California is what you make of it, and what it makes of you. Brave New World was written in the Old World, a long time before the Summer of Love. Yet rereading it now, I was impressed by the importance in it of soma, the wonder drug on which everybody in the World State, and the World State itself, is dependent. It’s partly a plot gimmick, to be sure, but surely also significant of the author’s preoccupations. Soma enhances all pleasures, sex above all, of course. It never causes bad trips, but induces bliss, invariably—even eternally, if you keep taking it. If it has any adverse effects on health they aren’t mentioned. Whether it’s addictive is a moot point. If you had unlimited access to a drug that would give you a perfect high for hours or days at a time, at any time, without doing you any bodily harm, and with the enthusiastic approval of your entire society, would you be likely to abstain from it?
You’re not allowed to. You must consume your daily dose of soma because it’s what holds everything together in happy inertia. Consumption is the basis of the World State, the state of delusion.
And in this, Huxley’s science fiction was undeniably and radically visionary, leaping decades beyond the society of his day into the post-millennial world of obligatory consumerism and instant gratification.
Here, too, he introduces an element of the book that greatly augments its emotional, vital power. Into the delusional world where everybody is made and kept perfectly, vapidly happy, he brings a character who isn’t.
Bernard Marx, dwarfed, meanspirited, and frustrated, at first seems to be this misfit or rebel, but turns out to be only the lead-up to him. The stranger to bliss, the tragic outsider, is John. He is called the Savage, but might more accurately be called the Puritan. Despite the miseries of his childhood among the “primitives” outside the World State, John has seen enough actual love and happiness to be sure that a chemical can deliver only imitations of them, that there are no shortcuts to the experience of the real. Trapped in the hell he thought would be heaven, he tries to opt out of delusion, to regain reality, to abstain from the drug that maintains the World State.
The word soma is Greek for “body.” Today we see it mostly in the word psychosomatic, but Huxley could assume that a great many of his readers had enough classical education to recognise it directly.
A Puritan is one who abjures the body and the pleasures of the body to save his soul. To what extent is Brave New World a study of body-hating, world-renouncing, self-castigating mysticism, concealed within a novel about politics and power?
The Savage has a long conversation, the most conventionally utopic passage of the novel, with the local World Controller, whose splendidly villainous name is Mustapha Mond. It’s hard not to see the Controller as a conscious competitor with the Grand Inquisitor of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. “There used to be something called God,” he begins airily, “before the Nine Years’ War.” The Savage knows a good deal about God, having grown up in a violent stew of Catholicism and Native religions, and can hold up his end of the conversation. In their discussion of the nature of God, he asks, “How does he manifest himself now?” and Mustapha Mond replies, “Well, he manifests himself as an absence.” They go on to argue about human spiritual need, John insisting that we need God to guarantee the value of virtue and self-denial, the Controller brushing aside such notions as “symptoms of political inefficiency.” “You can’t have a lasting civilization without plenty of pleasant vices,” he says, and, triumphantly, “You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.”
John’s final refutation of a tearless existence, his claim to have God, poetry, danger, freedom, goodness, and sin, his declaration of his right to be unhappy, are the high point of the novel; but a high point that can only be followed by a fall. The poor Savage will indeed find his unhappiness.
And thus he is the only character in the novel likely to remain in the reader’s mind as a person rather than an allegorical figure or intellectual construct. When I came to reread the book, I had forgotten Mustapha Mond and Bernard Marx and the pneumatic Lenina. I was glad to rediscover them. But I had remembered the Savage for fifty years.
Huxley’s later experiments with drug-taking seem almost a search for real-life soma, religion in a bottle. Did he think that mescaline and LSD and the other psychedelic drugs he consumed and endorsed falsified his perceptions and endangered his soul, or that they were a high road to enlightenment, shortcuts to a greater truth? Perhaps he thought both. The Savage and the Controller were, after all, both creations of his own mind, where their conflict might, perhaps must, continue unresolved.
Written with the aplomb of his class and culture, yet with a searing urgency; concealing obscure or unexamined motivations behind a fireworks of invention; showing pleasure as inevitably disgusting and degrading and freedom as mindless license, yet offering no escape from the sordid world where these are the only options, Brave New World is a troubled, troubling book, a masterpiece of the Age of Anxiety, a vivid record of the anguish of the twentieth century. It may also be a valid and very early warning of the risk of keeping civilisation on the course Aldous Huxley saw it beginning to follow more than eighty years ago.
Stanislaw Lem: Solaris
An introduction written in 2002 for a German-language edition of Solaris
from Heyne Verlag in Munich, in which it appeared in translation.
First published in 1961, Solaris appeared in an English translation in 1970. It was a revelation to us in America, not only of a brilliant book, but of a science-fiction writer who we now learned was immensely popular in his native land and well known throughout Europe, but of whom most of us knew nothing. Stanislaw Lem? We knew the acronym LEM, the Lunar Excursion Module—a wonderfully apt name for a writer of science fiction. And Solaris was clearly the work of a master of his art.
Several other Lem novels were soon translated into English, among them the marvelous Eden, and were well received critically. In 1973, Lem was made an honorary member of the Science Fiction Writers of America, but this was in the clammy depths of the Cold War, and many members of the association disapproved strongly of admitting a citizen of a Communist nation. Apparently it made no difference to them that Lem was a Pole, not a Russian, and that his books could be read as containing a cogent and subversive critique of Stalinist aims. The whole thing became a tiny cause célèbre. A magazine poll of science-fiction authors on the question of the Vietnam war showed them split half and half into hawks and doves, and the division over Lem followed much the same lines. There was great fulmination on both sides, to which I contributed. Finally the officers of the SFWA, citing a technicality, withdrew Lem’s honorary membership. Having assumed a lofty moral stance, I was trapped in it and felt I must refuse the Nebula Award voted me by the members of the SFWA for a story which was—all too ironically—about intellectual and political oppression. That the award therefore went to the runner-up, Isaac Asimov, a vociferous Cold Warrior, perfected the irony to an almost Lemian degree.
For many Americans, Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, released in 1972, unfortunately eclipsed the book itself. It is a thoughtful and beautiful film, but I do not think it equals the intellectual breadth and moral complexity of the novel. And indeed, though Lem enjoys giving us dramatic descriptions of the strange shapes and constructs created by the planetary ocean of Solaris, suggesting the unearthly galleries of Piranesi and the Borgesian perspectives of Escher, the book resists filmic interpretation, since in essence it is not conceived visually or even sensually. It is above all a work of the mind, about the work of the mind.
Rereading the novel, I saw again how immediately one perceives it as a genuinely serious work of science fiction in the tradition of the older masters of the form. Lem resembles Jules Verne in the audacity of his invention and in a certain stateliness or aloofness of style even when narrating in the first person. He is like H. G. Wells in his alertness to where the cutting edge of science lies at the moment, and to the social impl
ications of his fable. Like both Verne and Wells, he is a shamelessly good storyteller, using all the tricks of withholding and revealing information to keep the reader in suspense. His ambition to produce a literally universal parable is reminiscent of Olaf Stapledon.
In his perceptive afterword to the 1970 American edition of Solaris, Darko Suvin—one of the very few critics writing in English who were capable of appreciating Lem at the time—makes perhaps the most revealing literary parallel, calling the novel a variation on the eighteenth-century conte philosophique. The term is precisely descriptive and offers a useful approach to the book.
Yet the clear, amused gaze of a Voltaire is not how Lem sees his universe. His narrative promptly establishes an atmosphere of confusion, mystery, tension, suspense. The opening chapter, the arrival on the planet Solaris, is full of shocks, hints, glimpses, apparent hallucinations, unexplained events, enigmatic behaviors. The gradual, eventual development of the implications of these riddles throughout the book will offer the reader, just as a detective novel does, the profound and simple satisfaction of understanding, of solving the puzzle. But all such solutions remain, as it were, held in solution: for the explanations serve only to offer hints and glimpses of further mysteries on a deeper plane. The novel is an exhibition of the inability of human understanding to achieve a final stage of knowledge; perhaps it implies also that human understanding at best can understand itself, but nothing outside itself.
An early adept of cybernetics and information theory, Lem created in Solaris an extremely sophisticated narrative structure for exemplifying the frustration of the desire to understand. Dense, vivid, explicit, packed with implications, the words of his story lead us through tumultuous, suggestive, successive images to theory after theory, question after question, only to arrive at last at a word-constructed but wordless silence.
One element of this pursuit will delight anyone who has had to read much of what is called “academic research.” To such a reader the hitherto unknown field of Solaristics will be all too familiar. Lem’s sarcastic wit is at its sharpest as he goes through the library of Solaristics: the claims of the experts, the quarrels of the scholars, explanations that replace explanations ad infinitum, theories that jostle one another into oblivion—he has it all in a few brilliant pages.
Satire in the mode of Jonathan Swift, philosophical fiction in the mode of Voltaire, and science fiction in its parable mode are all likely to offer us more light than warmth. Seeking general truths about humanity, they must forgo the irreducible recalcitrance of human individualities from which other fictions draw their vitality. These narrative modes also tend to gender themselves strongly as male. They may denigrate women; they may include them as stereotypes, perceived as existing only in relation to the male characters; they may omit them altogether. All this was nothing unusual in literature (with the exception of the novel) in the eighteenth century and all the centuries before it. And all too often, by creating a “future” for only half of humanity, science fiction narrowed the intellectual and moral potential of the genre till it could be dismissed as a set of naïve adventure stories for boys.
The scientists and scholars of Solaristics in the library seem all to have been men; the present crew of scientists stationed on Solaris consists of men; so, evidently, did all previous crews. In a serious fiction written in the late twentieth century, to establish an intellectual realm that includes no women at all is to imply a statement by omission, intentional or not. The reader may legitimately wonder if the intellectual realm is somehow established by the exclusion of women. Will it collapse if women are admitted? Is that the implication?
There is nothing naïve about Lem. Solaris provides a unique and peculiarly interesting example of the womanless universe. For there is a woman at the center of the book. She is absolutely a key figure, and though she is essentially passive, her action proves decisive. Yet she does not exist.
Not only was she the wife of the protagonist, Kelvin, but she is far more indissolubly part of him, more absolutely his, than a wife can be, even a dead wife. A creation of the enigmatic Solaris-ocean, Rheya is a figment, a simulacrum, constituted from Kelvin’s memories. She is capable of thought and choice, up to a point, yet her seeming existence is altogether dependent on his existence: and she is literally, appallingly, unable to exist apart from him. What kind of love is it, then, that grows in him for her? We learn that he allowed her to kill herself once in real life; now, if she tries to kill herself again, and again . . . ? What is the function of these powerful, moving scenes, this pattern, in the narrative? What has this relationship (or is it an autism?) to do with Solaristics, or with the quest for final meaning? Has Rheya’s sacrifice any necessary connection to the ultimate glimpse of fragile, tentative redemption Kelvin attains at the end of the book, or can he attain it only once the disruptive feminine element is out of the way and the universe can be reduced once more to the play of pure, “genderless”—that is, masculine—mind?
To some readers, this may be the most fascinating problem of the book, even more fascinating than the paradoxical questions it poses openly, teasing us with its dense and marvelous imagery, goading us to distrust all information, leading us through hallucination to vision which may itself be delusion. To ask questions which must be asked yet cannot be answered, to create images which can be neither forgotten nor explained—this is the privilege of the most courageous artists.
George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin
An introduction written for the Puffin Classics edition of 2011.
George MacDonald, born in 1824, grew up in a world where people did as everybody had always done—traveled on foot or on horseback, warmed the house with fire and lighted it with candles, wrote with goosefeather pens. They knew their neighbors, but nobody else; towns fifty miles apart might be utterly strange to each other. Compared to ours, that world seemed timeless, changeless, and yet, far more than ours, it was filled with mystery, danger, dark places, the unknown.
It’s still the world of our folk and fairy tales and most of our fantasy stories. Our imagination is still at home there. Many of us are willing to erase all the automobiles and airplanes and electricity and electronics, escape from the machines we made that now control us, and let a story take us straight into the timeless green kingdoms of legend and fantasy.
We learn about those kingdoms early. Our guides are the authors who began writing stories for children just about the time the timeless green world began to vanish, to become the world of the past—outside time—the country of “There was once a little princess . . .”
George MacDonald was one of the first of those authors. The Princess and the Goblin is an old book now, but it was written for young readers. The heroine is eight and the hero twelve, and the language is mostly quite plain and straightforward. But MacDonald also uses words like “excogitation.” Some of his sentences are complicated. Some of the meanings of his sentences are very complicated. He wrote for children, not down to them. He didn’t confuse being young with being simpleminded. I think he expected that a reader could either figure out “excogitation” or look it up in the dictionary, and that the deeper meanings that underlie his exciting story would gradually come clear to any thoughtful child.
He is often stern; he can be tender, but he’s never soft. And his green kingdom isn’t very green: it’s more like the north of Scotland where he grew up, a great, stony, stormy landscape of high hills and poor farms, a lonesome, lofty land, beautiful in the play of cloud and mist and rainbows. A perfect place for magic shining in the air and goblins under the ground.
MacDonald is also stern and clear about what nobility is. It has nothing to do with money or social status. A princess is a girl who behaves nobly: a girl who behaves nobly is a princess. Curdy the miner, being brave and kind, and behaving (or anyhow trying to behave) nobly and wisely, is a prince. The king is king because he’s a good man. No other definition is allowed. This is radically moral democracy. It’s very different f
rom the lazy-minded stories that call some characters good and others bad although they all behave exactly the same way, only the Goods win the battles and the Bads lose them, besides being ugly. MacDonald’s goblins are ugly only because they behave badly. Treated unjustly, instead of standing up for their rights they went underground to sulk revengefully down in the dark, and so they got all twisted, with weird feet and no toes . . .
This is a great story, and I love it all, but I love the goblins best.
The Wild Winds of Possibility: Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake
A piece e-published on Book View Café, June 2011.
Dreamsnake is in some ways a strange book, unlike any other in science fiction, which may explain the even stranger fact that it’s not currently in print.
When people ask me what sf books influenced me or what are my favorites, I always mention Dreamsnake. Invariably I get a warm, immediate response—Oh yes!—and people tell me how much the book meant to them when they first read it and ever since. But these days, many younger readers don’t know it exists.
The short story the book was based on won the 1973 Nebula; the book was an immediate success; it became and still is beloved. Its moral urgency and rousing adventure story are not at all dated. It should have gone from one paperback reprint to another.
Why didn’t it?
I have some theories.
Theory #1: Ophidiophobia. The phobia is common and extends to pictures, even the mention, of snakes; and the book features them even in the title. A heroine who lets snakes crawl on her, and she’s named Snake? Oh, icky . . .
Theory #2: Sex. It’s an adult book. Snake, though, is barely more than a kid, setting out on her first trial of prowess, so that young women can and do identify with her, happily or longingly, as they do with Ayla in Jean Auel’s Earth’s Children books, though Snake’s taste in men is far better than Ayla’s. But could the book be approved in schools? The sexual mores are as various as the societies, including some very unorthodox customs, and Snake’s sexual behavior is both highly ethical and quite uninhibited. She can afford to be fearless because her people know how to control their fertility through biofeedback, how to prevent insemination through a simple, learned technique. But alas we don’t. Given the relentless fundamentalist vendettas against “witchcraft” and “pornography” (read imaginative literature and sexual realism) in the schools, few teachers in the 1980s could invite the firestorm that might be started by a right-wing parent who got a hint of how young Snake was carrying on. Sexless hard sf or Heinleinian fantasies of girlish docility were much safer. I think this killed the book’s chance of being read widely as a text in junior high or high school, and even now may prevent its being marketed to the YA audience.
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