Fantastic Metropolis

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.

Before Nader there was Pohl and Kornbluth. When they wrote The Space Merchants, some fifty years ago, they knew exactly what they were talking about and their prescience, in our modern consumerist global economy, is remarkable. Their non-sf social novels show a keen criticism of fifties America which only the privileged white middle class looks back on with pleasant nostalgia. Dick, Bester and a number of others all shared this instinct for the social realities and it is not surprising that they had the huge influence they had on modern literature, not to mention modern graphic novels. An astonishing number of British writers, including Rushdie, Martin Amis and Fay Weldon celebrate Philip K. Dick as a major influence and went on record as fans in a piece done for The Daily Telegraph about five years ago. As I’ve said elsewhere, Aldiss, Ballard, myself and a few others shared this attraction to the more humanistic forms of American sf precisely because it did seem to reflect our own experience and attitudes. We were actually repelled by the gentlemanly tones of John Wyndham and the nursery tones of Professor Tolkien, though both were peopleof great charm and generosity whose acquaintance I’m glad to have had and Wyndham’s conscious feminism was years ahead of its time.

I looked to sf, as I looked to R&B, not only as a particular stimulus, but as a potential medium, which had no academic criticism at all, scarcely any reviewers and was so marginalised from orthodox society that it was almost invisible. Blues was a marginal enthusiasm in the general culture until white boys and white jazzmen began to modify the form for a popular audience. Once Elvis began singing Big Mama Thornton’s (also modified) ‘Hound Dog,’ the process took a few years to get itself firmly set on the road to the Spice Girls and the boy bands. Students of rock and roll will recall that there was a deliberate movement to remove the ‘rough edges’ from the music and push the real rockers off the charts to introduce the ‘college singer’. Pat Boone became the benchmark. That the college market then modified into the Beach Boys and Pat made a bizarre comeback attempt in black leather, is proof, that, in the arts at least, good can indeed come out of bad. But it does involve change. Unfamiliar material. I have seen science fantasy, as I used to call it, undergo a similar process. Rock and roll now has its own critics and newspapers, just like science fiction. They share one thing, at least, by implication, if nothing else, they describe standards and make the writer far more self-conscious about what they are doing. They begin to quarrel with details or modify their work within an accepted range of what you can and can’t do… They are more interested in reproducing an already experienced frisson than in creating a fresh one. Instead of expressing their own experience, they begin to produce something which is essentially the same thing as French academic painting or English narrative painting of the 19th century. Gradually, by this means, they develop norms and expectations in the common reader. Just as a Victorian viewer trained to find narrative in a painting finds only ‘chaos’ in an impressionist, so the conventional sf critic, editor or reader is disturbed by the unfamiliar in a book. They are often quite aggressive in their dismissals of these unconventional fantasies… These people consider themselves lovers of the imagination. This is no doubt a question of their self-esteem rather than any empirical standard I’ve been able to find.

Until Kingsley Amis took an interest in New Maps of Hell, sf didn’t know what it could or couldn’t do. When I started, it could be anything we wanted it to be. Of course, that was before we hit the very orthodox hard-core sf fans whose response to our work has scarcely changed in fifty years. These boys and girls don’t want anyone taking away their big throbbing machines or loveable vermin. As I said at Armadillocon recently, the sf fan world offered New Worlds nothing but antagonism. We triumphed in spite of it and our influence went far beyond the sf field. But Amis, in the end, came to hate what Ballard and I were doing while Richard Hamilton (whose Kennedy As An Astronaut is still in the Tate Gallery) feared we were dropping the very imagery he loved and was using ironically in his pop-art paintings. But those were in the days when there was nothing odd about a panel at the Brighton Arts Festival including Ballard, Disch, Edouardo Paolozzi, A.J. Ayer, Michael Kustow, Director of the Institute for Contemporary Arts, Edward Lucy Smith, John Calder, the publisher and George MacBeth, then head of the BBC poetry department.

What changed this?

The most obvious change was the coming of Star Wars and the blockbuster success, once pirated into the real world by Don Wollheim himself, of Lord of the Rings. Del Rey and Ballantine (who had once tried to commission a set of Edgar Rice Burroughs clones from me and then settled for John Norman) began an almost instant cloning industry with the success of Tolkien’s first close imitators. The industry had found out what sold. Previously it was all weird stuff to them, so they’d give whatever it was a go. They had no benchmarks. They even tried publishing translated imaginative fiction (which among other things gave the film world Planet of the Apes). Moreover the publishing firms were family owned, had few or no shareholders to answer to, and advances were lower. Anthony Cheetham, the father of cheque-book publishing, had not yet left Eton. They had not learned that big advances make big publicity. They were closer to the venture capitalists that publishers originally started as. It meant a quirkier and far more adult publishing programme for those few publishers, like Faber and Faber or Cape, who understood the literary merit of Aldiss, Dick, Ballard and others. For about ten years, ending in the late 70s with the first Star Wars movie, the culminating advent of Thatcherism and Reaganomics, the unarguable realities of demographics, and the upcurving success of LOTR to a generation who were told it was literature, speculative fiction was a perfectly respectable literary form reviewed and noticed by the educated public. Star Trek, Star Wars and Lord of the Rings (and their clones) identified the form solidly as a juvenile medium with a fundamentally juvenile readership, something an adult had to explain away as a weakness. This was further proven by the deserved success of Terry Pratchett and later, of course, by the J.K. Rowling phenomenon. Without disliking her, I believe Rowling perfectly exemplifies that blending of ingredients with the necessary element of a juvenile or pseudo-juvenile protagonist to ensure the full commercial potential. Add a tone that tells you this is not really going to hurt you and bingo! You have the fairground thrill of the century. Context is everything, pards. You have to start by telling the reader this is really all a story. You do it through tone, if you have any sense. A little mild social commentary can be added, too, of course, to give something a suitable sense of depth.

While it could just change with the Potter phenomenon, which has as many adult readers as juvenile, until recently that identification with juvenile fiction enabled snobbery to step in with a vengeance where literary imaginative fiction was concerned. The sf review sections, the reviews of individual titles, began to disappear from the literary pages through the eighties until by the turn of the century they had all but gone completely. Known fans of sf with a fair amount of journalistic clout continued to exercise a fairly unseemly caution in their reviewing policies. We were entering that now familiar land that Thatcher and Reagan built, where people become afraid to speak because they might lose their jobs. An interest in science fiction became what facial hair was to Captain Sensible—riseable and probably boringly nerdy (I say nothing of my own opinion of the irritating and talentless captain). Given that all of us first saw publication in magazines called Science Fantasy, Fantastic Adventures, Science Fiction Adventures and New Worlds, it would have been hard for us to deny, whether we liked it or not.

While Ballard, Aldiss, Disch and myself all had established reputations as literary writers by that time, critics began increasingly to disassociate us from our science fiction origins. We had never claimed to write science fiction as such and we chose the term speculative fiction to distinguish what we did from other kinds of imaginative fiction aimed at a popular readership, but we also were perfectly happy to describe ourselves as sf writers to those who wanted us to renounce, as it were, our earlier, less classy affilitations. We were unusual in that we all had access to publications with wide general readerships. Disch might be asked to write his opinions on the state of modern poetry (since his public reputation as a poet was probably greater than his reputation as a novelist amongst sf fans) but would rarely be asked to do a piece on current imaginative fiction. I wrote far more about London writers and the city and can hardly remember being asked to write about imaginative fiction until the BBC decided to broadcast Gormenghast as a TV mini-series. Every time I wrote a literary novel there would be at least five reviews which announced that I had left all that infantile stuff behind and was now engaged in doing grown up books. After a while, even those critics noticed that I was still clearly addicted to my earlier embarrassments and now they talk about how there are ‘two’ of me: Jekyll, the respectable literary writer, and Hyde, the slumming sword and sorcery slut. It makes me hard to trust.

This obsession with placing a writer must have something to do with power and prestige which I don’t fully understand, having had a somewhat patchy formal education and no higher education at all. I suppose that vested interests must swiftly develop amongst the formally educated and they are not likely to give up their orthodoxies lightly, so they employ snobbery in their own interest. This is also why they refuse to be interested in science. It is almost impossible to have a baseless snobbish opinion of the General Theory of Relativity. Therefore the entire raft of disciplines has to be marginalised, along with the educated fiction writers who have not rejected those disciplines, but take as strong a curiosity in the objective world as their 18th century predecessors. These are the writers who incorporate not only authentic and sometimes uncommon experience into their work, but who also make it their business to be as well informed about the sciences as the arts. Those authors who attempt to accommodate the modernist orthodoxy usually fail to please either readership. Those who remain truest to their own visions ultimately, like Peake or Ballard, take their places, in spite of orthodox resistance, in the common literary canon.

For me visionary fiction is at its best when it references modernist concerns as well as the more objective concerns with which ‘hard’ science fiction is most commonly associated and which derives most of its literary machinery from Victorian popular fiction. For this is not exactly a ‘post-modernist’ form, as we see from the variety of material published here, but more an alternative to modernism. My generation did, to one degree or another, reject the concerns and methods of modernism, but the movement found its inspiration as much in pre-modernist work as post-modernist. We had grown up in social climates which made us rather alert to the objective world and which often did not have much time for introspection. The modernist novel’s rather unsatisfactory response to the Second World War, for instance, was exemplified recently when the critic Philip Hensher said on BBC Radio 4 that the modern novel ‘couldn’t deal directly with something like the WTC attack’ but could only see it, perhaps, from the point of view of someone who was watching it and their internal, individual responses. This surprised me, of course, because I was already working on the subject. One of my more modernist responses was a comic strip with Walter Simonson, to be published in a DC anthology. Unaware of its own narrowness, Hensher’s attitude is pretty much the antithesis of what we learned from those great Americans and turned, through idiosyncratic prose, into a way of recording our experience through the symbols and methods of science fiction. It was second nature to us to respond to current events. We had spent some time and energy working out ways of doing it! We wanted to find forms which did the job well, which were something other than fancy journalism. The recent critical success of Ballard’s collected short stories shows, I think, that at least one of us was doing something right.

However, Hensher’s statement also gives some indication as to why the kind of fiction represented on this site is largely ignored by the literary establishment. It is because it isn’t modernist. While it incorporates an understanding of modernism, it is not in itself modernist. It no more gives the ‘right’ signals than a graphic novel, which is equally difficult for those unfamiliar with the conventions of the comic book to ‘read’. The unfamiliar, even when it is trying to fit in, is therefore rejected. It is the easiest response. It saves examination. It maintains your status quo. Anything else would involve learning a whole new set of rules when you have already learned those which got you this far in your career. A mild accomodation with a few iconographic names—Dick, Ballard, Vonnegut—is about as far as you go.

Academic careerism ensures that only modernist fiction is accepted as ‘central’, even though, strictly speaking, it is marginalised in comparison to the best-selling fantasy blockbusters filling the charts. Must of us are now familiar with the phenomenon of long articles by books editors and well known critics complaining that modern fiction doesn’t deal with modern life and then they quote the modernists to prove it. Nothing in young Amis, nothing in McEwen, nothing in Byatt or even Carey. Those of us who are doing our best to write about modern life and using contemporary methods are often left gasping as we are told to our faces that what we write simply doesn’t exist. This is particularly amusing to Iain Sinclair for instance. A while ago he was asked to write a piece for The Independent on some of these ‘obscure’ writers he favoured. He wrote his article and sent it in. A day or two later he was phoned by the sub-editor who was preparing the piece for press. ‘Could we leave out all these names, do you think? Most people have never heard of them.’

The realities are that literary fiction, except where it is highly publicised through such corrupted methods as the Booker Prize, never sells as well as popular fiction and popular fiction obeys certain rules. The closer literary fiction mirrors those same rules, the better it does. It doesn’t much rock the conventional boat, it reflects the pieties and values of the day, it makes people feel good about themselves, it makes them, perhaps, feel superior, it delivers a hefty dose of escapism and reader-flattery. You, says the middle brow writer, are as smart as me. Middle brow writers like Kingsley Amis, for instance, also manage to get away, rather like his son, with reflecting the prejudices and snobberies of the day in a way which further flatters the reader or at least makes them feel comfortable about their prejudices. This is why such writers are bought in large numbers, why they understandably become self-impressed, though it is probable, of course, that the kind of advance offered to Amis reflects the publisher’s wish to enhance his prestige rather than his bank account, whereas advances paid to the likes of J.K.Rowling are recovered almost immediately.

Originality is not a very commercial quality. While Ronald Firbank might be Evelyn Waugh’s superior in almost every way, it was Waugh’s dilution of Firbank that caught the public fancy. Equally the writers we at this site tend to admire are idiosyncratic and maintain a somewhat edgy relationship to society. They are not comforting or flattering. They are, if they are successful, satrisfying our curiosity, our desire to see the world from as many different angles as possible. But our mind candy is the general public’s poisoned apple. It makes them feel queer. Therefore it is unrealistic to expect the increased popularity of Lord of the Rings, which is more on the lines of a modern Gone With The Wind than a modern War and Peace, to do much but threaten increased marginalisation to this form of fiction. The only thing it is doing for us is establishing a readership which, as it matures, will look to more substantial imaginative fiction for its satisfaction. It will understand the vocabulary. It will not have to learn how to read on more than one level. It will come to understand that language can in itself act as narrative, as well as image, as well as ‘story’ and that good fiction can work on a dozen levels at the same time, if we know what we’re about when we put it together. But I suspect there will be no immediate mass sales for Gene Wolfe, John Crowley or Jonathan Carroll, all of whom are in some way at odds with conventional attitudes. It is the secondary and particularly the tertiary writers in the same vein who popularise a form successfully. The writer of an original disposition is forever having to abandon method which has been distorted by imitation and find fresh narrative devices. This maintains considerable internal vitality to the medium, though it isn’t of much comfort to the authors.

What we will see, partly thanks to simple demographics, is a slowly growing literary readership which is so familiar with the forms it reads that it can make sophisticated judgements within them. Commercially, it is a large enough audience to support the less conventional writers (if a little more modestly than Stephen King).

All the writers I like are to some degree alienated, and are, by their nature, subversive. They find fault, they point fingers, they celebrate the extraordinary and the unnoticed, and sometimes their anger and their vision rises on flights of language to impress even the most cautious modern critic. But to expect them to benefit from Harry Potter’s success is, I suspect, a misreading of the commercial realities. Ultimately the best of what we celebrate will outlast commercial fashion, but it would be naïve to believe it is, in anything but the most superficial ways, the ‘same’ as that fiction which satisfies the demands of the mass market. The mass market demands suitably faded xeroxes.

What we are offering you here are examples of some of the best of the past, which you might not have had a chance to see, together with those writers who best exemplify our enthusiasms today. As a policy, we are actively looking for non-anglophone contributions and contributions by women, who are rather absent from this site. We know you are out there. Please let us see your work. We are currently shown a slight bias towards humorous fiction as you will see from stories like John Sladek’s ‘Stop Evolution in its Tracks!’ and Rhys Hughes’s Engelbrecht adventure. In the pipeline for publication very soon is some very funny work from Langdon Jones (the man who restored Titus Alone and wrote the beautiful music for Peake’s Rhyme of the Flying Bomb), Barrington Bayley and, newly arrived, Steve Aylett. James Sallis further enriches the site. Miéville will soon be appearing along with writers who were as little known to the general public as he was until recently, and, until we get more of your contributions, you’ll see more work by members of the editorial team, Rodrigues, Witcover, VanderMeer, Živković and myself, which we publish also as examples of the kind of thing we intend to run. You will note that we are championing no movements. We are enthusiasts, however, for ambitious writing. We have also supplied suitable links to sites about writers whose work exemplifies in some way the kind of fiction we enjoy. I repeat, we are actively looking for new contributors. We have no special policy, no manifesto, nothing but a hope to show the world that adult literary imaginative fiction is ambitiously written and conceived and offers as much variety, for every taste, as any other ambitious fiction. We are not here to persuade anyone through argument. We are here, however, to provide examples of the best and hope you will find plenty to enjoy.

The newest addition to our editorial team is the experienced editor, critic and novelist Paul Witcover. He was asked to join because we believe he can bring further dimensions and work of high quality to the site. You’ll find a piece on him here, which was one of the first things Gabe Chouinard put up. We’re also glad to be publishing Steve Aylett, a writer of whom I’m particularly fond. His stories set in the fictional city of ‘Beerlight’ are what first brought him to broad public attention. The Crime Studio, Slaughtermatic, Atom and his latest Shamanspace (‘God has been found to exist and the race is on to take revenge…’) are all recommended. An earlier generation would have called him a surrealist and the nearest writer I can compare him to is Boris Vian. James Sallis, another new contributor, was a colleague of mine on New Worlds from the late 1960s. Vian was a common enthusiast of ours. Sallis has written some authoratitive works on the guitar (viz. The Guitar in Jazz), which he plays with enviable genius, has translated Queneau and introduced Vian (see I Spit On Your Graves, which is on the Amazon UK site, if not the US) but is best known for his Lew Griffin detective novels. In books like Eye of the Cricket he offers a far subtler intervention than, say, Paul Auster’s. He has also published short stories in collections like Limits of the Sensible World and Time’s Hammer which is available through Amazon UK if you can’t find it anywhere else and from which the short story here was taken. Needless to say it is highly recommended. As a critic, he is admired for his work on writers like David Geddes and Chester Himes. He is also the translator of Queneau’s novel Saint Gingling and the author of Ash of Stars, about the work of Samuel R. Delany. A couple more lights brightening our favourite city, pards, and a lot more to come. You ain’t been dazzled by nothing yet…

On behalf of the Fantastic Metropolis editorial board I wish you all the compliments of your season and hope you’ll find this site substantial, stimulating and satisfying holiday reading!

With best wishes,

—Michael Moorcock

(Needless to say, the specific opinions in this editorial are my own!)