Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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      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 a consideration of form as well as content. On the whole, criticisms of this definition have been more effective than those directed at my proposals for the origins of the genre.^[12]

      It needs no great critical faculty to observe that most SF is not about ‘a search for the definition of man’; it is about telling a story to please the reader—and in that it is no different from any other literature. Only when SF texts are piled together do we see a common restlessness about where mankind is heading through its own blind efforts. More questionable is that phrase about the Gothic mould.

      I am not one hundred per cent sure about the phrase myself, but this much is clear: I got it from Leslie Fiedler. Fiedler writes the kind of criticism one can read with enjoyment, unlike most of the criticism which originates from within the orbit of SF academia. Fiedler has this to say of the Gothic mode, following on a discussion of Monk Lewis’s The Monk of 1976:

      The major symbols of the gothic have been established, and the major meanings of the form made clear. In general, those symbols and meanings depend on an awareness of the spiritual; isolation of the individual in a society where all communal systems of value have collapsed or have been turned into meaningless clichés. There is a basic ambivalence to the attitude of the gothic writers to the alienation which they perceive. On the one hand, their fiction projects a fear of the solitude which is the price of freedom; and on the other hand, an almost hysterical attack on all institutions which might inhibit that freedom or mitigate the solitude it breeds … The primary meaning of the gothic romance, then lies in its substitution of terror for love as a central theme of fiction … Epater la bourgeoisie: this is the secret slogan of the tale of terror. (Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960))

      Spiritual isolation, alienation—these lie also at the heart of SF, like serpents in a basket.

      Fiedler defines the sort of fiction that most of my admired contemporaries were writing. I saw in them, too, a reflection of my own responses to society which prompted me towards science fiction. The love of art and science I developed as a child was a rebellion against the smug bourgeois society in which I found myself. Art and Science were what They hated most. In this way, I reinforced the solitude I felt. This also: I merely wished to épater society, not overthrow it; the satirist needs his target.

      This stinging function of SF was always apparent, from the days of Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, like its progenitor, Caleb Williams, contains more punitive litigators than punitive monsters within its pages), through H. G. Wells, and Campbell’s Astounding, until the time when I sat down to write BYS in 1970. During the 1970s and 1980s, SF became widely popular, widely disseminated. Its sting has been removed. The awful victories of The Lord of the Rings, Star Trek and Star Wars have brought—well, not actually respectability, but Instant Whip formulas to SF. The product is blander. It has to be immediately acceptable to many palates, some of them prepubertal. Even the sentimentality of such as Spider and Jeanne Robinson’s ‘Stardance’ is not considered too sickly sweet for consumption. As Kurt Vonnegut ripened on the tree and fell with a thud to earth, so too did the nutritive content of SF.

      The nutritive content has been fixed to suit mass taste. Nowadays the world, or solar system, or the universe, or the Lord Almighty, has to be saved by a group of four or five people which includes a Peter Pan figure, a girl of noble birth, and a moron, a Forrest Gump of some kind. The prescription thus incorporates an effigy for everyone to identify with. In the old days, we used to destroy the world, and it took only one mad scientist. SF was an act of defiance, a literature of subversion, not whimsy.

      Notice Fiedler’s comment on the basic ambivalence which gothic writers feel towards their alienation. Leaving aside Instant Whip SF, one can perceive an ambivalence in science fiction which goes deep—perhaps one should say an ambivalence which is the subject. The emphasis of this ambivalence has changed over the years. Gernsback’s Amazing was decidedly technocratic in bias, and purported to demonstrate how the world’s ills could be solved by increased applications of technology—a reasonable proposition, if a century late—yet large proportions of the fiction concerned experiments etc. which went terribly wrong. Hubris was continually clobbered by nemesis.

      Another fundamental ambivalence is less towards technology than towards science itself. Even technology-oriented authors like Arthur C. Clarke show science superseded by or transcended by mysticism and religion; such surely is the meaning of his most famous short story, ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’. It is not science but the fulfilment of religion which brings about the termination of the Universe. The world ends not with a bang but a vesper.

      Another ambivalence is the attitude of writers and fans to SF itself. They declare it publicly to be far superior to any possible ‘mimetic’ fiction; yet privately they laugh about it, revel in the worst examples of the art, and boast of how little SF they read.

      SF is a function of the Gothic or post-Gothic. So, for that matter, are the novels of Peter Straub, and they also—in such examples as the tantalizingly named Ghost Story—bestraddle customary definitions of the ghost stories and mainstream literature.

      What I wish I had altered was the final word of my definition, to have said not ‘mould’ but ‘mode’.

      One of the difficulties of defining SF springs from the fact that it is not a genre as such, just as the absurd category ‘Non-fiction’ is not a genre. Taking my cue from Rosemary Jackson,^[13] I suggest that our problems in the area of definition will be lightened if we think of SF as a mode. Jackson says, ‘It is perhaps more helpful to define the fantastic as a literary mode rather than a genre, and to place it between the opposite modes of the marvellous and the mimetic’.

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