The kind of xenophobia which led, in Hitler’s Germany, to the the attempted extirpation of those Jews and Slavs unlucky enough to find themselves within the borders of the expanding Reich, is by no means extinct. It is clearly visible in recently re-united Germany, in recently dis-united Yugoslavia, and in the nation which William Joyce unwisely tried to adopt. If books and comic books which rudely, crudely and bravely assault complacency with every sharp-edged rhetorical weapon that comes to hand are to be suppressed, the likelihood of that xenophobia continuing to fester unconfronted and unopposed will surely be increased.
Sometimes, in respect of certain issues, we need to be challenged, to be provoked, to be shocked, and to be horrified. That is what horror fiction—in all media—is supposed to do. David Britton is not a soothing writer; his various works are invariably discomfiting and frequently annoying—that is the reason why, in my view, they are worth defending, and worth searching out.
As William Randolph Hearst once said: “News is what somebody wants to stop you printing; all the rest is ads.” In spite of being entirely imaginary, the adventures of Lord Horror are news. Like most news nowadays, they are not good news—but that does not make them bad art; their imagery can be uncomfortable to confront, but that is a virtue rather than a fault.
12Britton, David. Reverbstorm #4. Manchester, England: Savoy Books, 1995, p. 4-5 (not all the pages are numbered).
FILLING IN THE MIDDLE: Robert Silverberg’s The Queen of Springtime
In March 1989 I was fortunate enough to hear Robert Silverberg address the 10th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts on the topic of the ways in which contemporary SF writers had become “victims of their own success.” His thesis, briefly stated, was that the boom in the SF marketplace, which now allows the top writers to claim very handsome advances from publishers, has made it obligatory for those SF writers who want to maintain the high level of their advances to write for the broadest possible audience. In doing that, they must bear in mind that a large part of that potential audience consists of people who have no prior knowledge of the more sophisticated sciencefictional ideas and their development in other works. This situation, Silverberg argued, is bound to have a profound effect on the way financially-ambitious SF writers go about their work.
There was a time—from the forties to the sixties—when Anglo-American science fiction was largely the preserve of fans who read a great deal of it (and little else). This meant that the SF writers of those days could (and, if they wanted to publish in the leading magazines, must) presume that the hard core of their audience consisted of people who had a rough-and-ready knowledge of what had already been done within the field, and what passed for conventional attitudes to certain notions. The tacit contract into which writers and readers entered assumed that a certain amount of imaginative spadework had already been done in considering the implications of such ideas as humanoid robots, generation starships, time paradoxes, and so on; certain logical problems had already been pointed out, certain possibilities already explored, and all of this could be taken as read. New readers were expected to catch up as fast as they could, and relatively little allowance was made for them.
That phase in the development of SF as a publishing category was inevitably temporary. It could not last forever, and it has now gone. Even if science fiction had remained relatively esoteric, the steady accretion of texts would have made it more and more difficult, as time went by, for beginning readers to catch up with the present state of play. I can testify from experience that a beginning reader in 1962 could—within the space of seven years or so—familiarize himself with all the “classic” texts of the genre while still keeping abreast of most of what was interesting in the work being published at the time. The beginning reader of 1982 had no chance at all of doing that by 1989; there was by then too much science fiction past, and far too much science fiction present, to allow anyone to take in all that was “classic” while keeping track of all that was interesting.
In fact, as Silverberg pointed out, SF did not remain esoteric. Its basic ideas gradually infiltrated general popular culture—a process both reflected and considerably boosted by the success of TV programs like Star Trek and films like Star Wars. The kind of reader who only reads half a dozen books a year became willing to accommodate the occasional SF book within that select batch, and SF books therefore became hypable as possible bestsellers. Star Trek did do a certain amount of “educational” work in introducing to a much wider audience the basic vocabulary of SF ideas, but the bulk of SF’s new audience had nevertheless to be treated by the texts which sought to woo them as readers without any substantial resources of understanding—readers to whom everything would have to be explained, and whose imaginative capacity must not be overloaded.
(In actual fact, there are some notable exceptions to this generalization; Dune, which elevated Frank Herbert to handsome-advance status, is perhaps the most obvious example of a book which slowly became a bestseller in spite of its perverse tendency to compromize its own accessibility to a greater degree than its content actually warranted. Such exceptions suggest that naive readers may not be so conscientiously simple-minded as the theory implies. So far as would-be bestselling SF writers are concerned, though, it does not really matter whether the theory is true or not, or whether it has loopholes; it is sufficient that the publishers who have to cough up the big advances believe it, and are prepared to act in accordance with it. By and large, they do believe it, and they do act in accordance with it.)
Silverberg had other observations to make in his speech. He had much to say about the way in which the big bookstore chains estimate the likely sales of a book by consulting their computer records of sales of previous works. This, he argued, makes it very difficult for would-be bestselling SF writers to step temporarily out of their marketing category, or to write the occasional difficult and esoteric book just to please themselves. The results of any such jeu d’esprit are tabulated, and held against the writers who do this sort of thing when the time comes for orders to be placed for their next (hopeful) best-sellers. These comments were, of course, based on Silverberg’s contemplation of the results of his financially-unfortunate venture into the historical novel, Lord of Darkness.
Silverberg further noted that publishers had become besotted with the trilogy as a desirable format for publication—mainly because publishing sequels is nowadays the only means of persuading the bookstore chains to re-order titles of which they have sold out. This, he said, poses creative problems for would-be writers of SF bestsellers. Everyone knows that the first part of a trilogy has to be a story of emergence, and everyone knows that the third part has to build up to a consummation, but nobody has any satisfactory theory about what is supposed to happen in the second volume, which cannot do either of these things.
All of this is relevant to a consideration of the content and ambitions of The Queen of Springtime, which Silverberg must recently have completed when he made his speech, and the writing of which must still have been very much in his mind. In fact, it is very difficult to account for the substance of the novel unless all these arguments are borne in mind.
The Queen of Springtime appears to be the second volume of a trilogy begun with At Winter’s End—a trilogy which seemingly represents on Silverberg’s part a conscientiously-planned stratagem intended to recover and consolidate the best-seller status which was initially won for him by Lord Valentine’s Castle (which, thanks to the interpolation of a book of shorter pieces in place of a second volume, was also extended into a sort of “trilogy”).
The present story is set after the end of the next major ice age but one, which—like all its predecessors, here assumed to be precipitated by periodic series of cometary strikes—has caused a great wave of extinctions. As in all previous instances, rigorous processes of natural selection have produced a range of new biological types, which are now set for a new period of adaptive radiati
on. But in this case (as in the immediately-preceding case but no others) the forces of natural selection are not operating alone. Our own interglacial period produced the human species, which was capable of taking steps to preserve its own descendants, and the descendants of many other species, by calculated genetic adaptation. This resulted in the creation during the following interglacial period (the one which the story skips over) of the Great World—an apparently-Utopian era when the earth was shared by six intelligent races living in harmony. For some reason (the question is raised in both At Winter’s End and The Queen of Springtime but left dangling) four of these six species accepted extinction. One other—the Hjjks, a quasi-insectile hive-organized people—survived while making only minimal modifications to it own genetic heritage. The remaining one—the humans, of course!—appear to have done something rather more peculiar; they created a new race, physically similar to their own ancestors but blessed with particular powers of extra-sensory perception, whose members were then deposited in subterranean “cocoons,” culturally pre-programmed to emerge when the ice finally retreats.
At Winter’s End told the story of the emergence of a tribe of “the People” from their cocoon, detailing the trials and tribulations involved in their first meetings with others of their kind, and in the founding of their first cities. It deals with the personal stress suffered by various members of the tribe as the Old Order must make way for a new—particularly in respect of a schism in which would-be followers of a patriarchal way of life break away from the remainder who are determined to cling (at least for a while) to the idiosyncratic matriarchal society which they maintained in the cocoon. The story has several main characters, but the most central is an unruly boy whose questioning ways would have been disruptive in the cocoon but which become vital to the tribe’s survival outside it. It soon becomes clear that he must become the wise man who combines the heritage of traditional knowledge with the lessons of empirical discovery. A major factor in the action of the story is the enigmatic Hjjks, who drive the People out of the partly-preserved Great World city which they initially colonize, and nearly overwhelm their second city before being defeated with the aid of a cache of Great World superweapons which comes conveniently to hand.
The SF connoisseur is likely to find At Winter’s End unsatisfying in several ways. Much of what happens in it is clichéd. The post-disaster scenario is old hat, the only really intriguing feature of it being the Great World which has been and gone—but even that functions in the plot mainly as the source for one deus ex machina after another, its relics emitting an unsteady dribble of information into the plot until the time inevitably rolls around for the half-hearted orgy of violence which passes for a climax.
It is bad enough that the sophisticated reader cannot really be interested in all this, but the problem is compounded by the fact that the experienced reader (especially one familiar with Silverberg’s entire canon) can see all-too-clearly that the author cannot find it very interesting either. The performance is skillful, and there is something to be admired in the painstaking way in which Silverberg conducts the reader one step at a time through a whole series of imaginative notions without ever losing the narrative drive. At Winter’s End is a slow book, but not a boring one; it serves its introductory purpose reasonably well—but one cannot help feeling that the author’s impatience with some of his own devices weakens what impact they might have had for the naive reader. There comes a time when the People—who have thought themselves human—discover that they are not human at all; but the author is so completely aware of the commonplaceness of the move that he cannot even feign surprise. And there comes, as there must, a climactic battle when the misfit-kid-made-good must save the day with the recently-exhumed superweapons that only he was curious enough to search for; again poor Silverberg finds this so excruciating to propose, and does it in such a cursory and apologetic manner, that one cannot imagine the fresh-faced youth to whom such a plot-device is new and bold getting very much excitement out of it.
For all its failings, though, at least At Winter’s End had the task of making a beginning to sustain its momentum. The Queen of Springtime has no such advantage. It is not a beginning, and it makes no attempt to be an end—so what can one do with the second volume of such a project as this?
In the abstract, of course, more than one answer is possible. Leaving aside those trilogies which are (after the fashion of the granddaddy of them all, The Lord of the Rings) just three decker novels split in a more-or-less arbitrary fashion, and those which are likewise really two-part works in which the second part is more-or-less arbitrarily bisected, there are two ways to handle the problem which are commonplace in fantasy fiction. One is to plot out a series of specific goals, so that the attainment of each one in turn provides a climax. The other is the “N-shaped” plot, whereby the first volume ends with a worthy but incomplete victory, which is subsequently cancelled out at the beginning of the next volume (whose climax is victorious only in that it stops a decline to ultimate disaster), so that the achievement of a genuine but final victory requires a third volume. I repeat that these are the conventional devices of fantasy—but this is relevant, because the calculated dilution of ideas which is characteristic of so much best-selling SF often converts the stories into a subspecies of heroic fantasy.
In fact, it is only the conversion of SF into a subspecies of heroic fantasy which generates the agonized question of what to do with the second volume, because in a genuinely sciencefictional trilogy no such problem arises. Fantasy stories tend naturally towards closure; the victory of good over evil which convention demands is actually a process of restoration and recovery, Fantasy is characteristically conservative because it has its Ideal State built into it (hypothetically, at least) from the very beginning, and the task of its heroes is to rescue that Ideal from corrupting disruption. Real SF, by contrast, tends towards openness—the true climax of a science fiction story is some kind of conceptual breakthrough which reveals the limitations of whatever “normality” the characters have embraced, and celebrates its transcendence. A science fiction trilogy has to keep on expanding the perspective of the story—something which is not terribly difficult, especially when the story starts with characters who have an artificially limited viewpoint. Science, unlike magic, keeps on unfolding by virtue of its nature—beyond every new discovery there is another waiting to be made.
The Queen of Springtime does attempt to take some advantage of this inbuilt potential of science-fictional trilogizing. There is much more for the People to learn about the world in which they find themselves, and there are conclusions to which they have already jumped which cry out to be questioned, if not overturned. That is how the new story starts out: an emissary of the hated Hjjks arrives in the People’s largest city to raise the suggestion that the Hjjks are, in spite of appearances and understandable prejudices, really nice guys from which the People have much to learn. From there the plot flows fairly steadily (and, for the SF connoisseur, fairly predictably): factions emerge, pro- and anti- the Hjjks; nasty politically-ambitious types work underhandedly to foment a war in order to foster their own private ends; the emissary preaches the gospel of Nest-truth and Queen-love so effectively that his eventual assassination promptly turns him into a Christ-figure. The misfit-kid-made-good of At Winter’s End, by now a lovable-old-eccentric, must use his knowledge, his cleverness and his magical all-purpose-cliché-device to discover the real truth about the Hjjks and sort things out before war destroys everything.
It might have worked, but for two things. The first is that the author cannot really buy it. He has done this sort of thing before, often—and has done it with a passion and an intensity which would be inappropriate in a slow-moving, one-step-at-a-time text like this—and he is all-too-clearly aware that this version of it is a stripped-down finger exercise with no guts. The second is that the author is uncertain as to how far one might dare to go in this direction before losing the goodwill of huge
chunks of his audience. In his passionate and intense days, of course, he was uninhibited—he went wherever the force of his logic and the drive of his passion would take him, even if it took him to conclusions which he knew would prove unpopular with many of his readers (Downward to the Earth, Dying Inside) or into literary and imaginative territory which he knew would be incomprehensible to many of those readers (Son of Man). In those days, he was a bold explorer, not a careful crowd-pleaser—but that was then and this is now.
The result of this uncertainty is a process of prevarication which initially promises to be intriguing, but under the enervating influence of the author’s own lack of conviction decays in the end into mere floundering. So when the time comes for the climax, what do we get? Goodbye science fiction, welcome back fantasy. A minor character invented solely for the purpose finds a hole in a hillside, and inside the cave are some relics of the Great World, which turn out to be…SUPERWEAPONS! And lest any innocent reader might think that in view of what has gone before these weapons are too dreadful to use, there’s an equally-serendipitous revelation which explains why it’s okay to sock it to the Hjjks in spite of everything which has been said in their favor.…
I have every confidence that volume three of this particular trilogy will have some good stuff in it. All the interesting questions will then be answered. We will have to be told why the humans did what they did when the time came for the Great World to end—and, for that matter, how the Great World itself came to be. (I have a strong suspicion that I already know the answers to these questions, but I am willing to be surprised—in fact, I fervently hope that I am surprised.) Then again, the expansion of perspective whose beginnings are plotted out in the sidelines of The Queen of Springtime, will eventually have to be brought to long-delayed fruition (keep an eye out for the holier-than-we caviandis!)
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 6