by C. S. Lewis
LEWIS: That can’t be science fiction.
AMIS: I would dissent from that. It starts off with a characteristic bit of science-fiction situation: that World War III has begun, bombs dropped and all that. . . .
LEWIS: Ah, well, you’re now taking the German view that any romance about the future is science fiction. I’m not sure that this is a useful classification.
AMIS: ‘Science fiction’ is such a hopelessly vague label.
LEWIS: And of course a great deal of it isn’t science fiction. Really it’s only a negative criterion: anything which is not naturalistic, which is not about what we call the real world.
ALDISS: I think we oughtn’t to try to define it, because it’s a self-defining thing in a way. We know where we are. You’re right, though, about Lord of the Flies. The atmosphere is a science-fiction atmosphere.
LEWIS: It was a very terrestrial island; the best island, almost, in fiction. Its actual sensuous effect on you is terrific.
ALDISS: Indeed. But it’s a laboratory case—
AMIS:—isolating certain human characteristics, to see how they would work out—
LEWIS: The only trouble is that Golding writes so well. In one of his other novels, The Inheritors, the detail of every sensuous impression, the light on the leaves and so on, was so good that you couldn’t find out what was happening. I’d say it was almost too well done. All these little details you only notice in real life if you’ve got a high temperature. You couldn’t see the wood for the leaves.
ALDISS: You had this in Pincher Martin; every feeling in the rocks, when he’s washed ashore, is done with a hallucinatory vividness.
AMIS: It is, that’s exactly the phrase. I think thirty years ago if you wanted to discuss a general theme you would go to the historical novel; now you would go to what I might describe in a prejudiced way as science fiction. In science fiction you can isolate the factors you want to examine. If you wanted to deal with the theme of colonialism, for instance, as Poul Anderson has done, you don’t do it by writing a novel about Ghana or Pakistan—
LEWIS: Which involves you in such a mass of detail that you don’t want to go into—
AMIS: You set up worlds in space which incorporate the characteristics you need.
LEWIS: Would you describe Abbott’s Flatland as science fiction? There’s so little effort to bring it into any sensuous—well, you couldn’t do it, and it remains an intellectual theorem. Are you looking for an ashtray? Use the carpet.
AMIS: I was looking for the Scotch, actually.
LEWIS: Oh, yes, do, I beg your pardon. . . . But probably the great work in science fiction is still to come. Futile books about the next world came before Dante, Fanny Burney came before Jane Austen, Marlowe came before Shakespeare.
AMIS: We’re getting the prolegomena.
LEWIS: If only the modern high-brow critics could be induced to take it seriously . . .
AMIS: Do you think they ever can?
LEWIS: No, the whole present dynasty has got to die and rot before anything can be done at all.
ALDISS: Splendid!
AMIS: What’s holding them up, do you think?
LEWIS: Matthew Arnold made the horrible prophecy that literature would increasingly replace religion. It has, and it’s taken on all the features of bitter persecution, great intolerance, and traffic in relics. All literature becomes a sacred text. A sacred text is always exposed to the most monstrous exegesis; hence we have the spectacle of some wretched scholar taking a pure divertissement written in the seventeenth century and getting the most profound ambiguities and social criticisms out of it, which of course aren’t there at all. . . . It’s the discovery of the mare’s nest by the pursuit of the red herring. [Laughter.] This is going to go on long after my lifetime; you may be able to see the end of it, I shan’t.
AMIS: You think this is so integral a part of the Establishment that people can’t overcome—
LEWIS: It’s an industry, you see. What would all the people be writing D. Phil. theses on if this prop were removed?
AMIS: An instance of this mentality the other day: somebody referred to ‘Mr Amis’s I suspect rather affected enthusiasm for science fiction. . . .’
LEWIS: Isn’t that maddening!
AMIS: You can’t really like it.
LEWIS: You must be pretending to be a plain man or something. . . . I’ve met the attitude again and again. You’ve probably reached the stage too of having theses written on yourself. I received a letter from an American examiner asking, ‘Is it true that you meant this and this and this?’ A writer of a thesis was attributing to me views which I have explicitly contradicted in the plainest possible English. They’d be much wiser to write about the dead, who can’t answer.
ALDISS: In America, I think science fiction is accepted on a more responsible level.
AMIS: I’m not so sure about that, you know, Brian, because when our anthology Spectrum I came out in the States we had less friendly and less understanding treatment from reviewers than we did over here.
LEWIS: I’m surprised at that, because in general all American reviewing is more friendly and generous than in England.
AMIS: People were patting themselves on the back in the States for not understanding what we meant.
LEWIS: This extraordinary pride in being exempt from temptations that you have not yet risen to the level of! Eunuchs boasting of their chastity! [Laughter.]
AMIS: One of my pet theories is that serious writers as yet unborn or still at school will soon regard science fiction as a natural way of writing.
LEWIS: By the way, has any science-fiction writer yet succeeded in inventing a third sex? Apart from the third sex we all know.
AMIS: Clifford Simak invented a set-up where there were seven sexes.
LEWIS: How rare happy marriages must have been then!
ALDISS: Rather worth striving for perhaps.
LEWIS: Obviously when achieved they’d be wonderful. [Laughter.]
ALDISS: I find I would much rather write science fiction than anything else. The dead weight is so much less there than in the field of the ordinary novel. There’s a sense in which you’re conquering a fresh country.
AMIS: Speaking as a supposedly realistic novelist, I’ve written little bits of science fiction and this is such a tremendous liberation.
LEWIS: Well, you’re a very ill-used man; you wrote a farce and everyone thought it a damning indictment of Redbrick. I’ve always had great sympathy for you. They will not understand that a joke is a joke. Everything must be serious.
AMIS: ‘A fever chart of society.’
LEWIS: One thing in science fiction that weighs against us very heavily is the horrible shadow of the comics.
ALDISS: I don’t know about that. Titbits Romantic Library doesn’t really weigh against the serious writer.
LEWIS: That’s a fair analogy. All the novelettes didn’t kill the ordinary legitimate novel of courtship and love.
ALDISS: There might have been a time when science fiction and comics were weighed together and found wanting, but that at least we’ve got past.
AMIS: I see the comic books that my sons read, and you have there a terribly vulgar reworking of the themes that science fiction goes in for.
LEWIS: Quite harmless, mind you. This chatter about the moral danger of the comics is absolute nonsense. The real objection is against the appalling draughtsmanship. Yet you’ll find the same boy who reads them also reads Shakespeare or Spenser. Children are so terribly Catholic. That’s my experience with my stepchildren.
ALDISS: This is an English habit, to categorise: that if you read Shakespeare you can’t read comics, that if you read science fiction you can’t be serious.
AMIS: That’s the thing that annoys me.
LEWIS: Oughtn’t the word serious to have an embargo slapped on it? Serious ought to mean simply the opposite of comic, whereas now it means ‘good’ or ‘Literature’ with a capital L.
ALDISS: You can be serious without being
earnest.
LEWIS: Leavis demands moral earnestness; I prefer morality.
AMIS: I’m with you every time on that one.
LEWIS: I mean I’d sooner live among people who don’t cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards. [Laughter.]
AMIS: More Scotch?
LEWIS: Not for me, thank you, help yourself. [Liquid noises.]
AMIS: I think all this ought to stay in, you know—all these remarks about drink.
LEWIS: There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have a drink. Look, you want to borrow Abbott’s Flatland, don’t you? I must go to dinner, I’m afraid. [Hands over Flatland.] The original manuscript of the Iliad could not be more precious. It’s only the ungodly who borroweth and payeth not again.
AMIS (reading): By A. Square.
LEWIS: But of course the word square hadn’t the same sense then.
ALDISS: It’s like the poem by Francis Thompson that ends ‘She gave me tokens three, a look, a word of her winsome mouth, and a sweet wild raspberry’; there again the meaning has changed. It really was a wild raspberry in Thompson’s day. [Laughter.]
LEWIS: Or the lovely one about the Bishop of Exeter, who was giving the prizes at a girls’ school. They did a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the poor man stood up afterwards and made a speech and said [piping voice]: ‘I was very interested in your delightful performance, and among other things I was very interested in seeing for the first time in my life a female Bottom.’ [Guffaws.]
PART TWO
STORIES
X
THE SHODDY LANDS
Being, as I believe, of sound mind and in normal health, I am sitting down at 11 P.M. to record, while the memory of it is still fresh, the curious experience I had this morning.
It happened in my rooms in college, where I am now writing, and began in the most ordinary way with a call on the telephone. ‘This is Durward,’ the voice said. ‘I’m speaking from the porter’s lodge. I’m in Oxford for a few hours. Can I come across and see you?’ I said yes, of course. Durward is a former pupil and a decent enough fellow; I would be glad to see him again. When he turned up at my door a few moments later I was rather annoyed to find that he had a young woman in tow. I loathe either men or women who speak as if they were coming to see you alone and then spring a husband or a wife, a fiancé or a fiancée on you. One ought to be warned.
The girl was neither very pretty nor very plain, and of course she ruined my conversation. We couldn’t talk about any of the things Durward and I had in common because that would have meant leaving her out in the cold. And she and Durward couldn’t talk about the things they (presumably) had in common because that would have left me out. He introduced her as ‘Peggy’ and said they were engaged. After that, the three of us just sat and did social patter about the weather and the news.
I tend to stare when I am bored, and I am afraid I must have stared at that girl, without the least interest, a good deal. At any rate I was certainly doing so at the moment when the strange experience began. Quite suddenly, without any faintness or nausea or anything of that sort, I found myself in a wholly different place. The familiar room vanished; Durward and Peggy vanished. I was alone. And I was standing up.
My first idea was that something had gone wrong with my eyes. I was not in darkness, nor even in twilight, but everything seemed curiously blurred. There was a sort of daylight, but when I looked up I didn’t see anything that I could very confidently call a sky. It might, just possibly, be the sky of a very featureless, dull, grey day, but it lacked any suggestion of distance. ‘Nondescript’ was the word I would have used to describe it. Lower down and closer to me, there were upright shapes, vaguely green in colour, but of a very dingy green. I peered at them for quite a long time before it occurred to me that they might be trees. I went nearer and examined them; and the impression they made on me is not easy to put into words. ‘Trees of a sort,’ or, ‘Well, trees, if you call that a tree,’ or, ‘An attempt at trees,’ would come near it. They were the crudest, shabbiest apology for trees you could imagine. They had no real anatomy, even no real branches; they were more like lamp-posts with great, shapeless blobs of green stuck on top of them. Most children could draw better trees from memory.
It was while I was inspecting them that I first noticed the light: a steady, silvery gleam some distance away in the Shoddy Wood. I turned my steps towards it at once, and then first noticed what I was walking on. It was comfortable stuff, soft and cool and springy to the feet; but when you looked down it was horribly disappointing to the eye. It was, in a very rough way, the colour of grass; the colour grass has on a very dull day when you look at it while thinking pretty hard about something else. But there were no separate blades in it. I stooped down and tried to find them; the closer one looked, the vaguer it seemed to become. It had in fact just the same smudged, unfinished quality as the trees: shoddy.
The full astonishment of my adventure was now beginning to descend on me. With it came fear, but, even more, a sort of disgust. I doubt if it can be fully conveyed to anyone who has not had a similar experience. I felt as if I had suddenly been banished from the real, bright, concrete, and prodigally complex world into some sort of second-rate universe that had all been put together on the cheap; by an imitator. But I kept on walking towards the silvery light.
Here and there in the shoddy grass there were patches of what looked, from a distance, like flowers. But each patch, when you came close to it, was as bad as the trees and the grass. You couldn’t make out what species they were supposed to be. And they had no real stems or petals; they were mere blobs. As for the colours, I could do better myself with a shilling paint-box.
I should have liked very much to believe that I was dreaming, but somehow I knew I wasn’t. My real conviction was that I had died. I wished—with a fervour that no other wish of mine has ever achieved—that I had lived a better life.
A disquieting hypothesis, as you see, was forming in my mind. But next moment it was gloriously blown to bits. Amidst all that shoddiness I came suddenly upon daffodils. Real daffodils, trim and cool and perfect. I bent down and touched them; I straightened my back again and gorged my eyes on their beauty. And not only their beauty but—what mattered to me even more at that moment—their, so to speak, honesty; real, honest, finished daffodils, live things that would bear examination.
But where, then, could I be? ‘Let’s get on to that light. Perhaps everything will be made clear there. Perhaps it is at the centre of this queer place.’
I reached the light sooner than I expected, but when I reached it I had something else to think about. For now I met the Walking Things. I have to call them that, for ‘people’ is just what they weren’t. They were of human size and they walked on two legs; but they were, for the most part, no more like true men than the Shoddy Trees had been like trees. They were indistinct. Though they were certainly not naked, you couldn’t make out what sort of clothes they were wearing, and though there was a pale blob at the top of each, you couldn’t say they had faces. At least that was my first impression. Then I began to notice curious exceptions. Every now and then one of them became partially distinct; a face, a hat, or a dress would stand out in full detail. The odd thing was that the distinct clothes were always women’s clothes, but the distinct faces were always those of men. Both facts made the crowd—at least, to a man of my type—about as uninteresting as it could possibly be. The male faces were not the sort I cared about; a flashy-looking crew—gigolos, fripoons. But they seemed pleased enough with themselves. Indeed they all wore the same look of fatuous admiration.
I now saw where the light was coming from. I was in a sort of street. At least, behind the crowd of Walking Things on each side, there appeared to be shop-windows, and from these the light came. I thrust my way through the crowd on my left—but my thrusting seemed to yield no physical contacts—and had a look at one of the shops.
Here I had a new surprise. It was a jeweller’s
, and after the vagueness and general rottenness of most things in that queer place, the sight fairly took my breath away. Everything in that window was perfect; every facet on every diamond distinct, every brooch and tiara finished down to the last perfection of intricate detail. It was good stuff too, as even I could see; there must have been hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of it. ‘Thank Heaven!’ I gasped. ‘But will it keep on?’ Hastily I looked at the next shop. It was keeping on. This window contained women’s frocks. I’m no judge, so I can’t say how good they were. The great thing was that they were real, clear, palpable. The shop beyond this one sold women’s shoes. And it was still keeping on. They were real shoes; the toe-pinching and very high-heeled sort which, to my mind, ruins even the prettiest foot, but at any rate real.
I was just thinking to myself that some people would not find this place half as dull as I did, when the queerness of the whole thing came over me afresh. ‘Where the hell,’ I began, but immediately changed it to ‘Where on earth’—for the other word seemed, in all the circumstances, singularly unfortunate—‘Where on earth have I got to? Trees no good; grass no good; sky no good; flowers no good, except the daffodils; people no good; shops first-class. What can that possibly mean?’
The shops, by the way, were all women’s shops, so I soon lost interest in them. I walked the whole length of that street, and then, a little way ahead, I saw sunlight.
Not that it was proper sunlight, of course. There was no break in the dull sky to account for it, no beam slanting down. All that, like so many other things in that world, had not been attended to. There was simply a patch of sunlight on the ground, unexplained, impossible (except that it was there), and therefore not at all cheering; hideous, rather, and disquieting. But I had little time to think about it; for something in the centre of that lighted patch—something I had taken for a small building—suddenly moved, and with a sickening shock I realised that I was looking at a gigantic human shape. It turned round. Its eyes looked straight into mine.