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Once I saw a TV interview with a man who was directing a new production of Hamlet. He was a bit of an arty-farty idiot; and the principal novelty of his production was that the actors swung backwards and forwards on ropes while declaiming their soliloquies (God knows why). However he did say something that made me think. He said that there was a collective knowledge of Hamlet in the world at large. Even people who had never seen or read the play knew what Hamlet was all about. There were mutterings about new Jungian archetypes. As with everything else that he said in the interview, this simply proved that he wasn’t rowing with both oars in the water. But there was a nugget of truth buried in there.
Everybody knows that Hamlet is a “better” play than (say) Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap, though very few people could tell you why. I don’t think we need to invoke the shade of Jung to explain this—I think there are better reasons behind the intuitive knowledge, and I think it would be valuable to explore these reasons and to relate them to a discussion of SF. In other words, I want to ask the question “What distinguishes great literature from other fictions?”. And when we have an answer to that question, we will be in a good position to determine whether or not SF has ever produced anything that we could call great.
So as not to keep you in suspense (nervous tension is bad for the heart), I will say right away that I am pretty sure SF has produced some true works of great art (whatever that may be). But unless you are one of those nasty people who always read the last page to find out whodunnit, you’ll have to bear with me while I take you through my reasoning (nervous tension keeps you alert).
The best test of all is of course the test of time. Hamlet has been around for more than four hundred years. It must have something going for it. But we are concerned with twentieth century writings, and it is still too soon to apply that test. Yet the accepted wisdom has it that the works of D. H. Lawrence fit the criteria that we are searching for. Lawrence died in 1930, but for all that he is still a contemporary writer. People who knew him are still alive. I used to live in Eastwood (the Nottinghamshire village where Lawrence was born), and my landlady had known him and some of the people and places he wrote about. She didn’t like him much. She thought he had been very unfair in what he wrote.
I think that what we need to define is what the books we are concerned with are really about. And I don’t mean the plot or the story. That’s not what they are about. There is an old Woody Allen joke where he explains that he has been on a speed reading course, and it was really very good. He’s just read War and Peace. It took twenty minutes. It was about Russia.
Now that is true—as far as it goes; but it is a very facile thing to say, at least in terms with which we are concerned. The surface things, the things that happen, the twists and turns and incidents which move the story along—these are not what we should be talking about. They are window dressing; albeit important. Neither you nor I would bother reading the books in the first place if they weren’t there. They hold our interest; we want to know what happens next, how it all works out. We even want to know if the hero gets the girl or not. If such things are not there we end up with what the school of “anti-novelists” produced in France. Go and find a translation of something by Alain Robbe-Grillet if you feel like an interlude of terminal boredom. The closest English example I can think of is Report on Probability A by Brian Aldiss. Try that one too. It is almost devoid of incident. In my opinion, such experiments are artistic failures because they alienate through boredom.
Sometimes too the work is destroyed when the writer ceases to be concerned with his art and becomes too concerned with his reasons for writing—H. G. Wells often used his novels to explore his political ideas. Eventually he got more interested in the politics than the novelising, and he started writing tracts instead. That is an ever-present danger, and too many potentially great works fall into the trap. You must not preach. If you do, you start appealing to the brain instead of working on the emotions and that is too much of an overt intrusion. It is bad art. Let the thoughts come later, let them be generated naturally by the emotions. Don’t tell people—show them. It is much more effective. The drama on the surface is like the paint on a house. If it isn’t done properly, the wood rots.
Most books of course are all paint. There isn’t any wood underneath. No one in their right mind would contend for a minute that Rio Guns by J. T. Edson is anything but a soap opera with bullets and horses. The literary equivalent of candy floss from a fairground. It looks pink and solid, but eat it and it vanishes into nothing at all.
So I think we are agreed that we must have the surface happenings. Hamlet is quite exciting in parts. Lots of gore. (I just had an outrageous thought—wouldn’t it make a great Sam Pekinpah movie?.) But there must also be hidden depths; things to which we often respond more emotionally than intellectually, so we sometimes don’t even realise that they are there in any cerebral sense. True art, I think, goes straight for the gut. It bypasses the forebrain. How else do you explain the impact of something like The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck?
It seems to me that on this deeper level the great works of art are concerned with a close exploration and definition of man’s relationship with his environment. The environment differs of course. It may be social in the sense that many of Lawrence’s novels focused on the class differences he found in the world. (Lady Chatterley’s Lover is perhaps the most extreme example of this.) Or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with its sharp portrayal of wealthy American society and the exposure of the false glamour and moral emptiness of the so-called Jazz Age.
The environment could be political. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 is one of the great political novels of our time. Nothing else shows up the stupidity of our leaders as well as this book does. It is profoundly funny and dismally depressing (because it is all so true) at one and the same time. A wonderfully clever work.
There are as many environments as there are writers who wish to explore them; all that they have in common is that they are a definition of some aspect of what you might call the human condition. An attempt, if you like, to answer the old cliche—“Why am I here? Come to think of it, just where is here anyway?”
Often a book will show us a microcosm. The protagonists find themselves up against the immoveable object, the irresistible force. The Joad family (in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) had no control over the economic and political forces that made them move out of the Oklahoma dustbowl in a desperate search for work. But their tragedy, explored in the microcosm of their life on the Okie trail, is a pointer to the grand picture. You can’t stand back from it. You have to see the detail to appreciate how it all fits together. Steinbeck didn’t preach. He didn’t have to. The Joad family said it all for him.
The effect of an environment on our lives and our ways and methods and philosophies of living (as revealed in the experiences of the characters in the book) is the true nature of literature, the true purpose of art.
How does that apply to SF? Is there anything about SF that suggests it has a contribution to make? I think that there is. I have said that great art is concerned with the human condition in relation to an environment. In one sense, you could say that SF is concerned with the human condition in relation to the universe itself! That is one hell of a large environment, but think about it carefully. In the last analysis, isn’t that the only environment that there is? Everything else is just a subset of it.
We can call that the SF viewpoint.
It is also interesting that SF has something that no other literary form has—the ability to hold up a mirror to life by projecting it onto other societies, other points of view (and don’t we sometimes look distorted in that mirror?). It is instructive to observe how many “mainstream” writers have used it when their subject matter demanded it—Jonathan Swift, Washington Irving, Ambrose Bierce, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Doris Lessing, Gore Vidal—the list goes on and on. The SF viewpoint is a uniquely useful tool for exploring the depths that we have been discussing because the environment that is set up is the best answer that we can get to the question “What if…?”. Indeed, any answer to that question is always (in literary terms) ipso facto SF because it shows a nonexistent (but often plausible) world arising out of the author’s premises. If that question is not asked, you are always left with a description of the here-and-now, the situation-as-is (or sometimes the situation-as-was). Only by posing the question “What if…?” can you show just where that situation leads.
As a result of this, it is fair to say that Steinbeck showed us the Okies as they were (and showed how they got there), but he did not really say anything about what happened next. As far as we can see, the Joad family has a past and a present that is somewhat gloomy, and for all we can tell, a future that is exactly the same. Steinbeck showed us the reasons for their plight and he dramatised exactly what it meant but he offered no solutions to the problem either in terms of the Joad family themselves or in the greater terms of the world at large.
This is not to denigrate what Steinbeck did. It is quite valid to ask questions without posing a solution. Sometimes we are not even aware of the right questions to ask until someone points them out to us. But it is possible to take it further. James Blish extrapolated the situation and asked what the Okies could do about it. The result was the Cities in Flight novels where he used the Okies (even the name was the same—surely a good clue as to what Blish thought he was doing) and the historical theories of Oswald Spengler to suggest some developments of the social/economic/political forces which caused the Okies to be created.
We can call that the SF technique.
The SF viewpoint and the SF technique are the two literary tools that no other writing style has, and they are the two strengths that should of themselves mean that SF is very well suited to the production of great art.
But all too often SF fails to measure up to expectations (generally, I would submit, when it does not use the SF viewpoint or the SF technique; when it is, if you like, more mundane. But that is another Bearded Triffid).
Let’s face it, we shouldn’t be surprised. Sturgeon’s law applies to everything. Very few books outside of SF have any lasting claim to merit. For every War and Peace there are thousands of ordinary books; books of which you could quite legitimately say “It’s about Russia”; and when you’ve said that, there is nothing more to say. Why should SF be any different?
So there is no art in Doc Smith’s Lensmen or Jack Williamson’s space legionnaires. They have no life and no real concern. There is no form to Flandry, no soul to the Stainless Steel Rat.
But in my opinion, there are at least six SF novels which approach greatness; at least in the terms in which I have defined it in this little essay. In no particular order, the books are:
Martian Time Slip by Philip K. Dick
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
More than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Gateway by Frederik Pohl
I doubt that they will pass the test of time. No one will read them in the twenty-first century. No school children will write essays on them and curse the day they were written. I have fulminated before about the literary mafia who ignore the genre fictions. These books will never come to the attentions of the arbiters of contemporary taste and they will never become part of the common cultural heritage. But nevertheless they are profound and sometimes moving works, and I will forgive a million Star Wars for the sake of them.
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