Spain (Kress) 43, 45
Bell, M. Shayne
The Thing About Benny 76
Beloved Son (Turner) 281, 287
Benford, Gregory 37, 41
Bester, Alfred 291
The Demolished Man 277, 279-81
Bethke, Bruce 291
Bicycle Repairman (Sterling) 45
big dumb objects (BDO) 28
Billion Year Spree (Aldiss) 15
Bill's Break (Kellaway) 285-6
Bioy Casares, Adolfo 256-7, 259, 260
Birth of a Nation (film) 211
Birthday of the World (Le Guin) 77, 84
Birtwistle, Sir Harrison
The Second Mrs Kong (with Hoban) 268
Bisson, Terry
Fire on the Mountain 62-3
Black Heart, Ivory Bones 82
Blackwood's magazine 51
Blish, James
Beep 32
Blumlein, Michael 27
Boat of Fate (Roberts) 177
The Bone Forest (Holdstock) 164
Bone Orchards (McAuley) 77
The Book of the New Sun (Wolfe) 307, 313, 314, 321,
325-8
Borges: A Life (Williamson) 266
Borges, Jorge Luis 240, 291
The Aleph 261
The Aleph and Other Stories 266
The Book of Sand 260
Borges and myself 265-6
The Circular Ruins 261, 265-6
Death and the Compass 257
Don Guillermo Blake 264
Dreamtigers 265, 266
Ficciones 256
Funes the Memorious 263-4, 326
The Garden of Forking Paths 260, 263
The Immortal 264
The Immortals 264
introduces Nuez 331
Labyrinths 256, 257, 266
The Library of Babel 25, 259-60, 262
life and career of 255-6

The Lottery in Babylon 261, 262

The Masked Dyer, Hakim of Merv 257, 264, 265
as narrator 259
A New Refutation of Time 263, 264
The Other 258, 265
Other Inquisitions 263
Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote
259, 261, 266
The South 256
Streetcorner Man 255, 256, 257-8
Tln, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius 256, 257, 260-1
The Two Kings and their Two Labyrinths 266
A Universal History of Infamy 256
Bova, Ben 38, 44
The Boy Who Jumped the Rapids (Holdstock) 164
Boyd, William
The New Confessions 213
Bradbury, Ray
Fahrenheit 451 19
Bradfield, Scott
The Devil Disinfects 83
Brain Child (Turner) 279
Breaking Strain (Clarke) 154
Breuer, Miles J. 25
The Brightfount Diaries (Aldiss) 57
Brin, David 44
Bring the Jubilee (Moore) 69-71, 72
British science fiction
Conrad's influence 49
cosy catastrophes 54-5, 146-7, 173-4
islands and 53, 141-8
New Wave 173-4
origins of 49-52
separate development of 53-60
Broderick, Damien 27
Brosnan, John 281
Brown, John 62-3, 67
Brunner, John
Stand on Zanzibar 8, 58
Buckrich, Judith 279
Built Upon the Sands of Time (Flynn) 46, 83
Burdekin, Katharine P. 26
Burroughs, Edgar Rice 28
Burroughs, William 57, 291
Butler, General Benjamin 70
By-Ways on the Shining Path (Nuez) 331-2
Cadigan, Pat 291
The Cage of Sand (Ballard) 32-3
Campbell, John W.
as editor 18
glorifying man 154
Campbell, Ramsay
No Strings 81
Canopus in Argos (Lessing) 19
Capek, Karel
R.U.R. 7
Capella's Golden Eyes (Evans) 165-6
A Career in Sexual Chemistry (Stableford) 41

-- 354 --

Carroll, Jonathan
The Heidelberg Cylinder 84-5
Carroll, Lewis
Alice in Wonderland 281-2, 287
Carter, Angela 27
The Caves of Steel (Asimov) 19
Chaga (McDonald) 60
The Chalk Giants (Roberts) 58, 147, 174, 176
landscapes of 189-91, 191-4
Chamberlain, Joshua Lawrence 68, 69
Chandler, A. Bertram 277
Chanterelle (Stableford) 79-80
Chesney, George T.
The Battle of Dorking 143
Chiang, Ted
Seventy-Two Letters 77, 78, 79, 84, 85
Understand 45
Childhood's End (Clarke) 155, 156
Chimeras (Evans) 165, 169
A Christmas Carol (Dickens) 4, 5, 6
Christopher, John 94, 173
not cosy 149
A Wrinkle in the Skin 146-7
Chromatic Aberration (Ford) 29, 38
Churchill, Winston S. 72
If Lee had not Won the Battle of Gettysburg 68-9
Civil War (U.S.)
alternate history and 62-74
Gettysburg 67-71
Harpers Ferry 62-3
historians counterfactuals 63-4
the lost orders and Antietam 65-6
Clarke, Arthur C.
Childhood's End 155
collected short stories 153-6
establishes career 54
The Fountains of Paradise 145
as hard SF 31
politics and 44
Retreat from Earth 146
The Star 36, 38
2001: A Space Odyssey 28, 155, 156
Clarke, Susanna
Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower 82, 84
Clement, Hal 32, 38
Exchange Rate 46
on villains 42
Clute, John
Appleseed 197-204, 327
concept of Story 198-9
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Nicholls)
14,25-8
grammar of fantasy 200
on Keith Roberts 194
Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 198
Sevarian's mother and 325
Turner and 283
vocabulary of 4
The Cold Equations (Godwin) 19, 29, 31, 32, 42, 43

A Colder War (Stross) 81

The Committed Men (Harrison) 94, 174
The Commonwealth of Oceania (Harrington) 143
Conan Doyle, Arthur
see Doyle, Arthur Conan
Concrete Island (Ballard) 53, 141, 145
A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios
(McPherson) 63
Conrad, Joseph
Heart of Darkness 49, 52
influence on sf 49
Constantine, Storm
The Face of Sekt 84
Cook, David 292
Copernicus, Nicholas 21
The Coral Island (Ballantyne) 144
Costikyan, Greg
And Still She Sleeps 82
counterfactual fiction
Civil War historians and 63-4
defining 61-2
see also alternate history
Cowper, Richard
The Road to Corlay 58, 147, 186
The Twilight of Briareus 56, 94, 174
The Crack/The Time of the Crack (Tennant) 174
Cramer, Kathryn
Ascent of Wonder (ed. with Hartwell) 29-39, 41
The Hard SF Renaissance (ed. with Hartwell) 41-7
Year's Best Fantasy (for 2000, ed. with Hartwell)
75-85
The Cremation (Priest) 100, 101, 111, 112
Crispin, Edmund 52
Critical Terms for Science Fiction (Wolfe)
defining SF 13, 14
Crowley, John
An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings 82
Encyclopedia on 28
Great Work of Time 79
Little, Big 200
The Crystal World (Ballard) 52
Csicsery-Ronay Jr, Istvan 292
The Cupboard Under the Stair (Turner) 278
cyberpunk
emergence of 59
hard sf and 45
postmodernism and 27
Cyrano de Bergerac 21
Darwin, Charles
On the Origin of Species 145
Datlow, Ellen
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (for 2000,
ed. with Windling) 75-85
Davis, Jefferson 64, 69
Davy Jones Ambassador (Gallum) 30
Dawn (Wright) 151
Day Million (Pohl) 16, 35
Day of Creation (Ballard) 52

-- 355 --

The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham)

56, 57, 143-4, 173
development of disaster 177
Days Between Stations (Erickson) 207-16, 217, 228, 232
De Camp, L. Sprague 38
De Lint, Charles
Granny Weather 80
Making a Noise in This World 80
Deane, John F.
A Migrant Bird 83
Death and the Senator (Clarke) 155
The Death of Grass (Wyndham) 56
Debt of Bones (Goodkind) 75
Defoe, Daniel
Robinson Crusoe 141, 144, 145
Delany, Samuel R. 280
About 5,750 words 9
Babel-17 281
influence on cyberpunk 291
postmodernism 27
science fiction as language 11
DeLillo, Don 27, 291
Deluge (Wright) 141, 146
The Demolished Man (Bester)
Turner's criticism of 277, 279-81
A Descent into the Maelstrm (Poe) 36, 38
Desertion (Simak) 36
detective fiction 19
The Devil Disinfects (Bradfield) 83
Dick, Philip K.
Lem defends against Turner 284-5
postmodernism 27
Turner and 283
Ubik 283, 284-5
Dickens, Charles 201
A Christmas Carol 4, 5, 6
Different Kinds of Darkness (Langford)
44-5, 78, 79, 84
Disch, Thomas M. 57, 283
on Clute's Appleseed 197
fabulation 27
Turner on 288
The Discharge (Priest) 100, 129-32
Doctor Copernicus (Banville) 35
Doctor Kepler (Banville) 35
Donne, John 51, 52
Dowling, Terry
Basic Black 81
Rynosseros 142
The Saltimbanques 81, 85
Down and Out on Ellfive Prime (Ing) 32
Down Here in the Garden (Travis) 82
Down There in Darkness (Turner) 8, 10, 142
Doyle, Arthur Conan 51
The Lost World 146
Dozois, Gardner
The Year's Best Science Fiction (for 2000) 75-85
The Dream Archipelago (Priest) 90, 111-12
The Discharge 129-32

A Dream of Wessex (Priest) 89, 127

identity and 96-100, 103, 114
islands and 53, 147
landscape of 186
secondary world of 109-11, 117
Dreamtigers (Borges) 265, 266
Drek Yarman (Roberts) 189, 194
The Drowned World (Ballard) 56, 146
The Dryad's Wedding (Wilson) 80
Due, Tananarive
Patient Zero 76-7, 84
Duffy, Steve
The Penny Drops (with Rodwell) 82
Durrell, Lawrence 27
Numquam 57
Tunc 57
Earth and Stone (Holdstock) 160, 162
Earthlight (Clarke) 156
An Earthly Mother Sits and Sings (Crowley) 82
Earthsea stories (Le Guin) 141
Earthwind (Holdstock) 159-61, 162, 163
Ebb Tide (Singleton) 84
Edwin Mullhouse (Millhauser) 238, 242-3
Effinger, George Alec 68
fabulation 27
Look Away 71, 73
Egan, Greg 44
Oracle 77, 78
Reasons to be Cheerful 44
Wang's Carpets 6-7, 8, 45
Eliot, T. S. 240
Ellison, Harlan 9
Elphinstone, Margaret
Hy Brasil 143
The Emerald Forest (Holdstock) 163
Empire of the Sun (Ballard) 233
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 2nd edition
(Clute and Nicholls)
defining SF 14
review of 25-8
Endless Summer (ONan) 82
England Swings (ed. Merril) 58
The Equatorial Moment (Priest) 100, 101
Erdrich, Louise
Le Mooz 84
Erickson, Steve
Amnesiascope 141
Days Between Stations 207-16, 217, 228, 232
Leap Year 207, 226, 232-6
the nuclear imagination 207-8, 234-6
Rubicon Beach 207, 211, 216-25, 227
Tours of the Black Clock 207,209,211,225-32,234-5
Etchison, Dennis
My Present Wife 82
Eternal Light (McAuley) 28
Evans, Christopher
Aztec Century 169-71
Capella's Golden Eyes 165-6

-- 356 --

changes over career 165

Chimeras 165, 169
The Insider 165, 166-7
In Limbo 165, 167-9
Mortal Remains 171-2
Everything Changes (Sullivan) 82
Exchange Rate (Clement) 46
Extrapolation (journal)
Westfahl on language 6
The Extremes (Priest) 100, 103, 105, 116
doubling 107, 109
secondary worlds 124-7
Eye Among the Blind (Holdstock) 157-9, 162, 163
fabulation, defining 26-7
The Face of Sekt (Constantine) 84
Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury) 19
Fairyland (McAuley) 60
fantasy
genre definitions 19
Magic Realism 27, 331-2
thinning 200
Turner's definition 282-3
wrongness 200
Fast Times at Fairmont High (Vinge) 41, 45, 46
The Female Man (Russ) 16
Ficciones (Borges) 256
The Fifth Head of Cerberus (Wolfe) 321-4
Fintushel, Eliot
Milo and Sylvie 84
The Fire Eggs (Schweitzer) 80
Fire on the Mountain (Bisson) 62-3
Flowers for Algernon (Keyes) 45
Flynn, Michael F.
Built Upon the Sands of Time 46, 83
Mammy Morgan Played the Organ 29, 38-9
Ford, John M.
Chromatic Aberration 29, 38
Heat of Fusion 34
Forest, Nathan Bedford 72
Forever Free (Haldeman) 723-5
Forever War (Haldeman) 273
The Forgotten Enemy (Clarke) 156
Forster, E. M.
The Machine Stops 51
Forward, Robert L.
The Singing Diamond 35
Foucault, Michel 291
Foundation (journal)
Turner on sf 278, 288
The Fountains of Paradise (Clarke) 145
Fowler, Karen Joy 59
Fowles, John 148, 291
The Magus 97, 147
Foyster, John 277, 280, 281, 286
Frankenstein (Shelley) 13, 15, 19, 262
defining sf 21
as pioneer sf 49-50
precursors 51-2

Free Live Free (Wolfe) 307-13, 307-14

Fremder (Hoban) 267, 268, 271
Friesner, Esther M. 84
From the Realm of Morpheus (Millhauser)
238, 248, 251
Fugue for a Darkening Island (Priest) 56, 94-6, 104, 174
The Furies (Roberts) 56, 144
context of 173-4
landscapes of 185-7, 192, 194
plot and characters of 177-85
politics of 174-7
Gaiman, Neil
on Clute's Appleseed 197
Gallum, Raymond Z.
Davy Jones Ambassador 30
Garcia Marquez, Gabriel 331
Gene Wars (McAuley) 45, 46
Genesis (Anderson) 45
genre fiction
evolution of 16-17
mixed 19
Geoffrey of Monmouth 142
Gernsback, Hugo 13, 18, 50
defining SF 15, 20
Gettysburg: An Alternate History (Tsouras) 68
Gibson, William 291
influences 59
Virtual Light 53
Gillespie, Bruce 277
on Turner 278, 280
The Glamour (Priest) 96, 97, 109, 110, 114, 127
secondary world of 115-18
God's Fires (Anthony) 203, 204
Godwin, Francis
The Man in the Moone 143, 201
Godwin, Tom
The Cold Equations 19, 29, 31, 32, 42, 43
The Golden (Kritzer) 84
Golding, William 148
The Lord of the Flies 57, 141, 144, 146, 147
Pincher Martin 53, 144-5
Utopias and Antiutopias 147
The Good Rat (Steele) 46
Goodkind, Terry
Debt of Bones 75
Gossamer (Baxter) 46
Gothic fiction 50, 51-2
Grinne (Roberts) 175, 189
landscape of 192, 195
Granny Weather (de Lint) 80
Grant, General Ulysses S. 67, 71, 72-3
Appomattox 73-4
The Graveyard Cross (Holdstock) 162
Great Wall of Mars (Reynolds) 83
Great Work of Time (Crowley) 79
Greedy Choke Puppy (Hopkinson) 78, 84
Griffith, D. W.
Birth of a Nation 211

-- 357 --

Griffith, Nicola
A Troll Story 82
Gulliver's Travels (Swift) 51, 141, 148
Gunn, James
The New Encyclopedia 25
Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers 25
Guns of the South (Turtledove) 69, 72-3
Haldeman, Joe
Forever Free 723-5
Forever War 273
Hall, Bishop Joseph
Alter et Idem 143
Hamilton, Peter F.
The Suspect Genome 78-9
hard science fiction
cyberpunk and 45
defining 41
female characters in 43
Hartwell and Cramer's selection of 29-39, 41-7
origin of term 29
radical 44
The Hard SF Renaissance (ed. Hartwell & Cramer) 41-7
Harness, Charles
The Rose 19
Harrington, James
The Commonwealth of Oceania 143
Harrison, Harry
Stars and Stripes Forever 64, 71
Stars and Stripes in Peril 64
Harrison, M. John
The Committed Men 94, 174
fabulation 27
New Wave and 58
A Young Man's Journey to Virconium 112
Hartwell, David 75
Ascent of Wonder (ed. with Cramer) 29-39, 41
The Hard SF Renaissance (ed. with Cramer) 41-7
Year's Best Fantasy (for 2000, ed. with Cramer)
75-85
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 41, 50, 240
Rappacini's Daughter 37, 38
healing 200
Heart of Darkness (Conrad) 49, 52
Heat of Fusion (Ford) 34
The Heidelberg Cylinder (Carroll) 84-5
Heinlein, Robert A.
Campbell and 154, 155
It's Great to be Back 34, 36
representative SF 26
The door dilated 8-9
Herbert, Frank 26
A Heron Caught in Weeds (Roberts) 177
Hey, Hey, Something, Something (Jensen) 85
Hide-and-Seek (Clarke) 154
Hirshberg, Glen
Mr Dark's Carnival 81, 83
history
defining SF 14

see also alternate history; counterfactual history

History Lesson (Clarke) 156
Hoban, Russell
Amaryllis Night and Day 267, 269, 270
Angelica's Grotto 267-8, 269, 270
Fremder 267, 268, 271
Kleinzeit 267
The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz 271
The Medusa Frequency 267, 268
The Moment Under the Moment 268
Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer 267, 268, 269-70, 271
Pilgermann 268
Riddley Walker 267, 268
The Second Mrs Kong (with Birtwistle) 268
Turtle Diary 268
Hofmann, E. T. A. 240
Hogan, James P.
Making Light 35
Holdstock, Robert 58
The Bone Forest 164
The Boy Who Jumped the Rapids 164
Earth and Stone 160, 162
Earthwind 159-61, 162, 163
The Emerald Forest 163
Eye Among the Blind 157-9, 162, 163
The Graveyard Cross 162
Lavondyss 157
Mythago Wood 157, 161, 162-4
Necromancer 161-2
Night Hunter 162
The Shapechanger 164
A Small Event 162
themes of 157-64
Thorn 164
Travellers 162
In the Valley of Statues 162
Where Time Winds Blow 160, 161, 162
The Hole Man (Niven) 32
Hollinger, Veronica 292
Hooker, General Joseph 67
Hopkinson, Nalo
Greedy Choke Puppy 78, 84
How Few Remain (Turtledove) 66, 72
How to Do Things With Words (Austin) 4
How We Went to Mars (Clarke) 153
Howard, General O. O. 67
Hustvedt, Siri 198
Huxley, Aldous 26
Island 143
Hy Brasil (Elphinstone) 143
If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth... (Clarke) 156
The Illusionist (Millhauser) 238
Improving the Neighbourhood (Clarke) 153
In a Petri Dish Upstairs (Turner) 34
In Limbo (Evans) 165, 167-9
In Search of Wonder (Knight)
defining SF 15
In the Heart or in the Head (Turner) 278, 279, 281

-- 358 --

In the Penny Arcade (Millhauser) 238, 245-6, 249

In the Valley of Statues (Holdstock) 162
In the Year 2889 (Verne) 30
Indoctrinaire (Priest) 90-1, 103, 104, 107
An Infinite Summer (Priest) 96, 111
Ing, Dean
Down and Out on Ellfive Prime 32
The Inner Wheel (Roberts) 182
The Insider (Evans) 165, 166-7
Interzone magazine 75, 82
British context of 59
radical hard sf 44
The Invasion of England (Richards) 143
Inverted World (Priest) 58, 89, 92-4, 99, 103
secondary world of 107, 108
The Invisible Man (Wells) 20, 117
Irby, James E. 257-8
Island (Huxley) 143
The Island of Dr Moreau (Wells) 53, 141, 145
islands
British sf and 53, 141-8
Priest and 89-105
The Isle of Pines (Neville) 143
It's Great to be Back (Heinlein) 34, 36

To Cuddle Amy 80
Kritzer, Naomi
The Golden 84
Kroker, Arthur 292
Kuhn, Thomas S.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions 38
Kuttner, Henry
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (with Moore) 29
Kyrie (Anderson) 36-7

Jackson, General Thomas Stonewall 64, 67

James, Henry 51
James, M. R. 240
Jameson, Fredric 292
Jefferies, Richard
After London 56, 146, 149
Jensen, Jan Lars
Hey, Hey, Something, Something 85
Johnston, General Joseph E. 65
Jones, Gwyneth 60
Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography (Monegal) 266
Kafka, Franz 240
Kalimantan (Shepard) 53
Keith Jr, William H.
A Place to Stand 69
Kellaway, Frank
Bill's Break 285-6
Keyes, Daniel
Flowers for Algernon 45
Kilworth, Garry 58
Kipling, Rudyard 51
Puck of Pook's Hill 190
With the Night Mail 29
Kiteworld (Roberts) 174, 176, 186, 194
Kleinzeit (Hoban) 267
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories (Millhauser) 238
Knight, Damon
defining sf 15, 16, 18, 20, 30
The Kraken Wakes (Wyndham) 56, 146
Kress, Nancy
Beggars and Choosers 5-6, 7, 10, 11
Beggars in Spain 43, 45
Savior 80

Labyrinths (Borges) 266

Lady Chatterley's Lover (Lawrence) 57
The Land Ironclads (Wells) 33
Landis, Geoffrey A.
A Walk in the Sun 42-3
Langford, David
Different Kinds of Darkness 44-5, 78, 79, 84
language
contexts of 8
family resemblances 17-18
fictional reality 4-5
meanings and neologisms 5-11
metaphor 9
signposted words 3-4
Last and First Men (Stapledon) 53
The Last Question (Asimov) 36
The Last Supper (Stableford) 79-80
Latham, Philip
The Xi Effect 31-2
Lavondyss (Holdstock) 157, 163-4
Lawrence, D. H.
Lady Chatterley's Lover 57
Le Guin, Ursula K.
The Author of the Acacia Seeds 35-6
Birthday of the World 77, 84
Earthsea stories 141
hard sf and 30, 41
The Left Hand of Darkness 283
Nine Lives 38
Leap Year (Erickson) 207, 226, 232-6
Leary, Timothy 292
Lee, General Robert E. 65, 67
Gettysburg and 68-73
Harpers Ferry 63
The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin) 283
Lem, Stanislaw
Solaris 284
Turner and 283, 284-5
Lessing, Doris
Canopus in Argos 19
Levinson, Paul
The Mendelian Lamp Case 44
politics and 44
Lewis, Wyndham 26
Life During Wartime (Shepard) 285-6
Light of Other Days (Shaw) 33, 38
Lincoln, Abraham 63
alternate histories 66, 67

-- 359 --

The Lion of Boaz-Jachin and Jachin-Boaz (Hoban) 271

Little, Big (Crowley) 200
Little Kingdoms (Millhauser) 238
Look Away (Effinger) 71, 73
The Lord of the Flies (Golding)
57, 141, 144, 146, 147
The Lost World (Doyle) 146
Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death (Tiptree) 16
Lucian of Samosata 21
Lymington, John 173
Lyotard, Jean-Franois 291, 292
Mabinogion 157
McAuley, Paul 79
Bone Orchards 77
Eternal Light 28
Fairyland 60
Gene Wars 45, 46
politics and 44
Reef 43, 77
The Rift 146
McCaffery, Larry
Storming the Reality Studio 291-3
McCaffrey, Anne
Weyr Search 33
McClellan, General George B. 65-6, 67, 73
McDonald, Ian
Chaga 60
Tendeleo's Story 84
McHale, Brian
POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM 292
MacLeod, Ian R.
Nevermore 11
McPherson, James M. 63, 66
Maelstrom II (Clarke) 155
Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 75
Magic, Maples and Maryanne (Sheckley) 80
Magic Realism 27
Nuez 331-2
Magruder, General John B. 65
The Magus (Fowles) 97, 147
mainstream fiction
British sf and 57
Modernism 57
slipstream and 27
Turner's argument and 277-8
writers of SF in 26
Making a Noise in This World (de Lint) 80
Making Light (Hogan) 35
Malory, Sir Thomas
Le Morte DArthur 143
Mammy Morgan Played the Organ: Her Daddy
Beat the Drum (Flynn) 29, 38-9
The Man in the Mirror of the Book (Woodall) 266
The Man in the Moone (Godwin) 143, 201
The Man on the Ceiling (Tem and Tem) 83, 85
Marion Zimmer Bradley's Fantasy Magazine 75, 82
Marrow (Reed) 43, 45, 46
Mars trilogy (Robinson) 29, 142

Martin, George R. R.
Path of the Dragon 82
Martin Dressler (Millhauser) 237-8, 239, 241,
247-8, 249-50
Meade, General George 67, 68
meaning
see language
The Mechanics of Wonder (Westfahl) 15
The Medusa Frequency (Hoban) 267, 268
A Meeting with Medusa (Clarke) 153
The Mendelian Lamp Case (Levinson) 44
Mendlesohn, Farah 197-8
Merril, Judith
England Swings 58
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History
counterfactual speculation 63-4
Microbe (Slonczewski) 43
Miville, China
Perdido Street Station 18
The Scar 141, 148
A Migrant Bird (Deane) 83
Miller, Henry 57
Miller, P. Schuyler 46
Millhauser, Steven
Alice, Falling 240, 245, 250
August Eschenburg 241, 243-4, 247, 249
The Barnum Museum 238, 245, 247, 253
Beneath the Cellars of Our Town 251, 253
career of 238
Catalogue of the Exhibition 240, 250
Cathay 245, 249
The Dream of the Consortium 246-7, 253
Edwin Mullhouse 238, 242-3
The Eighth Voyage of Sinbad 245, 250
Eisenheim the Illusionist 238, 251
A Game of Clue 251
influences and sources 240
The Knife Thrower 250, 251
The Knife Thrower and Other Stories 238
The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne
240, 241, 242, 252-4
Little Kingdoms 238
Martin Dressler
237-8, 239, 241, 247-8, 249-50
The New Automaton Theatre 244-5, 249
Paradise Park 249-50
In the Penny Arcade 238, 245-6, 249
Portrait of a Romantic 238, 243, 247, 248
The Princess, the Dwarf and the Dungeon
239, 240, 241, 245, 246
A Protest Against the Sun 242
From the Realm of Morpheus 238, 248, 251
Sisterhood of the Night 245, 246
The Snowmen 243
Milo and Sylvie (Fintushel) 84
The Miraculous Cairn (Priest) 100, 101, 102, 112
Mitchell, Corporal Barton W. 65-6
Molly Zero (Roberts) 175, 193
The Moment Under the Moment (Hoban) 268

-- 360 --

Monegal, Emir Rodriguez

Jorge Luis Borges: A Literary Biography 266
Moorcock, Michael
fabulation 27
Jerry Cornelius stories 58
Moore, C. L.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves (with Kuttner) 29
Moore, Ward
Bring the Jubilee 69-71, 72
Le Mooz (Erdrich) 84
More, Thomas
Utopia 13, 21, 49, 51, 141, 143, 145
The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck (Schenck) 29
Mortal Engines (Reeve) 148
Mortal Remains (Evans) 171-2
Le Morte DArthur (Malory) 143
Mr Dark's Carnival (Hirshberg) 81, 83
Mr Rinyo-Clacton's Offer (Hoban) 267, 268, 269-70,
271
Mr Simonelli or the Fairy Widower (Clarke) 82, 84
My Present Wife (Etchison) 82
Mythago Wood (Holdstock) 157, 161, 162-4
Nabokov, Vladimir 240
Nature magazine 79
Necromancer (Holdstock) 161-2
The Negation (Priest) 89, 99, 101, 111-12, 129
Nemesis (Clarke) 154
Nevermore (MacLeod) 11
Neville, Henry
The Isle of Pines 143
The New Atlantis (Bacon) 141, 143
The New Confessions (Boyd) 213
The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (Gunn) 25
The New Horla (Sheckley) 80
New Maps of Hell (Amis) 52
New Wave sf 57-8
New Worlds magazine 58, 157
The New Yorker magazine 82
A Niche (Watts) 42, 43
Nicholls, Peter
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Clute) 14, 25-8
on mainstream sf 197
on structuralism 3
Turner and 283
Night Hunter (Holdstock) 162
Nightfall (Asimov) 38
The Nine Billion Names of God (Clarke) 155-6
Nine Lives (Le Guin) 38
Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell) 53, 57
Niven, Larry
The Hole Man 32
No, No, Not Rogov! (Smith) 38
No Strings (Campbell) 81
Noon, Jeff 60
Numquam (Durrell) 57
Nuez, Carlos Orfila
By-Ways on the Shining Path 331-2

Ocampo, Victoria 259

Occam's Scalpel (Sturgeon) 34-5, 38
On the Origin of Species (Darwin) 145
On the Orion Line (Baxter) 46, 78
ONan, Stewart
Endless Summer 82
Operation Ares (Wolfe) 297-305, 325
Oracle (Egan) 77, 78
Orwell, George
Nineteen Eighty-Four 53, 57
Other Inquisitions (Borges) 263
Our Mortal Span (Waldrop) 84
The Oxford Companion on English Literature 14
Palely Loitering (Priest) 96, 109
Panshin, Alexei and Cory
sense of wonder 28
The World Beyond the Hill 15
Path of the Dragon (Martin) 82
Patient Zero (Due) 76-7, 84
Pavane (Roberts) 16, 53, 147, 174
landscapes of 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195
Peace (Wolfe) 283
Peake, Mervyn 55
Pearson's magazine 51
The Penny Drops (Rodwell and Duffy) 82, 83
Perdido Street Station (Miville) 18, 19
Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein) 3-4, 17
Pilgermann (Hoban) 268
Pincher Martin (Golding) 53, 144-5
A Place to Stand (Keith) 69
Poe, Edgar Allan 21, 41, 50
A Descent into the Maelstrm 36, 38
Millhauser and 240
origins of SF 13
Pohl, Frederick
Day Million 16, 35
politics
hard sf and 44
Pollack, Rachel 307, 317
Portrait of a Romantic (Millhauser)
238, 243, 247, 248
post-structuralism 3
POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM (McHale) 292
postmodernism
Broderick on 27
cyberpunk and 291-3
Erickson and 207, 235
The Prestige (Priest) 89, 105, 116, 127
doubling 107
Dream Archipelago and 111-15
secrecy and doubling 120-4
Priest, Christopher
The Cremation 100, 101, 111, 112
The Discharge 100, 129-32
the Dream Archipelago 90, 97, 100-5, 147-8
The Equatorial Moment 100, 101
The Extremes 100, 103, 105, 107, 109, 116
fabulation 27

-- 361 --

Fugue for a Darkening Island 56, 94-6, 104, 174

Indoctrinaire 90-1, 103, 104
An Infinite Summer 96, 108
islands and identity 89-105, 141, 147-8
The Miraculous Cairn 100, 101, 102, 112
The Negation 89, 99, 101, 111-12, 129
New Wave era 58
Palely Loitering 96, 109
The Prestige 89, 105, 127
Real-Time World 91-2, 103, 104
scientific romances 149
The Separation 89, 100, 105
The Space Machine 96, 108
themes and voice of 89-90, 107-8
The Watched 100, 101, 112
Whores 100, 112
see also A Dream of Wessex; Inverted World;
The Affirmation; The Glamour;
The Quiet Woman
Priestley, J. B. 26
Prima Belladonna (Ballard) 32-3, 37-8
Procreation (Wolfe) 33-4, 37
The Psychologist Who Wouldnt Do Awful Things to
Rats (Tiptree) 38
Puck of Pook's Hill (Kipling) 190
Pullman, Philip
His Dark Materials series 327
Pynchon, Thomas 291
Quarantine (Clarke) 153
The Quiet Woman (Priest) 89, 94, 97, 115, 127, 147-8
secondary world of 116, 118-20
Radiant Green Star (Shepard) 78, 81
The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O (Swanwick) 77-8
Rain in the Doorway (Smith) 310
Raleigh, Sir Walter 51
Rappacini's Daughter (Hawthorne) 37, 38
Real-Time World (Priest) 91-2, 103, 104
realist fiction
mimesis and 26, 197-8
reality, language and 4-5
Reasons to be Cheerful (Egan) 44
Reed, Robert
Marrow 43, 45, 46
Reef (McAuley) 43, 77
Reeve, Philip
Mortal Engines 148
Report on Probability A (Aldiss) 16
Retreat from Earth (Clarke) 146
Reynolds, Alistair
Great Wall of Mars 83
Reynolds, General John 67
Richard II (Shakespeare) 143
Richards, Alfred Bate
The Invasion of England 143
Riddley Walker (Hoban) 267, 268
The Rift (McAuley) 146
The Road to Corlay (Cowper) 147, 186

Roberts, Keith
Anita stories 190
The Big Fans 190
Boat of Fate 177
The Chalk Giants 58, 147, 174, 176, 189-91
Drek Yarman 189, 194
The Furies 56, 144, 173-87, 192, 194
Grinne 175, 192, 195
A Heron Caught in Weeds 177
The Inner Wheel 182
Kiteworld 174, 176, 186, 194
landscapes of 185-7, 189-95
Molly Zero 175, 193
Pavane 16, 53, 147, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 194, 195
politics of 174-7
the Primitive Heroine 193
scientific romances 149
Sham Hill 189
The White Boat 193
Robinson, Kim Stanley 59
Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars 45
defining SF 14
Mars trilogy 29, 142
A Short Sharp Shock 53, 141
Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 141, 144, 145
Rodwell, Ian
The Penny Drops (with Duffy) 82, 83
Roosevelt, Theodore 66
The Rose (Harness) 19
Rowson, Martin 240
Rubicon Beach (Erickson) 207, 211, 216-25, 227
Rucker, Rudy 291
Ruddick, Nicholas 142
Ultimate Island 53, 141
R.U.R. (Capek) 7
Russ, Joanna 27
The Female Man 16
Rynosseros (Dowling) 142
The Saltimbanques (Dowling) 81, 85
Savior (Kress) 80
Saxton, Josephine 27, 58
The Scar (Miville) 141, 148
Schenck, Hilbert
The Morphology of the Kirkham Wreck 29
Schweitzer, Darrell
The Fire Eggs 80
science fiction
awards shortlists 76
borderlands of 18
concept of Story 198-9
defining 13-21, 25
family resemblances 17-21
humanist 59
mainstream writers of 26
mixed genres 19
mystifying language 5-11
national differences 50-1
postmodern nature of 291-3

-- 362 --

as realist 283
space opera 197-8
Turner debates 282-9
uncertainty of origins 13
see also cyberpunk; hard science fiction
Science Fiction Age magazine 75
A Scientific Romance (Wright) 52, 149
Scores: Reviews 1993-2003 (Clute) 198
The Sea and Summer (Turner) 287
Sears, Stephen W. 71, 73
A Confederate Cannae and Other Scenarios
63, 64, 67
Second Dawn (Clarke) 156
The Second Mrs Kong (Hoban and Birtwistle) 268
Seed, David 20
The Separation (Priest) 89, 100, 105
doublings 133-7
Seventy-Two Letters (Chiang) 77, 78, 79, 84, 85
SF Commentary
Lem on sf 284-5
Turner and 288
The Shadow of the Torturer (Wolfe) 297-8, 326
Shakespeare, William 142
Richard II 143
The Tempest 53, 141
The Shape of Things (Steiber) 82
The Shapechanger (Holdstock) 164
Shaw, Bob 26
Light of Other Days 33, 38
Sheckley, Robert
Magic, Maples and Maryanne 80
The New Horla 80
Sheena 5 (Baxter) 78
Sheldon, Alice
see Tiptree Jr, James
Shelley, Mary
Frankenstein 13, 15, 19, 21, 262
as pioneer sf 49-50
precursors of 51-2
Shepard, Lucius 291
fabulation 27
Kalimantan 53
Life During Wartime 285-6
Radiant Green Star 78, 81
Turner and 283
Sherman, General William T. 71, 73
Shiner, Lewis
Stoked 291-2
Shirley, John 291
A Short Sharp Shock (Robinson) 53, 141
Shute, Nevil 279
Silverberg, Robert 9
Simak, Clifford D.
Desertion 36
The Singing Diamond (Forward) 35
Singleton, Sarah
Ebb Tide 84
Sladek, John 27, 57
slipstream fiction 27

Slonczewski, Joan
Microbe 43
A Small Event (Holdstock) 162
Smith, Cordwainer
No, No, Not Rogov! 38
The Game of Rat and Dragon 28
Smith, E.E. Doc 27
Smith, Thorne 314, 315
Rain in the Doorway 310
Snowball in Hell (Stableford) 79-80
social change 14
Solaris (Lem) 284
Soldier of the Mist (Wolfe) 307, 314
The Space Machine (Priest) 96, 108
Spectrum magazine 75
Spinrad, Norman 57
defining SF 15
fabulation 27
Stableford, Brian
A Career in Sexual Chemistry 41
Chanterelle 79-80
introduction to Deluge 149-50, 151
The Last Supper 79-80
Snowball in Hell 79-80
Stand on Zanzibar (Brunner) 8, 58
Stapledon, Olaf 26, 285
Last and First Men 53
The Star (Clarke) 36, 38, 155
Star Trek (television) 58
Star Wars (film series) 58-9
Stars and Stripes Forever (Harrison) 64, 71
Stars and Stripes in Peril (Harrison) 64
Steele, Allen
The Good Rat 46
Steiber, Ellen
The Shape of Things 82
Sterling, Bruce
The Beautiful and the Sublime 38
Bicycle Repairman 45
cyberpunk 59, 291-2
Taklamakan 45
Twenty Evocations 292
Stevenson, Robert Louis
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 52
Storming the Reality Studio (McCaffery) 291-3
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(Stevenson) 52
A Stranger and Afraid (Turner) 278
Stross, Charles
Antibodies 81
A Colder War 81
structuralism 3
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn) 38
Stuart, J. E. B. 67-8
Sturgeon, Theodore
Occam's Scalpel 34-5, 38
Sullivan, John
Everything Changes 82
Summertime on Icarus (Clarke) 155

-- 363 --

The Suspect Genome (Hamilton) 78-9

Suvin, Darko
defining SF 13
the novum 56
Swanwick, Michael
The Raggle Taggle Gypsy-O 77-8
Swift, Jonathan
Gulliver's Travels 51, 141, 148
The Swiss Family Robinson (Wyss) 144
Taklamakan (Sterling) 45
Tem, Steve and Melanie
The Man on the Ceiling 83, 85
The Tempest (Shakespeare) 53, 141
Tendeleo's Story (McDonald) 84
Tennant, Emma
The Crack 174
There Are Doors (Wolfe) 307, 309, 313-19
Theroux, Paul 26
The Thing About Benny (Bell) 76
thinning 200
Thorn (Holdstock) 164
Thurber, James
If Grant had been Drinking at Appomattox 74
The Time Machine (Wells) 16, 20, 37
The Time Ships (Baxter) 60
Tiptree Jr, James (Alice Sheldon)
Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death 16
The Psychologist Who Wouldnt Do Awful
Things to Rats 38
Silverberg on method of 9
To Cuddle Amy (Kress) 80
Tolkien, J. R. R. 197
Tours of the Black Clock (Erickson)
207, 209, 211, 225-32, 234-5
Transience (Clarke) 156
Transit of Cassidy (Turner) 278, 287
Transit of Earth (Clarke) 155
Travel by Wire (Clarke) 153
Travellers (Holdstock) 162
Travis, Tia V.
Down Here in the Garden 82
A Troll Story (Griffith) 82
Tsouras, Peter G.
Gettysburg: An Alternate History 68
Tubman, Harriet 62-3
Tunc (Durrell) 57
Turner, George
Beloved Son 281, 287
Brain Child 279
critical views of 277-8
criticism of Bester 277
The Cupboard Under the Stair 278
debates with Lem and Shepard 283, 284-7
Down There in Darkness 8, 10, 142
In The Heart or the Head 278, 279
In a Petri Dish Upstairs 34
The Lame Dog Man 278
mainstream and 278-9, 287-9

Profession of Science Fiction 278, 281

The Sea and Summer 287
A Stranger and Afraid 278
Transit of Cassidy 278, 287
A Waste of Shame 278
Yesterday's Men 287
The Young Man of Talent 278, 279, 285-6, 287
Turner, Nat 63
Turtledove, Harry
American Front 66
Guns of the South 69, 72-3
How Few Remain 66, 72
Tussing, Justin
The Artificial Cloud 84
Twentieth Century Science Fiction Writers (Gunn) 25
The Twilight of Briareus (Cowper) 56, 94, 174
2001: A Space Odyssey (Clarke) 155
sense of wonder 28
Ubik (Dick) 283, 284-5
Ultimate Island (Ruddick) 53, 141
Understand (Chiang) 45
A Universal History of Infamy (Borges) 256
The Urth of the New Sun (Wolfe) 325-8
Utopia (More) 21, 49, 51, 141, 143, 145
as first SF 13
utopian fiction
ironic mimesis 197-8
Utopias and Antiutopias (Golding) 147
Van Vogt, A. E. 27, 38
Varley, John 38, 59
Veillot, Claude 178-9
Verne, Jules 13, 21
In the Year 2889 30
The Very Slow Time Machine (Watson) 36, 37
Vinge, Vernor 322
Fast Times at Fairmont High 41, 45, 46
Virtual Light (Gibson) 53
Vogt, A. E. van
see van Vogt
Vonnegut, Kurt 27
Waldrop, Howard
Our Mortal Span 84
A Walk in the Dark (Clarke) 154
A Walk in the Sun (Landis) 42-3
Wang's Carpets (Egan) 6-7, 45
The War of the Worlds (Wells) 20, 56, 182
The Wasp Factory (Banks) 141
A Waste of Shame (Turner) 278
The Watched (Priest) 100, 101, 112
Watson, Ian 58
postmodernism 27
The Very Slow Time Machine 36, 37
Watts, Peter
defining hard sf 41
A Niche 42, 43
Web (Wyndham) 141, 146

-- 364 --

Wells, H. G. 15, 255, 263, 285

genre and 13, 20, 21, 26, 50, 51
The Invisible Man 117
The Island of Dr Moreau 53, 141, 145
The Land Ironclads 33
The Time Machine 16, 37
Turner and 288
War of the Worlds 56
Westfahl, Gary
defining sf 13, 15, 20
The Mechanics of Wonder 15
The Words That Could Happen 6, 8
Weyr Search (McCaffrey) 33
Where Time Winds Blow (Holdstock) 160, 161, 162
The White Boat (Roberts) 193
Whiteford, Wynne 277
Whores (Priest) 100, 112
Wilhelm, Kate 322
Williamson, Edwin
Borges: A Life 266
Wilson, Robert Charles
The Dryad's Wedding 80
Windling, Terri 75
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (for 2000,
ed. with Datlow) 75-85
The Wire Continuum (Clarke and Baxter) 153
With the Night Mail (Kipling) 29
Wittgenstein, Ludwig
family resemblances 17-18
Philosophical Investigations 3-4, 17
The Wizard of Oz (film) 201, 308, 310-11
Wolfe, Gary K.
Critical Terms for Science Fiction 13, 14
Wolfe, Gene
All the Hues of Hell 34, 37
The Book of the New Sun 307, 313, 314, 321
The Death of Dr Island 307
fabulation 27
The Fifth Head of Cerberus 321-4
Free Live Free 307-14
hard sf and 41
The Island of Dr Death 307
Operation Ares 325
Peace 283
Procreation 33-4, 37
The Shadow of the Torturer 326
Soldier of the Mist 314
There Are Doors 307, 309, 313-19
The Urth of the New Sun 325-8
Wright on 325-8
Woodall, James
The Man in the Mirror of the Book 266
The Words That Could Happen (Westfahl) 6, 8
The World Beyond the Hill (Panshin and Panshin) 15
Wright, Peter
Attending Daedalus 325-8
Wright, Ronald
A Scientific Romance 52, 149

Wright, S. Fowler
The Amphibians 53, 56
Dawn 151
Deluge 141, 146, 149-52
A Wrinkle in the Skin (Christopher) 146-7
wrongness 200
Wyndham, John 26, 94
The Day of the Triffids 56, 57, 143-4, 173
The Death of Grass 56
establishes career 54
influence of 173, 174
The Kraken Wakes 56, 146
not cosy 149
Web 141, 146
Wyss, Johann
The Swiss Family Robinson 144
The Xi Effect (Latham) 31-2
Yates, Frances
The Art of Memory 326
The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (for 2000,
ed. Datlow and Windling) 75-85
Year's Best Fantasy (for 2000,
ed. Hartwell and Cramer) 75-85
The Year's Best Science Fiction (for 2000,
ed. Dozois) 75-85
Yesterday's Men (Turner) 287
The Young Man of Talent (Turner) 278, 279, 287
A Young Man's Journey to Virconium (Harrison) 112
Zagat, Arthur Leo 25
Zettel, Sarah
Kinds of Strangers 43

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