This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ Samuel Butler, Thomas Hardy and H. G. Wells.

      To call Butler an autodidact is to exaggerate. He was of the prosperous middle class, his father being a canon of Lincoln, and he was educated at Shrewsbury and Cambridge. But he repudiated his father’s religion and influence, becoming virtually a different man by leaving home for New Zealand, where he farmed sheep. In New Zealand, he began his literary career, the fruits of which are noted for their anti-Christian and unorthodox flavour – foremost among them being Erewhon (1872).

      One can see that Erewhon is not science fiction; one can also see how in crossing of some mysterious many ways it resembles science fiction. An imaginary journey, the crossing of some mysterious barrier (in this case mountains), and the discovery of another society with attendant marvels – these are the common stock alike of the medieval romance and of modern science fiction. Erewhon also has negative attributes which distance it from the ordinary novel. The central figure is solitary, a corollary of which is that there is no great emotional depth in the story; and human psychology is not a strong element of the design, which focuses instead on what is new, unknown. What is new and unknown is embodied in a series of brilliant ideas, brilliantly handled in a satirical way which reminds us somewhat of Peacock or, to look forward, Aldous Huxley. These ideas stem in the main from Darwinism, a subject to which Butler devoted several books.

      Thomas Hardy attended Darwin’s funeral. His sombre imagination was fired by the misty stretches of landscape revealed by evolutionary thought.

      We do not read Hardy for his ideas, thought they are present – the ideas of a dreamer more than an intellectual; we may read him as the novelist of countryside now largely vanished, though Hardy could scarcely distinguish one flower from another. In fact, what is most compelling in the Wessex novels is the struggle at all levels between traditional and disruptive new ways of thought. More directly, an evolutionary emphasis is present from the early novels to – and climaxing in – The Dynasts (1903), Hardy’s great para-historical drama with an evolving Immanent Will.

      The case of H.G.Wells, who was taught by Darwin’s friend and ally, Thomas Huxley, is too familiar to need examination here. Like Hardy, Wells got his education where he could, and taught himself by teaching. His brilliant entry into the literary field marks the con- gruence of two grand gloomy ideas, evolution crossed by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: The Time Machine (1895). The Time Machine is distinctively science fiction in the way that The Dynasts distinctively is not. Indeed, it is science fiction in a way that much later science fiction is not – not only does it contain new ideas, but it combines them in a new way. Small wonder that it has been the exemplar of much that followed.

      The Island of Dr Moreau, published the year after The Time Machine, shows Wells again worrying the bone of evolution. Wells himself pointed to its similarities with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. And he says, ‘I have never been able to get away from life in the mass and life in general as distinguished from life in the individual experience, in any book I have ever written.’ This viewpoint of Man as Statistic, typical of many an SF writer, is encouraged by Malthusian thought. Wells and Hardy and Butler, being outside the swim of middle-class society, had little to lose by a new approach; it came naturally to them to express what was not received wisdom, and to propagate the unpopular. With the unpopular, Wells caught the popular ear.

      These distinguished English writers were preceded by considerable writers from across the Channel. France was the first country of the Enlightenment; in Paris in 1771 was published a book which is in every way a product of its age – except that it is recognisably kin to science fiction.

      While Cook was busy discovering Botany Bay, Boston was holding its Tea Party, and the first iron bridge was being built, Sebastien Mercier published his predictive work, L’An Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante. Mercier visualised a time, seven centuries ahead, when society had improved and perfected itself. The actual and the metaphorical Bastilles have vanished. This futuristic utopian fiction was translated and published in other European countries and eventually in the newly independent America.

      How was it that the English by contrast took, even then, a much less sanguine view of the future? I cannot resist contrasting Mercier’s dream of the future as a place of fountains and fine buildings with the typically British preoccupation with disaster. Take for instance, an anonymous squib by one ‘Antonius’ published in Lloyd’s Evening Post for 25-28 November, 1771 (and never noticed again until now). It looks two centuries ahead to a ruinous Britain overcome by an American Empire.

      Two Americans are guided round London by a poor Briton. The latter provides a running commentary as follows:

      ‘Yonder is a field of turnips, there stood the Palace of Whitehall; as to St James’s there are no traces of that left, it stood somewhere near that pond. Here stood that venerable pile of antiquity, Westminster Abbey, which was founded in the year 796; at the west end was the famous Chapel of Henry the Seventh, in which were interred most of our English Kings. That on the right is the remains of Queen Elizabeth’s tomb; that on the left, those of King William the Third; all the rest are swept away by time.

      ‘The whole church had been ornamented with monuments of Admirals, Generals, Poets, Philosophers, and others, two of which only we found legible, that of Locke and Newton, some being quite defaced, and others we could not come at on account of the ruins fallen in upon them. – What a melancholy sight, we exclaimed, that this venerable dome, dedicated to God, should be now converted into a stable!’

      And so on. South Sea House is a mere jakes, its infamy well known. India House was destroyed one hundred and sixty years earlier, ‘for the blood they shed in India called for vengeance, and they were expelled the Country’.

      Why this dark vision? Only a generation after Antonius, a girl of eighteen was writing the melancholy and perverse Frankenstein – an English girl of eighteen. Perhaps our national lack of hope has preserved the country from some of the excesses inflicted on the rest of the world in the last two centuries.

      In the erudite and naive patchwork of creations we call science fiction, there is no other figure like Jules Verne; even his fellow-countrymen have not come to terms with him. Beyond pointing out that his immense Voyages Extraordinaires stands like an Enlightenment fortress which slowly crumbles into the darkness of the twentieth century, I prefer to mention two of his honourable predecessors who also precede H. G. Wells.

      Restif de la Bretonne’s La Decouverte Australe par un Homme-Volant, was published in 1781. It is a major speculative work describing flying machines, airborne fleets, and a civilisation in the wilds of Australia (something no living Australian would dare postulate). In a later work, Les Posthumes (1802), Bretonne describes other planets and extra-terrestrial beings.

      But in 1854, in Paris, a much more intensely science-fictional work was published: more science-fictional because it uses for its structure those grand gloomy ideas I have already mentioned. Charles Ischir Defontenay’s novel Star ou Psi de Cassiopée combines symbolism and science fiction; the result is rather like a painting by Gustave Moreau. Star is a sophisticated story concerning a remote solar system of which Star, oddly enough, is not the sun but the planet, the sole planetary body of a system containing three suns and some satellites.

      The humanoid races living on Star exhibit the features of various conflicting evolutionary theories. The Savelces result from miscegenation between a god and a small worm; the Ponarbates derive from animal species which occasionally give birth to superior types; the Nemsedes are the fruit of a kind of spontaneous generation ‘born from the sour lime of the soil heated by electric air’, and so on. One of Defontenay’s tribes is hermaphrodite, anticipating similiar themes by Theodore Sturgeon and Ursula Le Guin by a century or more.

      Defontenay’s tone might be described as religious СКАЧАТЬ