I now assume that the humiliation of this experience might well have been responsible for the fact that I was already an atheist when I was hustled through that first communion, although there was never any question of my confessing the fact. I continued to attend church—and even, for a while, to receive religious instruction from my local parish priest—until I was in my teens, but although I never said so I never had the slightest doubt that the idea of God was utterly and absolutely preposterous. Every formal confession I ever made, from the age of six onwards, was completely false, and it never occurred to me to behave otherwise. I was able to contrive a total disconnection of inner belief from outward affirmation.
To this day, I have never been able to understand how anyone finds the concept of God remotely plausible. It seems to me to be a bizarrely ridiculous notion, and the fact that many people plainly do believe in a God is to me a fascinatingly inexplicable phenomenon. The further fact that some people have found and do find in that belief a sanction to commit the most appalling acts of violence and persecution, seems to me to be an awful tragedy; I am nowadays a very fervent and devout atheist, who considers that the hijacking of moral philosophy and moral teaching by religious men has been the worst disaster to have overcome mankind during the last eight or ten thousand years.
* * * *
Among the several other factors which added to my sense of infant alienation, the most important was probably the fact that I developed severe myopia at the unusually early age of five.
The problems with my eyesight may or may not have been connected with a bout of the measles which I suffered. The conventional medical wisdom of the day advised that children bedridden with the measles should be kept in darkened rooms and not allowed to read—a rule which proved difficult to enforce in my case because I was already an enthisiastic reader and I keenly resented any attempt to curtail my reading.
My eyesight has continued to get worse throughout my life, although the rate of decline slowed as time went by. Whether any of this degeneration was really self-inflicted I do not know, but I do know that from the time of my first eye-test until I learned to be sceptical of all received wisdom I thought of myopia as something blameworthy, the result of my refusal to accept restraint while bedridden with the measles, compounded by continued wilful “straining.” Throughout my childhood I was a very determined clandestine reader; I had a fixed bedtime until I was fifteen or so, and there was not a single night during my formative years when I did not read for two hours or more after being sent to bed. This usually involved leaving my bedroom door open so that I could read by the light of the electric bulb on the landing. It no more occurred to me to take any notice of my parents’ instructions to refrain from reading and go to sleep than it occurred to me to take any notice of what my teachers said about God. I simply felt that I had to keep my after-bedtime reading a secret, and I did.
Because of my short-sightedness I was given spectacles at the age of five. I was the only child in my class with spectacles, so my classmates naturally called me “Speck”—which cognomen, although it was formed straightforwardly by abbreviating the commonplace “Specky Foureyes,” had in my case an extra pertinence; I was small and thin even for my age, and my classmates were all two years older than I was.
It would be tedious to add further details to what is essentially an exercise in mawkish complaint. I am well aware that the sum of these incidents is woefully inadequate to excuse the fact that I have never felt any sense of belonging to the world in which I find myself, but I have no other excuse to offer. I have always felt myself to be an alien.
* * * *
Psychoanalytic interlude: at the risk of being stupidly pretentious, I am tempted to suggest that the inexorable degeneration of my eyesight became a kind of personal metaphor for the whole process of my social isolation. Myopia blurred the entire perceived world so badly that almost nothing of it could be seen without the spectacles which were used in such derisory fashion to label me, and the social world seemed to become ever more elusive as that blurring got worse. The only activity which I could and did pursue without my spectacles was the activity of clandestine reading. Provided that I held my reading matter very close to my face I could still read without spectacles until I was about eighteen, and that was my habit—at least when I read in bed. The world of print remained present to my naked eye long after the world of objects had come to be contained in and contrived by the lenses of my spectacles.
I have always been prepared to say that books matter far more to me than anything else. I am aware that there is a certain silliness involved in trying to argue that the imaginary worlds entered via the decoding of texts could be more important than the real one, but that is the way I have always felt. I have always defined myself, labelled myself and entertained ambitions for myself entirely in terms of what I have read or will read, have written or will write, and have written or will write about what I have read or will read. This, more than anything else, is why the four-year-old hatchling that I once was had become by the age of eighteen the larva whose long pupation resulted in the imago which I now am: a writer (by profession), critic (by vocation) and social being (by aegrotat).
* * * *
The science fiction part of it might have been an accident. Then again, it might not. Science fiction does have a certain special appeal to aliens. This is not so much because it is written by aliens, for aliens, about aliens—after all, virtually all works of fiction have that in common—but because it easily outdoes other genres in pandering to the wilder extremes of alienness.
In the early days of the SF pulps there were so few SF readers around that just being one could make you different from everyone else; mere possession of the habit was a rubber stamp certifying that you were authentically weird. By the 1950s that was no longer the case, and by the early 1960s the genre was overtaken by the tragedy of fashionability; by that time nothing less than total absorption was necessary to guarantee and sanctify full-blown weirdness—but the possibility was still there.
As Oscar Wilde (who knew what he was talking about) once observed, it is better to be beautiful than to be good, but it is better to be good than to be ugly—or to put it another way, it’s better not to be weird, but if other people think you’re weird anyway you might as well try to make a virtue of it by pretending that it’s the way you want to be. The weirder they think you are, the harder you have to work in order to make weirdness appear virtuous. Science fiction helps, in several different ways.
One way in which science fiction helps is by being magnificently pretentious. All other kinds of fiction are straitjacketed by mundanity; science fiction has the infinite reaches of time and space to play with, and promises tantalising glimpses of a god’s-eye-view from which everything else will seem reassuringly irrelevant. If you let science fiction set the standards for what fiction ought to be about, then all other fiction is about next-to-nothing.
Another way in which science fiction helps is by flattering the alienated ego in no uncertain terms. Science fiction is full of misunderstood supermen whose heroism is so deliciously unlimited that they can achieve apotheosis without benefit of divine intervention. At the end of the day Sherlock Holmes is only a junkie smartarse and James Bond is only a homicidal yuppie, but even the kids in A. E. van Vogt are destined to rule the Sevagram.
The infinite cunning of science fiction (although Americans, who tend to be addicts of all kinds of junk food, including material success, are sometimes too simple-minded to realize this) is that it can perform this flattering function even when it refuses such secular apotheoses, trading instead in lachrymose hopelessness. If alienation and despair are conditions of the universe, applicable to all possible beings and all possible projects, then we poor also-rans in the human race are merely sharing in the tragedy of universal mortality, and are in no way to blame for our own misery.
Science fiction also helps by presenting a series of
characters who can be loved by those who are largely incapable of loving their fellow men. The alien isolated from his (or her) peers cannot really be expected to identify with the exploits of fictional persons whose projects and predicaments are defined largely in terms of social relationships. That fictions of the mundane variety describe a world to which the alien does not belong is immaterial; the point is that they describe a world from which he (or she) is actively trying to dissociate himself (or herself).
Science fiction frequently offers very different ideas of virtue, where success is not primarily defined as success in human relationships but as success in coping with hypothetical non-humans such as robots, the inhabitants of other worlds, and scientific problems. In Tom Godwin’s classic “The Cold Equations,” virtue resides in the act of chucking the girl out of the spaceship into hard vacuum, not in trying to form a meaningful relationship with her. No other genre of fiction can let your bitterest feelings off the hook as slickly and as satisfyingly as that, while simultaneously allowing you to be uninhibitedly sentimental about the likes of cute E.T.s and burbling robots.
* * * *
I honestly don’t know whether these ramblings include a correct explanation of the fascination for science fiction which I developed in 1962, when I was fourteen. I do remember that for most of the ten previous years I was aware of the existence of science fiction, but did not discriminate between stories of that kind and other kinds; I was a very voracious but utterly haphazard reader. After 1962, though, SF came to dominate my reading completely. For the next five years I read virtually nothing else.
Oddly enough, the first writer who ever made a deep impression on me—who really seemed to speak to me more intimately and more meaningfully than all the rest—was not an SF writer. I began reading him at thirteen, the age at which people traditionally begin to get hooked on SF, and he was the only non-SF writer whose books I continued to buy whenever I could find them in second-hand shops. The writer in question was P. C. Wren. At thirteen, I thought that Beau Geste was the best book ever written, closely followed by Beau Sabreur, Beau Ideal, Spanish Maine, and The Wages of Virtue. Later—in some cases much later—I managed to recapture an echo of the impact which those books made on me by reading others of his works, and there still, for me, is something uniquely fascinating about Wren’s plot construction.
All the P. C. Wren books which so entranced me have one thing in common: they feature heroes who, as a result of some essentially decent, usually misconceived, and apparently trivial act, are set inexorably upon a road which will lead to dreadful suffering—from which salvation can only be won belatedly, if at all. Wren delights in presenting readers with images of heroes whose sense of duty moves them to acts of absurdly-exaggerated self-sacrifice. There is no other author who treats his heroic projections of himself so savagely; he is the literary self-torturer par excellence, and it is as difficult to understand why he put himself on that kind of rack so meticulously and so frequently as it is to understand why some readers find the process so fascinating to watch. Most people find his performances absurdly unconvincing, and viewed from an objective standpoint they undoubtedly are, but their effect on my thirteen-year-old self (and what remained of that self in subsequent editions of my psyche) has only been surpassed by a dozen or so works by other hands.
Looking back now, with the aid of a keener critical eye, I can see that Wren must have been a man eaten up by envious resentment. He writes about a code of virtuous behavior which was affirmed by the aristocracy (especially in its military institutions), but not actually observed by its proponents. His most memorable central characters are all on the fringes of the aristocratic world; they are outsiders permitted to look in but denied full membership. All of them fervently wish to be a part of the magical world of the aristocracy, but are barred by poverty or by descent from disapproved marriages. At the same time, all of them are perfect embodiments of the aristocratic code of virtue—a code whose standards the vast majority of the aristocratic in-crowd fails miserably to meet. Wren’s “natural aristocrats,” prevented from demonstrating their virtues in the conventional social and military arenas, do so instead in the least likely and least appropriate circumstances—usually in the French Foreign Legion—and this is presented to the reader as something very painful, deeply humiliating and utterly tragic. (One of the less fortunate aspects of Wren’s work, his crude racism, is probably best understood as a logical extrapolation of this lunatic class-ism, as is much English racism.)
It hardly needs adding that there is a lot of science fiction which is similar to Wren’s foreign legion fantasies in its emotional appeal—although very little of it labors under the handicap of being tied to an absurdly mythologized vision of the English class system. In SF versions of this kind of fervent morality play—which have been written in considerable quantities by Jack Williamson, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon and Philip K. Dick, to name but a few—the innocent protagonist is treated vilely by other human beings, who fail miserably to meet the standards implied by the word “humane,” and must display his (or her) own finer nature by siding with (or actually becoming one of) the aliens, or the supermen, or the robots.
* * * *
It was not at all difficult for me to mis-spend my youth utterly and completely in the avid consumption of science fiction. From the age of eleven I attended a single-sex school which was several miles away from where I lived—no other pupils of the school lived near me, and it was therefore difficult to extend any friendships which I formed there beyond school hours. My relationships with my schoolfellows, such as they were, were largely determined by the extent to which they shared my enthusiasm for science fiction. One who did—Craig Mackintosh—was sufficiently interested eventually to join in with experiments in writing SF.
Writing is an essentially private business which certainly does not require to be done in collaboration, but the availability of a collaborator was of great importance to me. The chief advantage was that it provided motivation—it created a situation in which I had a responsibility to someone else actually to do what we had planned and agreed to do. That helped enormously to make the vital difference between abandoning work and seeing it through.
When Mack and I were fifteen we calculated that most paperbacks contained about 60,000 words. We planned a novel in eight chapters, each to be 8,000 words long, then divided the chapters up between us and wrote it. It took us about a month. We then divided the handwritten chapters between us for revision, but we never carried out the revision—mainly, I think, because the thought of trying to type out all those words was simply too daunting, given that we had no reason to believe that once we had a typescript we could actually sell the book.
Eighteen months later we wrote a novelette, grandiosely entitled “Beyond Time’s Aegis” in much the same fashion. Because 10,000 words did not seem too long I actually managed to complete the task of revising it and preparing a submission copy in the space of a weekend. It wasn’t easy for a one-finger typist, but when I had done it I felt a certain sense of achievement, and immediately sent it off to the editor of Science-Fantasy, to whom I had lately been submitting letters of comment. He bought it, and published it under the pseudonym Brian Craig.
I now understand how absurdly fortunate Mack and I were to sell that bizarre, episodic, plotless, and rather silly story. No doubt the editor saw in it certain seeds of promise, and he certainly had a keen desire to encourage new writers, but it was nevertheless a decision of astonishing generosity to accept it. The sale made a dramatic difference to my attitude to the possibility of being a writer. Mack and I wrote two more long stories in collaboration, neither of which sold, and I wrote dozens on my own, almost all of which were awful beyond belief, but the painful wounds inflicted by incessant rejection could henceforth only be superficial. I knew that acceptance was possible, and that possibility became the essential spur of motivation which drew me periodically back to the typewriter to peck
out something new.
“Peck out” was, and remains, an appropriate description; I never did learn to type properly. Having taught myself to find all the keys with my right forefinger—save only for the shift key, which became the sole responsibility of my left forefinger—I never attempted to unlearn the technique in order to do it right.
* * * *
The worst of the habits which I acquired in my early days as an aspiring SF writer was that of never throwing anything away. For many years I relentlessly cannibalized old manuscripts, borrowing descriptive passages and slices of action whenever there seemed to be an opportunity of putting them into a more promising story. This helped to give many of my early works an unfortunate patchwork quality.
One of the long stories which I had written with Mack—a 37,000-word short novel called “The Worlds Beyond the World”—told the story of a man trapped inside a curious fold in time, who catches glimpses of the entirety of future history. It had no plot to speak of, and unsurprisingly failed to sell, but the forty-odd glimpses of the future were to keep cropping up in my work for many years. A dozen or so were combined with an unsold solo novelette of the same period to form a makeshift first draft of The Blind Worm, which I stitched up and hastily revised in order to follow up my first novel sale. Half a dozen more were then built into the second half of another partially-drafted novel, Watchgod’s Cargo, which ultimately appeared as To Challenge Chaos. Several more, including at least one which had already been re-used in The Blind Worm, were decanted into the visionary sequence in Man in a Cage. Others became the bases for short stories, including “The Prisoner in the Ice.”
Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Page 18