Martin Amis, Success

1990 UK tv serial (1977-8). BBC TV….Most episodes written Wilfred Gretorex (1921-    ), who devised the series, or Edmund Ward. 

…Reflecting the fears of the middle classes in the 1970s, this serial, set in a socialist UK of 1990, warns of what could happen if the welfare state continued in its present direction. The country is run by the PCD, an all-powerful bureaucracy that incorporates the trade-union movement within its machinery; the only people free of its control are a select elite possessing Privilege Cards. The story concerns the efforts of a lone journalist ([Edward] Woodward) to outwit the system in such ways as helping people to escape to the USA, still a bastion of freedom.

John Clute & Peter Nicholls, eds. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993)

We’re getting taken over - that’s for sure, also. Everyone is a bit sweaty at my work these days. We’re all having a bit of a bad time these days. It now looks as though we will be obliged (I expected this) to affiliate with the Union, regularising staff rates of pay, holidyas, office hours, luncheon vouchers, going to the lavatory, etc. In return, the office will enjoy considerable increases of salary and proportionate rationalisations of personnel. 

It’s a nervous time for all of us here. This is is not a bad office, but at the moment it has a bad feel. Disgruntlement hangs in the air; it hangs in the air like migraine. …There are no new jobs and nobody wants to go looking for them. Nobody wants to go. (And it seems that we can’t protect each other. If we were in the Union we would be able to, but you can’t get organised until you get organised.) 

Martin Amis, Success (1978)

Currently reading

First Terry Pratchett, and now this.

Whilst America had Anne Rice, we had Tanith Lee. Unlike Rice, and unlike writers such as Clive Barker and Neil Gaiman whose work also can also be described in terms of sharing an aesthetic with her work, Lee never had the kind of popular success which might have buoyed her up commercially when fashions changed. She was a deeply romantic writer, whose concerns and style seem rooted in the genre landscape of 70s and 80s commercial fantasy fiction (and what other era/area of the publishing industry could have accommodated her incredible productivity?).

And her concerns seem to have been pretty constant through everything she wrote: often youthful protagonists, concerned with issues of personal growth or metamorphosis; vivid settings, which variously drew on standard genre tropes or twisted historical landscapes or myth or fairytale, and which often feel more like stage settings for her characters' inner dramas; plotting that often has more the quality of a dream than anything so prosaically mundane; an unconventional approach to ethical issues and concern with her characters' sexuality; and a prose style which was evocative, opulent, overwhelming - and at times, yes, somewhat purple in it's excesses.

It was this latter which captivated me when I first encountered her writing as a teenager. I'd be willing to bet that - apart that is from the restructuring of the publishing industry which saw saw the gradual narrowing and even disappearance of the mid list in the 90s, confining so many of the more interesting genre writers to smaller, independent publishers - it was perhaps this more than anything else which saw the eclipsing of her reputation with major publishers. Modern genre writing seems to favour a kind of prose which is more functional, more conversational with less flourish and style, probably thanks to the influence of film and television. Indeed, as I've said, purple prose was always a trap Ms. Lee risked, and occasionally fell prey to, not that that ever bothered me, since it was that opulence which attracted me in the first place.

When I finally encountered actual decadent writing a few years later, I remember several short stories from an anthology of female decadent writing which I read during my undergraduate degree which felt as though they could even have been written by her. And like so many decadents, she seems to have been obsessed with beauty. So many of her characters are extravagantly beautiful, always in some way above or cast out from the common herd. Central characters included not only aristocrats, but even Gods. (Again, this is perhaps another way in which she was somewhat out of step with modern culture, an era in which even our elites wish to clothe themselves with the language of equality).

Not that she ever really celebrates or idealises any kind of authority and hierarchy. Rather, where they appear in a story, these archaic power structures are accepted as a part of the world in which her characters live and have to negotiate. Patriarchy is always suspect. I'll never forget her story 'The Devil's Rose': the absence of any overt moralising of its telling and its lush, decadent prose, not only makes the final twist all the more horrific, but demonstrates even more effectively the callousness of a certain kind of predatory masculinity that is so easily romanticised.

*

So, currently, I'm reading an early work, a collection of the somewhat clunkily named Four-BEE novels, Don't Bite the Sun, followed by Drinking Sapphire Wine - the first British edition which combined them after their initial American publication. The text is littered with plenty of future slang from it's post apocalyptic world in which humanity is confined to three cities, taken care of by robots, and allowed to indulge themselves in any way they like. If they die, a new body will be supplied, so characters change not only faces, but also their gender, only 'tending' to either male or female out of personal preference (the covers of not only my, but of all, editions that I've found online obscure this point by over emphasising the femininity of the main character). It's a flamboyant brightly lit future which surely has something in common with 70s glam. The characters frequently take ecstasy pills - it's weirdly prescient for science fiction which seems blithely unconcerned with any notion of futuristic prediction. Rather the tropes of science fiction are deployed for their sensuous pleasure.

It's a vision of paradise in which our narrator is coming to realise the extent to which humanity is actually imprisoned by this superficially paradisiacal artificial environment. By the end of the first volume at least, she's come to make some kind of peace with her world - there are epiphanies along the way, but no delusions about finally breaking free from this artificial paradise in some way (the way we might expect this sort of story to go). Beneath the sprightliness and narrative propulsion - plenty happens, but for little ultimate purpose, and our central narrator ends up largely back where 'she' started out from - there's quite a knowing comment about the compromises modernity forces us to make. It will be interesting to see where the second volume takes the story.

Thinking about colonialism in Robert Silverberg's 'Downward to the Earth'

It's slightly ironic perhaps that the book I was reading whilst writing my previous few posts was Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth, a science fiction novel which is explicitly engaged with issues of colonisation in it's depiction of the alien planet Belzagor and it's sentient alien species the Nildoror and the Sulidoror. Since any consideration of fiction written by British writers about India is in some sense going to be related to issues our history of colonialism in the country. Even Mark Tully's book, in it's autobiographical introduction, contrasts his own position with that of the British who served in the army of clerks which administered the Raj. It was published soon after he left employment with the BBC, so it's understandable that he might have wanted to have set out his reasons for staying in the country rather than returning to Britain, a situation analogous to those British subjects who chose to stay on in India after 1947.

I've read little of Robert Silverberg's work to date, but from reading Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove's Trillion Year Spree years ago, around the time when I still thought of myself as primariliy a reader of science fiction, I know that the best period of his fiction was between 1967 and 1976, when he transformed himself from a writer of competent adventure fiction into a much more 'literary' writer, often exploring themes of alienation. 'Sombre period Silverberg' as Aldiss and Windgrove dub it. Both Clute and Nicholls' Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Wikipedia essentially concur with such a view. It's clear from the dates that the beginning of this 'classic period' of Silverberg's fiction coincided with the heyday of science fiction's New Wave. Like Ursula LeGuin, I don't see Silverberg as part of the New Wave exactly, rather they existed more in parallel. In their work, we still have all the old genre stand-bys: spaceships, alien planets and races, lasers, robots, but depicted with a more literary quality of language than most earlier writers in the genre achieved.

In some ways, whilst this begins as a novel explicitly engaged with colonialism, it then becomes something else. It takes place in a world in which it is already implicitly assumed that colonialism is inherently wrong; the human colonists have already withdrawn from the alien world after they discovered that the alien elephants they had exploited were actually sentient. Yet references to Kipling and Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the fact that it was a private company engaged in the exploitation of the planet's sentient alien species clearly allude to the way in which the history of imperialism is intimately bound up with that of capitalism, all suggests that the novel is engaged with metaphors for real world colonialism.

Yet there's something inherently problematic about using science fiction in such a way, and Silverberg is sensible enough to include a critique of this in an aside within the novel itself when a rather unpleasant human tourist suggests that there was a difference between the colonisation of Africans and that of aliens who mostly resemble elephants. The problem with using science fiction metaphors to engage with real world problems is that it's also a largely realist genre, where within the context of the narrative the alien planet is a real place. Certainly, any novel which is so indebted to the classic tropes of science fiction's previous era is going to have a similar problem. The alien jungle in which most of the narrative of Downward to the Earth takes place is depicted with a marvellous fecundity, replete with images of body horror and of overflowing alien life. As far as the narrative is concerned, it's a 'real' place. World-building is a large part of the appeal of any science-fiction.

The problem with attempting to map the exploitation of alien species onto real world colonisation is that the victims of human imperialism and colonialism didn't belong to another species, but were other humans. Obviously, there's an equally long history of racial and cultural 'othering' which continues to this day and has served to justify our histories of imperialism and colonialism. Many of the victims of colonialism are reduced to the status (literally as well as metaphorically) of animals, but that's also a historical process, one which is done to people who actually belong to the same species, differing only by the colour of skin, language or culture. Which is why such a process has to be carried out, to obscure the basic fact that we all belong to the same species and that there's rather more ways in which we resemble each other than those in which we differ. That is a little harder to sustain when your alien looks like an elephant.

Another related problem with this trope is that it can result in a form of wish fulfilment, most recently seen in James Cameron's Avatar, in which the alien species has access to some kind of transcendent mystical power which ultimately defeats the invading humans (which raises a further question of why this force only intervenes when things have got into a particularly poor state for the 'good' aliens; if it was there all along, then why didn't it intervene earlier?). Obviously you can fight your way out of an empire, history gives us plenty of examples of that, but reducing such a conflict to the status of an (all too literal) deus ex machina does tend to be rather insulting to the real world suffering of people engaged in such conflicts in both the past and the present (this is why I like Caitlin Kiernan's reading of Avatar: she elides any metaphorical weight of human colonisation and reads it as the purely misanthropic idealisation of the natural world taking its revenge on exploitative humanity; it's still a form of wish fulfilment, but one entirely in keeping with the logic of the invented world).

It's probably a little naive to assume that a private company would just pack up and desist from exploiting profitable resources simply because they've discovered that an alien species is sentient, as has apparently occurred before the beginning of Silverberg's novel, but then as I observed up above, the issues of colonialism are something of a feint, as the novel climaxes in something which, whilst wholly in keeping with the reality of the world in which the narrative occurs, is also purely metaphorical, speaking in a language of Biblical cadence to a yearning for transcendence and a meeting between opposites which is unexpectedly lovely and hopeful. And perhaps that does finally hold out something to the real world: a hope for a way in which we might begin to heal some the wounds left by our history.

Leigh Brackett...the queen of romantic interplannetry adventure!

Sea-Kings of Mars & Otherworldly Stories

Since I've already referred to this book a couple of times on this blog, I thought it only fair that I should devote a post to it now that I've finally finished it. I took my time with it because I struggle to read more than 600 pages of such writing. It's a little raw, unpolished, at times more concerned with simply getting from a to b as so much adventure writing is, with an obvious focus on action. it's writing for adolescents, which I don't mean as a criticism. I dearly wish I could have discovered this writer when I was on the verge of adolescence, around the same sort of time I was introduced to the work of her friend Michael Moorcock. And The Empire Strikes Back doesn't count, as it turns out that she didn't write the final script which was used for the film. Her posthumous credit was a sign of affection. She was though involved in the scripts for several Howard Hawks movies, including both The Big Sleep and Rio Bravo, two of my favourite films of Hollywood's golden age.

No matter, whatever her actual contributions to George Lucas' trilogy, a character like Han Solo is clearly a Leigh Brackett protagonist with the serial numbers filed off. She clearly loved that hard bitten, cynical man of action. Elements of the personas of both Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne, appropriately enough. Interesting that from her descriptions, her most famous character, Eric John Stark, hero of three tales in this collection, appears to be black. Not that that's reflected in any cover art I've been able to find online. And Stark's Tarzan-like origin on Mercury as 'N'Chaka' suggests a white skin, growing up amongst savage tribespeople. Still, we're told so often about his dark skin that it doesn't seem wholly inconsistent with what's written. And it's refreshing to think that one of the major heroes of this era of pulp science fiction might have been black.

But yes, as the reference to Tarzan surely suggests, she romanticises primitivism, but so what? It's her romanticism about her fantastical vision of Mars which is surely the main attraction of her fiction. The plots are fairly simple, often reliant on tropes such as telepathy and lost races. What's really powerful is the atmosphere, redolent of fantasies of North Africa and heavy with a sense of ill defined loss, and her powerful descriptions of Mars' landscape. A late story like 'The Last Days of Shandakor', unusually for her told in the first person, is largely plotless, and all the better for it. With many of her stories, I found my attention tended to drift a little as we reached the usually action packed climax of the story. What I most wanted was simply to inhabit this magical, barely habitable Mars for as long as possible. And whilst she may be guilty of romanticising primitivism, a prominent themes is the clash between Mars' aborigines and Earth's destructive bureaucracy. Politically she is on the right side, as far as I'm concerned. Tyrany and authoritarianism, whatever forms they take, is always resisted by her otherwise cynical heroes. Brackett's use of telepathy is interesting in this light. It nearly always takes the form of bodily possession, literally conquering another person's self in taking away their body.

But at times, Leigh Brackett can feel like a bizarrely post-colonial writer! The use of North Africa in the creation of her fictional Mars is obvious - there's even a city called Barrakesh, so it's not like it isn't in plain site - do seem to invite an Orientalist reading. It's difficult to know quite what to make of all this. Her writing displays an obvious love with her invented alien world and cultures, and undoubtedly part of waht's so attractive is a romanticisation of North Africa, which reminds me of something I read online a while ago, that exoticism isn't always a bad thing, because it also expresses a liking for what's being exoticised. It can be the beginning of an engagement with a real place. Something of this development can be traced in this collection, where the final story, the last one Leigh Brackett wrote about Mars, before her romantic vision was lost to our advances in knowledge about the real Mars, is the most explicit confrontation with issues of colonialism of any of them. Here the villains aren't some mysterious lost race as in so many of her stories, but liberal do-gooders who really want to help the natives. The means by which they are ultimately persuaded to stop their interverence might feel implausible, but then this is an adventure story. Some of the endings to other stories are rather more bittersweet, even downbeat. It's actually quite rare that Brackett leaves you with a simple feeling of victory. So her romaticism isn't so far away from the real world after all.

Spearhead from Space

A notable story for the introduction of the Autons, one of the Doctor Who’s most famous monsters, as well as for the fact that it was entirely recorded on location, with no video interiors within the confines of the television studio, as a result of strikes at the BBC (it’s also presumably the reason why we never see a TARDIS interior, because they wouldn’t have had access to the sets). As the sleeve-notes to the DVD correctly note this gives the story a unique feel in the series’ history. The use of location filming and real locations grounds it in a far more real world. What really interests me is the elements that make up the reality depicted in this story.

I seem to remember years ago reading in SFX magazine that the ‘comedy yokel’ was something of a staple of the Jon Pertwee era of the show. In the first moments of this story we’re introduced to just such a figure, a character, a poacher, who seems straight out of an English rural novel, or the popular stereotype of D.H. Lawrence as meteorites crash in Epsom, shortly followed by the TARDIS, looking incongruous surround by the forest. As someone who was born in 1979, I find myself wondering how representative this character could have been of life in 1970. Really, I have no way of knowing, although I doubt such characters as a poacher and his wife would ever have been able to afford such a prosperous looking cottage, and I feel fairly confident in suggesting that rural life in 1970 probably did have greater continuity with the world described by someone like Lawrence than to what you could find in our own time. It still feels like a cultural stereotype though, a pastiche of an older reality, although there’s still a moment in a later episode where the wife of our rural stereotype faces off against one of the Autons with her husband’s shotgun where the look of panic on her face has the sense of something real.

For those that care about such things, the dating of the UNIT stories is famously screwed up. It’s not actually mentioned in this particular story, but at some point it was decided that they should be set in 1980. Only when a retired Brigadier reappeared in a Peter Davison story in the mid 80s, the dates given would seem to place the stories in the 1970s contemporary with when they were made. It’s rather sweet the way some fans have apparently come up with theories to account for such discrepancies in-story. Personally I’m in agreement with those who have started to argue for multiplicity when dealing with these science fiction universes. The history of something like Doctor Who now stretches across such an array of stories in a variety of different media that constructing a coherent narrative is surely impossible.

Presumably for reasons of budget there was never any effort to ‘place’ the stories in an imagined future of ten years hence in terms of what we see of fashions and such like, so it makes far more sense to see them as set in the 1970s. At one point General Scobie vioces his assumption about the advantages of a fully automated factory, “robots can’t go on strike I suppose”, referencing both the reason for the story’s being on film and locating it clearly in its contemporary reality. A fear of 'plastic people' with its associations of conformity and dehumanisation feels peculiarly late 60s (Plastic People  was the title of a song by Frank Zappa and The Kinks sang about a Plastic Man). Placing the Autons in what would have been the audience's present is surely part of their effectiveness as monsters, locating horror within the everyday as shop dummies come to stumbling life. UNIT themselves though seem to belong in an earlier time than the 70s. You could easily see them as plucky Brits in some random film of World War II that turns up on a Sunday afternoon or Bank Holiday. This element of the past is further emphasised in the first couple of episodes by the strange hospital which appears to be a retrofitted country house, the sort of location that mentally belongs in World War II or even the previous War and their immediate aftermath.

And then there’s the Doctor himself of course, outfitted as an Edwardian Dandy, and borrowing a car that even in 1970 must have seemed antique, as well as the many science fiction elements. The whole narrative becomes a patchwork, or bricolage of these disparate time periods, which is surely appropriate in a series about a time traveller, even if the Doctor has been exiled to a particular time and place. Although there is still the eventual uncertainty of precisely when it is he’s been exiled too... But that is information which can only be supplied from without the story's frame. From outside the story we bring our own assumptions about the time and the reality in which the story is located. So that, watched here and now, in the present of 2011, the plastic special effects, swirly graphics, Radiophonic Workshop music, which were once intended to evoke the 'future', now seem to be inescapably tinged with nostalgia, a part of the viewer's past.