Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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СКАЧАТЬ than Lester del Rey’s. It actually manages to mention the title of one of my novels, Barefoot in the Head (‘extravagant if not incomprehensible’). The gain is offset by a veiled threat. The last time anyone said such rough things about Gernsback, we are told, ‘was at the 1952 Chicago con; a fan named Chester A. Polk was sent to hospital and Claude Degler, head of the Cosmic Circle, drove Don Rogers out of fandom for good’.

      Alexei Panshin, reviewing BYS in F&SF, also threatened to have me drummed out of the regiment.

      Fans like Kyle have had to watch SF taken out of their hands, when once they must have thought it was in their pockets. Well, chums, it belongs to Big Business now, so we’re all losers. The media have taken over—and First Fandom is preferable to the Fourth Estate.

      More ambivalent is the attitude of general critics of the field. There’s a feel of punches being pulled. Tom Clareson, in ‘Towards a History of Science Fiction’,^[22] evades the issue entirely, with a bland paragraph on Frankenstein which follows on a reference to Asimov’s The Gods Themselves. In James Gunn’s history of SF,^[23] he gives BYS a more than friendly nod, but cannot resist delivering the familiar litany of defunct magazines, backed by displays of gaudy covers. Like del Rey, Gunn names none of my fiction; like del Rey he lumps me in with the New Wave, though obviously without malice. In his later four-volumed critical anthology,^[24] Gunn—always honest and painstaking—becomes more venturesome; he is a ‘safe’ scholar moving slowly to a more individual, and creative, position.

      Clareson and Gunn, like Kyle and Moskowitz, may be regarded honourably as old-timers in the field. Robert Scholes and Eric S. Rabkin, one gathers, are relative newcomers—as their ‘thinking person’s guide to the genre’ demonstrates.^[25] This means they cannot reel off litanies of dead stories in dead magazines. It also means they adopt Frankenstein as the progenitor of the species. Hooray! No matter they don’t acknowledge where exactly they derived the idea from. They are genial about BYS, and mention in passing that I have written fiction, though of all my novels only Barefoot in the Head is named. More laziness! Perhaps someone somewhere taught it once. Charles Platt, are you blushing?

      All the critical books I have mentioned are quirky, including my own. I am less conscious of quirks in two recent encyclopaedic works, Neil Barron’s Anatomy of Wonder: Science Fiction^[26] and the John Clute, Peter Nicholls Encyclopedia of SF,^[27] both of which seek to be dispassionate in judgement. Both take cognizance of the range of my work over the last twenty-five years, short stories as well as novels, for which I am grateful.

      Clute’s Encyclopaedia is more bulky than The Oxford Companion to English Literature. It is a fact worthy of consideration.

      On the whole Billion Year Spree has entered the blood stream. I have gained fewer black marks for it than for my defence of the New Wave writers in England during the 1960s, when I fought for their right to express themselves in their own way rather than in someone else’s. Despite the attempts of persons like del Rey to lump me in with the New Wave, I flourished before it arrived, and continue still to do. That experience taught me how conservative readers of SF are, for all their talk about The Literature of Change. But perhaps the study of SF, virtually non-existent when I began BYS, has brought in a more liberal race of academics; one hopes it is so.

      This also must be said. I know, am friendly with, or at least have met, almost all the living writers and critics mentioned in this article. Such is part of the social life of science fiction writers, nor would one have it otherwise. David Kyle I have known since the 1950s—a man who would not set the head of the Cosmic Circle on to me unless I really deserved it. This gregariousness, reinforced by such SF institutions as conventions and fanzines, with their informal critical attitudes, forms a kind of concealed context within which—or against which—most SF writers still exist, long after the collapse of Gernsback’s SF League.

      Samuel Delany has pointed to this concealed context, urging formal critics to take note of it.^[28] Certainly, I was aware of it when writing BYS, even if I missed it at Lunacon, when it became solid flesh in the form of Sam Moskowitz. My brief here has been to talk of adverse responses to BYS. So I have not talked about the praise it has received in many quarters, outside and inside the SF field. I intended the book to be enjoyed, and rejoiced when it and the Aldiss/Wingrove successor gave enjoyment.

      BYS concluded by forecasting a great increase in academic involvement in science fiction. That involvement has developed rapidly, as all can testify. Watching from the sidelines, I see some of the difficulties from which academics suffer.

      Humanities departments are under threat in times of recession, in a way that science departments—though themselves not without difficulties—are not. In self-defence, academics in humanities posts write their papers in a form of language which imitates the jargon of their colleagues in the harder sciences. The result is frequently an inviolable form of gobbledegook. An example of what I mean is taken almost randomly from a respected critical journal:

      The most serious difficulty with the genre concept comes from the fact that the existence of a particular genre structure (variant) in a given epoch is usually accompanied by literary consciousness of writers, critics, and readers who recognize this structure as different from the synchronic structures of other genres. This intersubjective recognition, depending as it does on the general level of education and culture, on the familiarity of the reading public with traditional and modern literatures, and on the state of criticism in the epoch, is of course, often arbitrary.

      While not entirely resisting attempts at divination, these two sentences seem to say little, and say it in an ugly way remote from the graces of our language as she is spoken. A defence mechanism is in operation. To speak plainly is to risk being taken for a fool. Difficulty must be seen to operate in the texts, or else there may be difficulty with grants in the future. SF criticism, being new, is particularly vulnerable to the administrative chopper.

      Beneath the tortured language, what is said rarely carries malice. At least not openly. Our boat is still new and not properly tested: it must not be rocked. Thus criticism and its object have come full circle since the eighteenth century. Then, judgements were expressed with clarity and style, and were often designed to wound:

      Cibber, write all your verses upon glasses;

      So that we may not use them for our——.

      1. 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.

      2. Leonard Woolf, The Annotated Frankenstein, New York, Clarkson N. Potter Inc, 1977.

      3. Julian Symons, Bloody Murder, London, Faber and Faber, 1972 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974).

      4. Christopher Small, Ariel Like a Harpy, London, Gollancz, 1972.

      5. In Literary Women, London, W. H. Allen, 1972.

      6. Muriel Spark, Child of Light: A Reassessment of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Hadleigh Bridge, Essex, Tower Bridge Publications, 1951 (revised and published as Mary Shelley, London, Constable, 1988).

      7. W. Warren Wagar, Terminal Visions, Bloomington, IN, Indiana University Press, 1982.

      8. Percy G. Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel, Lexington, KY, University of Kentucky Press, 1984.

      9. William Walling, Mary Shelley, Boston, MA, Twayne, 1972.

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