booklit

Science fiction has been in the news a lot these days, most notably with Kim Stanley Robinson’s much publicised criticism about the lack of recognition awarded to the genre by judges of the Man Booker Prize (although it’s likely that sf publishers don’t submit the works for consideration). It’s a genre that seems to want to break away from being ghettoised and obtain respectability, to prove that it’s a genre of ideas rather than, as stereotypes imply, the domain of nerds.

It’s not a genre that I would consciously gravitate to, put off as I am by the notion of space operas and many a sf cover, but I see no harm in sampling from time to time, although my preference would seem to go to those recognised as good examples of what science fiction is capable of, and it’s for this reason that I turned to Walter Tevis’ The Man Who Fell To Earth (1963). It’s probably better known for the film adaptation starring David Bowie but the original novel is an enjoyable journey in its own right.

The book opens in the year 1985 with our titular ‘man’ wandering around Kentucky and having his first experiences of interacting with human beings:

It was a woman, a tired-looking woman in a shapeless blue dress, shuffling towards him up the street. He quickly averted his eyes, dumbfounded. She did not look right. He had expected them to be about his size, but this one was more than a head shorter than he. Her complexion was ruddier than he had expected, and darker. And the look, the feel, was strange — even though he had known that seeing them would not be the same as watching them on television.

It is through television - and FM radio - that he has observed humanity before arriving on the planet from Anthea, his own world. To understand their ways helps in dealing with the “complex, long-prepared plan” he has come to effect. Said plan isn’t immediately explained but forms part of the novel’s mystery as we watch the rise of Thomas Jerome Newton (his assumed identity) from selling gold rings to small jeweller’s for lows sums to becoming a wealthy man by patenting and producing advanced technology for the market to consume under the umbrella of World Enterprises Corporation. The only hint as to what Newton needs the money for — his target amount is five hundred million dollars in five years — is in his answer to his patent lawyer, that it’s for a research project.

Being a novel set during the Cold War it’s no surprise that suspicion towards foreigners should feature in the novel, and with his meteoric rise in status, Newton begins to inspire the doubts of many people, notably Robert Bryce, a chemical engineer who, upon seeing one of the W.E. Corp’s new products - a self-developing camera film - concludes that it “It’s got to be a whole new technology…somebody digging up a science in the Mayan ruins…or from some other planet…” and burrows his way into Newton’s employ in order to sate his curiosity.

The relationship between Newton and Bryce is an interesting one as the initial suspicion over Newton’s true origins leads to an eventual friendship, and also allows us into Newton’s existential quandary. He’s a man alone in the world, different to everyone on the planet and losing his identity the more he lives as a human and yearns to out himself as an Anthean.

Then he spoke aloud, to himself, in English. ‘Who are you?’ he said. ‘And where do you belong?’

His own body stared back at him; but he could not recognize it as his own. It was alien, and frightening.

While the novel’s title could be read literally, about a man falling to Earth, the truer premise lies in Newton’s decline in purpose. From intentions to serve a masterplan his Anthean self begins to disintegrate under the gravity of human ways, accelerated by a certain closeness to his low status housekeeper, who introduced him to gin and taught him “that a huge and indifferent mass of persons had virtually no ambitions and no values whatever”, and the thought of his own people loses its importance:

…he, the Anthean, a superior being from a superior race, was losing control, becoming a degenerate, a drunkard, a lost and foolish creature, a renegade and, possibly, a traitor to his own.

Tevis’ prose isn’t particularly showy, he deals mostly in facts and details and drifts through the minds of his characters. But in Newton he lingers longer and captures well the loneliness and sorrow that can affect a man who stands alone, obsessed with “vague guilts and vaguer doubts” and with no real confessor in his midst. His decline almost feels inevitable and with the ongoing questioning of himself (”…was it merely that a man surrounded by animals long enough became more of an animal than he should?”) Tevis achieves an agreeable balance of depth alongside pacier sections.

Toward the end of the book there is a mention of the Watergate scandal that, for a book written in 1963 is remarkably prescient, and would hint at Tevis having made later amendments to his work. The pictured edition doesn’t make mention of this and one wonders what other changes may have been made to the original text. But original text or updated probably doesn’t matter for The Man Who Fell To Earth is a satisfying tale that contains a wholly science-fiction premise but delivers it lightly with little emphasis on the science and much more on the fiction..

I grew up with an interest in vampire stories, working my through the likes of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles but, despite forever hearing good things about it, I’d never got around to reading Richard Matheson’s contribution to the canon, I Am Legend (1954). However, with its third big screen adaptation currently in the cinema - and hearing word of a reworked ending - I wanted to go straight to the source before seeing the film in order that my first impressions remain faithful to the book, not to whatever liberties the film-makers have taken.

Talking of impressions, I sort of knew what to expect from the book, but only in a bare bones way: vampires, an element of science-fiction in some form or other, and character who is the last man on Earth. That the novel is held as a masterpiece of science fiction rather than horror interested me and it was to the pictured edition I turned, not wanting the film tie-in because a) these are tacky; and b) Will Smith is on it.

I Am Legend begins as just another ordinary day in the life of Robert Neville, a plant worker from California who would appear to be the sole survivor of an apocalypse seemingly caused by a bacteria that infects the hosts who then go on to show signs of vampirism: aversion to garlic, crucifixes, and daylight; death by wooden stake; a taste for blood:

…no one had believed in them, and how could they fight something they didn’t even believe in?

Neville’s days consist of foraging for food, keeping his generator running, staying sober, repairing structural damage to his home, and hunting out the vampires, who retreat to the darkness and slip into a form of coma. On a cloudy day, he stays in. But Neville’s drive to understand what has happened leads to his education in matters such as blood and microscopes:

But, of course, he knew nothing about microscopes, and he’d taken the first one he’d found. Three days later he hurled it against the wall with a strangled curse and stamped it into pieces with his heels.

Then, when he’d calmed down, he went to the library and got a book on microscopes.

At night the neighbourhood vampires gather round his house, the regular mantra of ‘Come out, Neville’, trying to entice him into their clutches, but this is nothing for Neville, who now takes it for granted:

…from a distance they’d thrown rocks until he’d been forced to cover the broken panes with plywood scraps. Finally one day he’d torn off the plywood and nailed up even rows of planks instead. It had made the house a gloomy sepulcher, but it was better than having rocks come flying into his rooms in a shower of splintered glass. And, once he had installed the three air-conditioning units, it wasn’t too bad. A man could get used to anything if he had to.

As the novel progress, his understanding of blood and bacteria grows, making him able to forms conclusions as to what has happened to the world. And if his science is sketchy - I wouldn’t know, though - then it’s only because he’s an amateur. Finally, after months of solitude, he spots a dog wandering in daylight and spends time trying to befriend it, only to discover the true nature of the bacteria, and from there events escalate to the shocking ending that, on reflection, is strangely optimistic.

Throughout I Am Legend Matheson explores the vampire myth from a scientific point of view. Neville reduces garlic, for example, to its chemical constituents to find what offends vampires so. And when tackling other conventions, of the more psychological ilk, questions are asked, such as “what would a Mohammedan vampire do if faced with a cross?” It’s to his credit that he doesn’t just accept such traits as staples of the genre and dares to question them, lifting his novel from more pulpy contemporaries.

But vampires aside, its the human angle that takes centre stage in I Am Legend, charting Neville’s passage from man to monster as he goes around by day killing the slumbering vampires. Where, in the Bible Jesus met a man possessed and, on asking his name, was told, “I am Legion, for we are many”, so Matheson inverts this notion where the many see in him a legend, a mythical beast that haunts their numbers.

The novel benefits from Matheson’s style, a straightforward, no frills prose, that is immensely readable, offering up page after page of horrific action coupled with a realistic - seriously! - study of loneliness. In the vampire canon it’s one of the better novels I’ve read, daring to be edgy by explaining a predominantly supernatural subject matter as science. Other vampire novels should be scared of this - it deserves its legend.

Ask me what my favourite film is and I’ll no doubt respond with Last Year In Marienbad (1961), written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and directed by Alain Resnais. Its appeal is that no matter how many times I watch it I am never wholly satisfied. Not because it’s a poor work - it isn’t; rather it doesn’t force answers into tidy resolutions and the viewer is left to ponder long after. And with each viewing a new avenue of possibilities opens up, answers always just out of reach.

It was news to me, however, that Last Year In Marienbad was inspired by a novel and more surprising that the work in question was a slim volume of Latin American science fiction. The Invention Of Morel (1940) by Argentinian writer, Adolfo Bioy Casares, who, it seems, lived in the literary shadow of countrymen and friend, Jorge Luis Borges. And with Borges providing a prologue (an introduction, really) it would appear he can’t even release a book without his friend casting that shadow.

The Invention Of Morel was Casares’ seventh novel and he believed it was the first true work of his literary career. In said prologue Borges states that “to classify it as perfect is neither an imprecision nor a hyperbole”. Octavio Paz echoed this when he said of the novel that it “may be described, without exaggeration, as a perfect novel.” With such heavyweights singing its praises and my own curiousity about how it inspired my favourite film I was eager to cast generic sci-fi prejudices aside and see just how perfect it was. As it turns out, rather close. But perfection in reading is subjective.

On the run from the police for a crime in his homeland, the narrator has wound up on a deserted island “known to be the focal point of a mysterious disease”. The novel forms his diary, the entries undated, from the moment when “a miracle” happens. That miracle is the arrival of other people to the island, people dressed as if “from another era”, who take up residence, having seemingly come from nowhere:

When I was finally able to sleep, it was very late. The music and the shouting woke me up a few hours later. I have not slept soundly since my escape; I am sure that if a ship, a plane, or any other form of transportation had arrived, I would have heard it. And yet suddenly, unaccountably, on this oppressive summerlike night, the grassy hillside has become crowded with people who dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad.

Fearing being turned in to the authorities, the narrator stays out of their way, but soon becomes attracted to one of their party, the beautiful Faustine, who he observes from a distance, falling, like Casares did for Louise Brooks, who graces the cover, into a love unrequited:

She watches the sunset every afternoon; from my hiding place I watch her. Yesterday, and again today, i discovered that my nights and days wait for this hour. The woman, with a gypsy’s sensuality and a large, bright-colored scarf on her head, is a ridiculous figure. But I still feel (perhaps I only half believe this) that if she looked at me for a moment, spoke to me only once, I would derive from those simple acts the sort of stimulus a man obtains from friends, from relatives, and, most of all, from the woman he loves.

As the days pass events become more mysterious. Two suns take to the sky, followed by two moons. The people of the island talk about the same things over and over again and the narrator becomes braver in his love for Faustine, daring to present himself only to be ignored.

The Morel of the title is a nod to H.G Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau and, like his literary forebear, is an unscrupulous scientist. But that’s not what’s important to our narrator, for he belives that Faustine is using Morel - and the other islanders, as he gets to know them - to repudiate him. The invention of the title, however, is best left unmentioned as its revelation serves the story well in answering all of the novel’s mysteries before leading on to the beautiful, but unnerving, coda.

While much of the novel is written as fact within diary entries, there are occasions to dispute the reality. The reader is given pause to wonder if all of this is in the narrator’s mind. After all, the island does bask in severe warmth and it’s not outwith the realms of possibility that severe heat stroke could be causing hallucinations:

From the marshlands with their churning waters I can see the top of the hill, and the people who have taken up residence in the museum. I suppose someone might attriute their mysterious appearance to the effect of last night’s heat on my brain. But there are no hallucinations or imaginings here: I know these people are real - at least as real as I am.

Like Last Year In Marienbad, that’s the beauty of such a narrative and in rereading The Invention Of Morel early passages that inform later events or knowledge enhance the reading experience, all the while leaving dubiety about the conclusion. Each interpretation is possible, just as they dismiss one another.

As far as the perfection quoted by Borges and Paz goes, I can see where they are coming from as Casares has produced an immensely readable novel that is the sum of its parts, with nothing extraneous lurking in the narrative. As a mystery it’s engaging, and all the threads come together in an intricate weave with no frayed lines to tug on. I’d be loathe to call it perfect, however, especially since I’m reading it in translation. But as a novel it’s light on the science, and prefers to linger on themes of immortality and love, within a temporal puzzle, twisting them until they are all the better for it.

Reading Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World was inspired by realising that I hadn’t read any of a recent list stating the top twenty geek novels. Given that my impressions of geek literature amount to either hardcore science fiction or adventures in Elfworld it was pleasant to discover that this novel, over seventy years after its publication, is still fresh. I would tend to think, however, that its endurance is due to its satirical tone rather than any sort of geeky idolisation as, despite its futuristic setting, it deals more with its characters rather than the world around them.

Set in a dystopian society in 2540AD or, as the book calls it, AF632 (AF meaning After Ford) the novel presents an almost perfect society where war and poverty has been eliminated at the cost of family, culture, and religion. The whole world is considered to be a single state and the central tenets are those, as you would expect, of the industrialist Henry Ford. Fordism is the semi-religious doctrine that permeates this society: his sayings are gospel, his name is said in vain, the cross has been replaced by the ‘T’; indeed, in a motion similar to crossing oneself, the citizens make the sign of the ‘T’. An interesting idea, perhaps, but the incessant expletives (“for Ford’s sake!”, “oh my Ford!”, etc.) do lose some of their humour and power.

It begins, with little narrative, in the Central London Hatching and Conditioning Centre, a place where human beings are raised are ‘bottled’ (raised in test tubes) and then conditioned via radiation and Pavlovian techniques to become one of the five social castes of society (the independent Alphas through to the half-retarded Epsilons). Once fit for society the citizens are then ‘decanted’. The Director of this centre is giving a tour to a group and shows them the bottled embryos passing along a conveyor belt as they are treated with chemicals to determine the future intelligence and physical attributes of the embryo. He then shows them the nursery where some children are being conditioned to loathe, of all things, books and flowers.

Then, moving on, we meet one of the world’s controllers, a man named Mustapha Mond. He tells the touring children about the World State and the benefits that attempts to quash peoples’ emotions and relationships has made on society. Indeed, in this world, there is no marriage, grief, or joy – promiscuous sex is actively encouraged, death is no big deal, and games only serve to further the economy.

More characters, from here, are introduced into the narrative as Huxley’s world escapes the Hatchery and Conditioning Centre and goes further afield. The self-conscious Bernard Marx gets permission from the Director to visit a savage reservation in New Mexico; Lenina Crowne, attracted to him, accepts his offer to join him. Helmholm Watson, a hypnopaedia writer (slogans that are repeated and learnt whilst citizens sleep) shows discontent at his job feeling, as an Alpha, that he is capable of much more. And, in New Mexico, they meet John and his mother Linda, a pair of savages discontent with their world. Returning to London attempts are made to integrate John into society but, his world is shaped by Shakespeare (he found a copy of his complete works) and he disagrees with the dystopian World State, arguing with Mond until each character goes their own way (John to exile; Marx exiled.) and the final denouement.

Brave New World could have been better, there’s no doubt about that. The obvious hindrance was a narrative that never really centered on one character: one minute we were touring the hatchery, the next we’re following Bernard who, in turn, slinked into the shadows when John was introduced. Huxley has ideas, though, and amidst his obvious taste for neologisms (centrifugal Bumble-puppy!) gets his ideas across fairly well although this can be at the cost of the narrative as the climactic argument between John and Mond goes back and forward with neither being right. The World Controller argues that society is better off when nobody reflects on the past, when people aren’t given any time to themselves, and when there is nothing to be emotional about and that eliminated studies (history, religion, science) are wrongs that require control while John, in his misunderstanding of the World State, believes that people should have freedom of thought and be allowed to suffer emotions to make them human. Of course, in a world where people are made to order, made on Ford’s assembly line, he has little chance of ever making a point.

The writing in Brave New World is fine, if a tad verbose at times or scientific at others (dolichocephalic!) with, as previously mentioned, a world of neologistic commodities (pneumatic armchairs, for example). Dialogue is alright and serves to paint a more accurate picture of the characters but it is not entirely realistic and sometimes serves as device for infodumps. The characters, however, are hard to follow as they feature for little periods and, while you get an idea of what drives them, you don’t get a complete sense of their role within the story, especially as to their reactions by the novel’s close.

While I liked Brave New World one of the hardest things for me to do was imagine Huxley’s vision as it would be incarnate. When I think of future societies I am given to thoughts of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis but, when least expected, Huxley would throw in the countryside, savage reservations, and, unexpectedly, a lighthouse. I understand that these elements demonstrate a world that strives to be perfect but suffers from underlying problems (the people are kept happy by use of recreational drugs rather than any utopian positivity) that mean it is still a burgeoning dystopia rather than fully realised with its wheels completely greased. Overall, it’s an attractive novel, full of ideas, but one that suffers from a lack of organisation with them.