Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss

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      We captured the Falklands from you Spaniards back in Johnson’s time. And what did Johnson have to say about that victory, in his ponderous, humorous fashion?

      … What have we acquired? What, but a bleak and gloomy solitude, an island thrown aside from human use, stormy in winter, and barren in summer; an island which not the southern savages have dignified with habitation; where a garrison must be kept in a state that contemplates with envy the exiles of Siberia; of which the expense will be perpetual, and the use only occasional …

      How the words ring on!

      Garry Kilworth has gone to Hong Kong. Perhaps we shall have a similar devastating bulletin from him in the next Yearbook. SF in England has settled down to comfortable squalor, relatively unmoved by dirty needles, inner city decay, and the prospect of union with Europe. At least you preserved the clean contorted rocks of Figueras and the drypoint desert as background. Your air was clear.

      You may not have been in the very front rank, Dali, but you stood up to be counted. At the least, you kept us amused throughout a lifetime, like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor rolled into one. You replenished that small vocabulary of images which shapes our imaginative life. You are the great international SF writer in paint.

      And you chucked that bloody ocelot into the water.

      All the best in the summer stars,

      Your admirer,

      Brian Aldiss

       ‘A ROBOT TENDED YOUR REMAINS …’

       The Advance of the Mega-machine

      Every so often, someone writes a heart-rending book about science fiction. To say how bad it is. Perhaps to say how good his or her writing is and how little appreciated. That needs courage.

      The most academic journal in the field, Science-Fiction Studies, in its issue #61 (November 1993) listed my name among the five or six most neglected names of authors. So I suppose I am also entitled to lament. However, cheerfulness keeps breaking in.

      There remains that comment of Samuel Johnson’s in his letter to Lord Chesterfield, which no doubt speaks to the hearts of many authors: ‘I had done all I could’, Johnson writes, ‘and no man is well pleased to have his all neglected, be it ever so little’. The elegant English art of litotes! All the same, I have had a fair run for my money. More particularly, perhaps, in the United States than in my own country. Three books on my writing, plus a wacking great 360-page bibliography of an unprecedented accuracy (being the work of my wife Margaret Aldiss) have been published—in the States, but not the UK.

      In that same Science-Fiction Studies article, Gary K. Wolfe, one of our most acute and active critics, lists topics he feels are neglected, such as the contributions of SF editors other than Gernsback and Campbell.

      Another topic rarely discussed goes to the very roots of SF—the drift towards the impersonal, towards humans as units, as machines. Towards rule by machine. Towards the sort of giantism in corporations and architecture such as Nazi Germany preferred. Towards anything which rules out of court the quiet dissident voice of the individual. Towards crushing the anima. Towards the immense—which is always cruel.

      Towards metropolis and megalopolis.

      Towards galactic empires.

      Towards artificial intelligences taking over from us.

      Towards, in sum, most of the gaudy goodies on the front counter of SF’s supermarket …

      Are not these items which reinforce anomia and spiritual impoverishment among the prevailing dreams of SF? Approached ambivalently, yet rarely rejected out of hand. Our SF culture springs from nations with most power. So power is naturally a prevailing theme.

      A Czech playright by the name of Vaclav Havel spoke out on this threat in the days before his country threw off the Communist yoke, and before he became president of the Czech Republic. Here is an extract from what he said:

      In my view Soviet totalitarianism is an extreme manifestation—a strange, cruel, and dangerous species—of a deep-seated problem which equally finds expression in advanced Western society. These systems have in common something that the Czech philosopher Vaclav Belohradsky calls ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’. That is, a trend towards impersonal power and rule by mega-machines or colossi that escape human control.

      I believe the world is losing its human dimension. Self-propelling mega-machines, juggernauts of impersonal power such as large-scale enterprises and faceless governments, represent the greatest threat to our present-day world. In the final analysis, totalitarianism is not more than an extreme expression of that threat.

      My first SF novel, Non-Stop, aired this theme. The big battalions, the grandiose ideas, have taken over from individuals and, in the words of the prologue, ‘gobbled up their real lives’. The theme finds expression in much of my fiction since then. Less than a decade ago we were being confronted by that ‘eschatology of the impersonal’ in one of its most dreadful guises, Armageddon brought about by nuclear destruction, and by the belief that the Enemy was evil and had to be destroyed.^[1]

      My fondness for Orwell’s old novel, as noted elsewhere, is because for him utopia is just a note saying I LOVE YOU, a rather seedy bedroom, a girl, and privacy … great things to set against a megamachine. Clifford Simak was against the mega-machine; time and again, his characters seek something better—in City, his best-loved novel, it is a place where men do not have to be humans or dogs dogs. Philip Dick also fought against the mega-machine. His novels were for so long more popular in France and England than in the USA.

      Every decade, SF changes as the world changes. The most popular SF/Fantasy author of the nineties is Terry Pratchett, with his wonderful Discworld comedies. They adroitly side-step any megamachine back to the invention of the wheel.

      More typically—SF is a solemn business—the novels of the nineties often strive to accommodate themselves within ‘the eschatology of the impersonal’, perhaps in an attempt at domestication. The machine manifests itself as cyberspace in the popular novels of William Gibson and others. Cyberspace has become a popular buzz word, with the Internet a manifestation of its neural structure. In Tom Maddox’s novel Halo, several characters are ingested by Aleph, a controlling artificial super-intelligence installed on an orbiting satellite.

      Jerry Chapman is one such character. He asks Aleph what became of his body.

      ‘It was … recycled. A robot tended your remains with loving grace.’

      ‘So I am nowhere.’

      ‘Or here. Or everywhere. As you wish.’

      Here the limits of human individuality seem to extend to infinity—but within the limits of the machine.

      One of the unspoken divisions in the SF field lies between those who delight in the mega-machine and those who mistrust it. Rich and acclaimed authors, the L. Ron Hubbards of this and other worlds, are generally those who subscribe to and propagate the easy belief that bigger means better, that larger is lovelier. Happily, we know how God despises wealth, СКАЧАТЬ