Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature

by Brian Stableford

  I invited youngwomen from all walks of life…to write their own stories, sparing no detail. Youngwomen reading these stories felt that the truth was, at last, being told. Now the world would hear how badly treated, underpaid and unappreciated they were, how awful were their lives.… Youngmen, on the other hand, read the stories and were pleased that youngwomen were indeed being kept underfoot, reassured that nothing had changed since the last book.…

  “[Women] felt, and I agreed, that it was inappropriate to describe the sort of comfort and joy women give each other in books to be read in the open market. They thought men would enjoy it salaciously; I thought men would burn it as sedition. The effect was the same: no one wrote of it.11

  Whether or not in actuality the interests of men and women are fundamentally opposed and contradictory, the majority of feminist SF texts do seem to operate from the hypothesis that they are. If we are to take this at face value, then the texts themselves determine that the situation of male readers can only be seen in an unflattering light. They are refused any attitude except the self-congratulatory, the pornographic, or the threatened. It does appear that if a male reader’s sympathies are enlisted for the characters, those sympathies can only express the hypocritical remorse of the predator confronting his prey; the texts themselves seem to insist that any tears a male reader sheds can only be crocodile tears.

  If we must take this prejudgment at its face value, what kind of enthusiasm could a male reader legitimately express in respect of a work of this kind? Gwyneth Jones apparently thinks that it would be okay for him to compliment the texts “literary merits.” One might add to this a few other similarly evasive approaches. It might be acceptable, for instance, for a male reader to appreciate the wit and humor of such writers as Josephine Saxton, on the grounds that most of us can see a joke even if it is directed against ourselves. It might also be acceptable for the male reader to go along with other political stances taken up in these books, even if they are presented as corollaries to the main argument (one can endorse a conclusion without necessarily agreeing with the route by which it has been reached). Bulldozer Rising is especially seductive in this respect because it takes up arms not just on behalf of women against men, but also on behalf of the old against the oppressions of the young, and because its city-dystopia partakes of many of the horrors of city-dystopias in general.

  If the male critic looking at feminist SF is to talk about these peripheral issues while diplomatically remaining silent about the central theses of the texts which he examines, however, he is surely committing the same folly as the Country Life reviewer who remarked of Lady Chatterley’s Lover that it contained some interesting descriptions of the everyday duties of a gamekeeper but unfortunately kept getting sidetracked into matters of no intrinsic interest. That reviewer was being deliberately silly for ironic effect; it would be foolish to do the same thing in all innocence.

  Is there, then, any role which the male critic can play in assessing feminist works? Is there, in fact, any sensible response which texts like these might seek to invoke in the male reader? A simple mea culpa, repenting of the wickedness of the male-volent world, is clearly not enough because on its own it is always going to appear hypocritical, no more than a crocodile tear.

  Fortunately, there is one more stage in the critical process which remains open, and that is to move to an actual interrogation of the hypothesis which these texts adopt, which places the male reader in such an awkward position. Is the assumption which these texts make, of a radical and fundamental difference in male and female interests, really to be taken at face value? Does it mean that such a radical and fundamental difference really does exist, or should it be seen as a literary or rhetorical device?

  What the intentions of authors are is something that the authors themselves must be left to state, but I do want to argue that the apparent assumption of these texts can be construed as a rhetorical device, and that if it is, it places the male reader in a rather different position from that limited range of standpoints specified by a superficial reading of the texts.

  It is important that we do address this question because a naive reading of much feminist fiction (and much feminist SF in particular) might easily lead the female reader straight to despair. If it really were the case that the female imagination, attempting to visualize a better future, could come up with nothing other than an all-female world, then the real-world prospects for the betterment of the female condition would be rather bleak. The disappearance of men is not a likely contingency; nor is it likely that universal consent could ever be obtained for a programme of total female separatism. It is not simply the apparent pessimism of feminist images of future Utopias and Dystopias that is significant here; a great deal of mainstream feminist fiction offers images of unfortunate women so ground down by circumstance that nothing remains for them but madness or suicide.

  If this apparently-nihilistic aspect of feminist fiction is taken entirely at face value, then much feminist fiction seems to be saying that there is (unfortunately) no hope at all. Anna Livia makes this point in Bulldozer Rising when her heroine speaks sourly of a whole subclass of women’s writing:

  Some of them, their spirit’s broken before they’re born. The books they write, revelling in bruises because it makes them righteous.7

  Anna Livia is not without a morbid streak of her own, but she knows that there is more to this kind of writing than a lust for martyrdom. Unhappy outcomes in fiction are not necessarily masochistic, nor are “happy” outcomes necessarily hopeful in any meaningful sense—as the feminist critic must recognize when confronted with the works of Barbara Cartland et al. This recognition is implicit in the afterword to The Handmaid’s Tale, where Margaret Atwood carefully toys with the reader’s expectations, doggedly refusing to answer his or her curiosity except by deliberately tantalizing and frustrating hints. Writers do not do that sort of thing when they are trying to tell us what the answers are; they do it when they are trying to make us look harder at the questions.

  The downbeat thrust of much feminist fiction is, I contend, not intended to point women toward despair, any more than the purpose of Greek tragedy was to spread hopelessness throughout the community. The stories of the present and (hypothetical) future sufferings of women are not intended simply to make readers see the signposts in their everyday experience which make the future threatening, but to make them react to those signposts, to make them question what women are doing and what is being done to them. The same can surely be said about fiction in general, and about science fiction as a genre; the fact that SF deals so frequently and routinely in horrid futures is not evidence of whingeing moral cowardice but evidence that its writers and readers have a questioning temperament rather than a faith-seeking temperament.

  The all-female Utopia so often glimpsed in feminist SF is strikingly similar to the male pornotopia which can be glimpsed by riffling through the pages of Playboy: what we see, in essence, is a population of healthy, happy women waiting to welcome us. No male thinks seriously about the possibility or desirability of making over the entire world in the image of a fantastic brothel; the Utopia of pornography is not an actual political project, and if we want to understand it as an imaginative device we must look at it in another way. I cannot say how many females there might be whose real political ambitions are to rid the world of men and create Herland on Earth, but until I am presented with evidence to the contrary I will rest content with my belief that the image needs to be understood as a literary device, not as a political project.

  We need sometimes to be reminded that Thomas More did not wish that he lived in his Utopia, and did not want to make England over in its image; what he wanted to do was to use the image of Utopia to make Englishmen think more seriously about the condition of England, to make them question that which they might easily take for granted. We cannot make images of the perfect society in fiction, because we ourselves are the products of a very imperfec
t society. We could not be happy in a world which reproduced the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity/sorority as fully as any world could, because our own sentimental education has tied our experiences of joy and triumph to other things. The good, alas, are almost as flawed as the world in which they find themselves—the bad are mostly those who have not the saving grace of that “almost.”

  In this view, the work of serious imaginative fiction can only be either to further and confirm the sentimental education we have already received, or to oppose and weaken it. For myself, I am on the side of the wreckers; the best function of the imagination is surely to make us dissatisfied, to make us ask questions, to create ambivalence where there was self-satisfaction, and in the end to steer us away from the monstrous conclusion that we live in the best of all possible worlds.

  This is why I think that it is possible for a male to read feminist fiction without feeling too uncomfortable about the corner into which the text tries to drive him. I do not think that he has to be content with that corner, but nor do I think that he has to come out fighting. I believe that he can come out of it thinking; and that is no bad thing. I even believe that men and women can come to share similar anxieties about the state of the world—and that an anxiety shared is an anxiety squared.

  This is why I believe that feminist fiction is not only addressed to women, but to men too. Beneath the surface of the text, readers can reach an imaginative space where that hypothesis about the irreconcilable opposition of interests between men and women is opened to doubt, with the result that we may at least hope that it is false, and that our world might make progress—even though we are simultaneously made to appreciate how hard-won a thing progress always is.

  If I am wrong about feminist SF, and it does not have this layer beneath the surface—if its authors really are asserting that the world and its women cannot be saved unless men (not just images of masculinity, or machismo, but men) are obliterated—then I can only apologize to its authors; I have been misreading them, and have mistaken the authenticity of my own sympathies. If I am not wrong, then I am surely secure in the opinion that it does have something to say to me as well as to female readers.

  I will await the results of further discussion of the topic with interest.

  To return now to Gwyneth Jones’s comments on my observations on The Handmaid’s Tale, I will admit to the ambivalence with which I was charged. I like to be ironic in fact, I take a positive delight in sarcasm, which I know is not to everyone’s taste—but I must insist that I do it because I would far rather make a question more pointed than pretend that I know the answer. I am not in favor of cattle-prods for women, but I am in favor of goads intended to coax quiet minds toward the hectic delights of enquiry. However, I am nothing if not inconsistent, and I shall be happy to end this little adventure of the mind with a few uncharacteristically explicit statements.

  I think The Handmaid’s Tale is a good book. It is a good book of lamentations, because it has something to lament. It is a good futuristic fantasy, because it is tantalizing. It asks a good question when it asks how much men deserve the forgiveness of women, and the question is all the better because male and female readers alike are left to ponder it, with only an apparatus of images to place in the loaded balance when we try to weigh it up.

  I think Bulldozer Rising is a good book too. It is good satire because it puts aspects of our world under the satirical microscope, requiring us to see them in an amended context. It’s rhetoric is good because it tries to lend powerful support support a principle of tolerance—a principle which is of importance to each and every one of us, no matter what our sex or sexuality. Bulldozer Rising also asks some good questions about the way in which the old tend to lose their human dignity and their human rights along with their sexual desirability, and it makes those questions painful.

  To complete the picture, I think In the Chinks of the World Machine is a good book as well. It is a good guidebook to feminist SF, because it is reasonably comprehensive and because it reflects an interested viewpoint. It is good because it is more interested in social criticism than any kind of “purified” literary criticism. It is good because it realizes that feminist SF is essentially constructive even when it deals with nowheres and with nastiness.

  But have I stopped beating my wife?

  Well, what can I say…?

  * * * *

  Note (1995): This article appeared in Foundation #43 alongside four further comments by Sarah Lefanu, Jenny Wolmark, Gwyneth Jones, and Colin Greenland as a “Forum” discussion of “Feminism and SF.”

  6Jones, Gwyneth. Letter in Foundation #41 (Winter 1987): 72-73.

  7Le Fanu, Sarah. In the Chinks of the World Machine. London: The Women’s Press, 1988, p. 186.

  8Ibid., p. 69.

  9Ibid., p. 176.

  10Ibid., p. 117.

  11Livia, Anna. Bulldozer Rising. London: Onlywomen Press, 1988, p. 143.

  THE ADVENTURES OF LORD HORROR: Across the Media Landscape

  Lord Horror began life as the eponymous central character of a novel by David Britton, which was eventually published in 1989 although it had been written some years earlier. In the meantime, and subsequently, Lord Horror appeared in numerous comic books and also became manifest as a strident if slightly inconsistent vocal presence haunting a number of record releases. If his history is to be properly understood, however, the story must begin some years earlier.

  David Britton is co-proprietor with Michael Butterworth of Savoy Books, a publishing company established in the late 1970s. Its early products included a number of previously-unpublished books by Michael Moorcock, new editions of novels by Henry Treece, M. John Harrison, Nik Cohn, and Jack Trevor Story, a number of books on rock music and a few miscellaneous non-fictional oddities. Two erotically-explicit novels by SF writers Charles Platt and Samuel R. Delany (The Gas and Tides of Lust) were also included in the Savoy list, but the project remained essentially unconnected with Britton’s “day job,” which consisted (and still consists) of running bookshops whose principal stock-in-trade was soft pornography.

  The stock carried by Britton’s bookshops was and is of a kind which is generally available in similar shops throughout the British Isles. Such shops are compelled to operate without window displays but are otherwise perfectly legal, even though some of the material they sell sails close to the wind in respect of the Obscene Publications Act, which proscribes material “likely to deprave and corrupt” its readers. Britton’s principal shop, however, happens to be in Greater Manchester, which for many years boasted a Chief Constable named James Anderton who was notorious—or famous, depending on one’s point of view—for his muscular Christianity and outspoken illiberalism. Anderton formed a local Obscene Publications Squad (the only one in Britain save for the one based in London) to mount a concerted attack on the sale of pornography in his region; in pursuit of this crusade Britton’s Manchester shop was regularly raided during the 1980s and various materials were rather indiscriminately seized therefrom—including some of the Savoy Books titles.

  Britton’s response to this hounding was to issue a plush anthology called Savoy Dreams in 1984, co-edited by himself and Michael Butterworth. This included fiction and non-fiction by many Savoy authors intermingled with newspaper clippings, some exhibiting the kind of bizarre horror stories which regularly appear in British tabloid newspapers and others detailing the exploits of James Anderton. The book’s chief dedicatee was one-time rock idol P. J. Proby, by then living in alcoholic obscurity in Alderley Edge, and it included a reprinted comic strip drawn by Kris Guidio which featured the Los Angeles band The Cramps. A long article entitled “Savoy Under Siege: A Report from Prison” detailed Anderton’s persecution of the company—a persecution which had eventually resulted in Britton’s imprisonment. In the late ‘80s Savoy continued to realize some of the dreams previsioned in this
remarkable book. The company diversified into records and comics, although it continued to publish occasional books.

  The first Savoy Records release, in 1986, was a twelve-inch single credited to “The Savoy-Hitler Youth Band,” featuring Lord Horror on vocals. The record’s sleeve featured a caricature of James Anderton, his head exploding amid a tattered halo of hateful obscenities; the lettering on the other side overlaid photographs taken during the liberation of Dachau. The song—which superimposed the lyric of Bruce Springsteen’s Cadillac Ranch on a version of New Order’s Blue Monday—was actually sung by P. J. Proby, who subsequently released records with Savoy under his own name. The cover illustration was sufficient to get the record banned, and a new phase in the conflict between Britton and his bête noire was joined—a conflict uninterrupted by the subsequent retirement of Anderton.

  * * * *

  The novel version of Lord Horror was issued by Savoy after being rejected by all the leading British publishing houses (Britton, according to his habit, proudly reprinted the ruder rejection slips). It is a complex work which includes among its many characters a chief constable named James Appleton, whose viciously anti-Semitic dialogue is derived by substituting the word “jew” for the word “homosexual” (and various equivalent terms) in public pronouncements which had been made by James Anderton. The members of the Obscene Publications Squad might conceivably have been unaware of this when, on 31 August 1991, they seized 150 copies of the book and 4,000 copies of the earliest Savoy comics (which employ characters from the novel), but seize it they did. Savoy’s appeal against that seizure was the first court case concerning the supposed obscenity of a novel since the failure of the British courts to uphold the banning of Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn in the late 1960s.