The Pale Shadow of Science
BY BRIAN ALDISS

Contents

Title Page

Introductory Note

Introductory Note to The Lurid Glare of the Comet

Preparation for What?

Long Cut to Burma

Old Bessie

Science Fiction’s Mother Figure

The Immanent Will Returns

The Downward Journey: Orwell’s 1984

A Whole New Can of Worms

Peep

A Transatlantic Harrison, Yippee!

The Atheist’s Tragedy Revisited

The Pale Shadow of Science

A Monster for All Seasons

Helliconia: How and Why

Bold Towers, Shadowed Streets …

… And the Lurid Glare of the Comet

When the Future Had to Stop

What Happens Next?

Grounded in Stellar Art

It Takes Two to Tango

Robert Sheckley’s World: Australia

Sturgeon: Mercury Plus X

The Glass Forest

About the Author

Also available by the author

Also part of The Brian Aldiss Collection

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introductory Note

This book preserves a few of the many articles and reviews I have written over the last few years. My passport describes me as ‘Writer and Critic,’ because a fair proportion of my writing has always been non-fiction. Non-fiction has a role to play in an author’s life. It is to fiction what target practice is to a soldier: it keeps his eye in in preparation for the real thing.

For the record, these are the various places where the pieces originally appeared.

‘Preparation for What?’ in The Fiction Magazine, 1983; ‘Long Cut to Burma’ (as ‘Drawn Towards Burma’) in The Fiction Magazine, 1982, here revised; ‘Old Bessie’ first told at a Halloween party in Chris Priest’s house in Harrow, October 1984.

‘Science Fiction’s Mother Figure’ (as ‘Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’) in Science Fiction Writers, edited by E.F. Bleiler, Simon & Schuster, 1981; ‘The Immanent Will Returns’ (as ‘Olaf Stapledon’) in the Times Literary Supplement, 1983; ‘The Downward Journey’ in Extrapolation, 1984; ‘A Whole New Can of Worms’ originated in a speech delivered at the City Lit on 9 January 1982, later published in Foundation, 1982; ‘Peep’ formed the Introduction to James Blish’s Quincunx of Time, published by Avon Books, 1983; ‘A Transatlantic Harrison, Yippee!’ was printed in the programme book for Novacon 12, held in Birmingham, England in 1982.

‘The Atheist’s Tragedy Revisited’ is a new piece. ‘The Pale Shadow of Science’ was delivered as a talk to the British Association for the Advancement of Science during their annual meeting at Norwich, 11 September 1984, and an abridged edition was published in The Guardian newspaper, 13 September 1984; ‘A Monster for All Seasons’ in Science Fiction Dialogues, edited by Gary Wolfe, Academy Press, 1982; ‘Helliconia: How and Why’ has not yet been published anywhere.

My thanks go to the committee of Norwescon 8, to all my friends attending that illustrious event, and in particular to Jerry Kaufman, Donald G. Keller, and Serconia Press.

This volume is divided into three sections, autobiographical, followed by articles on individual writers, and articles on more general aspects of science fiction.

This section is the most fun. Here are a few of the experiences which went to shape me as a writer. An American audience will surely find them very strange, especially when they come to the piece about the haunted house in which my family once lived.

These pieces have been published here and there in England. They are an approach towards an autobiography which I intend one day to write … once I have set a few more pressing novels down on paper.

Introductory Note to The Lurid Glare of the Comet

The idea of this book is to preserve some of the articles I have written over recent years which may be of more than ephemeral interest. It follows on from my earlier Serconia Press book, The Pale Shadow of Science, and is the mixture as before. Except.

Except that here I include a brief autobiography, presenting it to my readers with some trepidation. Gale Research Books in Detroit have begun a rather astonishing series of volumes, entitled Contemporary Authors – Autobiography Series. Gale sent me a copy of Volume I, asking me if I would write for Volume 2. Writers are allowed to have photographs of their choice to accompany the text. It all looks amateur and artless, but from it a reader can learn a great deal about that ever-mysterious subject, other people’s lives. I decided to have a go at Volume 2.

It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to be truthful about oneself. I did my best. The exercise opened up a new area of writing. Gale limits its writers to a certain number of words. In the greatly revised sketch, here presented as ‘The Glass Forest,’ the thing has grown almost half as long again. My trepidation is, in consequence, almost half as great again.

Incidentally, it is worth anyone’s while looking up the Gale books in their library. The first volume contains autobiographical sketches by Marge Piercy, Richard Condon, Stanislaw Lem, and Frederik Pohl, among other familiar names, the second Poul Anderson, James Gunn, and Alan Sillitoe.

‘The Glass Forest’ is the pièce de resistance on this menu; but I hope that the other courses will also please. As before, science fiction and writing rub shoulders with travel, history, and other arts.

My thanks go as ever to the stalwarts of Serconia Press and to Marshall B. Tymn, President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, in connection with that august event, the Seventh Conference of the IAFA in Houston, Texas on 12-16 March 1986, which I was privileged to attend as Guest of Honour.

B.W.A.

Preparation for What?

There should have been a law against the preparatory school I went to. Later, there was a law, and places like St Paul’s Court no longer exist. In the thirties, there must have been many of them dotting the country, little plague spots of pretention and ignorance.

I was sent there at the age of eight.

‘Be brave,’ my mother said. It was easier to be brave the first term than succeeding terms, when one knew what one was in for.

At the best of times, St Paul’s managed twenty pupils, twelve of whom were boarders. It was the headmaster’s resolve to turn us into gentlemen: that much was clearly stated in the brochure. Of course we all turned into scoundrels. The parents were mainly tradesmen in a modest way of business who wanted their sons to grow up to despise them.

My father was irked to discover, after a year or two, that he was the only parent who was paying the full fees demanded in the brochure. I kept this revelation secret, knowing that the boys – whose sense could not be entirely beaten out of them – would despise him if they found out.

St Paul’s was a large brick building which stood out starkly against the flat Norfolk coastline. Beach and sea lay just outside the back gate. The house was surrounded with sharp shingle, as if it had been caught by a high tide. To one side lay a large games field. In one corner of this field, behind a line of old apple trees, boarders were allowed to keep little gardens. One thing at least I learned to love at St Paul’s: gardening. It was almost a necessity.

The food was abominable. Meat was delivered in a van by Roy’s of Wroxham. To us little exiles, the van was a messenger from a happier world, for Wroxham was where one went to get boats to sail on the Broads. But the headmaster ordered the cheapest cuts, and our opinion of Roy’s became low as a result.

Most of the cooking was done by the headmaster himself. His name was Mr Fangby. He was a smoothly porcine man with a thin nose and thinning hair swept and stuck back over a domelike head. I never really disliked him for much of the time, though it is hard to say why. His wife looked after their child and, when meals were over, Mr Fangby could be seen doing the washing-up and dolorously drying the dishes on an old baby’s napkin.

Breakfast was the worst meal. The rule at St Paul’s was that plates had to be cleared. It was that rule, rather than the cooking, which made it possible to claim that the food was edible. The porridge was an impossible paste. One other boy and I often remained after the others had gone, getting the paste down spoonful by spoonful, with occasional bolts to the lavatory to vomit.

I took some tiny sweets back with me the next term. By concealing one in my mouth before we filed into the dining room, I used its flavour to camouflage the taste of the porridge. This ruse worked well for some weeks. But our enemy, the bootboy, who helped Fangby with breakfast, detected the sweet; I was in trouble, and my tuck was confiscated.

We were always hungry. Fangby was a lazy man, and the worst news of all was when he felt too lazy to take lessons. Then he would enter the dining room at breakfast time, all smiles, and announce a day’s holiday for good work. The news spelt starvation and boredom.

Out in the field we had to go. We were not allowed back into the house all day. Sometimes it would be eight o’clock or even later before either Fangby or his only master, Noland, came to tell us to get inside quietly and go to our dormitory.

During those long days, we would be visited twice, either by the hated bootboy or by Mrs Fangby. At lunch time, they would bring out a big toffee tin containing meat and lettuce sandwiches. At tea time, they would bring a tray with mugs of tea and perhaps buns. That was our day’s food. The meat in the sandwiches was inedible.

We cultivated our gardens, although we had never heard of Voltaire’s advice. It was possible in spring to take our pocket-money to a small shop just down the road from the school. Since the Victorian Age lingered in Norfolk until World War II, the shop was run by a lady in black called Miss Abigail. From Miss Abigail, penny packets of Carter’s seeds could be bought.

We tilled our strips and sowed them before the spring holidays. When we returned for the summer term, there among the weeds would be thin lines of lettuce, carrot, radish, and spring onion. These lines we tended with care. They were our food. We used them to eke out the meagre rations provided. And we ate, or at least bit into, the green apples on the trees.

The unripe apples provided useful ammunition, along with stones, in our wars against the local lads. The local lads hated us, and made the life of the dozen prisoners of St Paul’s as hazardous as they could. They would creep along the footpath which ran behind the field, to launch a stone barrage as we pottered about our garden strips. We fought back. We aimed to kill. When one of us was hit, we hushed it up and made excuses for any visible gashes.

Sunday was the day when the local lads triumphed, when our humiliation was greatest. For the fool Fangby, impelled to destruction by some folk-myth of decent schools which he had never seen, made his boarders dress in Sunday best. This meant black pinstripe trousers, black jackets, ties, and Eton collars. Eton collars are wide and stiff, permitting the wearer about as much freedom and comfort as an ox gets from a yoke. In this loathed outfit, and with the addition of straw boaters, the twelve of us were made to march in crocodile five miles to Mundesley Church for the morning service.

What a raree-show for the local lads. In their hobnails, cords, collarless shirts and braces, they would turn up to laugh and trip or kick us as we passed. It was a relief to arrive at the church.

Our hero for a few weeks was Legge. As we were passing the village pond, he managed to skim his boater into the middle of the duckweed. To get it out, we broke ranks and all became desirably muddied almost to the knee. In that state, we became less of a free advertisement for Mr Fangby’s menagerie.

I liked church. I had fallen in love with the local policeman’s daughter. We smiled at each other across the intervening pews. In her smile was forgiveness for the whole world of Eton collars.

In that church, gazing at the beautiful stained glass windows, I experienced the first of my eternal moments. Everyone was singing, and the policeman’s daughter was at the outer end of the pew on the opposite side of the aisle, so that we could exchange looks. Carried away by everything, I was filled with an oceanic feeling of happiness. ‘I will remember this moment all my life,’ I said to myself. And I have.

The picture of that moment returns easily. I can see the organ, the timbered roof, the choir, the stained glass. The view is an elevated one. The eternal part of me which took the snapshot was floating about twenty feet above my head.

The vicar’s name was Winterton. He had two sons, who came to St Paul’s at reduced rates. They were badly bullied at first. We chased them round and round the field and eventually buried them head first in a huge pile of grass clippings. Next term, they returned with avenging fury. Their father had been talking to them. Both were small. But they set upon us with sticks and terrified us. From then on, they drove us round the field at whim.

While the garden was one consolation, the library was another. Library was the name of the bookshelves behind the door of our classroom – it was more than a classroom, being the room in which we were trapped when we were not in the dormitory or exiled to the field. The misery of being back in that room for another term was stifled by being able to pick out The Captives of the Sea (or was it The Prisoners of the Sea?) and commence a re-reading. The story was sub-Dumas. I read it at the start of every term I was at St Paul’s.

Learning to be a gentleman is not something I recommend unless one has a natural bent for it. It included standing in an embarrassed line and singing such catches as ‘My Dame Hath a Lame Tame Crane’ and soppy songs like ‘The Ash Grove,’ ‘Fare Thee Well for I Must Leave Thee,’ ‘The Golden Vanity,’ ‘Cherry Ripe,’ and ‘The Keel Row,’ the words of which we copied into exercise books.

The gentlemanly arts also included football and cricket. Football was all right. Cricket was less satisfactory. With a maximum of twenty players, we could at best play with no more than ten a side. Despite which our parents had to provide us with full cricketing gear – white ducks and shirts, sweaters, caps, cricket boots. The worst ordeal of all was when Fangby decided that a St Paul’s team should play a local lads’ eleven.

To make it an event, lemonade was provided before play and between innings. We had to take the glasses round to the local lads. How they leered! Our ages ranged from seven to eleven or twelve, theirs from twelve to seventeen. They towered above us. They wore any old dress. The lad from the garage came in his overalls.

The match was a complete disaster. We sneered because they did not take up proper batting positions, whereas we, in our turn at the wicket, came up properly and asked for ‘Middle-and-leg.’ They batted first, and knocked us all round the field. But we had two good bowlers in Tom and Roger. Since the local lads were carelessly confident, they were vulnerable, and we got them all out for seventy-nine.

After a further round of humiliating lemonades, we went in to bat. The local lads closed in round us like a wall, smirking. The garage lad in his overalls took the bowling and was devastatingly violent. Nothing, of course, compared with the publican’s son who bowled from the other end. They made mincemeat of us. We were all out, wounded, for nine. But at least we were properly dressed.

One form of sport I took as an Extra. That Extra got me away from the school grounds once a week. It was generous of my father to pay for the Extra. Perhaps he felt for me in that captivity. At all events, every Monday I was allowed to walk unescorted down the road to a gentleman called Mr Field, who taught me riding.

Mr Field was a cheerful red-faced man. I liked him better than his horses. Nevertheless, as the lessons progressed, even the horses became less stupid. Then we would trot down Archibald Road on the spectacular beach which curved all the way round to Happisburgh and beyond, with never a soul on it. There we would gallop along in the foam, with the sun dazzling and the wind roaring in the ears. On, on, with a world uncluttered – indeed, about to dissolve into speed and light.

Unfortunately, the riding lessons did not last many terms. They stopped and no reasons were given. Maybe it was something I said.

One voluntary sport we endured was swimming. We learnt in geography lessons about the vernal equinox; it was, in Mr Fangby’s mind, the day on which swimming in the North Sea commenced. The North Sea throughout most of its career is a grey untrustworthy mass of chilled fluid, in which such alien entities as seaweed, shrimps, and jelly fish somehow contrive to make a living. It is not the natural element for boys of tender age – unless, of course, they are destined to become gentlemen.

On good days, the waves of the North Sea at Bacton, as they cast themselves in desperation on the shore, are not particularly large. But to a child of eight, not long accustomed to thinking of himself as a being apart from his teddy-bear, they are enormous. As you approach them, together with a dozen other blue-limbed disconsolates, they appear to open their mouths, display their sandy throats, and prepare to devour you.

If we did not enter this man-devouring medium with an affectation of eagerness, we were pushed or thrown in. This was not a job for Mr Fangby – whose porpoise-like form had an unporpoise-like aversion to water – but for the assistant master, Mr Noland. The logic of the operation was simple: one swam to avoid a watery grave. Those who pretended to drown were punished.

Despite the regime of starvation and ordeal-by-ocean, I do not recall anyone being ill at St Paul’s. There was none of this namby-pamby Jane Eyre stuff of dying of consumption. That would have been frowned upon.

Winters were harder to get through than summers. The greatest deprivation was loss of toys. Bullying and fighting remained as recreation, but I developed alternatives of my own.

One was the making of mazes. Throughout my three years’ incarceration at St Paul’s, my mazes became bigger and more elaborate. To be caught in one of them was to wander for hours in a tedium of bafflement. Yet they were popular, possibly because that tedium, volunteered upon, was preferable to the larger tedium which contained us.

I also made books. These were mainly notebooks with shiny red covers, bought from Miss Abigail for three-ha’pence. I stuck pictures in them, or wrote stories about enormous square machines which took people to the Moon, to their profit. A treasured microscope was permitted at school, since it was ‘scientific’; happy hours were spent poring down its tube, sketching things twitching in a drop of pond water or wild-life moving on someone’s hair. These sketches went into books.

A rival to the popularity of the microscope by day was the kaleidoscope by night. I smuggled a small pocket kaleidoscope back to St Paul’s, and a torch. Homesickness was worst at night. It could be conquered by snuggling down into the bed and shining the torch up the kaleidoscope. Hours were spent over long winter nights, watching the tumbling patterns of colour. The pattern never repeated, one’s eye never wearied.

We also traded cigarette cards. More esoteric were the adhesive pictures to be collected from penny bars of Nestlé’s milk chocolate. These were divided into various categories, such as birds (a bit boring), machines (good), famous explorers (okay, especially Mungo Park, because of his funny name), and prehistoric monsters (best of all). Another point of interest was that Nestlé’s – presumably in the cause of a rapidly disintegrating world peace – printed the text in English and Esperanto.

Several of us were interested in the idea of Esperanto. Latin was boring, because dead, but Esperanto was of the present, an invented language. For a penny, one could buy a special Nestlé’s album in which to stick the pictures. There was more Esperanto. We set ourselves to learn it. Progress was rapid on some fronts, since the Esperanto for Brontosaurus is Brontosauro.

A child’s world in the thirties was not knee-deep in dinosaurs, as is the world of the enviable child today. How can any child be miserable when Hanna-Barbera throws the beasts at you in full animation almost every week-day and twice on Sundays? Time was when you had to hunt to turn up a dinosaur in black-and-white. I slowly acquired works of reference. Particularly valued was A Treasury of Knowledge, which my father had from the Daily Mail by clipping out coupons.

I began to feel I knew something. It was an illusion, but a strong one, and during my later days at St Paul’s I gave lectures on Prehistoric Monsters for one penny per attendee. Nobody ever stumped up, as far as I remember, but at least the charge stood as a kind of guarantee of everyone’s seriousness. My pupils took notes and had to draw a diplodocus every week (side view only – nobody had seen a diplodocus from the front in those days, not even Nestlé’s).

Dramatic distractions were few. The best was when brave Tom, our head boy, decided he had had enough of the insufferable bootboy. One dull Saturday afternoon, when we were kicking our heels in the classroom, the bootboy was invited up, and Tom told him to fight if he was not a coward. It was done in the best traditions of English boys’ school stories. Tom and the bootboy took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, brandished their fists, and set to.

It was a desperate conflict. The bootboy was much bigger and thicker than Tom. But Tom had made up his mind. They slammed at each other furiously. The fight carried through to the landing, and then to the narrow, winding stair. With a final flurry of blows, Tom knocked the bootboy down the last few steps. He fell backwards to the floor, his mouth bloodied, and lay looking up at us. Tom flung his jacket down at him. He grabbed it and slunk away.

The weeks of our incarceration passed, Hitler grew bolder. Echoes of that larger world reached our backwater. We had a German-Jewish boy whom we called Killy-Kranky. He was lively and comic and popular because he taught us German swear-words and insults. ‘Du bist eine alte Kamel!’ was, we were assured, a terribly rude thing to say. We treasured the knowledge; I at least have never forgotten it, my first sentence in German.

Poor Killy-Kranky! His parents disappeared. He had to stay on at school in the holidays. One day in the summer holiday, my father drove our family past St Paul’s. There, in a corner of the immense field, stood Killy-Kranky, gazing out across the wire fence at liberty.

‘Look, there’s Killy-Kranky!’ I exclaimed. ‘Can I go and speak to him, Dad?’

‘What do you want to say to him?’ my father asked, contemptuously. Of course it was one of those adult questions which cannot be answered. We sped on our way.

After the beginning of one summer term, an Italian drove up St Paul’s shingle-strewn drive in a big car. He was tall, bronzed, elegant, well dressed. He came with Mr Fangby to speak to us in the classroom. We stuttered or were silent. He spoke excellent English and smelt of perfume. With him was his little son, aged five. The son was going to stay with us while his father went back to Italy, to resolve a few problems.

I still remember seeing that man embrace his son in the drive, squatting on his heels to do so. He gave him a child’s paper – probably Chatterbox – and kissed him fondly. Then he drove away.

We were so cruel to that boy. He wore a little blouse, with braces under it. This was cause for endless amusement. We teased him about it, about everything. We ran away with his Chatterbox, which he tried always to keep clutched to him, a symbol of his father. We excelled in being unpleasant. We made his life a misery. We made his every day a torment.

Why did we do it? Our triumph over the child was the most awful thing about St Paul’s. Years later, as an adult, I was wracked with guilt about our treatment of that Italian-Jewish child whose name eludes me. Why had we no compassion? Was it because we recognized in his father a civility superior to ours? Was it the barbarity of the Anglo-Saxon way of life? Or was it something more basic, more cruel, in human behaviour?

The child’s only refuge was Legge, the other outcast among us. Legge’s popularity after the duckpond incident had not lasted. Tom had fought and beaten him, too. Unlike the bootboy, Legge could not escape, except to the upper branches of the apple trees. There he took the Italian boy, hauling him up like a gorilla with young. There they sat. Waiting for end of term and a release from misery.

Next term, the Italian boy did not reappear. My remorse did not develop till some years later, when I started to comprehend the world from an adult viewpoint. Compassion springs from a position of some security.

The assistant master, Mr Noland, was sacked. He went out and got drunk one night. Next morning, he refused to leave his bed. Fangby sent Tom to Noland’s room to command him to come down. The answer was a rude one. So Noland left at the end of the week. There were those who hung out of the window and cried openly as he drove off in his backfiring blue car. Those who had almost drowned at his hands experienced a certain relief.

It is easy to believe now that St Paul’s was more unbearable for adults – perhaps even for Fangby – than for its principal victims, the boys. Perhaps the rule applies to all prisons.

To cheer us up, Fangby took us out. He drove us over to Wroxham, where the bad meat came from, where there was a cinema. I still remember the excitement of being out that night, of speed, of seeing the willows flash by and vanish forever from the blaze of the headlights.

We went to see a film version of Lorna Doone, the boring novel of which we had read. The film was better. John Ridd fought Carver Doone, and Carver Doone fell back into an Exmoor bog and sank slowly down, down into the bog. It compelled our imaginations for a long while.

Legge was caught in his own personal bog. He did something which Fangby found unforgiveable. What it could have been still escapes conjecture. Was he caught smoking? I do not remember that any of us had cigarettes in a world where even ice cream was forbidden. Was he caught masturbating, or even in bed with another boy? With the Italian boy? It seems unlikely. We knew nothing about sex. We were still at an age when we were uninterested in our own or other penises. When Roger returned at the beginning of one term to say he had been in bed with his sister and she had told him that cocks went into the wee-wee hole and produced children, we were shocked by such coarseness, and gave him six with his own cricket bat.

Whatever it was Legge had done, he was treated like an absolute pariah. He was removed to a bare room in the attics and his clothes were taken away. The rest of us moved in silence and fear.

Then he was brought down among us to the classroom. Fangby announced that his crime was so great that it could not be mentioned. It meant that he was to be beaten and expelled. A similar fate would befall us if we did the same thing.

Legge was deathly white. He was told to drop his pyjama trousers and bend down. Fangby then proceeded to thrash him with a cricket stump. He laid on twelve strokes, putting all his porpoise-like strength behind them. One of our number fainted, another ran out crying and was dragged back, another was sick all over the floor and was made to mop it up later. Then Legge was helped away. We never saw him again.

Before that incident, I had not minded Fangby. There was at times a sort of cringing friendliness about the man, as if he might be afraid of us, or at least had some sympathy for our predicament. Now we all hated him. He had utterly estranged himself from us.

It was clear that to become gentlemen we had to undergo the same sort of treatment as Dr Moreau dished out to the Beast People on his celebrated Island. Fear and force make gentlemen. It is the Law.

Long Cut to Burma

War shapes individuals and nations like no other experience. As my boyhood slipped away, Europe, with a terrifying inevitability, sank toward Hitler’s war. When I was thirteen, we started digging air raid shelters at school. But at the age of eighteen, I was drawn into the war against Japan, and despatched to the East: to India, the great whirlpool that sucked men into action in Burma.

Things get out of control in wartime and, in 1944, I found myself spending sixteen days on an Indian train. A detachment of eleven of us entrained at Mhow station. We crammed into a compartment with a little bone notice above the door: TO SEAT EIGHT INDIANS.

We were loaded down with kit and rations. We crammed in somehow, in the best of spirits as troops always are when on the move. Mhow station, beset by monkeys and banyan trees, smelt powerfully of cooking, frangipani, animal droppings, and hot steam engines. Soon the station fell back into the night.

We pulled the windows down to enjoy the warm breeze. We rolled our sleeves down. We applied acidic anti-mosquito cream to face and hands. All night we sat among our kitbags and rifles, talking and joking. In charge of us was a genial Yorkshireman, Ted Monks – fresh from England like the rest of us. He was a foreman bricklayer in Civvy Street.

Indian towns came flashing out of the night like Catherine wheels. A nostril full of pungency, a glimpse of eyeballs human and animal, and we would be tearing through, on, on, with the challenge of Burma somewhere at the end of the line. By dawn we fell asleep over our kitbags, huddled against one another or dozing on the luggage racks.

The Mhow quartermaster had issued us with rations for what was intended to be merely a five-day journey. No air transport in those days, you note. By the time we emptied a tin full of stale hard tack, we had a useful pail. In this pail – whenever the train stopped for inscrutable reasons of its own – we collected hot water from the engine with which to brew ourselves tea.

India was endless. The railway lines were endless. Sometimes the train pulled into a siding, where we waited in heat and silence for an hour or two for an express to thunder by.

Days passed. We ran out of food and money. The great lands, the bringers of famine and plenty, rolled past. Flat, achingly flat, always inhabited. Out on the glazed plains, frail carts moved, figures laboured. Always the bent back. No matter what befell elsewhere, those figures – men and women – were committed to their labours without remission. While I stared out of the window, talk in the compartment was of home, always of home, the work and fun, the buggers at the factory, the knee-tremblers after dark behind the pub, the years of unemployment and disillusion in the Welsh mines. All this was news to me at eighteen, and had almost the same impact as the landscape. I felt so ashamed of my middle-class background that never once in all my army years did I mention that I had been to public school.

Our detachment was at the mercy of the RTOs along the route. RTOs were Railways Transport Officers; they sat at various points along the system of routes the British had forged, like spiders in a big metal web. Occasionally, they would call us off the train; occasionally, we could wrest from them either fresh supplies or a meagre travel allowance.

The RTO at Allahabad, a great steel town, allowed us to sleep on the platform of his magnificent station. Next day at dawn, we were put on a milk train heading East. Every day, Burma – a word synonymous with death – drew nearer.

We visited Benares and, untutored as we were, had only contempt for the pilgrims washing in the filthy waters of the Ganges. Then the train was carrying us across the infinities of the Ganges plain. Again the labouring figures of people and animals, committed every day to struggle beneath the sun.

The line ran straight ahead until it faded into sizzling heat. Our train stopped unexpectedly at a wayside halt. On the platform stood a corporal, immaculate in his KD, rigidly to attention. The Indian passengers leaning from the window or hanging on the outside of the coaches took some interest in him. He was bellowing at the top of his voice.

‘Reinforcement detachment from Mhow heading for 36 British Division, disembark from train immediately. Bring your kit. At the double. Fall in.’

‘Christ, that’s us,’ said Ted Monks. ‘We’re not getting off here, are we? Where the hell’s this? This is nowhere.’

We de-trained and fell in with our kit and our sack of bread and bully beef. We stood to attention. The train pulled away. It disappeared into the distance, down the straight line, across the great plain.

Without explanations, we were ‘fell in’ outside the halt in a column of twos. On orders from the corporal, we began to march. A dusty track stretched away from the railway line at right angles to it. We progressed along it, sweating in silence.

After an hour’s march, we reached a transit camp. It was arbitrarily established, and could just as well have been next to the railway line. There was no shade. We paraded in the sun to be addressed by a sergeant, who told us we were there to get properly washed and dhobied; we would be given a meal and would proceed with our journey in the morning. We were fell out.

As Monks said, we had arrived at nowhere. Wild dogs and jackals ran through our bashas during the night (I was thrilled – something that did not happen at home). Kite hawks – the hated kite hawks – dived down and scooped food out of the mess tins of anyone unwary enough to cross an open space with his meal. Beyond the perimeters of the camp was flat desolation. The camp was the British world.

One member of the camp staff was a man I recognized. He had been on the same troopship, the Otranto, which had brought our posting to India. I remembered him from among thousands of other troops aboard because he walked about in a distinctly civilian way (i.e. stoop-shouldered) singing a snatch of song over and over again.

Take thou this rose,

This little thing…

There he was, bathed in Indian sunlight, clutching a piece of paper going about some negligible errand. I got close to him. He was singing to himself. It was the same song. I dubbed him the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah. When we got talking, I learnt that he prided himself on this snip of a posting he had secured, office orderly at the Transit Camp; it meant that he would not have to go to Burma. I was convinced that anywhere was better than that nowhere camp.

A year or so later, it happened that I saw the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah again. He was alone in a crowd. To my delight, he was still singing the same unfinished lines of song to himself. War had no power to alter whatever was on the Take-thou-this-rose-wallah’s mind.

We returned to our journey with a sack full of fresh provisions. The train was shunted into a siding at Jamalpore, where monkeys swarmed down, climbed throught the open windows of our carriage and stole two loaves of bread from our sack.

Furious shouts. I jumped up and out of the window and on to the top of the train in no time. Six large rhesus monkeys regarded me with disapproval, before making off with their loot. I followed, jumping from carriage to carriage. The monkeys carrying the loaves began lagging behind. I had almost caught one when we came to some branches overhanging the line. The six of them leaped up and disappeared gibbering into the crown of a giant tree. We’d lost our bread.

We were met at Sealdah Station when we arrived in Calcutta. A truck carried us to a transit camp buried somewhere in the greasy outskirts of the city. They say that Calcutta is a memorial to the unquenchable human spirit of survival. One’s first impression is that one has – as one was expecting to do all one’s life – arrived in Hell, that here is human desperation on a gigantic scale, and that the slums and hinterlands of the Infernal Regions are spreading until they encompass all India. A black water buffalo was calving on an iron bridge over a railway line. Her body lay on the pavement, her legs in the road. All the traffic, including our trucks, ran over her hooves. I looked down as we passed. A calf was emerging from among pulped flesh.

Our camp lay under a railway embankment, surrounded by ferocious slums. Seven Dials in Henry Fielding’s time would have looked the same if you had put it under the grill. The tents which comprised the camp were survivors from the first world war. Everything was indescribably filthy, and flies buzzed everywhere.

It was a refuge for deserters. East of Calcutta, the war machine drew everyone into Burma and the fighting. You either jumped off here or were drawn on. Deserters had no chance of escaping to England or to any neutral country. Their best bet was to hang about in this filthy camp, for years if need be. Some of the N.C.O.s also had deserted, a fiddle was working whereby everyone still managed to draw army pay on which to venture into town once a week, to whore and booze.

One of our detachment nervously asked if we would not stand ‘a better chance’ if we joined the ranks of the deserters.

‘I’d rather die in the bloody jungle than rot here,’ said Monks, with his usual solid sense.

After two days, we reported to Howrah station, in order to continue our journey to Dibrugarh and 36 Div. The RTO at Howrah mysteriously took two of our number away, for posting elsewhere. No explanations were given. Nine of us were left, with damaged morale.

The line from Howrah northwards had come under American administration. American troops were on the train, noisy, casual, well-dressed. They had attached a canteen, which they called the caboose. Every fifty miles or so, the train would stop in the middle of nowhere, and anyone who wanted could collect a mug of coffee from the caboose. We were hospitably invited to do the same. The coffee was excellent. But we simply could not understand the Yanks and their boyish excitement at going to war. One of them, however, presented me with a copy of Astounding Science Fiction, which he had finished reading.

Our excitement increased as we neared Dibrugarh. What a welcome we would get! The railway ran along the south bank of the wide Bramaputra. After many changes of train and mysterious delays, we reached Tinsukia, the railhead. No one was there to meet us. The RTOs had erred.

We waited on the station, kit drawn up round us. Dusk thickened on the plain. In the distance, clear, aloof, still in sunlight, stood the majestic range of the Himalayas, with Tibet beyond. Their snow-crowned heights slowly turned pink with sunset.

A three-tonner rolled up. We climbed aboard and went bumping into the dark. The driver was mad and did his best to run down any dogs which crossed the road. He succeeded twice. All round us was miserable secondary growth, slum jungle.

We arrived at the Dibrugarh camp at three in the morning. A banner over a wooden sentry post announced that we had made contact at last with the British 36th Division. They were about to go into action north-eastwards, towards the River Salween, to strengthen Vinegar Joe Stilwell’s Burma Road to Chungking, the wartime Chinese capital.

A corporal was woken. He had no knowledge of us. There was nowhere for us. They did not need reinforcements. We would have to sleep in the mess, on the mess tables, and someone would sort out the balls-up in the morning. No, there was no grub. Not at four in the morning, mate. What did we think they were, a bloody hotel?

The cooks woke us at six. We sat around on our kitbags for some while.

The camp was run on a piratical basis by a captain and two senior NCOs. They were extremely nasty. We stood in the sun and were dressed down by one NCO. for being there at all. Meanwhile, the captain was hatching a simple plot.

Our proper allowance of kit was, as I recall, 95 lbs. It included smart tropical dress uniform. The captain announced that, as we were now in an active service zone, our kit must be reduced to 60 lbs. We had ten minutes to get down to regulation weight.

Our dress uniforms and dress hats went. Books went. I was left with only a World Classics Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the copy of Astounding Science Fiction. Life in the army was full of abandoned things; we adopted an Urdu word for it, ‘pegdo.’ Our pegdoed kit, books, uniforms, musical instruments, had to be piled up at the door of the quartermaster’s stores.

We were informed that a truck would come immediately and we would be shipped back to the RTO at Howrah. I took action I could hardly believe myself to be doing; without telling the others, I stepped into the captain’s tent, saluted, and volunteered to go to Chungking.

‘Who are you to volunteer? You’re fresh out from England, haven’t even got your knees brown.’

‘I passed first class as a 19 and 22 set operator, sir. And can work a line instrument.’

‘I didn’t ask you that. I asked you what category you were. Are you A1?’

‘No, sir, I’m A2, sir. But that’s only because of my specs. I can see perfectly well with them on. I’ve had commando training, sir.’

‘A2s are no use to us. This is a real fighting division. Get out. Dismiss.’

My old dream of getting to China had triumphed over a sensible concern to stay with my mates. I read every word I could find on Chungking, the muddy, isolated much-bombed capital of Chiang Kai-shek. I longed for its Chinese squalor. Throughout my time in the East, I kept volunteering for China; Hong Kong was the nearest I got.

Before the three-tonner bumped us out of the compound, we had the mortification of seeing the captain and his thugs descend on our pegdoed treasures and begin to divvy them up.

Back to Tinsukia. There, hanging about the sidings waiting for a train, Monks and I were accosted by an ancient Indian and a small boy. The old man would sing to us, good British songs, sir, for only one rupee. As it happened, we had only two rupees in small change between us. We gave him half a rupee and he began to sing, accompanied by the small boy on a flute, a garbled version of ‘Tipperary.’

It’s a long long the Tipperarip,

It’s a way ago.

It’s a long long the Tipperarip,

To the Swedish, ah no.

Go try to pick a lilly fair

Well let’s scare …

Monks and I stood among the maze of lines and roared with laughter. We pressed more money on the old boy, forcing him to sing his song again. His words grew wilder. He was overjoyed by his success, bewildered by his reception. He went on singing until we had given him our last anna and his metre ran out. Long after, three years later in Sumatra, Monks and I could make each other laugh just by singing in a creaking nasal voice, ‘It’s a long long the Tipperarip.’

We never got back to Calcutta. At Gauhati, on the Bramaputra, we were caught by another RTO, and directed to the 2nd British Division. This entailed getting a train of a different gauge, heading eastwards. This time, there was no escaping our fate. We were heading for Dimapur, Kohima, and the Jap-infested fastnesses of Burma.

At Dimapur, we de-trained. We were not expected. We checked into a fearsome camp, and one or two of us were immediately collared for fatigues.

This consisted of climbing into the cargo hold of a Dakota aircraft and sitting among the stores, hanging on grimly as the plane took off, to fly low over the hills of Nagaland and drop supplies to British and Indian troops. When a flying type with a clipboard shouted ‘Now,’ our job was to boot supplies put of the open door of the aircraft as it banked over the target. Such was my first experience of flying.

The next morning, a lorry arrived at the camp and the nine of us climbed in. We were driven eighty miles along the famous Dimapur Road. The road climbed steadily, twisting and turning to follow the convolutions of the mountainside. Sunlight and shade swung about our heads. Parts of the road were still being built or rebuilt. Over the sheer drop, we could see in the valley below burnt out carcasses of trucks which had been carelessly driven.

We reached Milestone 81 rather pale and shaky, and were assigned officially to the British 2nd Division. Our sixteen-day journey was over. A journey into war lay ahead.

Old Bessie

THIS IS A TRUE STORY, AND A GHOST STORY. YET I DON’T believe it myself.

What is a true story? It is a tale whose lies you cannot detect.

What is a ghost story? It is this – and with it comes entangled much of my life.

Earlier this year, I had the responsibility for carrying out the last wishes of my grandfather’s second wife. That is to say, of my step-grandmother whom I called (for simplicity and other reasons) my Aunt. She died in the spring, almost fifty years after my grandfather, at the age of ninety-five.

My Aunt Dorothy was the reason – or one of them, for life is never that simple – why our family broke up in a spectacular way. My grandfather was a strong-willed, self-made man, to whom his descendants owe a great debt. When he took a young second wife at the age of seventy, everyone was scandalized. In those days, in a country town in the mid-thirties, such a step was regarded as little short of treasonable. Particularly by a family which stood to lose financially by the union.

As a child, and as an adult, I loved my Aunt. She was among the best people I ever knew. I was glad to honour her wish to be laid to rest beside my grandfather’s bones, although to do that entailed a journey half across England to the dark dull heart of Norfolk.

Few people attended the funeral service. I spoke a short encomium over the grave. Then our little party climbed back into the cars to head for the only presentable hotel, where I was standing everyone lunch. I had reached that time in life, that position in the family, where it was taken for granted I would provide. How different from when I had lived as a boy in this miserable little town, when I was neglected and allowed to run wild.

On the way to the hotel, my wife dropped me by the council offices. The rest of the party went on their way while I went to pay the gravediggers’ fees.

Afterwards, on a whim, I walked to see the house where we had lived before we left the town in disgrace. The house stood down St Withburga Lane and was in fact called Withburga House. It faced across to the churchyard and to the church with its square tower.

There was the house still, much altered, covered with a thick stucco, and half the size I remembered it. It was now the HQ of the Brecklands District Council, or some such absurd name. The house and I confronted each other, to see how we had fared over forty years. Its fate was no worse than mine. We both survived, in our fashion.

To be truthful, I had never liked the house. I had been frightened there, at a tender age. This was where my lifelong habit of insomnia began, in the bedroom overlooking the old graves.

Our garage had been knocked down to allow for a small yard at the side. I walked round and looked over the high wooden gate into our old walled garden.

It was just as it had been, that summer we left. The terrace by the house, the old wash-room, converted into a summerhouse, the central flowerbed planted with annuals, the rustic work, the heavy laburnum at the far end, the lawn. Everything maintained.

My father made that garden. When we bought Withburga, it had been in a state of decay. Restoration had been needed inside, while the garden, a wilderness, had had to be restarted from scratch. My father had thrown himself into the work with his usual energy, digging, sowing, planting, and mixing concrete for paving and to support rustic pergolas. Staring over the gate, back into the past, I could imagine him still at work there, doing the sort of thing he liked best.

The front door of the house had been blocked off. One entered by the side, where once there had been no door. All was quiet. I wandered down a bare corridor. It was chill, unwelcoming. I saw that our old rooms had been partitioned into cubicles. Here was the kitchen, a kitchen no more. Here was our breakfast room, where the sun once filtered in on to the tablecloth, the china, the bowl of stewed apple. Here my sister’s dolls house had stood, one memorable Christmas … now there were instead three little rooms, each with a chair and a pencil on a string.

At the far end of the corridor was one of those hatches which has a button-bell outside it, against which a notice says ‘Push for Attention’; when the bell is pushed, it calls forth a girl who opens the hatch and says ‘Yes?’ With a sense of unreality, I pushed the bell. The hatch opened, and a girl said yes.

‘I used to live here,’ I said. ‘You are sitting in my dining room.’

She looked at me in some anguish. I was dressed in a black suit, with a black tie, and a black overcoat to protect me from the East wind.

‘I’ll get Mrs Skinner,’ she said.

There were three other women in our dining room, but Mrs Skinner entered from an adjoining room and bid me good-afternoon. She was a handsome woman in her mid-thirties, well-dressed with an elegant figure. She seemed to belong in that little menage no more than I did.

I told her of our family connection with the offices. She was interested. So were the other women. They stopped their work and sat with hands on laps, listening as I talked to Mrs Skinner through the hatch. Both of us craned our necks in order to see the other properly.

‘Our lounge was on the other side of the old front door,’ I said.

‘That is now my office – or part of it is,’ said the elegant Mrs Skinner, I thought with more reserve than she had shown so far.

‘Have you ever heard anything strange in there?’ I asked.

The women all looked at one another. An older woman at the back of the office, who did her hair in a bun, said, with a nervous laugh, ‘Oh, we’ve all heard strange things in this place. Some of the girls will tell you it’s haunted.’

‘It is haunted,’ said the girl at the hatch.

‘It is haunted,’ I agreed.

So I related the story of Old Bessie.

Withburga had been the home of a spinster, Bessie Someone, who had lived there in increasing decrepitude with an aged companion. My mother, given to good works, used to go to see Bessie regularly, taking her a cake, a trifle, or one of her fine steak-and-kidney puddings, wrapped in a cloth. Bessie died eventually. My father bought the house from Bessie’s executors.

Our builders moved in. They ripped out a back staircase and put in a new bathroom. They re-roofed the house. They pulled out all the rotting sashcord windows and installed metal ones in their stead. They repainted and redecorated. Then we took up residence, my parents, my sister and I. My sister would then have been four or five, and I eight or nine.

Almost at once, we started hearing the sounds. It was a winter’s evening. I sat with my parents in the living room, in the room that was to become – at least in part – the elegant Mrs Skinner’s. My sister was asleep in the bedroom above, in the room where old Bessie had died.

We heard footsteps overhead. In the centre of the living-room ceiling was a light whose china shade was supported by three chains. The footsteps were perfectly distinct. As they passed the centre of the room, the chains rattled on the lamp.

All three of us, motionless, followed the trail of the steps with our eyes, as they progressed to the bedroom window. There was a pause. Then the sound – the unmistakeable sound – of a sashcord frame being thrown up, squealing in its runners as it went.

‘There’s someone up there,’ said my father. He snatched the poker and ran upstairs. Thrilled, I snatched the fire-tongs and followed close behind.

There was no one in the bedroom, except for my sister fast asleep in her bed. The metal-frame window remained closed. My father investigated the walk-in linen cupboard – how I was to fear that cupboard later – and found nothing. Eventually, we returned downstairs.

‘It must have been old Bessie,’ said my mother.

And we laughed. We had a ghost. And it had a name. Old Bessie.

‘We never did anything but good for Old Bessie,’ said my mother. ‘So she won’t harm us.’

Well, it is true that Bessie did us no harm. But she was ever active. Most ghosts are content to live on their reputations, or reappear once a year. Not Bessie. She was always about the house. Cats would not stay with us.

The focus of the trouble was always that room with the linen cupboard, where Bessie had died, where my sister slept. I occupied the other front bedroom across the landing, while my parents slept at the rear of the house, overlooking the garden. In a very short while, my sister was bursting out on the landing in the middle of the night, screaming and crying. A lady carrying a lamp had come out of the linen cupboard, or from behind the wardrobe, to stand over her bed. So my sister always told us. A fierce lady with a lamp.

An ideal solution was discovered to this dilemma. My sister and I should change bedrooms. After all, I was by this time at boarding school, and did not sleep at home most of the year.

So I inherited the room with the linen cupboard. When you opened the linen cupboard door, drawers and lockers confronted you on two sides. On the third side was a window without a curtain, leaving the place vulnerable to the night. I always fell asleep with my gaze directed towards that ominous cupboard.

Did Bessie visit me? She did. I cannot remember whether she frightened me. I do know that I understood that here was ideal subject matter for school where, in the little dormitory, I made the nights terrible as I told them the story of Old Bessie. Boys hid their heads under the blankets in fright.

Living with Old Bessie became increasingly difficult. We told nobody in town about her. She was a disgrace, nudging us like a bad conscience.

When she started to visit us downstairs, it all got too much.

One October evening, at about four o’clock, when the dusk begins to fall with peculiar intensity in Withburga Lane, when farmers go mad from melancholy and shoot their dogs and their wives, my mother was alone in the house. My sister and I were at school. My father had not yet returned home.

Mother was in the kitchen at the rear of the house, baking one of her famous cherry cakes, when she heard someone walking about the bathroom overhead. Assuming that my father had returned early, and surprised that he had not at least called out to her, she went through to the hall.

As she removed her apron, she looked up the stairwell and spoke his name. ‘Bill?’

No response, although she still heard the footsteps. It was dark up there.

‘Bill. Is that you? Are you there?’

The footsteps came out on to the upper landing.

‘Bill? Who is it? Who’s there?’

The footsteps began to descend the stairs.

She stood petrified as they passed by her eyes. Still descending. She could not leave the stairwell. The footsteps came down to hall level. They turned and came towards her.

It was then that she found the power to scream. She dropped her apron and rushed out of the front door into the lane. There she stood, as it grew dark, and waited for half an hour before my father returned. He had to coax her into the house.

‘If Bessie’s coming downstairs, I’m leaving,’ said my mother.

We sold the house. Nobody selling property mentions the fact that it is haunted. Ghosts do not increase the saleable value. We left Withburga, and shortly after that came the family row which exiled us from Norfolk forever.

Mrs Skinner and her ladies listened to the story with intense interest, peering at me through the hatch.

Immediately I had finished, they burst into excited talk. ‘There you are, what did I tell you?’ ‘So Old Bessie’s still about then ….’

Each of them had a tale to tell. They had heard spooky noises. One of them had had to come back at night and had been too frozen with fear to go in. Another had heard footsteps which seemed to walk through the cubicles upstairs. The girl at the hatch, not to be outdone, said, ‘And when you come in of a morning, there’s always – oh, you know, a kind of sinister something … I’ve never liked working here.’

Mrs Skinner told me that she had come back one evening after the offices were closed to do some work for her boss. She had gone upstairs to his room – the very room where Bessie had died – and was working there when she heard someone downstairs. Thinking it must be her boss, she had called out. No answer. When the steps began to come up the staircase, she grew alarmed and went to see who it was. The footsteps kept coming. She saw no one. She represented herself as a lady not easily upset – and indeed I believed it – but she had been so frightened that she had run downstairs and out into the lane, where she had waited until her boss arrived.

As she finished speaking, Mrs Skinner and I both realized at the same time the congruence between her story and my mother’s. We stared at each other.

And as we stared, I saw her expression change from one of a kind of quizzical amusement to one approaching fear. Her lips parted. She could not cease staring through the hatch at me.

Perturbed myself, I said, ‘I must disappear … go and join the funeral party.’

I shut the hatch. I stood there alone. The corridor was chill and empty; its hostility closed in upon me.

As I hurried down the corridor into the open, as I left Withburga, as I moved rapidly down the lane, I knew exactly what the expresion on Mrs Skinner’s face implied. She had become, in that instant, certain that she was talking to the ghost itself.

Back at the hotel, our party was ordering its second round of gin-and-tonics.

‘Bessie’s still in residence,’ I told my sister. Even as I said it, a thought occurred to me which I will leave with you. It had been our asssumption that the haunter of Withburga was Old Bessie. But we could have been wrong. The tormented spirit which still wandered in its imprisoned limbo was possibly much older than Bessie – older and more malevolent.

Is this a true story? I don’t know. I still cannot bring myself intellectually to believe in ghosts.

This second section consists of articles on major contributors to the SF field whose work I admire greatly.

They run as follows: Mary Shelley, to whom all SF writers owe a debt, Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell, Phillip K. Dick, James Blish, and Harry Harrison.

Science Fiction’s Mother Figure

IN ANTHONY BURGESS’S NOVEL, BEARD’S ROMAN WOMEN (1977), there is a passage where Beard, the central character, meets an old girl friend in an airport bar. Both work in what it is fashionable to call ‘the media’; they discuss Byron and Shelley, and she says ‘I did an overseas radio thing on Mary Shelley. She and her mother are very popular these days. With the forces of women’s liberation, that is. It took a woman to make a Frankenstein monster. Evil, cancer, corruption, pollution, the lot. She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life ….’

Even today, when our diet is the unlikely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein seems extremely far-fetched; how much more so must it have appeared on publication in 1818. Yet Beard’s girl friend puts her finger on one of the contradictions which possibly explains the continued fascination of Frankenstein, that it seems to know a lot about life, whilst being preoccupied with death.

This preoccupation was undoubtedly an important strand in the character of the author of Frankenstein. Marked by the death of her mother in childbirth, she was haunted, at the time of writing Frankenstein, by precognitive dreads concerning the future deaths of her husband and children. By embodying some of this psychic material into her complex narrative, she created what many regard as that creature with a life of its own, the first SF novel.

This perception will bear examination later. Meanwhile, it should be pointed out that Frankenstein is generically ambivalent, hovering between novel, Gothic, and science fiction, just as its science hovers between alchemy and orthodox science. To my mind, precisely similar factors obtain even today in the most celebrated SF novels. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land contains magic; Anne McCaffrey’s dragon novels hover between legend, fairy tale, and science fiction. ‘Pure’ science fiction is chimerical. Its strength lies in its appetite.

Mary Shelley’s life (1797–1851) forms an unusual pattern, with all the events crowding into the early part and, indeed, many transactions that would mould her character occurring before she was born. Both her parents played important roles in the intellectual life of the time. Her father, William Godwin, was a philosopher and political theorist, whose most important work is An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Political Justice (1793). Godwin also wrote novels as a popular means of elucidating his thought, the most durable being Caleb Williams (1794), which can still be read with interest, even excitement, today. The influence of both these works on Godwin’s daughter’s writing is marked. Mary’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was a brilliant woman who wrote the world’s first feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Mary Wollstonecraft came to the marriage with Godwin bringing with her a small daughter, Fanny, the fruit of her affair with a charming but elusive American, Gilbert Imlay, who deserted his pregnant mistress in the Paris of the Terror.

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft by Sir John Opie shows a moody and passionate woman. Distracted by the failure of her love for Imlay, she tried to commit suicide by jumping into the Thames off Putney Bridge. She survived to marry Godwin and bear him a daughter, Mary. After the birth, puerperal fever set in, and she died ten days later.

Godwin remarried. His second wife was a Mrs. Mary Jane Clairmont, and she brought with her two children by her previous marriage, Charles, and Jane, who later preferred to be known as Claire and bore Byron an illegitimate child, Allegra. Fanny and Mary, then four years old, were further upset by the arrival of this new step-mother into their household, and the alienation was no doubt increased when Godwin’s new wife bore him a son in 1803. The five children crowded into one house increased Mary’s feeling of inner isolation, the refrain of which sounds throughout her novels and short stories. Another constant refrain, that of complex familial relationships, is seen embodied in the five children, no two of whom could muster two parents in common, Charles and Jane excepted.

Mary grew to be an attractive woman.[1] Her reserved manner hid deep feelings baffled by her mother’s death and her father’s distance – two kinds of coldness, one might say, both of which are embodied in her monster’s being in a sense dead and also unloved. When Shelley arrived, he received all her love, and Mary remained faithful to him long after his death, despite his callow unfaithfulness to her. She was also a blue stocking, the product of two intellectuals, and through many years maintained an energetic reading programme, teaching herself several foreign languages. Moreover, she had the good fortune to know in childhood many of the celebrated intellectuals and men of letters of the time, Samuel Taylor Coleridge among them. Trelawny said of Mary that ‘her head might be put upon the shoulders of a Philosopher.’

Enter Percy Bysshe Shelley, poet, son of a baronet. An emotional and narcissistic youth, full of admiration for Godwin’s revolutionary but now somewhat faded political theories. When nineteen, he had married Harriet Westerbrook. He soon fell in love with Mary, and she with him. Before his twenty-second birthday, the pair had eloped to France, taking Jane with them.

Europe! What freedom it must have represented to Mary, after her sixteen circumscribed years, and what close companionship Shelley, handsome and intellectual, must have offered. But these youthful travellers were among the first to enter France after the Napoleonic Wars, and a desolate place they found it, the fields uncultivated, the villages and buildings destroyed. On the way to Switzerland, Shelley wrote to invite Harriet, now pregnant with Shelley’s second child, to join the party. Before they reached Lake Lucerne, Mary knew that she also was pregnant.

Catastrophe followed the harum-scarum young lovers. Mary’s child, a daughter, was born after they returned to London and their debts; it was premature and died. A second child, William, scarcely fared better. In the summer of 1816, Shelley and Mary went to Switzerland again, taking along William and, inevitably, Claire, as Jane now called herself. On the shores of Lake Geneva, they found accommodation at the Maison Chapuis, next to the Villa Diodati, where the poet Lord Byron was staying. Although Claire threw herself at Byron’s head, and managed to encompass the rest of him too, it was a happily creative time for them, with philosophy and learning pursued as well as the more touted facets of the good life. Here, Mary began to write Frankenstein. Summer had too short a stay, and the party returned to England to face more trouble.

Mary’s self-effacing half-sister, Fanny, committed suicide with an overdose of laudanum at the age of twenty-two, by which time the Shelley menage had moved to the West Country; Claire still followed them, as the monster followed Frankenstein, and was now also pregnant. Then news reached them that Shelley’s wife Harriet had drowned herself, not in the Thames, but in the Serpentine. She had been far advanced in pregnancy. Shelley and Mary were married almost immediately.

The date of the marriage was 29 December 1816. Six and a half years later, in July 1822, Shelley was drowned whilst sailing on the Ligurian Sea. By that time, the little boy, William, was dead, as was another child, Clara; Mary had also had a miscarriage, but a further son, Percy Florence, was born. He alone of Mary’s progeny survived to manhood. Even Claire’s daughter by Byron, the little Allegra, had died.

The rest of Mary’s life is curiously empty, lived in the shadow of her first twenty-five years. After Byron died in Greece in 1824, both the great poets were gone – a loss to English letters. Mary remained ever faithful to the memory of her husband. She edited his poems and papers, and earned a living by her pen. She wrote historical novels, such as Perkin Warbeck (1830), Lodore (1835), which enjoyed some success, short stories, and one novel, The Last Man (1826) which, by its powerfully oppressive theme of world catastrophe, is classifiable as science fiction. Percy married. Her cold father, Godwin, died; Shelley’s difficult father died. Finally, in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, Mary herself died, aged fifty-three.

This painful biography, as confused as any modern one, is worth retelling, for it helps to explain not only why Mary’s temperament was not a sanguine one, but where much derives from what we read in her two science fiction novels, Frankenstein and The Last Man. Both owe a great deal to the literature that preceded them; more is owed to experience. Critics are liable comfortably to ignore the latter to concentrate on the former.

The essence of the story of Frankenstein is familiar, if in distorted form, from many film, stage and TV versions, in which Victor Frankenstein compiles a creature from corpses and then endows it with life, after which it runs amok. The novel is long, and more complex than this synopsis suggests. It is a flawed masterpiece of growing reputation, and an increasing body of criticism attests to the attraction of both its excellences and its flaws.

Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus begins with letters from Captain Walton to his sister. Walton is sailing in Arctic waters when he sees on the ice floes a sledge being driven by an enormous figure. The next day, the crew rescue a man from a similar sledge. It is Victor Frankenstein of Geneva; when he recovers, he tells his tale to Walton, which account makes up the bulk of the book, to be rounded off by Walton again, and to include six chapters which are the creature’s own account of its life, especially of its education. If the style of the novel is discursive, Mary Shelley was following methods familiar to readers of Richardson and Sterne; the method became unfashionable but, to readers of eccentric modern novels, may now be increasingly sympathetic and help to account in part for the new-found popularity of the novel.

One of the enduring attractions of the book is that Mary sets most of the drama, not in the seamy London she knew from childhood, but amid spectacular alpine scenery, such as she had visited with Shelley. The monster’s puissance gains greatly by this association with the elements, storm, cold, snow, desolation.

Interest has always centred on the monster and its creation (it has no name in the novel, merely being referred to as ‘creature,’ ‘daemon,’ or ‘monster,’ which accounts for the popular misusage by which the name Frankenstein has come to be transferred from the creator to the created – a mistake which occurred first in Mary’s lifetime. This is the essential SF core of the narrative: a fascinating experiment that goes wrong: a prescription to be repeated later, many times, in Amazing Stories and elsewhere. Frankenstein’s is a Faustian dream of unlimited power, but this Faust makes no supernatural pacts; he succeeds only when he throws away the fusty old reference books, outdated by the new science, and gets to work on research in laboratories.

But SF is not only hard science, and related to the first core is a second, also science-fictional, the tale of an experiment in political theory which relates to William Godwin’s ideas. Frankenstein is horrified by his creation and abjures responsibility. Yet the monster, despite its ugliness, is gentle and intelligent, and tries to win its way into society. Society repulses it. Hence the monster’s cry, ‘I am malicious because I am miserable,’ a dramatic reversal of received Christian thinking of the time.

The richness of the story’s metaphorical content, coupled with the excellence of the prose, has tempted commentators to interpret the novel in various ways. Frankenstein’s sub-title, The Modern Prometheus, leads us to one level of meaning. Prometheus, according to Aeschylus in his play Prometheus Bound, brings fire from Heaven and bestows the gift on mankind; for this, Zeus has him chained to a rock in the Caucasus, where an eagle eats his viscera.[2] Another version of the legend, the one Mary had chiefly in mind, tells of Prometheus fashioning men out of mud and water. Mary seized on this aspect of the legend, whilst Byron and Shelley were writing Prometheus and Prometheus Unbound respectively. Mary, with an inspired transposition, uses electricity as the divine fire.

By this understanding, with Frankenstein acting god, Frankenstein’s monster becomes mankind itself, blundering about the world seeking knowledge and reassurance. The monster’s intellectual quest has led David Ketterer to state that ‘basically Frankenstein is about the problematical nature of knowledge.’[3] Though this interpretation is too radical, it reminds us usefully of the intellectual aspects of the work, and of Mary’s understanding of the British philosophers, Locke, Berkeley and Hume.

Leonard Wolf argues that Frankenstein should be regarded as ‘psychological allegory’.[4] This view is supported by David Ketterer, who thinks that therefore the novel cannot be science fiction.[5] Godwin’s Caleb Williams is also psychological or at least political allegory; it is nevertheless regarded as the first crime novel.* Surely there are many good SF novels which are psychological allegory as well as being science fiction. Algis Budrys’s Who? is an example. By understanding the origins of ‘real’ science fiction, we understand something of its function; hence the importance of the question. Not to regard Frankenstein but, say, The Time Machine or even Gernsback’s magazines as the first SF – as many did only a few years ago – is to underestimate the capabilities of the medium; alternatively, to claim that Gilgamesh or Homer started it all is to claim so almost anything becomes SF.

Mary Shelley wanted her story to ‘speak to the mysterious fears of our (i.e. humankind’s) nature’ … Is that not what SF still excellently does?

That the destructive monster stands for one side of Shelley’s nature, and the constructive Victor for the other has been convincingly argued by another critic, Christopher Small.[6] Mary’s passion for Shelley, rather than blinding her, gave her terrifying insight. In case this idea sounds over-sophisticated, we must recall that Mary herself, in her Introduction to the 1831 edition of her novel, means us to read it as a kind of metaphor when she says ‘Invention … does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but it cannot bring into being substance itself.’

In referring to Frankenstein as a diseased creation myth,[7] I had in mind phrases with sexual connotations in the novel such as ‘my workshop of filthy creation,’ used by Frankenstein of his secret work. Mary’s life experience taught her to regard life and death as closely intertwined. The genesis of her terrifying story came to Mary in a dream, in which she says she saw ‘the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy half vital motion.’ The powerful line suggests both a distorted image of her mother dying, in those final restless moments which often tantalisingly suggest recovery rather than its opposite, and also the stirrings of sexual intercourse, particularly when we recall that ‘powerful engine’ is a term which serves in pornography as a synonym for penis.

The critic, Ellen Moers, writing on female gothic,[8] disposes of the question of how a young girl like Mary could hit on such a horrifying idea (though the authoress was herself the first to raise it). Most female writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were spinsters and virgins, and in any case Victorian taboos operated against writing on childbirth. Mary experienced the fear, guilt, depression and anxiety which often attend childbirth, particularly in situations such as hers, unmarried, her consort a married man with children by another woman, and beset by debt in a foreign place. Only a woman, only Mary Shelley, could have written Frankenstein. As Beard’s girlfriend says, ‘She was the only one of the lot of them who knew about life.’

Moreover, the casual remark made by Beard’s girlfriend takes us into a deeper level of meaning which, although sufficiently obvious, has not been remarked upon to my knowledge. Frankenstein is autobiographical.

It is commonly accepted that the average first novel relies for its material on personal experience. We do not deny other interpretations – for a metaphor has many interpretations – by stating that Mary sees herself as the monster. This is why we pity it. She too tried to win her way into society. By running away with Shelley, she sought acceptance through love; but the move carried her further from society; she became a wanderer, an exile, like Byron, like Shelley. Her mother’s death in childbirth must have caused her to feel that she, like the monster, had been born from the dead; behind the monster’s eloquence lies Mary’s grief. Part of the continued appeal of the novel is the appeal of the drama of the neglected child.

Upon this structure of one kind of reality, Mary built a further structure, one of the intellect. A madness for knowledge abounds; not only Frankenstein but the monster and Walton also, and the judicial processes throughout the book, are in quest for knowledge of one kind and another. Interestingly, the novel contains few female characters (a departure from the Gothic mode, with its soft, frightened heroines); Victor’s espoused remains always a cold and distant figure. The monster, product of guilty knowledge, threatens the world with evil progeny.

The monster is, of course, more interesting than Victor. He has the vitality of evil, like Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost before him and Quilp in Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop after him, eloquent villains both. It is the monster that comes first to our minds, as it was the monster that came first to Mary’s mind. The monster holds its appeal because it was created by science, or at least pseudo-science, rather than by any pacts with the devil, or by magic, like the golem.

Frankenstein emerges from the Gothic tradition. Gothic still tints science fiction with its hues of suspense and doom. In Billion Year Spree I argued that Frankenstein was the first real science fiction novel. Here the adjective ‘real’ serves as an escape clause. The point about discussing where science fiction begins is that it helps our understanding of the nature and function of SF. In France in pre-Revolution days, for instance, several books appeared with Enlightenment scenarios depicting a future where present trends were greatly developed, and where the whole world became a civilized extension of the Tuilleries. The best-known example is Sebastien Mercier’s L’An 2400, set seven centuries ahead in time; it was translated into several foreign languages. Mercier writes in the utopian tradition; Mary Shelley does not. Here we see a division of function. Jules Verne was influenced by Mercier, and worked with ‘actual possibilities of invention and discovery.’ H.G. Wells was influenced by Frankenstein, and wrote what he called fantasies – the phrase set in quotes is Wells’s, who added that he ‘did not pretend to deal with possible things.’* One can imagine Mary Shelley saying as much.

As Muriel Spark says, Mary in her thinking seems at least fifty years ahead of her time.[9] She discovered the Irrational, one of the delights and torments of our age. By dressing it in rational garb, and letting it stalk the land, she unwittingly dealt a blow against the tradition to which Mercier was heir. Utopia is no place for the irrational.

Other arguments for the seminal qualities of Frankenstein are set out more fully in Billion Year Spree, for those interested. In sum, Victor Frankenstein is a modern, consciously rejecting ancient fustian booklore in favour of modern science, kicking out father figures. His creation of life shows him further usurping paternal power, invading what was previously God’s province – the role medicine has played since Jenner’s smallpox vaccine. Victor and his monster together function as the light and dark side of mankind, in a symbolism that was to become increasingly comprehensible after Mary’s death.

As befitted an author writing after the Napoleonic Wars, when the Industrial Revolution was well under way, Mary deals, not merely with extrapolated development like Mercier before her, but with unexpected change, like Wells after her. Above all, Frankenstein stands as the figure of the scientist (though the word was not coined when Mary wrote), set apart from the rest of society, unable to control the new forces he has brought into the world. The successor to Prometheus is Pandora. No other writer, except H. G. Wells, presents us with as many innovations as Mary Shelley.

The Last Man was published in 1826, anonymously, as Frankenstein had been. Few critics of standing have praised the novel. It meanders. Muriel Spark, however, said of it that it is Mary’s ‘most interesting, if not her most consummate, work.’

The theme of The Last Man was not new, and could hardly be at a time when epidemics were still commonplace. The title was used for an anonymous novel in 1806. Thomas Campbell wrote a poem with the same title; whilst at the Villa Diodati, Byron composed a poem entitled ‘Darkness’ in which the world is destroyed and two men, the last, die of fright at the sight of each other. In the same year that Mary’s novel was published, John Martin painted a water-colour on the subject (later, in 1849, he exhibited a powerful oil with the same title).

The novel is set in the twenty-first century, a period, it seems, of much sentimental rhetoric. Adrian, Earl of Windsor, befriends the wild Lionel Verney. Adrian is the son of the King of England, who abdicated; one of the King’s favourites was Verney’s father. Adrian is full of fine sentiments, and wins over Verney. Verney has a sister called Perdita who falls in love with Lord Raymond, and eventually commits suicide. Raymond is a peer of genius and beauty who besieges Constantinople. The relationships of these personages, together with a profusion of mothers and sisters, fill the first of the three volumes. Adrian is Mary’s portrait of Shelley, the bright rather than the dark side, Perdita is Claire, Raymond Byron. Verney plays the part of Mary, and eventually becomes the Last Man. Verney, like Frankenstein, is a paradigm of the Outsider.

There is undoubted strength in the second and third books, once the plague has the world in its grip. Society disintegrates on a scale merely hinted at in the unjust world of Frankenstein. ‘I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety. In the south, the disease, virulent and immedicable, had nearly annihilated the race of man; storm and inundation, poisonous winds and blights, filled up the measure of suffering. In the north it was worse ….’

Finally, Verney-Mary alone is left, drifting south towards the equator, like a character in a J.G. Ballard novel. So Mary tells us how life was without Shelley; her universe had gone. Through science fiction, she expressed her powerfully inexpressible feelings.

In his brief book on Mary,[10] William Walling makes a point which incidentally relates The Last Man still more closely to the science-fictional temper. Remarking that solitude is a common topic of the period and by no means Mary’s monopoly, Walling claims that by interweaving the themes of isolation and the end of civilization, she creates a prophetic account of modern industrial society, in which the creative personality becomes more and more alienated.

Tales and Stories by Mary Shelley were collected together by Richard Garnett and published in 1891. They are in the main conventional. Familial and amorous misunderstandings fill the foreground, armies gallop about in the background. The characters are high-born, their speeches high-flown. Tears are scalding, years long, sentiments either villainous or irreproachable, deaths copious and conclusions not unusually full of well-mannered melancholy. The tales are of their time. Here again, the game of detecting autobiographical traces can be played. One story, ‘Transformation,’ sheds light on Frankenstein – but not much. We have to value Mary Shelley, as we do other authors, for her strongest work, not her weakest; and her best has a strength still not widely enough appreciated.

This collection of stories from scattered journals and keepsake albums indicates Mary’s emotional and physical exhaustion. In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, she had borne four children, three of whom died during the period, and had suffered miscarriages. She had travelled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who had most probably had an affair with her closest friend, Claire. And she had witnessed suicides and death all round her, culminating in Shelley’s death. It was much for a sensitive and intellectual woman to endure. No wonder that Claire Clairmont wrote to her, some years after the fury and shouting died, and said, ‘I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew.’[11]

1. An enjoyable recent biography is Jane Dunn’s Moon in Eclipse: A Life of Mary Shelley, 1979.

2. One thinks here of the scene after Shelley’s death, when Trelawny caused his corpse to be burnt on the shore, Byron and Leigh Hunt also being present. At the last possible moment, Trelawny ran forward and snatched Shelley’s heart from the body.

3. David Ketterer, Frankenstein’s Creation: The Book, The Monster, and Human Reality, University of Victoria, 1979.

4. Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Frankenstein, 1977.

5. David Ketterer, ‘Frankenstein in Wolf’s Clothing,’ Science Fiction Studies, No. 18, July 1979.

6. Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, 1972.

7. Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, 1973.

8. Ellen Moers, ‘Female Gothic: The Monster’s Mother,’ The New York Review, 21 March 1974, reprinted in Literary Women, 1976.

9. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1951. *A biographer of Mary Shelley, writing in the nineteen-thirties, advances the argument that Frankenstein is ‘the first of the Scientific Romances that have culminated in our day in the work of Mr. H. G. Wells,’ because it erects ‘a superstructure of fantasy on a foundation of circumstantial “scientific fact.”’ Shrewd judgement, although the excellence of the novel is otherwise underestimated. (R. Glynn Grylls: Mary Shelley, A Biography, 1938.)

10. 9 William Walling: Mary Shelley, 1972.

11. Claire Clairmont, letter, quoted in Julian Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1889.

The Immanent Will Returns

‘WHAT OF THE IMMANENT WILL AND ITS DESIGNS?’ ASKS Thomas Hardy at the beginning of The Dynasts, and proceeds to demonstrate at length how little the Will cares for its creations. He leaves us with a faint hope that the Will can in some way evolve, and that ‘the rages of the Ages shall be cancelled,/Consciousness the Will informing,/Till it fashion all things fair.’ Thinking the matter over after the First World War, Hardy conceded that this was a little too optimistic: thereby leaving the door open for Olaf Stapledon.

Stapledon sweeps away the human characters in whom Hardy delighted, to give us a threadbare stage upon which humanity is lost in the incomprehensible toils of creation or the soliloquies of the Star Maker. The Star Maker is the Immanent Will wearing another hat.

W. Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is a very English kind of writer. He won no great reputation in his lifetime and has accumulated little since; yet he cannot be said to be entirely forgotten, despite his mysterious absence from most of the histories of English Literature.

His work in philosophy – a subject which at one time he taught in the University of Liverpool – has proved impermanent, although A Modern Theory of Ethics went through several reprints.

His kind of visionary writing, which attempts to establish an individual mythology, is not unfamiliar. His novel Odd John has a subtitle which recalls Blake (‘A Story Between Jest and Earnest’ – though there’s precious little enjoying of the lady in it); his grandiosities recall Doughty’s six-volume epic poem, Dawn in Britain, with its quixotic resolve to restore Chaucer to modern English. Two other conflicting voices echo strongly through Stapledon’s fiction: the Milton of Paradise Lost and that great Victorian storm-trooper, Winwood Reade, whose Martyrdom of Man attempted to justify the ways of man to a dead god.

We may call H.G. Wells’s early scientific romances science fiction with a clear conscience. It is more debatable whether Stapledon’s first novel, Last and First Men (1930), and Star Maker (1937) so qualify. They are Stapledon’s attempt to blend fiction and philosophy. Wells’s imagination was untainted by metaphysics, though politics finally eclipsed it; but Stapledon read Modern History while up at Balliol from 1905–09, and most of his fictions strive to iron themselves out into the progressions of historicity, complete with time-charts.

These two vast works, best regarded as a unity, are sui generis. The preface to Last and First Men warns that this ‘is not a prophecy; it is a myth, or an essay in myth.’ Even sterner is the disclaimer at the portals of Star Maker: ‘Judged by the standards of the Novel, it is remarkably bad. In fact, it is no novel at all.’

The Novel has proved itself unexpectedly capacious, but the Immanent Will does seem to demand a less convivial stage on which to enact the rages of the ages. The rages which energise the gaunt structures of Last and First Men and Star Maker are, basically, religious faith versus atheism and the quest for individual fulfillment versus the needs of the community, whether terrestrial or stellar. Modern rages, one might call them.

With their emphasis on spiritual suffering, catastrophe to come, and the surrealist mutations of shape which mankind must undergo in submission to the Creator, those great glacial novels, together spanning the thirties, now appear oddly characteristic of their day.

In many respects, Stapledon himself is markedly of his time. As were many men of his generation, he was torn by religious doubt; he was a non-combatant in the 1914–1918 war, and had some trouble in fitting himself, essentially a Victorian, into post-war society. Along with other intellectuals of his day, he flirted with pacifism and promiscuity. He had strong leanings towards Communism without ever becoming a member of the Party. Like many writers outside the swim of London literary society, he knew few other authors, and was critically disregarded.

It could also be said that the central premise of his work, that mankind is irrelevant to the purposes of the universe, is unpalatable to believer and unbeliever alike. It is precisely for that unpalatability, so variously, so swoopingly, expressed, as if in contradiction to itself, that his admirers honour him.

Last and First Men belongs to that class of book which needs to arrive in a reader’s life at the right moment if it is to arrive at all. Then one never forgets it.

I remember my first encounter with it. I was awaiting a typhus inoculation in Assam in 1943, before the British Second Division advanced on Japanese-held Mandalay. The medical officer was housed in a commandeered bungalow outside Kohima which possessed a considerable library. On the shelves stood a book I had never heard of, in two volumes, the first two volumes Allen Lane published in his blue series of Pelican Books (for he had taken Stapledon at his word and issued the work as non-fiction). I was captivated before I was inoculated.

For the last and first time in my life, I deliberately stole a book. I could not bear to be parted from it.

While great things went forward in the world – destruction and victory – Stapledon’s voice proved to be what was needed, in marked contrast to the pedestrian chat of soldiers. His daring time-scales in particular corresponded to something felt in the bloodstream.

What filled me then was Stapledon’s all-embracing vision of humanity locked within the imperatives of creation, untainted by a Christianity which seemed to have failed. Star Maker, written only seven years later, amplifies this vision, elevates it, and marks a great advance in the writer’s art. The two billion year long history of the future which is Last and First Men is encompassed in one paragraph of the second book. Again, human kind – this time one individual soul – is confronted with the necessity of comprehending the cosmic process of which it is part: a noble and ever-contemporary quest.

Noble or not, Stapledon has been neglected. He had a dislike of Bloomsbury and satirised the coterie in Last Men in London – which presumably did for him. If his name is to be preserved, it will be by science fiction readers. Science fiction studies are now so alarmingly advanced in the United States that the first two studies of Stapledon’s oeuvre are American. First was Patrick McCarthy’s Olaf Stapledon (Twayne, 1982). Now here comes the energetic, unorthodox Professor Leslie A. Fiedler, with Olaf Stapledon, A Man Divided (O.U.P., 1983). His volume appears in a series flatly entitled ‘Science Fiction Writers,’ edited by Robert Scholes, in which studies of Wells, Heinlein and Asimov have already appeared.

Fiedler has problems. One initial difficulty is that Last and First Men evidently did not arrive in his life at the right moment. He was ‘infuriated’ that it had no story or characters. He finds it improbable that he should be writing on ‘so anomalous an author.’ Not an encouraging start, not an encouraging attitude.

One’s initial misgivings are never allayed. Fiedler briefly covers Stapledon’s life (though not the Oxford years, when Stapledon rowed for his college), deems it an uneventful one, like the lives of most writers, and hurries on to investigate the glories and shortcomings of the fiction. The book reaches roughly the same conclusions as would any reasonable man: that Odd John is a worthwhile contribution in the Poor Little Superman line, that Sirius is late gold, and that Star Maker is the great triumph, with its ‘all but intolerable appeal.’ While finding the other writings disappointing, it relates them illuminatingly to one another.

On the whole, more engagement would have been welcome, and a recognition that Stapledon is the first to write about an Immanent Will, or whatever you call It, which stands completely outside the universe He or It has created – a remarkable alienation effect derived from the scientific despairs of the time.

Despite its remote title, Sirius is the most approachable of all Stapledon’s inventions. Although Fiedler surprisingly finds its theme pornographic, he gives a perceptive account of its Beauty and the Beast theme, in which the super-dog, Sirius, and the human girl, Plaxy, consummate their love. Stapledon essays this unpalatable theme, interspecific sexual relations, with genuine warmth and pathos.

The scientist who develops Sirius’s intelligence exclaims, ‘I feel as God ought to have felt towards Adam when Adam went wrong – morally responsible.’ But this, as Fiedler rightly insists, is a love story, and a doomed one at that. The ordinary clamour of human affairs, the rattle of coffee spoons, the marrying and begetting, lie beyond Stapledon’s compass: yet this harried canine life, with its struggle for self-realisation on lonely hillsides, does grow to represent, as Fiedler declares, ‘the condition of all creatures, including ourselves.’

It is Stapledon’s most famous book, Last and First Men, which most troubles Fiedler. The problem with that splendid flight of the imagination is that four opening chapters intervene before take-off. These are the chapters purporting to cover terrestrial history from 1930, when the book was published, until the fall of the First Men (us), five thousand years after the death of Newton. Not only do these chapters get everything wrong (Germans good, Americans bad, Russians nice, Chinese still sporting pigtails in 2298 A.D.); they show racial prejudice, with short shrift given Negroes, Jews, and capitalist Americans.

Only after Stapledon has struggled through this weary catalogue of fake history do we get to the great scientific myth. Should we trust the myth when the fact is so faulty? Charity suggests that Stapledon was, by all the evidence, a pleasant, self-effacing man who preferred to live quietly with his wife, son and daughter in the Wirral. His contacts with the outside world were few; he was glad to dream and cultivate his garden. He got the facts wrong but the dream right. Many contemporary science fiction writers achieve the opposite.

So Fiedler spends some while talking about the long out-of-print American edition of Last and First Men, abridged by Basil Davenport, ignoring what we may term the Allen Lane solution. Such is the price we pay for the defects of English scholarship.

British readers will also sense Fiedler’s difficulties in coming to terms with Stapledon’s Englishness and his English self-deprecation. That Stapledon was a late developer is clear; his early transplantation to Egypt may help account for that. But there was nothing particularly unusual about a Victorian man remaining virgin into his thirties, owing to lack of opportunity and the sexual mores of the time; repression is a theme occurring more than once in Stapledon’s works – however odd this may appear to the generation which invented AIDS. Fiedler stresses the homosexual relationships he detects in Stapledon’s books, worries about no loves free of ‘shameful miscegenation,’ and shakes his head in a fuddy-duddy way over Stapledon’s ‘not-quite-incestuous’ marriage to his Australian first cousin, Agnes. He also claims to find in the works a streak of sado-masochism ‘verging on the pathological.’ Myself, I think it was just a passing Zeitgeist.

Perhaps this pop psychology serves to add a little melodrama to an otherwise humdrum existence, but it distorts the truth. What a reader of Stapledon would really like to know is whence came his intense imaginative gift, which can at once create such effects of distancing in space and time and yet brings us close to multitudinous beings unlike ourselves in almost every way. Could it have been something to do with those restless early years, exiled back and forth between Merseyside and Port Said? The sea voyages would have been odysseys of estrangement for a sensitive child.

The exclusion of events from his life suggests that, like Bertrand Russell, Stapledon felt cursed by loneliness. His novels are short on dialogue and read often like debates with himself. In one remarkable section of Chapter X of Star Maker, the journeying human soul, with spirit friends, views the galaxy at an early stage of its existence. The passage is far too long to quote here; it concludes with a view of the fully evolved galaxy:

The stars themselves gave an irresistable impression of vitality. Strange that the movements of these merely physical things, these mere fire-balls, whirling and travelling according to the geometrical laws of their minutest particles, should seem so vital, so questing. But then the whole galaxy was itself so vital, so like an organism, with its delicate tracery of star-streams, like the streams within a living cell; and its extended wreaths, almost like feelers; and its nucleus of light. Surely this great and lovely creature must be alive, must have intelligent experience of itself and of things other than it.

Then comes one of those quick contradictions which endow Stapledon’s narrative with its tensile strength:

In the tide of these wild thoughts we checked our fancy, remembering that only on the rare grains called planets can life gain foothold, and that all this wealth of restless jewels was but a waste of fire.

Under the detached tone is an almost animist belief in life everywhere, sentience everywhere. One of Stapledon’s last fantasies, The Flames, postulates a madman’s vision of fire with intellect.

With such paradox, such bleakness and beauty, Fiedler is well-equipped to deal. ‘Ecstasy’ is one of Stapledon’s favourite words, and the ecstasy is usually one of both pain and pleasure. For there is pleasure of a high order in making that desperate voyage to come face-to-face with the Star Maker, and pain in discovering that this universe is but one in a sequence of universes, each imperfect in its way. ‘Cosmos after cosmos, each more rich and subtle than the last, leapt from his fervent imagination.’ In the extraordinary Chapter XV, Stapledon describes a progression of these flawed cosmoses, each one in turn failing ultimately to satisfy its creator, who stores them away like so many old video games in a cupboard, as he turns to prepare a yet more complex strategy.

Our own cosmos is in turn about to be put away. In the succeeding cosmos, according to the thought of the Star Maker, the physical will be ‘more patently phantasmal than in our own cosmos,’ while the beings who inhabit it will be ‘far less deceived by the opacity of their individual mental processes, and more sensitive to their underlying unity.’

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