The View from the Cheap Seats (15 page)

“There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet . . . and they are simple phrases.

“What if . . . ?

“If only . . .

“If this goes on . . .”

I
met Fritz Leiber (it's pronounced Lie-ber, and not, as I had mispronounced it all my life until I met him, Lee-ber) shortly before his death. This was twenty years ago. We were sitting next to each other at a banquet at the World Fantasy Convention. He seemed so old: a tall, serious distinguished man with white hair, who reminded me of a thinner, better-looking Boris Karloff. He said nothing, during the dinner, not that I can remember. Our mutual friend Harlan Ellison had sent him a copy of
Sandman
#18,
A Dream of a Thousand Cats,
which was my own small tribute to Leiber's cat stories, and I told him he had been an inspiration, and he said something more or less inaudible in return, and I was happy. We rarely get to thank those who shaped us.

My first Leiber short story: I was nine. The story, “The Winter Flies,” was in Judith Merril's huge anthology
SF12
. It was the most important book I read when I was nine, with the possible exception of Michael Moorcock's
Stormbringer,
for it was the place I discovered a host of authors who would become important to me, and dozens of stories I would read so often that I could have recited them: Chip Delany's “The Star Pit,” R. A. Lafferty's “Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “Narrow Valley” and William Burroughs's “They Do Not Always Remember,” J. G. Ballard's “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” not to mention Tuli Kupferberg's poems, Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman and
Kit Reed and the rest. It did not matter that I was much too young for the stories: I knew that they were beyond me, and was not even slightly troubled by this. The stories made sense to me, a sense that was beyond what they literally meant. It was in
SF12
I encountered concepts and people that did not exist in the children's books I was familiar with, and it delighted me.

What did I make of the “The Winter Flies” then? The last time I read it I saw it as semiautobiographical fiction, about a man who philanders and drinks when he is on the road, whose marriage is breaking down and who interrupts a masturbatory reverie to talk a child having a panic attack back to reality, something that, for a moment, brings a family, fragmenting in alcohol and lack of communication, together. When I read it as a nine-year-old it was about a man beset by demons, talking his son, lost among the stars, home again.

I knew I liked Fritz Leiber from that story on. He was someone I read. When I was eleven I bought
Conjure Wife,
and learned that all women were witches, and found out what a hand of glory was (and yes, there is sexism and misogyny in the book and in the concept, but there is, if you are a twelve-year-old boy trying to make sense of something that might as well be an alien species, also the kind of paranoid “what if it's true?” that makes reading books such a dangerous occupation at any age). I read a 1972 issue of
Wonder Woman
written by Samuel R. Delany, featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and was disappointed that it felt nothing like a Chip Delany story, but had now encountered our two adventurers, and, from the magic of comics, knew what they looked like. I read
Sword of Sorcery,
which was the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser comic that DC comics brought out in 1973, and finally found a copy of
The Swords of Lankhmar
at the age of thirteen, in the cupboard at the back of Mr. Wright's English class, its cover (I would later discover) a bad English copy of the Jeff Jones painting on the cover of the US edition; and I read it, and I was content.

I couldn't enjoy Conan after that. Not really. I missed the wit.

Shortly after I found a copy of
The Big Time,
Leiber's novel of the Change War, being fought by two incomprehensible groups of antagonists using human beings as pawns, and read it, convinced it was a stage play cunningly disguised as a novella, and when I reread it twenty years on I enjoyed it almost as much (aspects of how Leiber treated the narrator bothered me) and was still just as convinced it was a stage play.

Leiber wrote some great books, and he wrote some stinkers: the majority of his SF novels in particular feel dated and throwaway. He wrote some great short stories in SF and fantasy and horror and there's scarcely a stinker among them.

He was one of the giants of genre literature and it is hard to imagine the world today being the same without him. And he was a giant partly because he vaulted over genre restrictions, sidled around them, took them in his stride. He created—in the sense that it barely existed before he wrote it—witty and intelligent sword and sorcery; he was the person who put down the foundations of what would become urban horror.

The best of Leiber has themes that recur, like an artist returning to his favorite subjects—Shakespeare and watches and cats, marriage and women and ghosts, the power of cities and booze and the stage, dealing with the devil, Germany, mortality, never actually repeating, usually both smarter and deeper than it needed to be to sell, written with elegance and poetry and wit.

Good malt whisky tastes of one thing; a great malt whisky tastes of many things. It plays a chromatic scale of flavor in your mouth, leaving you with an odd sequence of aftertastes, and after the liquid has gone from your tongue you find yourself reminded of first honey, then woodsmoke, bitter chocolate and of the barren salt pastures at the edge of the sea. Fritz Leiber's short stories do the thing a fine whisky does. They leave aftertastes in memory, they leave an emotional residue and reso
nance that remains long after the final page has been turned. Like the stage manager in “Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” we feel that Leiber spent a lifetime observing, and he was adept at turning the straw of memory into the bricks of imagination and of story. He demanded a great deal of his readers—you need to pay attention, you need to care—and he gave a great deal in return, for those of us that did.

Twentieth-century genre SF produced some recognized giants—Ray Bradbury being the obvious example—but it also produced a handful of people who never gained the recognition that should have been their due. They were caviar (but then, so was Bradbury, and he was rapidly taken out of SF and seen as a national treasure). They might have been giants, but nobody noticed them; they were too odd, too misshapen, too smart. Avram Davidson was one. R. A. Lafferty another. Fritz Leiber was never quite one of the overlooked ones, not in that way: he won many awards; he was widely and rightly seen as one of our great writers. But he never crossed over into the popular consciousness: he was too baroque, perhaps; too intelligent. He is not on the roadmap that we draw that takes us from Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell back to H. P. Lovecraft in one direction, from every game of Dungeons and Dragons with a thief in it back to Robert E. Howard, in another.

He should be.

I hope this book reminds his admirers of why they love his work; but more than that, I trust it will find him new readers, and that the new readers will, in turn, find an author they can trust (as much as ever you can trust an author) and to love.

This was my Introduction to
Selected Stories
by Fritz Leiber, 2010.

Annihilating all that's made

To a green thought in a green shade

      
“The Garden,” Andrew Marvell

B
rian Aldiss is now the preeminent English science fiction writer of his generation. He has now been writing for over fifty years with a restless energy and intellect that have taken him from the heart of genre science fiction to mainstream fiction and back again, with explorations of biography, fabulism, and absurdism on the way. As an editor and as an anthologist he has done much to influence the kind of science fiction that people were reading through the sixties and seventies, and was responsible for shaping tastes of readers of science fiction in the UK. He has been a critic, and his examinations of the SF field,
Billion Year Spree
and its reinvention,
Trillion Year Spree,
were remarkable descriptions of the genre that Aldiss argued began with Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein
and defined as “Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.” His career has been enormous: it has recapitulated British SF, always with a ferocious intelligence, always with poetry and oddness, always with passion; while his work outside the boundaries of science fiction, as a writer of mainstream fiction, gained respect and attention from the wider world.

Brian Aldiss is, as I write this, a living author, still working and still writing, and a living author who has restlessly crossed from genre to genre and broken genre lines whenever it suited him; as such he is difficult to put into context, problematic to pigeonhole.

As a young man in the army Brian Aldiss found himself serving in Burma and in Sumatra, encountering a jungle world unimaginable in gray England, and it is not too presumptuous to suggest that the inspiration for the world of
Hothouse
began with that exposure to the alien, in a novel that celebrates the joy of strange and savage vegetable growth.

He was demobbed in 1948, returned to England and worked in a bookshop while writing science fiction short stories. His first book was
The Brightfount Diaries,
a series of sketches about bookselling, and shortly thereafter he sold his first set of science fiction stories in book form—
Space, Time and Nathaniel
—began editing, became a critic and describer of SF as a medium.

Aldiss was part of the second generation of English science fiction writers; he had grown up reading American science fiction magazines, and he understood and spoke the language of “Golden Age” science fiction, combining it with a very English literary point of view. He owed as much to early Robert Heinlein as to H. G. Wells. Still, he was a writer, and not, say, an engineer. The story was always more important to Aldiss than the science. (American writer and critic James Blish famously criticized
Hothouse
for its scientific implausibility; but
Hothouse
delights in its implausibilities, and its impossibilities—the oneiric image of the web-connected moon is a prime example—are its strengths, not weaknesses.)

Hothouse,
Aldiss's next major work, like many novels of its time, was written and published serially, in magazine form, in America. It was written as a linked sequence of five novelettes, which were collectively given the Hugo Award (the science fiction field's Oscar) in 1962, for Best Short Fiction. (Robert A.
Heinlein's
Stranger in a Strange Land
took the Hugo for Best Novel.)

There had been prominent English science fiction writers before Aldiss, writing for the American market—Arthur C. Clarke, for example, or Eric Frank Russell—but Aldiss came on the scene after the so-called Golden Age was over, began to write at a point where science fiction was beginning to introspect. Authors like Aldiss and his contemporaries, such as J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, were part of the sea change that would produce, in the second half of the sixties, coagulating around the Michael Moorcock–edited
New Worlds,
what would become known as the “New Wave”: science fiction that relied on the softer sciences, on style, on experimentation. And although
Hothouse
predates the New Wave, it can also be seen as one of the seminal works that created it, or that showed that the change had come.

Aldiss continued to experiment in form and content, experimenting with prose comedic, psychedelic and literary. His
Horatio Stubbs Saga,
published between 1971 and 1978, a sequence of three books which dealt with the youth, education and war experiences in Burma of a young man whose experiences parallel Aldiss's, were bestsellers, a first for Aldiss. In the early 1980s he returned to classical science fiction with the magisterial
Helliconia
sequence, which imagined a planet with immensely long seasons orbiting two suns, and examined the life-forms and biological cycles of the planet, and the effect on the planet's human observers, in an astonishing exercise in world-building.

Restlessly creative, relentlessly fecund, Brian Aldiss has created continually, and just as his hothouse Earth brings forth life of all shapes and kinds, unpredictable, delightful and dangerous, so has Aldiss. His characters and his worlds, whether in his mainstream fiction, his science fiction, or in the books that are harder to classify, such as the experimental, surreal
Report
on Probability A,
are always engaged in, to use graphic novelist Eddie Campbell's phrase, the dance of Lifey Death.

Hothouse
was Aldiss's second substantial SF novel. It is an uncompromising book, and it exists simultaneously in several science fictional traditions (for it is science fiction, even if the image at the heart of the story, of a moon and Earth that do not spin, bound together by huge spidery webs, is an image from fantasy).

It is a novel of a far-future Earth, set at the end of this planet's life, when all our current concerns are forgotten, our cities are long gone and abandoned. (The moments in the ruins of what I take to be Calcutta, as the Beauty chants long-forgotten political slogans from a time in our distant future, are a strange reminder of a world millions of years abandoned and irrelevant.)

It is an odyssey in which our male protagonist, Gren, takes a journey across a world, through unimagined dangers and impossible perils (while Lily-yo, our female protagonist, gets to journey
up
).

It is a tale of impossible wonders, part of a genre that, like
The Odyssey,
predates science fiction, its roots in the travelers' tales of Sir John Mandeville and before, tall tales of distant places filled with unlikely creatures, of headless men with their faces in their chests and men like dogs and of a strange form of lamb that is actually a vegetable.

But above and behind all else,
Hothouse
is a novel of conceptual breakthrough—as explained by John Clute and Peter Nicholls in their
Encyclopedia of Science Fiction,
the moment of conceptual breakthrough occurs as the protagonist puts his head through the edge of the world to see the cogs and gears and engines turning behind the skies, and the protagonist and the reader begin to understand the previously hidden nature of reality. In Aldiss's first science fiction novel,
Non-Stop,
the jungle is, as we will learn, inside a starship which has been traveling through space for many human generations—so long that the
people on the ship have forgotten that they are on a ship.
Hothouse
is a novel of a different kind of conceptual breakthrough, for the various protagonists are more concerned with survival than they are with discovery, leaving the moments of “Aha!” for the reader to discover: the life cycle of the fly-men, the role of fungus in human evolution, the nature of the world—all these things we learn, and they change the nature of the way we see things.

Hothouse
is plotted by place and by event and, over and over, by wonder. It is not a novel of character: the characters exist at arm's length from us, and Aldiss intentionally and repeatedly alienates us from them—even Gren, the nearest thing we have to a sympathetic protagonist, gains knowledge from the morel and becomes estranged from us, forcing us from his point of view into his (for want of a better word) mate Yattmur's. We sympathize with the final humans in their jungle, but they are not us.

There are those who accuse science fiction of favoring idea over characters; Aldiss has proved himself over and over a writer who understands and creates fine and sympathetic characters, both in his genre and in his mainstream work, and yet I think it would be a fair accusation to make about
Hothouse
. Someone who made it would, of course, miss the point, much as someone accusing a Beatles song of being three minutes long and repeating itself in the choruses might have missed the point:
Hothouse
is a cavalcade of wonders and a meditation on the cycle of life, in which individual lives are unimportant, in which a nice distinction between animal and vegetable is unimportant, in which the solar system itself is unimportant, and in the end, all that truly matters is life, arriving here from space as fine particles, and now passing back on again, into the void.

It's the only science fiction novel I can think of that celebrates the process of composting. Things grow and die and rot and new things grow. Death is frequent and capricious and usu
ally unmourned. Death and rebirth are constant. Life—and Wonder—remain.

The Sense of Wonder is an important part of what makes science fiction work, and it is this Sense of Wonder that
Hothouse
delivers so effectively, and at a sustained level that Aldiss would not surpass until his trilogy of novels
Helliconia Spring, Helliconia Summer
and
Helliconia Winter,
almost thirty years later.

The world of
Hothouse
is our own planet, inconceivable gulfs of time from now. The Earth no longer spins. The moon is frozen in orbit, bound to the Earth by weblike strands. The day-side of the Earth is covered by the many trunks of a single banyan tree, in which many vegetable creatures live, and some insects, and Humankind. People have shrunk to monkey-size. They are few in number, as are the other remaining species from the animal kingdom (we will meet a few species, and we will converse with one mammal, Sodal Ye). But animals are irrelevant: the long afternoon of the Earth, as nightfall approaches, is the time of vegetable life, which occupies the niches that animals and birds occupy today, while also filling new niches—of which the traversers, the mile-long space-spanning vegetable spider-creatures, are, perhaps, the most remarkable.

The teeming life-forms—which, with their Lewis Carroll–like portmanteau names, feel as if they were named by clever children—fill the sun-side of the world. Gren, the nearest thing to a protagonist that Aldiss gives us, one letter away from the omnipresent green, begins as a child, and more animal than human. A smart animal, true, but still an animal—and he ages fast, as an animal might age.

His odyssey is a process of becoming human. He learns that there are things he does not know. Most of his suppositions are wrong, and in his world a mistake will probably kill you. Randomly, intelligently, fortunately, he survives and he learns, encountering a phantasmagoria of strange creatures on the way,
including the lotus-eating tummy-bellies, a comic relief turn that gets increasingly dark as the book progresses.

At the heart of the book is Gren's encounter with the morel, the intelligent fungus who is at the same time both the snake in the Garden of Eden and the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, a creature of pure intellect in the same way that Gren and the humans are creatures of instinct.

Sodel Ye, the descendant of dolphins that Gren will encounter towards the end, and the morel are both intelligent, both know more about the world than the humans, and both are reliant on other creatures to move around and encounter the world, as parasites or symbiotes.

Looking back, one can see why
Hothouse
was unique, and why, almost fifty years ago, it won the Hugo and cemented Aldiss's reputation. Compare
Hothouse
with its most traditionally English equivalent, John Wyndham's disaster novel
The Day of the Triffids
(1951), a “cosy catastrophe” (to use Aldiss-the-critic's phrase) in which blinded humans are victimized by huge, ambulatory, deadly plants, band together and learn how to keep themselves safe before, we assume, reestablishing humanity's dominion over the Earth. In the world of
Hothouse
there is nothing that makes us superior to plants, and the triffids would be unremarkable here, outclassed and outweirded by the doggerel monsters of the hothouse Earth, the crocksocks, bellyelms, killerwillows, wiltmilts and the rest.

Still,
Hothouse
remains British science fiction—its imperatives are very different to the American SF of the same period. In American SF from the early sixties, Gren would have gone on to explore the universe, to restore wisdom to the humans, to restore animal life on Earth, all endings that Aldiss is able to dangle before us before he rejects them, for
Hothouse
is not a book about the triumph of humanity, but about the nature of life, life on an enormous scale and life on a cellular level. The
form of the life is unimportant: soon the sun will engulf the Earth, but the life that came to Earth, and stayed for a moment, will move on across the universe, finding new purchase in forms unimaginable.

Hothouse
is a strange book, alienating and deeply, troublingly odd. Things will grow and die and rot and new things will grow, and survival depends upon this. All else is vanity, Brian Aldiss tells us, with Ecclesiastes, and even intelligence may be a burden of a kind, something parasitic and ultimately unimportant.

This was my introduction to the 2008 Penguin Modern Classics edition of
Hothouse,
by Brian Aldiss.