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He tries not to get the three confused. |
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Calling yourself a Science-Fiction fan is like calling yourself a Christian. Other fans eye you suspiciously, wondering which sect you belong to, while unbelievers wonder why someone who appears relatively sane wastes his time and intellect on stories that have no connection with reality. Let me explain. Firstly, in case your view of Sci-Fi is Yoda and Captain Kirk, I assure you I am too old to be a Trekkie or a Star Wars fanatic. Jedi Knights appeal mostly to fourteen year old boys who are becoming Aware of The Opposite Sex, but who are still more comfortable unsheathing their light sabres to destroy hordes of plodding robots. The Star Trek fan, on the other hand, is the late teenager who appreciates the tight-fitting costumes on both the male and female cosmonauts and for whom the Deep Meaningful Homilies spouted by Jean-Luc Picard and his crew are still deep and meaningful. Despite appearances, both series make only token reference to aliens. In the first Star Wars film, they only appear in the bar and, like specimens in a zoo, there are only one or two of each variety. In the final scene, where the heroes are honoured by an entire army, the only alien in sight is Chewbacca. Where were all the millions of aliens that inhabited this universe while humans were blasting each other out of existence? No doubt doing the sensible thing and getting drunk in less popular bars. Later Star Wars began to integrate aliens into human society, something that Star Trek has done since the beginning, but in both series the aliens are no more than humans with funny masks. Since we can no longer make fun of other ethnicities, or ascribe to them the wisdom of the ancients, all we need to is elongate an ear here, elevate a brow there and put a few ridges on a nose. Bingo! Instead of Jews and Germans, Chinese and Indians, we have a range of humanoid species, all with very human traits, that we can either mock or turn to for Zenlike lectures. The writers at Star Trek are at least more adventurous than George Lucas, although their creations are seldom consistent. The Borg, which supposedly act as one being composed of thousands or millions of cyberhuman entities, keep behaving as individuals - why do they talk to each other if they are constant mental communication? and why do they ask questions when they already know the answer? Then there is Data, the pasty-faced android who in each episode falls into a situation where he is supposed to develop his humanity. He'd be superhuman by now if he actually learnt from his experiences. So will whoever is wiping his data banks clean between episodes kindly stop doing it? Enough of what I don't like. Moving on to what I do... My preferred science fiction is on the printed page, not the screen. And while I read many authors, I have four clear favourites, two of which do not easily fit the Sci-Fi mode. They are, in alphabetical order, J G Ballard, Iain M Banks, Ray Bradbury and Samuel R Delany. Ballard first, in particular his short stories of the 1960s and 1970s. His work is mostly earthbound, set in a near, often dystopic, future. His characters are caught by circumstances beyond their control, observers rather than actors. Plots are secondary; it is the settings that remain in the memory - the city that imploded in Chronopolis; the slow-motion barbarians in The Garden of Time; the whitened ribcage of The Drowned Giant. But it is Vermilion Sands that I remember most clearly, that city where it is always four o'clock in the afternoon in late summer, that time when, drinks in hand, the inhabitants come out to watch to watch the cloud sculptors at work. It is in Vermilion Sands that sound sweeps vacuum away the dead noises that accumulated in rooms and houses over days and weeks, and where prima donnas duel arias with singing plants. When I first moved to Los Angeles, it seemed to me that Vermilion Sands was just over the horizon, one of the many small towns that line the coast from Santa Monica to San Diego. Occasionally I would take the car and park where the airport met the ocean, to watch the planes roar up into the sky and disappear over the Pacific before driving slowly south, not on the freeway, but on the smaller streets through Manhattan Beach and Redondo Beach and on, slowly on, through Long Beach, Newport Beach and Huntington Beach, but never reaching my goal. If Ballard writes about the earth, Delany takes you deep into space. The only gay black science fiction writer I am aware of, Delany frequently explores sexuality, from Triton, where individuals can change sex and sexual orientation almost at will, to Nova, where the sexual element includes father-son and human-pet and the Nevèrÿon series where the roles of master and slave frequently interchange. His most interesting novel to date is Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand which imagines better than any other writer I know the experience of human and alien species living closely together. Iain M Banks is too familiar for me to describe here and I will end this column where I meant to begin it, with Ray Bradbury. Although Bradbury's work has included science fiction, most notably in The Silver Locusts (aka The Martian Chronicles) he is the most earthbound of the four and a significant minority of his stories have no fantastical element at all. Sun and Shadow tells the story of a Mexican angered by an American photographer's desire to take fashion photos in his poverty stricken village. The Great Wide World Over There reveals the longings of an illiterate farmers' wife to communicate with the world beyond her horizon. The final heartbreaking paragraph reads: “And at last the day came when the wind blew the mailbox over. In the mornings again, Cora would stand at the open door of her cabin, brushing her grey hair with a slow brush, not speaking, looking at the hills. And in all the years that followed she never passed the fallen mailbox without stooping aimlessly to fumble inside and take her hand out with nothing in it before she wandered on again into the fields.” As Bradbury grew older, however, the sharp eye that had envisioned his classic tales, including the novels Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes became increasingly clouded by the tear of sentiment. Now, his latest book, From the Dust Returned has just been published, a novel bringing together various characters that first appeared in short stories in the late 1940s and 1950s. This is not the first time that Bradbury has created a novel this way; Dandelion Wine and The Illustrated Man have a similar structure. Here is the Family, recognisable to us as forerunners of the Munsters and the Addams Family, but without their demeaning humour and in their full humanity. There is Uncle Einar, a giant of man whose great wings allow him to fly far and wide, Cecy, the young woman who lies in her bed and whose mind takes her into the minds of animals humans across the land, a Thousand Times GrandMère, the matriarch, countless cousins who run or fly by night and sleep by day, and Timothy, the foundling whose one regret is that he is only too human. I loved these characters when I first met them, for it seemed that they revelled in their outcast state, that their experience of life was more intense than mine and their immortality brought them wisdom rather than ennui. Unfortunately, what is broadly described in the stories is not examined in depth in the novel. True, if you have not read Bradbury before, this book will not disappoint, but if you want to see what he is truly capable of, look for the books that he published in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. |
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| 11 November 2002 |
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© Martin Foreman |