by Brian Aldiss
‘I must get an electrician in to look at it,’ I said. ‘Unless you actually enjoy the noise, that is. It just sits there gobbling electricity like a –’
‘A robot?’ Marion suggested.
‘Yep.’ I ambled into the living room-cum-study. Nikola was lying on the rug under the window in an absurd position, her tummy up to the sunlight. Absently, I went over and tickled her to make her purr. She knew I enjoyed it as much as she did; she was very like Marion in some ways. And at that moment, discontent struck me.
I lit a Van Dyke cigar and walked back into the kitchen. The back door was open; I leant against the post and said, ‘Perhaps for once I will tell you the plot. I don’t know if it’s good enough to bear completing.’
She looked at me. ‘Will my hearing it improve it?’
‘You might have some suggestions to offer.’
Perhaps she was thinking how ill-advised she would be ever to call me in for help when the cooking goes wrong, even if I am a dab hand with the pappadoms. All she said was, ‘It never hurts to talk an idea over.’
‘There was a chap who wrote a tremendous article on the generation of ideas in conversation. A German last century, but I can’t remember who – Von Kleist, I think. Probably I told you. I’d like to read that again some time. He pointed out how odd it is that we can surprise even ourselves in conversation, as we can when writing.’
‘Don’t your robots surprise you?’
‘They’ve been done too often. Perhaps I ought to leave them alone. Maybe Jim Ballard’s right and they are old hat, worked to death.’
‘What’s your idea?’
So I stopped dodging the issue and told her.
This earth-like planet, Iksnivarts, declares war on Earth. Its people are extremely long-lived, so that the long voyage to Earth means nothing to them – eighty years are nothing, a brief interval. To the Earthmen, it’s a lifetime. So the only way they can carry the war back to Iksnivarts is to use robots – beautiful, deadly creatures without many of humanity’s grandeurs and failings. They work off solar batteries, they last almost forever, and they carry miniature computers in their heads that can out-think any protoplasmic being.
An armada of ships loaded with these robots is sent off to attack Iksnivarts. With the fleet goes a factory which is staffed by robots capable of repairing their fellows. And with this fully automated strike force goes a most terrible weapon, capable of locking all the oxygen in Iksnivarts’ air into the rocks, so that the planetary atmosphere is rendered unbreathable in the course of a few hours.
The inhuman fleet sails. Some twenty years later, an alien fleet arrives in the solar system and gives Earth, Venus, and Mars a good peppering of radioactive dusts, so that just about seventy per cent of humanity is wiped out. But nothing stops the robot fleet, and after eighty years they reach target. The anti-oxygen weapon is appallingly effective. Every alien dies of almost immediate suffocation, and the planet falls to its metallic conquerors. The robots land, radio news of their success back to Earth, and spend the next ten years tidily burying corpses.
By the time their message gets back to the solar system, Earth is pulling itself together again after its pasting. Men are tremendously interested in their conquest of the distant world, and plan to send a small ship to see what is going on currently on Iksnivarts; but they feel a certain anxiety about their warlike robots, which now own the planet, and send a human-manned ship carrying two pilots in deep freeze. Unfortunately, this ship goes off course through a technical error, as does a second. But a third gets through, and the two pilots aboard, Graham and Josca, come out of cold storage in time to guide their ship in a long reconnaissance glide through Iksnivarts’ unbreathable atmosphere.
When their photographs are delivered back to Earth – after they have endured another eighty years in deep freeze – they show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.
But Earth is reassured. It seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescope lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth. It shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: ‘Robot with Flowers’.
Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.
‘Is that the end?’ Marion asked.
‘Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted – an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.’
Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.
She said, ‘That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.’
‘Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.’
‘It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired – “Epilogue”, wasn’t it?’
‘Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one. It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his War With the Robots collection.’
‘“Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad”’, she said, quoting a private joke.
‘“Wish I’d written that,”’ I said, adding the punchline. ‘But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish “Robot With Flowers”. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.’
‘You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.’
The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake – it lacked emotional tone.
‘You were meant to ask why I was disappointed with the idea.’
‘Darling, if we are going to go and collect the Carrs, we ought to be moving. It’s two-forty already.’
‘I’m raring to go.’
‘I won’t be a moment.’ She kissed me as she went by.
Of course she was right, I thought. I had to work it out for myself, otherwise I would never be satisfied. I went and sat by the cat and watched the goldfish. The birds were busy round the church, feeding their young; they could enjoy so few summers.
In a way, what I wanted to say was not the sort of thing I wanted to say to Marion, and for a special reason that was very much part of me. I’d seen many loving summers with several loving girls, and now here was Marion, the sweetest of them all, the one with whom I could be most myself and most freely speak my thoughts; for that very reason, I did not wish to abuse the privilege and needed to keep some reserves in me.
So I was chary about telling her more than I had done. I was chary about telling her that in my present mood of happiness I felt only contempt for my robot story, and would do so however skilfully I wrote it. There was no war in my heart; how could I begin to believe in an interplanetary war with all its imponderables and impossibilities? When I was lapped about by such a soft and gentle person as Marion, why this wish to traffic in emotionless metal mockeries of human beings?
Further, was not science fiction a product of man’s divided and warring nature? I thought it
was, for my own science fiction novels dealt mainly with dark things, a reflection of the personal unhappiness that had haunted my own life until Marion entered it. But this too was not a declaration lightly to be made.
The idea of robots gathering flowers, I suddenly thought, was a message from my psyche telling me to reverse the trend of my armed apprehensions, to turn about that line of Shakespeare’s:
‘And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies;
Now thrive the armourers. …’
It was a time for me to bankrupt my fictional armourers and get out the dalliance. My psyche wanted to do away with armoured men – but my fearful ego had to complete the story by making the robots merely prepare for a harsher time to come. All fiction was a similar rationalisation of internal battles.
But suppose my time of trouble was over … even suppose it was only over temporarily … Ought I not to disarm while I could? Ought I not to offer some thanks to the gods and my patient regular readers by writing a cheerful story while I could, to reach out beyond my fortifications and show them for once a future it might be worth living in?
No, that was too involved to explain. And it made good enough sense for me not to need to explain it.
So I got up and left the cat sprawled by the pond, fishing with an occasional hope under the leaves. I walked through the kitchen into the study and started putting essentials into my pockets and taking inessentials out, my mind on the picnic. It was a lovely day, warm and almost cloudless. Charles Carr and I would need some cold beer. They were providing the picnic hamper, but I had a sound impulse to make sure of the beer.
As I took four cans out of the fridge, the motor started charging again. Poor old thing, it was getting old. Under ten years old, but you couldn’t expect a machine to last for ever. Only in fiction. You could send an animated machine out on a paper spaceship voyage over paper light years and it would never let you down. The psyche saw to that. Perhaps if you started writing up-beat stories, the psyche would be encouraged by them and start thinking in an upbeat way, as it had ten years and more ago.
‘Just getting some beer!’ I said, as Marion came back into the room from upstairs. She had changed her dress and put on fresh lipstick. She looked just the sort of girl without which no worthwhile picnic was complete. And I knew she would be good with the Carr kids too.
‘There’s a can opener in the car, I seem to remember,’ she said. ‘And what exactly struck you as so wrong with your story?’
I laughed. ‘Oh, never mind that! It’s just that it seemed so far divorced from real life.’ I picked up the cans and made towards the door, scooping one beer-laden arm about her and reciting, ‘“How can I live without thee, how forgo Thy sweet converse and love so dearly joined?” Adam to Eve, me to you.’
‘You’ve been at the beer, my old Adam. Let me get my handbag. How do you mean, divorced from real life? We may not have robots yet, but we have a fridge with a mind of its own.’
‘Exactly. Then why can’t I get the fridge into an SF story, and this wonderful sunlight, and you, instead of just a bunch of artless robots? See that little furry cat outside, trying to scoop up goldfish? She has no idea that today isn’t going to run on forever, that the rest of life isn’t going to be one golden afternoon. We know it won’t be, but wouldn’t it be a change if I could make a story about just this transitory golden afternoon instead of centuries of misery and total lack of oxygen, cats, and sexy females?’
We were outside the front door. I shut it and followed Marion to the car. We were going to be a bit late.
She laughed, knowing by my tone that I was half kidding.
‘Go ahead and put those things into a story,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you can do it. Pile them all in!’
Though she was smiling, it sounded like a challenge.
I put the beer carefully into the back of the car and we drove off down the baking road for our picnic.
How Are They All on Deneb IV?
All right, I know, times are changing. It’s the great theme of our age. Ever since evolution and all that, the decades have gone hog wild for change; you’d think there was a law about it. Maybe there is a law about it.
Don’t think I’m complaining: I am. Since I was a kid, everything has changed, from the taste of bread to the nature of Africa and China. But at least I thought SF would stay the same.
Instead, what has happened? It’s all different. They don’t write like Heinlein any more – even Heinlein doesn’t. In the old days, you knew exactly where you stood in a story. Take the aliens; back in the Golden Age, when the writers had a bit of a sense of wonder and there were blondes on the covers, you knew the aliens would always be there, endlessly mown down, endlessly picturesque, swarming over endless alien worlds. But nowadays – well, let’s take actual cases, he said, reaching eagerly for the May 1940 copy of Gruelling Science Stories. The Luftwaffe was plastering London at the time, but thank heavens the American SF writers hadn’t got wind of that, and Zago Blinder was still turning out his customary peaceful limpid prose. His May 1940 stint was entitled, with what I’ve always thought showed considerable skill in alliteration, ‘The Devils of Deneb IV’.
You know how this sort of thing goes right from the start. The pleasure lies in its predictability. Scarcely has the whine (whisper, snarl, thunder) of the landing jets died than the hatch opens and three Earthmen jump (crawl, climb, fall) out and stand looking round Deneb IV. They find the air is breathable and quickly hoist the flag (Old Glory, UN banner, Stars and Stripes).
Up to now, we readers have been carried along breathlessly (restlessly, hesitantly, mindlessly) on the flood of the author’s prose, full of admiration for the way in which he has so economically created a situation so distinct from our own humdrum world. More, the old-timers among us are full of gratitude for his dropping the first three (four, six, twelve) chapters describing the construction of the spaceship in someone’s back yard and its long eventful journey to Deneb which were once considered compulsory in this sort of exercise.
Now, however, comes an awkward pause. We have been brought painlessly through what the textbooks call Building Up Atmosphere, Establishing Environment, Creating Character, and so on. The idyllic mood must be shattered. It is time to Introduce the Action.
‘Look!’ gasps (coughs, barks, yells) the captain, pointing with trembling (rigid, scarred, nicotine-stained) finger at the nearby hill (jungle, ocean, ruined temple). His crewmen follow the line of his fingertip, and there approaching them they see an angry group (ugly bunch, slavering horde, slobbering herd) of Denebians who are plainly out for blood as they gallop (surge, slime, esp) towards the spaceship.
You must admit this is value for money, particularly if you only borrowed the magazine. In no time, the three intrepid explorers are back in their ship and the vile Denebians are trying to scratch their way in through the cargo hatch.
What more could you ask for? Personally, I asked for nothing more; I had had enough by the time I came across this situation for the fiftieth time. It was not boredom so much as bravery. The Denebians weren’t what they used to be. However mindless and merciless they got, I was no longer scared. I developed immunity. Yet, for all that, I liked things the way they were. The more unsociably those aliens behaved, the more I realized how superior we Earthmen were.
Then things became less straightforward. I was rifling through Microscopic Sex Wonder during the boom year of 1951 when I realised that Deneb was no longer the same. They’d dared to alter the plot!
This time, the aliens didn’t appear when the flag was hoisted. Everything was peaceful – too peaceful. Our three chums wandered among beautiful trees, or they found charming people like themselves but nicer, with sweet old mums sitting knitting on the porch, and Pa sucking a corn cob and spittin’ to avoid bunches of rosy-cheeked kids, or else they found nothing there at all except the waving grass.
You remember what happened, don’t you? Those beautiful trees, that grand old granny, those cheeky kids, that expanse
of nothing, that sneaky grass, was really our old Denebians in disguise. Yes, sir! Freud had hit SF by this date, and the old slobbering hordes were back in full force only nastier, because they could thought-wrap themselves as grannies or grass and get into the ship and cause chaos. That was a terrible era, and I don’t know how I survived it. Story after story, I had to face utter mind-wrenching terror.
I grew to love it.
Then they went and changed the plot again! I knew just how things were going and was all set to relax when the editors or whoever it is that insists on these things – for sure it’s not the writers – altered the orthodoxy.
I can pinpoint the date exactly when I realized something had gone wrong. I had bought the Jannish – sorry, the January issue of The Monthly of Whimsey and Whammo-Science, 1960, and was leafing through this story by Piledriver Jones entitled ‘On Deneb Deep My Pleasure Stalks’. Funny, I thought, the title doesn’t sound right, they’ve started mucking around with the titles now, is nothing sacred? But since I wanted to find out if a pleasure stalk was what I thought it was (it wasn’t), I forced myself to read on.
You can’t fail to recall the story, not only because it has since been anthologised fifty-two times and won a Hank, but because it started a new trend. This is the one where they arrive on Deneb IV all right, in this funny ship that rides solar winds, but some sort of bug gets them and they all grow extra limbs; the captain alone grows twelve big toes, fourteen left arms, a spare pair of buttocks, two girl’s knees, and a horse’s head. And then they sit around and talk philosophy, not minding at all, until in the end it turns out that back on Earth things are even worse because people are terribly short of horse’s heads and buttocks and knee caps and things.
Let’s have no false modesty – I can adjust to anything. But it needs about twenty years to adjust to that sort of plot. And what happened? Already, already, they’ve altered the line again. That’s what I mean about change running hog wild.
Just this year the new orthodoxy has set in. Look at this month’s crop of magazines – it’s not a very big crop these days, because people won’t read unless they know what to expect – look at Monolog, look at Off, look at Odious Fantasy and Lewd Worlds and Gallimaufry, and what do you find? Not a darned one of them has a story set on Deneb IV!