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Many shops have collecting tins on the counter—you’ve all seen them. Give to the Lions; Support the SPCA. When I lived in England I used to visit an Alternative bookshop called Mushroom. It had a collecting tin too, but because it was an Alternative bookshop, it collected to help victims of VD. Goodness knows what the system was. Presumably they put all the donations together and ferried them round to the local pox doctor once a month or so. Clap hands, here comes Charlie.
In the back of the shop was a “Free Cupboard”—if you found anything in it that took your fancy you could just take it away. You were also encouraged to donate things to the cupboard—but I never saw it happen. (I never saw anything taken out either. Few people have a lot of use for one gym shoe or a broken fork.)
Being an Alternative bookshop, Mushroom was heavily into radical politics (I bought my copy of The Thoughts of Chairman Mao there) and the occult (I bought my copy of the I Ching there—this was years before it became respectable) and because of this it attracted many of the local weirdos. I once heard someone ordering a book that wasn’t in stock. That was no problem. Then he said, “How about if I like lay some bread on you as a deposit?” I made a strangled gurgling noise, collapsed against the collected works of Kropotkin and laughed myself silly. I got glared at.
One of the reasons I liked Mushroom was that it had a very good stock of SF. I visited it regularly. The stock turned over quite quickly—SF was very popular with the heads. It always gave me a weirdly surrealistic feeling to know that the radical freaks were so heavily into such a reactionary, conservative literature as SF. I suspect that all too often the medium got in the way of the message—they really were blind to what they were reading. That upset me a little because I don’t like wilful stupidity.
Tangential to SF has always been the political allegory, the social satire. That’s why we point admiringly to books such as 1984 and Brave New World and try and use them to justify the seriousness with which we take our rather perverse hobby. If Aldous Huxley did it, the argument goes, then it must be alright. However I think we are comparing apples with pears. There are very strong reasons for saying that Huxley, Orwell, all the rest of them weren’t writing SF at all. When there’s an “r” in the month, I often believe it. After all, just look at the abysmal standard of the real thing when it tries to take on the same targets.
Politically SF has always been very naive, not to say unimaginative. Galactic empires abound; feudalism rules OK. It makes an interesting irony that the literature of the future should choose its trappings from the politics of the past (in many cases the quite remote past). Does anyone seriously think that the universe will be governed by the chinless wonders from Debrett or the Almanach de Gotha? I suspect we have a case of subconscious wish fulfilment here. Most SF is written by Americans—and they were always suckers for a title. When you haven’t got an aristocracy of your own, you envy other people’s (God knows why—as far as I’m concerned they can take ours home with them any time they like).
Dune is perhaps the most extreme example of this with the Padishah Emperor lording it over all and rank upon rank of courtiers, politicians and “priests”. There was a good opportunity here to make some points about the split between church and state. Just how much power did the various aristocratic houses have and how much rested with the more commercially oriented guild or the religiously oriented Bene Gesserit? This was left rather vague; Herbert had other furrows to plough and the overwhelming impression left in my mind was of the sixteenth century writ large. Also the complexity of the plot and the Machiavellian intrigues all combined to make me think of it as I Claudius in space. Incidentally, did you know that A. E. van Vogt’s novels Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn are virtually a direct rewrite of I Claudius? The Roman Empire becomes a galactic empire and instead of revolutions in Gaul or wherever, they have revolutions on Mars. There is a one to one relationship between the characters in the van Vogt novels and the Robert Graves. And to quote Damon Knight: “even the coinage is in sesterces”. Nonetheless the books are quite fun provided that you can turn your critical faculties off while you read them—in common with most van Vogt novels, they don’t make any sense, but if you want a book that makes sense, what are you doing reading van Vogt anyway?
Very few SF novels are overtly political. Mostly it is just window dressing—a mechanism to allow the book to get on with what it is really about. But there are some books whose major concern is political. A Torrent of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight is an examination of what Blish has called a “fascist utopia”. A major reason for writing it was that other utopias (and dystopias, come to that) are generally from the other end of the political spectrum and Blish wanted to show the opposite side of that coin. Despite the apparent contradiction in terms of the phrase “fascist utopia”, he succeeded admirably. Not only is the book fun to read on the action and “sensawonder” level, but it actually makes sense on the political level as well. It sounds as though it might work—might even be fun to live in, in some ways. You would think that the book would be guaranteed to curdle my left wing friends’ cream. Not at all. “Far out, man.”
Heinlein of course is the major sticking point for me. He isn’t always what he seems, though. Double Star is a wonderful novel about being a politician, but it has nothing whatsoever to do with politics. I often wish that more politicians realised the truth of that. It won a Hugo, and it was thoroughly deserved. However Stranger in a Strange Land also won a Hugo, so perhaps that’s not a good measuring rod. This book really is the great acid test. The freaks went overboard for it—even before Charlie Manson adopted it as a bible and used it as justification for his bloodier excesses. Over the years it has sold steadily and is probably one of Heinlein’s most popular works. In every crashpad or ashram, basement flat and backpack there always seems to be a dog-eared, broken-backed very well read copy of Stranger in a Strange Land. Ken Kesey loved it—it is mentioned by name in Tom Wolfe’s biography of Kesey: The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And I’d be willing to bet that the Radical Chic mob thought just as highly of it; in public anyway. In private they were probably too dumb to understand it. Not that the radical freaks showed much of an understanding though. Very few seemed really to listen to what Jubal Harshaw put together in his education of young Smithy. The end result was understandably attractive to the free love generation. Superficially it mimicked their life style, and perhaps it seemed like a good justification for what they did. But Jubal’s reasons were subtle and seemed largely over the heads of the heads.
I’d hesitate to call Heinlein fascist, reactionary or right wing. I’ve heard these pejoratives used enough times to know that often they are simply mouth noises and don’t mean very much. A close reading of Heinlein convinces me that whether you agree with him or not (and I most certainly don’t) he doesn’t arrive at his opinions from nowhere. He argues them well. Unlike most extremists (of either persuasion) he does actually have a brain in his head; he doesn’t just yell slogans.
The positions his characters espouse are often justified by appeals to rationality (Heinlein is a rationalist supreme). Too often the radical freaks seem to lack rationality (perhaps they don’t understand it—too long a diet of non-sequiturs out of little red books maybe) and respond much more at the gut level, the level of feeling, a close attraction to the superficialities and surface gloss. I can find no other explanation for the vast popularity that Heinlein’s books enjoy among people who really should be burning and banning them. I’m not immune to it myself. I don’t know how many times I’ve read Starship Troopers. It swings. (It also sucks.) I hate and love the book at the same time (could that be the attraction of it?). I suspect that it may be the closest thing he has produced to a work of art. It seems to push so many buttons simultaneously in so many people that he must have stumbled on some universally applicable symbols to clothe his message in.
It was the first of his preaching novels in the sense that it was the first time that his characters stood up on their hind legs and talked about things outside the direct scope of the plot. It wasn’t so much a case of “then we went out and stomped the nasty aliens”; rather it was “this is why we are going to go out and stomp the nasty aliens”. Once that had been explained, we could relax and do the stomping. And if we survived that, we could talk a bit more about the privileges accruing from being an ex-stomper. That was actually the major thesis of the book—that the franchise had to be earned, it was a privilege, not a right. In the universe of the book only veterans had voting privileges, only veterans could hold office. Not necessarily combat veterans, I hasten to add. Heinlein made it very clear that the right could be earned by many different forms of service. He chose to tell the tale from the point of view of the fighting marines because that made it more interesting as a story. (And the only good alien is a dead alien.) It was interestingly argued and a fun story, but opposition to the ideas was squashed by fiat—if Heinlein said it was true, then it was true. Full stop, no argument. That was unfair and infuriating, an underhand debating tactic. There were so many times that I wanted to take the hero’s History and Moral Philosophy teacher by the scruff of the neck and shake him that I often feared for my blood pressure when reading the book. Apoplexy rules. So I’d finish reading it and then immediately go and read Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero which is a wonderful satire on Starship Troopers and which never fails to make me laugh out loud. That always made me feel better.
Despite all of that, time and time again, those were the books that I saw vanish off the shelves at Mushroom, those were the books I saw many of my weirder friends reading. I never saw them reading what I would have thought of as political orthodoxy (by their standards at least).
Mack Reynolds wrote a lot of socialist SF. I’ve never met anybody who knew that fact—indeed I’ve never met anybody who’s read any Mack Reynolds. Even I’ve never read any Mack Reynolds (except for something called—I think—The Rival Rigellians which was just as bad as it sounds) and the only reason I know that he wrote from a left wing viewpoint is that I happened to read an article which told me so. Strike one.
The best example though just has to be Ursula K. Le Guin. The Dispossessed is one of my all time favourite books. It discusses a true Kropotkin-like anarchist state and compares and contrasts it with a more capitalist viewpoint. In the hands of someone like Heinlein there is no doubt as to how the development of such a theme would be handled. It would all be red and white, and there wouldn’t be any shades of pink to be seen. It is to Le Guin’s credit that she does not fall into this easy trap. The Dispossessed is thoughtful and sympathetic (at both ends of the spectrum) and is an intellectual tour de force. I love it very much. Unfortunately, again I’ve never met anyone else who shared my enthusiasm. Most people who have started reading it seem to leave it about half read. They find it boring (an attitude that amazes me). Often they do appreciate what Le Guin is up to but they just can’t maintain the enthusiasm to follow her. “Worthy but dull”, I once heard someone say. Strike two.
So what about the socialist writers (in a geographical sense)? SF is not a purely western phenomenon (though sometimes you might be forgiven for thinking so). What about Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers? (These are the most immediately available to western readers.)
I have to say straight away that I dislike their writing (and from discussion with other people I know that I am not alone). I suspect that it has something to do with different literary traditions since the works of these writers that I have read seem to me to be direct descendants of the traditions of Dostoievsky, Kafka et al. The “eastern” viewpoint if you like. I find it tedious in the extreme—they never seem to know when to stop, they never know when they’ve said enough. Lem is particularly infuriating in this regard. The Futurological Congress and Manuscript Found in a Bathtub are so boringly repetitive that I could scream. He makes his point, makes it again, underlines it, shouts it from the rooftops and then (just in case you weren’t listening) starts over again from the beginning. His novels read rather like short stories that simply go round in circles until the page count is long enough. Interestingly, his short stories do not show these faults. The collections The Cyberiad and The Star Diaries contain much that is good. Perhaps he is really a short story writer who has never grown up into a novelist. Perhaps so—but on the whole, strike three.
It doesn’t look good for the opposition does it?
Collectively though, books and viewpoints with any serious political implications are very rare in the SF canon. I think I’ve touched on most of the existing ones in this brief essay—there are one or two more, but they simply reinforce what I’ve already said. The devil has all the good tunes, and the fascists have all the good stories. “Far out man. Can you grok it?”
I suspect that what all the above is leading to is to confirm yet again the intellectual shallowness not only of much SF but also of many SF readers. Even when the depths are there as in all the books I’ve discussed above, the readers often will not swim in them. I’ve complained about this before, and I’m not going to go over old ground again, but I think that the example I’ve chosen to illustrate it with this time is perhaps the most dramatic I know. The sight of the Mushroom customers grooving on their intellectual enemies was a sad one.
One of the last books I bought from Mushroom was More Joy of Sex. The proprietor confided in me that he wished he’d ordered a larger stock. He said he could have sold them many times over and made quite a bit of loot out of them. That annoyed me, because it wasn’t what Mushroom was all about, and I felt ripped off. I never went back.
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