by Damon Knight
Aldiss is at his best in discussing the literary progenitors of science fiction; he is illuminating on Walpole and Beckford, brilliant on Poe. Surprisingly, he devotes more than half his book to authors who he says did not write S.F. Although he quotes Kingsley Amis’s famous couplet,11 12 13 he appears to say, in several convoluted sentences,14 that Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce & Co. did not write S.F. because they wrote literature. But if their literature is not S.F., why not? Aldiss does not say. By ducking the problem in this traditional and circular way he vitiates his argument and leaves the question as vexed as ever.
In dealing with Wells, Heinlein, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, Aldiss is penetrating and witty. He is illuminating on the subject of such writers as Lewis Padgett (but he gives all the credit to Kuttner, forgetting that C. L. Moore was part of that by-line too), Olaf Stapledon, and Walter Miller, Jr. (“cordon bleu pemmican”). He does somewhat less well with Haggard, “Saki,” Chesterton, Hodgson, Kafka, and Lovecraft, and astonishingly misjudges van Vogt (good God, “tenderness”!).
About Gernsbackian S.F. he writes, “As long as the stories were built like diagrams, and made clear like diagrams, and stripped of atmosphere and sensibility, then it did not seem to matter how silly the ‘science’ or the psychology was.” And about the New Wave: “To argue for either side in such a controversy is a mistake; phonies are thick on either hand, good writers few.” There is much sound sense here, along with a certain amount of inevitable tedium. In the end, the book is faintly disappointing because of its muddy conception; Aldiss never confronts the problem of deciding what his subject is, and as a result he takes in at once too much and too little.
The book is marred by many evidences of haste, and by a coy use of French (“the more au fait citizens”) and a genteel avoidance of the word “I” (“for this critic’s taste”). Aldiss sometimes attempts American slang, e.g., “the wish to escape from urban civilization, where there are lousy jobs like railroad cop going.”
Like Aldiss, Lin Carter lays his groundwork in a chapter of name-dropping—Gilgamesh, the Vedic hymns, the Odyssey, Akhnaton’s Hymn to the Sun, etc. It is evident that he loves his subject enough actually to have read these works and many others. He writes knowledgeably of the Mabinogion and of Beckford’s Vathek. His discussions of William Morris and Lord Dunsany, and of Tolkien (for whom he has a measured enthusiasm), are lucid and informative. His style is chatty, well larded with cliches. Like Aldiss, he has a healthy sense of his own unique importance; like Aldiss, he graces his text with many gratuitous allusions to himself and his works. Although his book is subtitled “The Art of Fantasy,” and Carter maintains it is the first ever written on that subject, after the first few chapters it quickly narrows down to the kind of thing Carter writes himself, i.e., sword & sorcery. Within this narrow focus Carter’s judgment is reliable if lenient; outside it, he is undependable. (He dismisses Thurber’s The Thirteen Clocks as “essentially a sort of joke” because it scans and occasionally rhymes.) His chapter on technical problems is stupefyingly dull; he solemnly informs us that a kingdom is not the same thing as an empire, that great cities frequently arise near the mouths of rivers, etc. He quotes with approval C. S. Lewis’s list of examples of realistic details in fiction, then, by his additions to it, shows that he has completely missed the point. He introduces the idea of stage business in fiction and manages to misunderstand that. The latter half of his book is trivial because its subject is trivial.
Nevertheless, these books give eloquent testimony of the two kinds of fascination that keep S.F. and fantasy obstinately alive. Aldiss: “These days, we all have two heads. Frankenstein’s monster plunges along beside us, keeping just below the Plimsoll line of consciousness, buoyant with a life of its own.” Carter: “All I know is that something within me wakes and thrills and responds to phrases like ‘the splendid city of Celephais, in the Valley of Ooth-Nargai, beyond the Tanarian Hills,’ where galleys ‘sail up the river Oukranos past the gilded spires of Thran,’ and ‘elephant caravans tramp through perfumed jungles in Kled,’ where ‘forgotten palaces with veined ivory columns sleep lovely and unbroken under the moon.’”
DAMON KNIGHT
* * *
1
Professor of geography and director of the Institute of Behavioral Science at the University of Colorado.
2
Professor of zoology and curator of mollusks in the Museum of Zoology at the University of Michigan.
3
Director of the Natural Resources Research Division of UNESCO in Paris.
4
The Aswan High Dam has seventeen times the volume of the Cheops Pyramid.
5
Research professor of zoology at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.
6
Professor of soil science at the University of Reading, England.
7
Mohammad Abdul Fattah Kassas, professor of applied botany at the University of Cairo.
8
Mary A. Farvar, an anthropologist at Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri.
9
Gunnar Karl Myrdal, professor of international economics at the University of Stockholm.
10
Kenneth E. Boulding, professor of economics at the University of Colorado.
11
“SF’s no good,” they bellow till we’re deaf.
“But this looks good.”
“Well then, it’s not SF.”
12
E.g. “The greatest of these books would be the greatest of science fiction books if they were science fiction; but they are not, and it is only the growth of the genre since, stimulated by their vigorous example, which makes them seem to resemble it as much as they do.”
THE STARS BELOW
Only a madman would look for them underground.
Ursula K. Le Guin
The wooden house and outbuildings caught fire fast, blazed up, burned down, but the dome, built of lath and plaster above a drum of brick, would not bum. What they did at last was heap up the wreckage of the telescopes, the instruments, the books and charts and drawings, in the middle of the floor under the dome, pour oil on the heap, and set fire to that. The flames spread to the wooden beams of the big telescope frame and to the clockwork mechanisms. Villagers watching from the foot of the hill saw the dome, whitish against the green evening sky, shudder and turn, first in one direction then in the other, while a black and yellow smoke full of sparks gushed from the oblong slit: an ugly and uncanny thing to see.
It was getting dark, stars were showing in the east. Orders were shouted. The soldiers came down the road in single file, dark men in dark harness, silent.
The villagers at the foot of the hill stayed on after the soldiers had gone. In a life without change or breadth a fire is as good as a festival. They did not climb the hill, and as the night grew full dark, they drew closer together. After a while they began to return to their villages. Some looked back over their shoulders at the hill, where nothing moved. The stars turned slowly behind the black beehive of the dome, but it did not turn to follow them.
About an hour before daybreak a man rode up the steep zigzag, dismounted by the ruins of the workshops, and approached the dome on foot. The door had been smashed in. Through it a reddish haze of light was visible, very dim, coming from a massive beam that had fallen and had smoldered all night inward to its core. A hanging, sour smoke thickened the air inside the dome. A tall figure moved there and its shadow moved with it, cast upward on the murk. Sometimes it stooped, or stopped, then blundered slowly on.
The man at the door said, “Guennar! Master Guennar!”
The man in the dome stopped still, looking toward the door. He had just picked up something from the mess of wreckage and half-burnt stuff on the floor. He put this object mechanically into his coat pocket, still peering at the door. He came toward it. His eyes were red and swollen almost shut, he breathed harshly in gasps, his hair and clothes Were scorched
and smeared with black ash.
“Where were you?”
The man in the dome pointed vaguely at the ground.
“There’s a cellar? That’s where you were during the fire? By God! Gone to ground! I knew it, I knew you’d be here.” Bord laughed, a little crazily, taking Guennar’s arm. “Come on. Come out of there, for the love of God. There’s light in the east already.”
The astronomer came reluctantly, looking not at the grey east but back up at the slit in the dome, where a few stars burned clear. Bord pulled him outside, made him mount the horse, and then, bridle in hand, set off down the hill leading the horse at a fast walk.
The astronomer held the pommel with one hand. The other hand, which had been burned across the palm and fingers when he picked up a metal fragment still red-hot under its coat of cinders, he kept pressed against his thigh. He was not conscious of doing so, nor of the pain. Sometimes his senses told him, “I am on horseback,” or, “It’s getting lighter,” but these fragmentary messages made no sense to him. He shivered with cold as the dawn wind rose, rattling the dark woods by which the two men and the horse now passed in a deep lane overhung by teasel and brier; but the woods, the wind, the whitening sky, the cold were all remote from his mind, in which there was nothing but a darkness shot with the reek and heat of burning.
Bord made him dismount. There was sunlight around them now, lying long on rocks above a river valley. There was a dark place, and Bord urged him and pulled him into the dark place. It was not hot and close there but cold and silent. As soon as Bord let him stop he sank down, for his knees would not bear; and he felt the cold rock against his seared and throbbing hands.
“Gone to earth, by God!” said Bord, looking about at the veined walls, marked with the scars of miners’ picks, in the light of his lanterned candle. “I’ll be back; after dark, maybe. Don’t come out. Don’t go farther in. This is an old adit, they haven’t worked this end of the mine for years. May be slips and pitfalls in these old tunnels. Don’t come out! Lie low. When the hounds are gone, we’ll run you across the border.”
Bord turned and went back up the adit in darkness. When the sound of his steps had long since died away, the astronomer lifted his head and looked around him at the dark walls and the little burning candle. Presently he blew it out. There came upon him the earth-smelling darkness, silent and complete. He saw green shapes, ochreous blots drifting on the black; these faded slowly. The dull, chill black was balm to his inflamed and aching eyes, and to his mind.
If he thought, sitting there in the dark, they were not thoughts that found words. He was feverish from exhaustion and smoke inhalation and a few slight burns, and in an abnormal condition of mind; but perhaps his mind’s workings, though lucid and serene, had never been normal. It is not normal for a man to spend twenty years grinding lenses, building telescopes, peering at stars, making calculations, lists, maps and charts of things which no one knows or cares about, things which cannot be reached, or touched, or held. And now all that which he had spent his life on was gone, burned. What was left of him might as well be, as it was, buried.
But it did not occur to him, this idea of being buried. All he was keenly aware of was a great burden of anger and grief, a burden he was unfit to carry. It was crushing his mind, crushing out reason. And the darkness here seemed to relieve that pressure. He was accustomed to the dark, he had lived at night. The weight here was only rock, only earth. No granite is so hard as hatred and no clay so cold as cruelty. The earth’s black innocence enfolded him. He lay down within it, trembling a little with pain and with relief from pain, and slept.
Light waked him. Count Bord was there, lighting the candle with flint and steel. Bord’s face was vivid in the light: the high color and blue eyes of a keen huntsman, a red mouth, sensual and obstinate. “They’re on the scent,” he was saying. “They know you got away.”
“Why . . .” said the astronomer. His voice was weak; his throat, like his eyes, was still smoke-inflamed. “Why are they after me?”
“Why? Do you still need telling? To burn you alive, man! For 'heresy!” Bord’s blue eyes glared through the steadying glow of the candle.
“But it’s gone, burned, all I did.”
“Aye, the earth’s stopped, all right, but where’s their fox? They want their fox! But damned if I’ll let them get you.”
The astronomer’s eyes, light and wide-set, met his and held.
“Why?”
“You think I’m a fool,” Bord said with a grin that was not a smile, a wolf’s grin, the grin of the hunted and the hunter. “And I am one. I was a fool to warn you. You never listened. I was a fool to listen to you. But I liked to listen to you. I liked to hear you talk about the stars and the courses of the planets and the ends of time. Who else ever talked to me of anything but seed corn and cow dung? Do you see? And I don’t like soldiers and strangers, and trials and burnings. Your truth, their truth. What do I know about the truth? Am I a master? Do I know the courses of the stars? Maybe you do. Maybe they do. All I know is you have sat at my table and talked to me. Am I to watch you burn? God’s fire, they say; but you said the stars are the fires of God. Why do you ask me that, ‘Why?’ Why do you ask a fool’s question of a fool?”
“I am sorry,” the astronomer said.
“What do you know about men?” the count said. “You thought they’d let you be. And you thought I’d let you bum.” He looked at Guennar through the candlelight, grinning like a driven wolf, but in his blue eyes there was a glint of real amusement. “We who live down on the earth, you see, not up among the stars . . .”
He had brought a tinder box and three tallow candles, a bottle of water, a ball of pease pudding, a sack of bread. He left soon, warning the astronomer again not to venture out of the mine.
When Guennar woke again a strangeness in his situation troubled him, not one which would have worried most people hiding in a hole to save their skin, but most distressing to him: he did not know the time.
It was not clocks he missed, the sweet banging of the church bells in the villages calling to morning and evening prayer, the delicate and willing accuracy of the timepieces he used in his observatory and on whose refinement so many of his discoveries had depended; it was not the clocks he missed, but the great clock.
Not seeing the sky, one cannot know the turning of the earth. All the processes of time, the sun’s bright arch and the moon’s phases, the planets’ dance, the wheeling of the constellations around the pole star, the vaster wheeling of the seasons of the stars, all these were lost, the warp on which his life was woven.
Here there was no time.
“O my God,” Guennar the astronomer prayed in the darkness under ground, “how can it offend you to be praised? All I ever saw in my telescopes was one spark of your glory, one least fragment of the order of your creation. You could not be jealous of that, my Lord! And there were few enough who believed me, even so. Was it my arrogance in daring to describe your works? But how could I help it, Lord, when you let me see the endless' fields of stars? Could I see and be silent? O my God, do not punish me any more, let me rebuild the smaller telescope. I will not speak, I will not publish, if it troubles your holy Church. I will not say anything more about the orbits of the planets or the nature of the stars. I will not speak, Lord, only let me see!”
“What the devil, be quiet, Master Guennar. I could hear you halfway up the tunnel,” said Bord, and the astronomer opened his eyes to the dazzle of Bord’s lantern. “They’ve called the full hunt up for you. Now you’re a necromancer. They swear they saw you sleeping in your house when they came, and they barred the doors; but there’s no bones in the ashes.”
“I was asleep,” Guennar said, covering his eyes. “They came, the soldiers … I should have listened to you. I went into the passage under the dome. I left a passage there so I could go back to the hearth on cold nights. When it’s cold my fingers get too stiff, I have to go warm my hands sometimes.” He spread out his blistered, blackened hands
and looked at them vaguely. “Then I heard them .overhead . . .”
“Here’s some more food. What the devil, haven’t you eaten?”
“Has it been long?”
“A night and a day. It’s night now. Raining. Listen, Master: there’s two of the black hounds living at my house now. Emissaries of the Council, what the devil, I had to offer hospitality. This is my county, they’re here, I’m the count. It makes it hard for me to come. And I don’t want to send any of my people here. What if the priests asked them, ‘Do you know where he is? Will you answer to God you don’t know where he is?’ It’s best they don’t know. I’ll come when I can. You’re all right here? You’ll stay here? I’ll get you out of here and over the border when they’ve cleared away. They’re like flies now. Don’t talk aloud like that. They might look into these old tunnels. You should go farther in. I will come back. Stay with God, Master.”
“Go with God, Count.”
He saw the color of Bord’s blue eyes, the leap of shadows up the rough-hewn roof as he took up the lantern and turned away. Light and color died as Bord, at the turning, put out the lantern. Guennar heard him stumble and swear as he groped his way.
Presently Guennar lighted one of his candles and ate and drank a little, eating the staler bread first, and breaking off a piece of the crusted lump of pease pudding. This time Bord had brought him three loaves and some salt meat, two more candles and a second skin bottle of water, and a heavy duffel cloak. Guennar had not felt cold. He was wearing the coat he always wore on cold nights in the observatory and very often slept in, when he came stumbling to bed at dawn. It was a good sheepskin, filthy from his rummagings in the wreckage in the dome and scorched at the sleeve ends, but it was as warm as ever, and was like his own skin to him. He sat inside it eating, gazing out through the sphere of frail yellow candlelight to the darkness of the tunnel beyond. Bord’s words, “You should go farther in,” were in his mind. When he was done eating he bundled up the provisions in the cloak, took up the bundle in one hand and the lighted candle in the other, and set off down the side tunnel and then the adit, down and inward.