Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
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a strength still not widely enough appreciated.
In the course of eight years, between 1814 and 1822, Mary Shelley suffered miscarriages and bore four children, three of whom died during the period. She travelled hither and thither with her irresponsible husband, who probably enjoyed an affair with her closest friend, Claire. 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 down, saying ‘I think in certain things you are the most daring woman I ever knew’ (quoted in Julian Marshall’s Life and Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1889).
Certainly in literature Mary Shelley was daring. She found new ways in which to clothe her powerful inward feelings.
New ideas in science are often followed up swiftly by science fictions which utilize or even examine them. The story may be successful even if the original idea is less so. The theory of ‘continuous creation’, so attractive in essence, posited by Fred Hoyle, had to give way to the Big Bang theory of creation. That theory is itself now being challenged.
Literary ideas are less subject to acid tests, more subject to fashion and changing taste.
To put forward a more personal view of Frankenstein, I would say that I seized upon this novel at the inception of Billion Year Spree because I needed to do something more than write a history of science fiction, and of the hundreds of thousands of books and stories I had read. I wished also to render SF more friendly towards its literary aspects. It is a battle needing to be fought; for still these days one sees reviewers and others use the adjective ‘literary’ pejoratively. SF is not separate from ordinary literature: merely apart. A means of distinguishing the best of it definitively from the writings of Herman Melville, Angela Carter, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Hermann Hesse has yet to be formulated.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, SF is not a literature of prediction, although some may see it in this light, although guesses may turn out to be proved accurate later. A scone, for all the currants in it, remains ineluctably a scone, not a currant. How many times have I been forced to say as much in television interviews? It makes no difference. Those who do not know SF well believe in the prediction theory. I am a literary sort of chap, and must fight my corner.
What SF can do well—it is what Wells does, and the precept is worth following—is take a new theory and dramatize it. James Lovelock’s Galia hypothesis of the biomass of the planet conspiring towards its own survival conditions overtook me with excitement. Was it true? It deserved to be, so beautiful was it. It was adopted with Lovelock’s agreement as one of the bases for my Helliconia novels of the 1980s.
My preference remains for the printed word, despite all that the movies, TV, and Nintendo can do. Billion Year Spree and its successor bear witness to that. There is a density to a page of text lacking even in radio (where you cannot turn back to check) and certainly in TV, where pictures so often get in the way of text; I like my coffee black, not served up as an ice cream.
Billion Year Spree proved an asset to many scholars. It gave them carte blanche not to have to study texts a million miles from the real thing unless they wished; they could narrow their sights on Frankenstein and all the amazements which have poured forth since. That proved to be good news.
The success of the volume meant that I was called upon to update it in the 1980s, when the field had greatly expanded and its parameters became even more blurred than previously. I could not manage the task without my colleague, David Wingrove, the most diligent collaborator a man could wish for. So we produced Trillion Year Spree in 1986, with the able editorial assistance of Malcolm Edwards, then at Gollancz. Trillion Year Spree won a Hugo. What follows is an account of the earlier ground-breaking volume, and some of its rivals.
But first, a story. The scene is the main convention hall of a science fiction convention, Lunacon, held in the crumbling Commodore Hotel, New York, in 1975. Famous critic, fan and collector, Sam Moskowitz, is holding forth from the platform. Fans are slouching around in the hall, sleeping, listening or necking. I am sitting towards the back of the hall, conversing with a learned and attractive lady beside me, or else gazing ahead, watching interestedly the way Moskowitz’s lips move. In short, the usual hectic convention scene.
Fans who happen to be aware of my presence turn round occasionally to stare at me. I interpret these glances as the inescapable tributes of fame, and take care to look natural, though not undistinguished, and thoroughly absorbed in the speech.
Later, someone comes up to me and says, admiringly, ‘Gee, you were real cool while Moskowitz was attacking you’.
That is how I gained my reputation for English sang froid. The acoustics in the hall were so appalling that I could not hear a word Moskowitz was saying against me. To them goes my gratitude, for my inadvertent coolness in the face of danger may well have saved me from a ravening lynch mob.
Few reviewers stood up in support of my arguments in Billion Year Spree. Mark Adlard in Foundation was one of them.[10] Yet it appears that some of my mildly ventured propositions have since been accepted.
Sam Moskowitz, of course, was pillorying me on account of heretical opinions in BYS. I did not gather that he said anything about my major capacity as a creative writer. One unfortunate effect of the success of BYS, from my point of view, is that my judgements are often quoted but my fiction rarely so, as though I had somehow, by discussing the literary mode in which I work, passed from mission to museum with no intermediate steps.
Such is the penalty one pays for modesty. I mentioned no single story or novel of mine in my text; it would have been bad form to do so. Lester del Rey, nothing if not derivative, repays the compliment by mentioning no single story or novel of mine in his text,[11] though to be sure, disproportionate space is devoted to del Rey’s own activities.
This particular instance can perhaps be ascribed to jealousy. To scholarly responses we will attend later.
First, to rehearse and repolish some arguments advanced in Billion Year Spree, in particular the arguments about the origin of SF. On this important question hinge other matters, notably a question of function: what exactly SF does, and how it gains its best effects.
BYS was published in England and the US in 1973, the English edition appearing first, from Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
The book took three years to write. I had no financial support, and was assisted by no seat of learning. I favoured no clique. I used my own library. I consulted no one. Really, it was a bit of a gamble, since I have a wife and children to support by my writing. But there were two best sellers to fund the venture (The Hand-Reared Boy and A Soldier Erect). I looked both inward to the SF field itself and outward to the general reader, Samuel Johnson’s and Virginia Woolf’s common reader; I wished to argue against certain misconceptions which vexed me, and I hoped to demonstrate what those who did not read SF were missing.
There was no history of science fiction in existence. I wrote the sort of book which it might amuse and profit me to read.
Of the two initial problems facing me, I overcame the second to my satisfaction: how do you define SF, and what are its origins? Obviously the questions are related. My ponderous definition of SF has often been quoted, and for that I’m grateful, although I prefer my shorter snappier version, ‘SF is about hubris clobbered by nemesis’, which found its way into The Penguin Dictionary of Modem Quotations. The definition in BYS runs as follows:
Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is characteristically cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.
Not entirely satisfactory, like most definitions. It has the merit of including