Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (329 page)

Painfully, Superman stirred in his seat. He sat so rapt for so long that his limbs grew stiff and dead without his noticing it.

Universal thoughts may occur if one times carefully enough one’s circumbendibus about a given table

“Dictation,” he said, and waited impatiently until the command had penetrated backwards to the limbo by the fire where Stackpole sat. What he had to say was so terribly important—yet it had to wait on these people.

As was his custom, he rose and began to walk round the table, speaking in phrases quickly delivered. This was to be the testament to the new way of life.…

“Consciousness is not expendable but concurrent…There may have been many time nodes at the beginning of the human race…The mentally deranged often revert to different time rates. For some, a day seems to stretch on for ever…We know by experience that for children time is seen in the convex mirror of consciousness, enlarged and distorted beyond its focal point.…” He was momentarily irritated by the scared face of his wife appearing outside the study window, but he brushed it away and continued.

“…its focal point…Yet man in his ignorance has persisted in pretending time was some sort of uni-directional flow, and homogenous at that…despite the evidence to the contrary…Our conception of ourselves—no, this erroneous conception has become a basic life assumption.…”

Daughters of daughters

Westermark’s mother was not given to metaphysical speculation, but as she was leaving the room, she turned and said to her daughter-in-law, “You know what I sometimes think? Jack is so strange, I wonder at nights if men and women aren’t getting more and more apart in thought and in their ways with every generation—you know, almost like separate species. My generation made a great attempt to bring the two sexes together in equality and all the rest, but it seems to have come to nothing.”

“Jack will get better.” Janet could hear the lack of confidence in her voice.

“I thought the same thing—about men and women getting wider apart I mean—when my husband was killed.”

Suddenly all Janet’s sympathy was gone. She had recognised a familiar topic drifting on to the scene, knew well the careful tone that ironed away all self-pity as her mother-in-law said, “Bob was dedicated to speed, you know. That was what killed him really, not the fool backing into the road in front of him.”

“No blame was attached to your husband,” Janet said. “You should try not to let it worry you still.”

“You see the connection though…This progress thing. Bob so crazy to get round the next bend first, and now Jack…Oh well, there’s nothing a woman can do.”

She closed the door behind her. Absently, Janet picked up the message from the next generation of women: “Thank you for the dollies.”

The resolves and the sudden risks involved

He was their father. Perhaps Jane and Peter should come back, despite the risks involved. Anxiously, Janet stood there, moving herself with a sudden resolve to tackle Jack straight away. He was so irritable, so unapproachable, but at least she could observe how busy he was before interrupting him.

As she slipped into the side hall and made for the back door, she heard her mother-in-law call her. “Just a minute!” she answered.

The sun had broken through, sucking moisture from the damp garden. It was now unmistakably autumn. She rounded the corner of the house, stepped round the rose bed, and looked into her husband’s study.

Shaken, she saw he leaned half over the table. His hands were over his face, blood ran between his fingers and dripped on to an open magazine on the table top. She was aware of Stackpole sitting indifferently beside the electric fire.

She gave a small cry and ran round the house again, to be met at the back door by Mrs Westermark.

“Oh, I was just—Janet, what is it?”

“Jack, Mother! He’s had a stroke or something terrible!”

“But how do you know?”

“Quick, we must phone the hospital—1 must go to him.”

Mrs Westermark took Janet’s arm, “Perhaps we’d better leave it to Mr Stackpole, hadn’t we? I’m afraid—”

“Mother, we must do what we can. I know we’re amateurs. Please let me go.”

“No, Janet, we’re—it’s
their
world. I’m frightened. They’ll come if they want us.” She was gripping Janet in her fright. Their wild eyes stared momentarily at each other as if seeing something else, and then Janet snatched herself away. “I must go to him,” she said.

She hurried down the hall and pushed open the study door. Her husband stood now at the far end of the room by the window, while blood streamed from his nose.

“Jack!” she exclaimed. As she ran towards him, a blow from the empty air struck her on the forehead, so that she staggered aside, falling against a bookcase. A shower of smaller volumes from the upper shelf fell on her and round her-. Exclaiming, Stackpole dropped his notebook and ran round the table to her. Even as he went to her aid, he noted the time from his watch: 10.24

Aid after 10.24 and the tidiness of bed

Westermark’s mother appeared in the doorway.

“Stay where you are,” Stackpole shouted, “or there will be more trouble! Jack, I’m right with you—God knows what you’ve felt, isolated without aid for three and a third minutes!” Angrily, he went across and stood within arm’s length of his patient. He threw his handkerchief down on to the table.

“Mr Stackpole—” Westermark’s mother said tentatively from the door, an arm round Janet’s waist.

He looked back over his shoulder only long enough to say, “Get towels! Phone the Research Hospital for an ambulance and tell them to be here right away.”

By midday, Westermark was tidily in bed upstairs and the ambulance staff, who had treated him for what after all was only nosebleed, had left. Stackpole, as he turned from closing the front door, eyed the two women.

“I feel it is my duty to warn you,” he said heavily, “that another incident such as this might well prove fatal. This time we escaped very lightly. If anything else of this sort happens, I shall feel obliged to recommend to the board that Mr Westermark is moved back to the hospital.”

Current way to define accidents

“He wouldn’t want to go,” Janet said. “Besides, you are being absurd; it was entirely an accident. Now I wish to go upstairs and see how he is.”

“Just before you go, may I point out that what happened was
not
an accident—or not as we generally define accidents, since you saw the results of your interference through the study window before you entered. Where you were to blame—”

“But that’s absurd—” both women began at once. Janet went on to say, “I never would have rushed into the room as I did had I not seen through the window that he was in trouble.”

“What you saw was the result on your husband of your later interference.”

In something like a wail, Westermark’s mother said, “I don’t understand any of this. What did Janet bump into when she ran in?”

“She ran, Mrs Westermark, into the spot where her husband had been standing 3.3077 minutes earlier. Surely by now you have grasped this elementary business of time inertia?”

When they both started speaking at once, he stared at them until they stopped and looked at him. Then he said, “We had better go into the living room. Speaking for myself, I would like a drink.”

He helped himself, and not until his hand was round a glass of whisky did he say, “Now, without wishing to lecture to you ladies, I think it is high time you both realised that you are not living in the old safe world of classical mechanics ruled over by a god invented by eighteenth-century enlightenment. All that has happened here is perfectly rational, but if you are going to pretend it is beyond your female understandings—”

“Mr Stackpole,” Janet said sharply. “Can you please keep to the point without being insulting? Will you tell me why what happened was not an accident? I understand now that when I looked through the study window I saw my husband suffering from a collision that to him had happened three and something minutes before and to me would not happen for another three and something minutes, but at that moment I was so startled that I forgot—”

“No, no, your figures are wrong. The
total
time lapse is only 3.3077 minutes. When you saw your husband, he had been hit half that time—1.65385 minutes—ago, and there was another 1.65385 minutes to go before you completed the action by bursting into the room and striking him.”

“But she
didn’t
strike him!” the older woman cried.

Firmly, Stackpole diverted his attention long enough to reply. “She struck him at 10.24 Earthtime, which equals 10.20 plus about 36 seconds Mars or his time, which equals 9.59 or whatever Neptune time, which equals 156 and a half Sirius time. It’s a big universe, Mrs Westermark! You will remain confused as long as you continue to confuse event with time. May I suggest you sit down and have a drink?”

“Leaving aside the figures,” Janet said, returning to the attack—loathsome opportunist the man was—“how can you say that what happened was no accident? You are not claiming I injured my husband deliberately, I hope? What you say suggests that I was powerless from the moment I saw him through the window.”

“‘Leaving aside the figures.…’“ he quoted. “That’s where your responsibility lies. What you saw through the window was the result of your act; it was by then inevitable that you should complete it, for it had already been completed.”

Through the window, draughts of time blow

“I can’t understand!” she clutched her forehead, gratefully accepting a cigarette from her mother-in-law, while shrugging off her consolatory “Don’t try to understand, dear!” “Supposing when I had seen Jack’s nose bleeding, I had looked at my watch and thought, ‘It’s 10.20 or whenever it was, and he may be suffering from my interference, so I’d better not go in,’ and I
hadn’t
gone in? Would his nose then miraculously have healed?”

“Of course not. You take such a mechanistic view of the universe. Cultivate a mental approach, try and live in your own century! You could not think what you suggest because that is not in your nature: just as it is not in your nature to consult your watch intelligently, just as you always ‘leave aside the figures’, as you say. No, I’m not being personal: it’s all very feminine and appealing in a way. What I’m saying is that if
before
you looked into the window you had been
able to think, ‘However I see my husband now, I must recall he has the additional experience of the next 3.3077 minutes’, then you could have looked in and seen him unharmed, and you would not have come bursting in as you did.”

She drew on her cigarette, baffled and hurt. “You’re saying I’m a danger to my own husband.”

“
You’re
saying that.”

“God, how I hate men!” she exclaimed. “You’re so bloody logical, so bloody smug!”

He finished his whisky and set the glass down on a table beside her so that he leant close. “You’re upset just now,” he said.

“Of course I’m upset! What do you think?” She fought a desire to cry or slap his face. She turned to Jack’s mother, who gently took her wrist.

“Why don’t you go off straight away and stay with the children for the weekend, darling? Come back when you feel like it. Jack will be all right and I can look after him—as much as he wants looking after.”

She glanced about the room.

“I will. I’ll pack right away. They’ll be glad to see me.” As she passed Stackpole on the way out, she said bitterly, “At least
they
won’t be worrying about the local time on Sirius!”

“They may,” said Stackpole, imperturbably from the middle of the room, “have to one day.”

All events, all children, all seasons

* * * *

“Man in His Time” by Brian Aldiss Copyright © 1965 by Brian Aldiss. Permission granted by the author and his agent, Robin Straus Agency, Inc.

The New Wave was a period in English-language science fiction, primarily but not exclusively British and American, from the early 1960s to the early 1970s during which several writers began producing stories and novels that were markedly different from both traditional Anglo-American science fiction published in preceding decades and from much of the work that older writers and more-traditional newer writers were publishing during this period. These differences involved both content and style.

In terms of content, Anglo-American SF for years had largely avoided explicit descriptions of sex, and topics such as drug use were either avoided or treated in a critical manner. By contrast, many examples of New Wave SF were much freer when it came to sexuality, as well as drug use. Little wonder, then, that many commentators upon the New Wave have linked it with its historical context of London’s Swinging Sixties and the American counterculture. In addition, New Wave SF tends to reveal a shift in tone and attitude from more-traditional SF. While British and American SF writers had long outgrown the naïve technophilia of much magazine SF from the Gernsback era, a persistent strain of positive feeling about humanity’s conquest of nature and outer space remained in the work of many writers, despite occasional ironic or pessimistic treatments of traditional SF themes. In contrast, New Wave SF was largely pessimistic, touching frequently on the human race’s penchant for self-destruction and speculating about where this may lead in an increasingly tenuous future. Also, as several commentators then and since have observed, if traditional SF could be said to be focused on outer space, New Wave SF was drawn more toward inner space, toward the social and psychological as opposed to the physical.

In European and American fiction in the late 1800s and early 1900s, a similar shift from the external to the internal could be seen in the decline of Realism and the rise of Modernism, and parallels between this development and the New Wave could be drawn. Traditional SF often relied upon a straightforward narrative style that maximized storytelling through dialogue and unornamented description and typically did not draw attention to its use of language. But just as Modernist writers sought to “make it new,” in Ezra Pound’s famous phrase, likewise many of the writers associated with the New Wave began to experiment with language and also with typography.

The New Wave did not begin with the writers to whom the label was later attached agreeing among themselves to start a new movement. The term’s best-known use prior to the 1960s came from French film criticism, in which
nouvelle vague
(New Wave) was used in reference to the work of innovative filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut beginning in the 1950s. Historians differ as to who was the first to apply the term to science fiction writers, but its use was solidified by American-born writer and editor Judith Merril. Recognizing that the most innovative English-language SF at the time was being produced by British writers, Merril moved to London in 1965 and eventually edited one of the key anthologies associated with the New Wave, England Swings SF (1968).

The fact that the British led what became the New Wave can be credited to the British magazine
New Worlds
, which Michael Moorcock began editing in 1964. Like Merril with her
Year’s Best SF
anthologies, Moorcock was open to innovative science fiction. In his editorials early in his tenure with
New Worlds
, Moorcock advocated for SF that pushed and expanded traditional assumptions of the form, as established by the American SF magazines that continued to dominate the field. Many younger writers especially responded to his call for science fiction that addressed the issues of its time in ways that were not beholden to previous approaches, and he also provided an arena for more established authors—among them Brian W. Aldiss and J. G. Ballard—to employ new themes and techniques. Other SF magazines in the mid-to-late 1960s and into the 1970s would prove to be open to New Wave SF as well, but
New Worlds
was clearly the standard bearer.

Although he would later deny that there was ever such a thing as the New Wave, let alone that he was a part of it, American writer Harlan Ellison also became part of its history, both in unconventional stories such as “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965) and “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967) and in editing Dangerous Visions (1967), an anthology of original stories in which he encouraged writers, many of them new to the field, to explore subjects and try techniques that would be unacceptable to the science-fiction magazines of the day. This was followed by an even larger sequel, Again, Dangerous Visions, in 1972.

As with any artistic movement whose aesthetic is based in large part on challenging the status quo and shocking the bourgeoisie, much New Wave SF was experimental for its own sake, confrontational or unconventional for the sake of shock value, and often obscure not because the intricacies of the subject demanded a challenging prose style but because, one suspects, the writers confused difficulty with genius. However, Sturgeon’s Law (“90 percent of anything is crap”) may be said to apply to this particular portion of SF as well as to other areas of the field, and despite the many efforts that were not as effective as their authors may have hoped, quite a few works connected with the New Wave emerged that have proven to be of lasting interest.

One example is Pamela Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe,” published in
New Worlds
in 1967. The story is set in the present, not the future, and in fact seems to contain no traditional science fiction elements whatsoever. However, its protagonist, an educated housewife whose intelligence is underutilized within the domestic concerns that consume her days, connects the repetitive routines of her life to meditations on chaos and entropy, with her own breakdown paralleling the far-future breakdown of the universe. Entropy was a frequent theme in New Wave SF; moreover, the story’s unconventional structure—told in fifty-four numbered paragraphs, which switch between narrative and scientific exposition—is in line with similar fictional experiments found in the work of other New Wave authors.

Unconventionality is also the hallmark of J. G. Ballard’s work during this period, as in his best-known story from his 1970 collection
The Atrocity Exhibition
, “The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race” (first published in 1966). This “condensed novel,” as Ballard thought of these stories, is told in fragments, and like the others in the collection involves a psychotic vision in the mind of a character who tries to come to terms with significant events as filtered through a barrage of media images. One of Ballard’s literary heroes was the American Beat writer William S. Burroughs, whose drug-fueled narratives dispensed with easy distinctions between reality and hallucination, and whose work defies simple chronological structure. Ballard in his stories and novels of the 1960s and early 1970s took science fiction into new directions, and it is no surprise that he became the writer Moorcock most often pointed to when editorializing about the direction toward which he felt the field should move.

Ballard’s novels also stand as representative examples of what many people, supporters and opponents alike, thought of when they spoke of the New Wave. At first glance some of his science fiction novels of the 1960s seem like latter-day variations on the earlier tradition of the “cozy catastrophe” as exemplified by writers such as John Wyndham. However, Ballard’s depictions of future disasters in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) owe as much to Modernist interiority as they do to the more action-oriented narratives of the SF tradition. Another contemporary aspect that distinguishes such novels from their predecessors is that Ballard consciously points to the human role in the making of these disastrous futures.

The relationship between these works and previous science fiction is clear, even if Ballard’s character-driven fiction and psychological concerns seemed somewhat out of synch with its more plot-centered antecedents. The same cannot be said of his work of the 1970s, which like Zoline’s “The Heat Death of the Universe” seemed to move further and further from the typical topics of the field. For example,
Crash
(1973) concerns a character’s connection between automobile accidents (rather graphically described) and sexual arousal. The SF element lies in the speculative nature of the protagonist’s scientific experiments, but otherwise the book reads much like an edgy mainstream novel. Similarly,
High-Rise
(1975) depicts the tensions and conflicts that arise among the residents of an apartment building. Like certain works later in the history of science fiction, such as the later novels of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, High-Rise feels like science fiction, even if it lacks the conventional apparatus of the genre. One might say that Ballard’s experiments with the boundaries of science fiction eventually led him out of the field altogether.

Another literary-minded author of science fiction whose career was already underway when the New Wave began, and whose work during this period exemplifies many New Wave themes and techniques, is Brian W. Aldiss. For instance, his novel
Report on Probability A
(1968), while rooted in science—in this case Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle—nonetheless reads very differently from a conventional SF novel, from the glacially slow, minutely detailed “reports” of three observers to its repetition to its layers upon layers of observers focused upon a house, its occupant, and a painting. The novel is strongly influenced by the French anti-novel of the mid twentieth century.

Another influence lay behind Aldiss’s most experimental novel,
Barefoot in the Head
(1969), in this case James Joyce, and most especially Joyce’s
Finnegans Wake
(1939). The future-war story was nothing new in science fiction, but what was new to the field was the linguistic playfulness and dexterity that Aldiss brought to this book. In part he employed such a Joycean style because of the novel’s depictions of the psychedelic Acid Head War and the attendant insanity that results.

Modernist influence is also apparent in two novels by John Brunner,
Stand on Zanzibar
(1968) and
The Sheep Look Up
(1972). Depicting an overpopulated future,
Stand on Zanzibar
is noteworthy for its fragmented, multifaceted narrative, which many commentators have linked to John Dos Passos’s
U.S.A. Trilogy
(1930–1936). Brunner utilized a similar technique in
The Sheep Look Up
, which focuses on environmental catastrophe.

The New Wave’s characteristic themes tended to be both cosmic (entropy being particularly popular) and contemporary, with major social changes, warfare, oppressive political regimes, and the negative implications of technology being frequently addressed. Not every writer associated with the New Wave was young, but by and large it seemed a kind of revolt of younger writers against their older colleagues, and generally these younger writers, with their critiques of the establishment and the status quo, were aligned with the youth culture of the period. Consider, for example, Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius Chronicles, beginning with
The Final Programme
in 1969. A sprawling set of parodies of the conventions of popular genre fiction, the series also includes metafictional techniques and in various ways relates to the counterculture of the period.

Although the New Wave has often been spoken of as primarily a British phenomenon, American writers participated as well, and several of them clearly have affinities with their British peers during this period. For example, Thomas M. Disch serialized his novel Camp Concentration (1968) in New Worlds, which provided a welcome home for this unusual first-person narrative about a political prisoner whose intelligence is artificially increased. Like Ballard’s High-Rise, Disch’s 334 (1972) deals with an apartment building and how its residents strive to cope with a dystopian New York City.

Another American, Norman Spinrad, was also one of the most controversial authors associated with the New Wave. His novel
Bug Jack Barron
(1969), also serialized in
New Worlds
, not only addresses the media-saturated environment of its near-future setting but does so with both a nod to the cut-up technique of William S. Burroughs and a high level of sexual explicitness.
New Worlds
at this time was subsidized in part by the British Arts Council, and the serialized version of the novel was attacked by members of Parliament, angry both at the novel’s cynical depiction of politicians and its sexual content and language. The book was defended by the head of the British Arts Council, but later when it was published independently the British bookstore chain W. H. Smith refused to sell it. Prior to the New Wave such controversies were rare within science fiction, whose publishers tended to view their magazines and books as acceptable reading for teens as well as adults and who preferred to avoid anything that might negatively affect sales.

In the United States as well as Great Britain, however, an increasing number of authors were interested in writing science fiction that could more realistically address a broader array of issues and do so with literary techniques that could be Modernist or Postmodernist as well as the more traditional use of Realism. Among them were Samuel R. Delany, whose highly intellectual and often experimental stories and novels of the late 1960s have much in common with the New Wave; Robert Silverberg, who reinvented himself during this period with a string of novels whose concerns were more psychological than had been the norm for much science fiction before this stage of his career, including his own; Ursula K. Le Guin, who presented culturally relevant studies of gender and imperialism in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Word for World Is Forest (1972) respectively, and who employed an unconventional plot structure in The Dispossessed (1974); and Joanna Russ, whose experimental novel The Female Man (1975) tells the intersecting stories of four different women who are really variations on the same individual.