This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ (‘an idiot who can fix things,’ says Kott), a survival job, since it helps maintain the status quo. Similar survivors in other novels are pot-healers, traders, doctors, musical instrument makers, and android-shooters (since androids threaten the status quo).

      The characters who survive are generally aided by some system of knowledge involving faith; the system is rarely a scientific one; it is more likely to be ancient. In Martian Time-Slip, it is the never-formulated paranormal understanding of the bleekmen; Bohlen respects this vague eschatological faith without comprehending it, just as Kott despises it. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, the four thousand year old Chinese work of divination, performs a similar function in the The Man in the High Castle, whilst in Counter-Clock World Lotta Hermes randomly consults the Bible, which predicts the future with an alarming accuracy. In both Dick’s two early masterpieces, Time-Slip and High Castle, this religious element – presented as something crumbling, unreliable, to be figured out with pain – is well-integrated into the texture of the novel.

      Dick’s next great book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, was written very soon after Martian Time-Slip, and the two are closely related, not only because Mars is in both cases used as a setting. To my view, Eldritch is a flawed work, over-complicated, and finally disappearing into a cloud of quasi-theology; whereas Martian Time-Slip has a calm and lucidity about it. But in Eldritch we also find an ancient and unreliable metastructure of faith, in this case embodied in the ferocious alien entity which fuses with Eldritch’s being.

      ‘Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox … and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become … maybe that’s the source of the knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding.’

      So muses Barney Mayerson. Jack Bohlen desperately needs a transcendental act of fusion; he is estranged from his wife, sold by his first employer, threatened by his second, invaded by the schizophrenia of the boy he befriends. He sees in this mental illness, so frighteningly depicted in the book, the ultimate enemy. From this ultimate enemy comes the time-slip of the title and that startling paragraph which seems to condense much of the feeling of the book – and, indeed, of Dick’s work in general, when Bohlen works out what Manfred’s mental illness means: ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’

      This is the maledictory circle within which Dick’s beings move and from which they have to escape: although almost any change is for the worse, stasis means death, spiritual if not actual.

      Any discussion of Dick’s work makes it sound a grim and appalling world. So, on the surface, it may be; yet it must also be said that Dick is amazingly funny. The terror and the humour are fused. It is this rare quality which marks Dick out. This is why critics, in seeking to convey his essential flavour, bring forth the names of Dickens and Kafka, earlier masters of Ghastly Comedy.

      Martian Time-Slip is full of delightful comic effects, not least in the way in which Steiner and the lecherous Otto Zitte ship illegal gourmet food items from Earth in unmanned Swiss rockets. Dick’s fondness for oddball entities and titles is much in evidence, notably in the surrealist public school, where the Emperor Tiberius, Sir Francis Drake, Mark Twain, and various other dignitaries talk to the boys. Below this easy-going humour lies a darker stream of wit. Arnie Kott’s terrible and fatal mistake of believing that reality is merely another version of the schizoid past is also part of the comedy of mistakes to which Dick’s characters always dance.

      There is a deeper resemblance to the work of Dickens and Kafka. Dick, like Dickens, enjoys a multi-plotted novel. As the legal metaphor is to Bleak House, the world-as-prison to Little Dorrit, the dust-heap in Our Mutual Friend, the tainted wealth to Great Expectations, so is Mars to Martian Time-Slip. It is exactly and vividly drawn; it is neither the Mars as adventure-playground of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the Mars as parallel of Pristine America of Ray Bradbury; this is Mars used in elegant and expert fashion as metaphor of spiritual poverty. In functioning as a dreamscape, it has much in common with the semi-allegorical, semi-surrealist locations used by Kafka to heighten his Ghastly Comedy of bafflement. (Staring at his house standing in the meagre Martian desert, Bohlen smiles and says, ‘This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.’)

      Dick’s alliance, if one may call it that, with writers such as Dickens and Kafka makes him immediately congenial to English and European readers. It may be this quality which has brought him reputation and respect on this side of the Atlantic before his virtues are fully recognised in his own country.

      Perhaps I may be allowed to add that I feel particularly delighted to see this novel added to the growing list of titles in the Master Series. I read it over a decade ago in the American Ballantine edition, admired it greatly, and recommended it over the next few years to several British publishers. Some seemed to feel that it was too ‘advanced’ for the English market; also there were contractual difficulties. One admirer of the book was Mr Ronald Whiting, who was establishing his own publishing firm, but he was defeated by various unlucky circumstances; his firm closed down before it could publish Martian Time-Slip.

      Since then, Martian Time-Slip had been floating round in a limbo of its own, in a tombworld of non-publication, with nothing ever happening to it again.

      1. Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick, NEL, 1976. This edition marks its first English publication, belated but perhaps – in view of Dick’s growing reputation as a master of science fiction – not untimely.

       Why They Left Zirn Unguarded: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

      The early and mid-fifties formed a period of great richness for SF (although we did not notice at the time). Magazines sprouted and proliferated as never before, in a last glory before the onslaught of paperbacks – in much the same way, I imagine, that all the crack stage-coach runs in this country were at their peak in the very years the railways were making them obsolete.

      Smith’s bookstalls were flooded with covers celebrating marvels of astronomy and space-engineering, much as they now sport anatomy and the freaky electronics of pop. Then it was that one bought one’s first Galaxys, F&SFs, Thrilling Wonders, IFs, Spaces, Fantastics, and the lesser but delectable breeds, all of which seemed to be edited by Robert Lowndes: Future, Original, and Dynamic. These magazines were not imports but British reprints.

      Among the clever new names, one searched particularly for those of Richard Matheson, William Tenn, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, and – if one was smart enough – J. G. Ballard. They were all short-story writers; the SF magazines were the ideal medium; and none of them was as much fun as Robert Sheckley.

      The typical Sheckley appearance was in Galaxy, edited by the celebrated madman H. L. Gold, where he appeared beside other celebrated madmen like Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon. Madmen are essential to SF. We still have madmen today, but often the madness gets into the style rather than the story, as with Harlan Ellison and some of the layabouts in New Worlds Quarterly. Sheckley kept his madness honed to a fine point by writing clear English about utterly convincing impossibilities. After all the sobersides in Astounding, it was marvellous to read a man whose characters never scored victories (though they rarely suffered utter defeat), whose planets were lunatic and draughty, whose aliens pursued totally inane rituals (like the Dance of the Reciprocal Trade Agreement), whose technologies were generally dedicated to perfecting robots which lurched СКАЧАТЬ