Christmas Editorial
Many years ago someone asked Brian Aldiss if he felt science fiction might in some ways be a ‘subversive’ form of fiction. Brian replied ‘Of course it’s subversive. It wouldn’t be any good if it wasn’t subversive.’ That was in what we now know to be the hey day of literary science fiction, at least in Europe, where writers like Aldiss, Ballard, Disch, Sladek and myself enjoyed a rather higher status in general! Aldiss had also added that until women read sf and wrote it in larger numbers, it would never be a completely mature form. So things do improve. That was during the few years before the commercial media discovered a public taste which could be put through their usual mill and standardised, pasteurised and blanded out for public consumption much as blues somehow had to turn into commercial soul to get a mass audience.
Essentially all but a few superficialities of the original vitality remain through this process. In a recent Spectator piece, they were not sure how Lord of the Rings would go down as a movie because the story had already been told in Star Wars. What they meant was that the structure and stereotypes were very similar. However, that similarity is what almost guarantees a success. As I’ve said many times, if people didn’t like repetition, they wouldn’t like music. An animal feels easy if it can take the same route to the waterhole every day and not risk being eaten. To the mass audience, repetition is exactly what comforts them and what they will pay most for. What makes Tolkien the mass market success that Peake is not is that Tolkien can be smoothly assimilated into the culture. His stereotypes slide easily into the world of popular fiction. Peake’s grotesques are the opposite of Tolkien’s fairy tale regulars. Peake’s characters and plot are brilliantly idiosyncratic. Tolkien’s entire ensemble of greybeards, evil forces and humanoids is instantly recognised It’s the familiar, with a little gloss, that sells in millions, not the awkwardly unfamiliar. Tolkien’s stated aim was to tell fairy stories, Peake’s stated aim was to break windows. Tolkien has mass sales, Peake has more likelihood of longevity. For Peake was an original visionary where Tolkien was manipulating existing images.
A couple of years or so after Aldiss had made his remark about subversion, Ballard was asked to appear in court to defend his story ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.’ He was asked to say that it was not obscene. He refused. ‘How could I say it isn’t obscene? It was meant to be obscene.’ His US agent of the day had somehow failed to send ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ to Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions, which is how we came to publish it in New Worlds, then displayed on most newsstands across the UK before it was reprinted in Evergreen Review. I don’t remember a single complaint from readers, though it suited the government’s enemies of the day to raise questions about its Arts Council grant in the House of Commons. However the stories we sold on those newsstands, which appeared in The Atrocity Exhibition by Ballard, were judged too dreadful for the American public by Doubleday executives who had the first edition of his book pulped, so that now it is a very rare collector’s item indeed!. My own Final Programme and Byzantium Endures have both been censored without my knowledge by their original publishers in the US which has more of a habit of censorship, in spite of the Constitution, than the UK. All these acts of censorship were committed because of elements in the books considered ‘subversive’ by the publishers in question. Perhaps this goes some way to explain the sanitised, acceptable commercial reading-product which is promoted as much by literary sections of newspapers as by chain bookstores. They all have one thing in common—a deep, sometimes aggressive, attachment to the status quo. Indeed they seem to identify its maintenance with their own self-interest, even when it is manifestly not the case.
The reason why my generation was attracted to science fiction wasn’t because we got excited watching big spaceships unfold before us or wondered if there was life on Mars, but because we understood that writers like Phlip Wylie, Ray Bradbury, Pohl and Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon and a handful of others were getting at. They, too, were subversive writers, working in a far more dangerous social climate than most of us have known: the shameful McCarthy era. While they modified their views as they grew older, many of the New York writers began as communists or fellow travellers. I still remember a conversation with Donald A. Wollheim, a man for whom I have considerable affection, when he was buying my book The Steel Tsar. He didn’t like the book much. And he thought I’d been too hard on Stalin. Don was still convinced circa 1981 that Stalin was the strong man the Soviet Union needed and while Fred Pohl is no longer a radical he and many others, according to Judith Merril’s own recollections, were Trotskyites or some other form of socialist during their early writing years. These were highly conscious social critics with a considerable level of political sophistication. And they were ambitiously at odds with what they found unjust in American society. Even Heinlein claimed to be a socialist in the 1940s and, of course, there is a great tradition of fine American literary socialist fiction from William Dean Howells, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis through to the younger Steinbeck. Now in England writers like Iain Banks, Ken MacLeod and China Miéville are also declared radicals and even the nicest and funniest of European writers will call themselves socialists and often know more about the American left than most Americans. When I was first writing to Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the fifties, they were both under a form of house arrest, investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. This honourable radical left tradition has been virtually excised from standard American history and it is worth remembering how these people not only predicted what would happen to modern America, they tried, as one does, through their work to stop the worst happening. Make no mistake, they wrote in the laconic style of the best popular fiction, but as social visionaries they were actually more on the money than Wells, Huxley or Orwell.
