August SF
Alex de Jonge
I don't know whether it is the time of year but the science fiction I've seen over the last months has either been dull or consisted of collections of short stories. I have never got on with the latter in any form, except for Chekhov's Lady with a Little Dog, and have hitherto managed to arrange things so as to avoid them absolutely. However it must be admitted that the authors Christopher Priest has assembled in his Anticipations (Faber £4.95) include Ian Watson, Thomas Disch, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss, all on
good form.
Anyway, as far as novels are concerned the lean times are over now for Gollancz have come out with four lovely books. Ian Watson's Miracle Visitors (£4.95) is quite un to his very high standard, a marvellous and moving piece of speculation on the nature of UFOs. Don't groan. This is not another Strange Encounter. In its seriOnsness and its sheer intellectual and irnaginative quality it shows up that prePosterous piece (you can now read the book should you miss the film too badly; Arthur baker £4.95) for the simplistic meretricious rubbish that it really is. The sole Point of the work is to flatter the longing for the .irrational to be true, a la Jung, and to excite us with the feeling 'we are not alone' and the realisation that some alien space Ships are a great deal larger than we might reasonably have expected. Mr Watson's treatment of the topic, while also acknowledging the existence of the phenomenon, is infinitely subtler and more interesting and will appeal to Spinoza's many readers. This is not to say that it is in any Sense pretentious or affected, anything but. It is a supremely skillful piece of narrative which makes the smoothest transitions tronl, shall we say, views and assumptions that. most of us share about the nature of our ‘v. orld, and a very different apprehension of It indeed. The smoothness of the transition give.s the book a tremendous sense of convtitletion, making the reader happily accept
e existence of 'little green men' as being Well within the bounds of possibility. There ar, e other things to like about the book.
nAlthough the author still favours the split arrative technique he used in The Embedcling and The Martian Inca the split imposes 'Mich less strain here. It must be said, however, that the book is not an easy read. The author asks his readers a fair old question, ftor one of his concerns is the examination of nature of consciousness, or rather coniousnesses, and there are times when we get close to the territory that Colin Wilson :taxing been known to explore in a somewhat Jung manner. The Embedding was easier, ince all we needed there was a slight
acquaintance with transformational grammar, which is, I assume taught at most progressive schools these days. Not only is doing transformations so much more exciting than learning to write English, it does not discriminate between the gifted and the underpriviliged.
Much as I like Frank Herbert's earlier work I am not quite sure about The Dosadi Experiment, (£4.95) although it is streets ahead of most of the competition, and an extremely subtle book. An alien race, renowned for a highly developed capacity for survival learned at birth — frog-like creatures, their tadpoles have to swim away from a devouring father who then suffers a lifetime's guilt for having eaten his slower progeny — have set up an experiment on a planet cut off from the rest of the universe, where humans and themselves, big green men, coexist in a savagely hostile environment. The result is the emergence of a ruthless, untrusting, quick and survival conscious cast of mind, the Dosadi cast, with every danger that if the Dosadis ever break out of their thrall they will conquer the universe. There is much to like about this basic conception, and the account of the Dosadi attitude, most beautifully done, is probably the best thing in the book. There is also some good characterisation, particularly of the heroine and some of the aliens. The trouble is that it is all too subtle and unclear; the author has grown so familiar with the world he has invented that he has failed to appreciate that his readers know it a great deal less well than he. Thus the narrative is developed by the central character, and hence also the readers, gradually learning more and more about the nature and ramifications of the Dosadi experiment. Unfortunately, this withholding of information inhibits necessary exposition, so that when we are plunged into the intricacies of a very alien legal system we don't really know enough about it to appreciate what is going on. One other objection to what is otherwise an interesting and exciting book: the author has allowed himself perhaps too many bits of sci-fi technology and one can't help feeling that some of these are designed to teleport him out of tight corners. Dune was a more disciplined work altogether.
Readers easily put off by preposterous or pretentious endorsements should ignore what Ursula Le GuM has VD say about Vonda McIntyre's Dream Snake (£4.95), a very beautiful work which has nothing pretentious or preposterous about it. It is richly and beautifully imagined, and is a gentle, moving and feminine hook in the good sense of that word. Set in a post-nuclear age among nomads and country dwellers, it is the story of a healer. The healers are a brotherhood which have developed extraordinary biochemical skills, and who rely for their healing on genetically modified snakes. The heroine, herself named Snake, uses three, a cobra and a rattler, for her healing, and a third, a precious alien `dreamsnake' which has the power of easing death. Dreamsnakes are dreadfully rare, and when hers is killed by an ignorant nomad she sets out on a desperate quest to find a replacement, or else, as a healer, she will have failed both herself and those that put their faith in her. It is a very satisfying book indeed., The Strugatsky brothers, Arkady and Boris are fast becoming something of a cult among Soviet trendies, and Roadside Picnic (£3.95) can begin to show us why. It is a very good piece of science fiction indeed. Aliens have paid a brief visit to a part of Canada and left behind them a zone, full of strange gadgets and artifacts, some useful, others merely puzzling. Although the zone is full of goodies they are not easy to recover since it is a very dangerous place indeed, full of death traps. Nonetheless 'stalkers' persist in dodging the guards and trying to get in and out in order to sell the alien objects. It is a hazardous business and they could never do it without the help of a few pulls of the hard stuff. Indeed they display a loony disregard for danger, a love of the hard stuff, together with the understanding of the workings of the underworld (blat in Russian) and its black markets, which gives the book a subtle undertone of the old country. Not having seen the original I don't know how accurate the translation is, but it reads extraordinarily convincingly in its own right, down to the various neologisms and slangy dialogue. The book does not arrive at any momentous conclusions, but the fact that it stands up in the distinctly demanding company of Watson, Herbert and McIntyre shows us at the very least that the idea of Russian science fiction is not just another Polish joke.
'The worst thing is when nothing, absolutely nothing happens to a person in a whole lifetime. Just think of that.' Enduring, or escaping from such a nothing is what James Hanley's beautifully controlled, exquisitely written novel is all about. On the face of it, nothing much does happen. Silent, tyrannical Welsh fanner dies in his remote smallholding in which he has dominated first one daughter, Lucy, who escapes to snug marriage with a nice sub-postmaster met on her once-ever day-trip to Prestatyn; and then the other, Cadi, hauled back from teaching in Manchester to look after him in his widowhood. From death to funeral, the two women spar, parry, self-justify their different guilts and hatred. Lucy returns to the post-office; Cadi decides to carry on alone. The hoops of iron, the slog of being bound to such a father, with only one agonisingly pathetic hope of escape with a missionary who lets her down, have entered her soul. She has, like Lucy, 'writhed in days that spelt themselves out with unerring regularity.' Their father, lying dead upstairs, still dominates the book; and, right at the end, Cadi clearing out his things discovers an old photograph under his mattress: an elegant lady, admiration for whom from impossibly afar has provided his fantasy lifeline and dominated him -not unlike the grand lady Stan Parket rescues from the fire in Patrick White's Tree of Man.
Death gives birth to links and significances previously slipped into the mind's back pockets, and this novel is not just about paternal dominance and filial acceptance (his last words, Lear-like, to Cadi, are 'Thank you', but she's not Cordelia and 'No cause' cannot be the reply) but about the recognition and acceptance of endurance. I cannot praise this book too highly.
Hodgman is a winner: her tale of a crazy kind of relationship between a tough, orphaned Australian girl from the bush and the battered warcripple who raped her as a child and whom she finally marries is a perfectly observed description of Australian life before and after the war, which then teeters into something verging on lunacy as Jill becomes a successful writer of children's books, featuring a perfect all-Australian little boy, the child they never had. Jack impregnates a passing hippy and the child is adopted by the two eccentrics. Difficult to categorise the charm and verve of such a wild creation, but Miss Hodgman's way with the Australian language makes Barry Humphries pale by comparison. Strange and mad as the story is, it's sheer delight from beginning to end. The sane perversity of human relationship is blown sky-high.
Miss Slaughter has, frankly, bitten off more than she can chew with her tale of Mary Magdalene, who, of course, was the naughty one we all wanted to know more about in Scripture. Told in the keening, whingeing, first person to an unidentified Loved One (more of that later) she portrays herself as a neurotic, sexy girl who has lost two husbands and a child and ends up being kept by a sinister rich merchant and haunting the red-light section of Tiberias. She addresses the story pleadingly to this lovely, strange chap who was unlike anyone else! by turns angry, beautiful, removed, different: they had some kind of a brief thing together and then he too was killed by people who hated and feared him. No prize for guessing etc. It's bad taste time, folks. In spite of some fashionable psychological insight into a disturbed woman, overlaid with lib truths about how women can only ever be helped by other women and some good, sensible and well-expressed insights ('endurance has no limit: the heart can always move over just a little bit more to accommodate that new despair'), I'm afraid it's thumbs down for an oveiwrought and rather soppy piece.
Mary Hope
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