First published in New
Worlds, November 1960.
Amis is largely
dismissive of the New Wave. Moorcock’s Cornelius novels ‘give
rise to little more than incurious bewilderment if read with any
close attention.’ J G Ballard’s own sense of his limitations has
led him to write novels like Crash and Concrete Island
‘the one takes physical disgust about as far as I have ever seen in
print, the other is a kind of urban non-escape story overcrowded with
realistic detail. Thomas Disch has ‘real but unorganised talent’,
John Sladek is ‘an experimentaliser in a mode sometimes compared
with Kurt Vonnegut’, and Norman Spinrad is ‘notable for his use
of four letter words’.
I don’t agree with
Amis’s assessment of these writers, but on the other hand I do
think he gets the deleterious effect of the New Wave pretty much
right.
‘SF’ itself, a time-sanctioned abbreviation, came to stand for, not ‘science fiction’ but ‘speculative fiction’, a phrase signifying either a boldly liberating adventurism or a fairly frank admission that anything went.
While he’s dismissive
of New Wave writers generally, Amis singles out Brian Aldiss for
particular praise: ‘Aldiss may have his limitations, too, but he
has yet to reach them. There seems no theme or style, from the ‘hard
core’ of the genre to its modernist fringe and beyond that this
talented and prolific writer won’t attempt.’ He goes on to draw
particular attention to Report of Probability A and Barefoot
in the Head.
This story was written
especially for the one-hundredth issue of New Worlds magazine,
then edited by John Carnell and included in Aldiss’s 1963
collection from Faber & Faber, The Airs of Earth. This
places it right at the end of Amis’s Golden Age, and so it has some
of the characteristics of the coming New Wave.
The most obvious of
these is its sense of millenarian decadence and ennui. This is an
ancient world, tired and near its end. It’s like M John Harrison’s
Viriconium, any of Moorcock’s sixties and seventies SF and fantasy
series, and the particular atmosphere of Vermillion Sands.
In this story, humanity
has fled and left only ruins. The Earth is home to layers of history
that allow the writer to show off both their erudition and ability to
depict a psychedelic experience of future-senses through tricksy
prose.
His view of what she saw enriched hers. He knew the history, the myth behind this forsaken land. He could stock the tired old landscape with pageantry, delighting her and surprising her. Back and forward he went, flicking her pictures; the Youdicans, the Lombards, the Ex-Europa Emissary, the Grites, the Risorgimento, the Involuters – and catchwords, costumes, customs, courtesans, pelted briefly through Dandi Lashadusa’s mind. Ah, she though admiringly, who could truly live without these priestly, beastly, erudite, erratic mentors.
These aren’t new
ideas for SF – the ancient Earth and the advanced cognitive state –
but writers describing them previously have done so without resorting
to alliteration and
assonance. This kind of over-literariness is identified by Amis as
producing ‘leaden fables with some science fiction trimmings to
their verbal tricksiness’. It’s not laid on as thickly here as it
would be by later writers, but it’s clearly present in this story,
this desire to sing where speaking is more effective.
The apocalyptic setting
reflects the mental state of the main character herself, introduced
as ‘old Dandi Lashadusa’. After seventy years she’s tired of
life and seeks to follow humanity into the transcendent state beyond
the Involute.
Each Involute carried thousands or even millions of people. They were, not dead, not living. How they exulted or wept in the transubstantiation, nobody left could say. Only the could be said: man had gone and a great emptiness was fallen over the Earth.
It’s a very New Wave
apocalypse. It’s not the end, it’s a change of form, an
ascendancy to a purer state of being. In a way, this story and
stories like it betray the very core of Amis’s vision of SF. They
don’t describe life in a godless universe. They replace God with
science and use it to offer the same comforting lies: there is no
death, you are more than flesh, the best is yet to come.
It’s not only that I
don’t believe in God and heaven, it’s that I believe that the
state of perfection offered by conventional Christianity and in
stories like this is inimical to the process of being alive. This is
a religious story for atheists, where I can only imagine we’re
supposed to feel satisfaction that Dandi ends up in the futuristic
version of heaven that I don’t believe in either. Pain, struggle,
work and grind – these are the essential elements of human life and
when your body grows sick and tired, you don’t ascend, you die.
Themes: ancient Earth, transcendence, uplifted animals, verbal tricksiness, New Wave.
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