Now Comes Tomorrow

 

Robert Moore Williams
Now Comes Tomorrow (1971)
Although a prolific novelist, Williams was a man with certain psychological idiosyncrasies, suffering from schizophrenic episodes expressed as voices in the head or visions of abstract colours, all contributing to his own unique view of the universe and how he believed it worked. These ideas endeared him very much to the flower power generation and, although older, he seems to have been flattered by their attention and saw their desire to take control of their own destiny as generally positive. His ideas about the nature of the universe informed his novels and short stories, most of which were published as science-fiction by a very loose definition of the term; and while it's often difficult to work out quite what he's trying to say, the later novels are more and more explicit in their attempts to describe the Williams-cosmos. Given the quantity of books he had published, it seems safe to assume he had enough of an audience to justify taking chances, and 1970's Love is Forever, We Are for Tonight was an autobiography which, in common with some of Philip K. Dick's later efforts, is more or less impossible to differentiate from his science-fiction.

I've come to think of Williams' writing as theosophical more than philosophical given that which it shares in common with other fringe authors, Richard Shaver and so on, not least themes common to those of psychologically unorthodox disposition - mind control, psychic visitations, unexplained and unseen forces, subterranean realms, the science of lost civilisations, myth as reality and so on. Williams also brings much of his own vision to the table in recurring themes of often profoundly allegorical composition - tiered societies within mountains, portentous sounds heard across time and space, and love as a physical universal force. Needless to say, it can all get a bit confusing because Williams often seems to be talking to himself. If Love is Forever, We Are for Tonight represented a serious effort to give some sort of background to his ideas, crackers though they may well be, Now Comes Tomorrow is perhaps the first example of their dominating his fiction to this extent, as distinct from merely informing certain elements.

If you took Euclid's point and extended it simultaneously in all directions—a piece of rock dropped on the surface of a still pond sent out waves in all directions on the surface—it became a sphere.

In doing this, you had described the creation of a solid figure with an inner and an outer surface. Had you also described the manner in which an energy of enormously high frequency descended to a lower frequency and built itself a house in which to live, the house being the sphere?

Crenshaw rather suspected that this was what you had described. He suspected that at the original point was a whirling vortex. He suspected that planets and suns and solar systems and the great swirling galaxies had come into existence in this way. He suspected that the physical structure of the universe, meaning suns and stars and men, was only a small part of a much greater, much vaster, perhaps much more beautiful universe than was visible to man, which human eyes could not see nor human ears hear nor human fingers touch. He thought this greater, invisible universe had existed for billions of years and that the physical universe which humans knew was only the extension of it, perhaps the most recent extension...

More than with at least a few previous novels, this one follows a simple story in a straight line while sweetening the pill of Williams' reality with rumination - or at least invocation - of associated theory drawn from mathematics and the weirder end of physics. The simple story in question describes the lives of a group of people frozen in a form of suspended animation for various reasons, then revived in a very different world after a century has passed, with particular emphasis on the different realities each experienced while frozen. If it superficially sounds like Dick's UBIK, there's little common ground beyond the customary questions regarding the nature of reality, here coming from a quite different direction; and even with Williams writing during what appears to have been one of his more lucid periods, it remains essentially crackers, but works because the internal logic of the novel is stronger than usual. So we experience something profound even if it's hard to describe.

More and more I find it difficult to keep on thinking of Williams as a pulp writer given the apparent depth of that which he tried to communicate, and his obvious desire to go beyond the straightforward adventures of A. Merritt which inspired him. Today he's mostly forgotten, or else remembered as an oddity, novels routinely described as incomprehensible by people who probably should have stuck to their Heinlein. Yet even when his plotting ties itself into a knot, there's a mysterious elegance to the shadows cast by the atmospheric effects of his fiction, and even where the answers might turn out to be screwy, the questions can really grab you; and if you remain unable to appreciate this on some level, maybe books just aren't for you.

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory (1984)

 

I reeled with shock when I first read this and it seemed like a masterpiece, but then I hadn't read much else for the sake of comparison. Coming back to it decades later, it still packs a punch but feels otherwise surprisingly thin and not entirely satisfying.
 

If you need spoilers for something published forty years ago, grow up. The Wasp Factory is the story of Frank, a young man in an isolated community who is ultimately revealed as having been a girl all along. This turns out to have been an experiment conducted by his hippy father, and I gather we are to assume Frank's peculiarly brutal worldview stems from resentment at having had his meat and two veg bitten off by a bulldog when he was a baby, or so he's been told; except he was born female and what he's been told is pure fiction. Let us at least be thankful for this novel having been written before the rise of the gender pillock.
 

What makes any of this interesting is the elaborate ritual existence by which Frank deals with his perceived disability, which is mostly animistic and sacrificial incorporating the murder of several younger children and a lot of animal cruelty. It's rare that I read all the way through anything with animal cruelty these days because it so rarely seems to do anything beyond pushing a button, and I'd rather not carry certain images around in my head, thank you very much. Banks is absolutely pushing buttons in this book but just about gets away with it through descriptions mostly favouring the psychological over the visceral. Nevertheless, having had a number of previous novels rejected, this one feels like a conscious effort to record his own version of Never Mind the Bollocks in an effort to break through which, as you will have noticed, worked. Critics of the time responded to and condemned the apparent application of shock tactics, and some of the most scathing reviews are jumbled up along with those written in praise in the opening pages; which is amusing, somewhat as though the author, or at least the publisher, knows and doesn't give a shit, much like punk bands claiming they couldn't play.

The problem is that the novel is so reliant on pulling the rug out from under its readers right at the end, because otherwise, while exceptionally well written, it doesn't make enough sense to even account for why it was written. Once our sight recovers from the blinding of the final revelation, it becomes difficult to work out why anyone does what they do here, and mumbling well, that's just what happens in this story doesn't seem quite enough; which leaves us with just an admittedly engaging account of some guy shooting critters so he can stick their heads on poles.

David Gill - In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves (2015)

 

David Gill served as one of a number of editors and annotators to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt's 2011 collation of Philip K. Dick's Exegesis, and his name stuck with me as one of those yielding the more interesting and insightful annotations to what may have been an otherwise near impenetrable text. By association I therefore expected short stories owing much to Dick, but hopefully done better than the usual recycled Phil which somehow misses the whole fucking point, Ridley. I wasn't disappointed because not only can Gill write, but he very much writes his own thing, and which seems distinctively his own thing, the only comparison coming to mind being that the warmth and humanity of his tone seems comparable to that occasionally achieved by Ray Bradbury, who doesn't otherwise seem an obvious influence.

Time's Empire comprises short stories - mostly very short at just a couple of pages - comprising tiny, fleeting glimpses through the window of human experience, with the occasional android or spacecraft serving to fast-track an understanding which might otherwise be weighed down by the baggage of its own explanation (and I swear that sentence will make sense if you catch it on the right day). The sheer brevity is astonishing and often a delight in its contrast to the emotional charge of many of these stories - no twists, no fuss, no ostentatious tech fixation, just tiny poems caught in the moment revealing emotional nuance so fragile that it would be lost to a more robust description. Spoiled for choice, my favourite is possibly the title track, In Time's Empire, They Were All Slaves which accordingly takes place at a drive-in as young lovers divide their attention between Spartacus and each other, their fumblings taking on an allegorical dimension as the moment unfolds across its scant two and a half pages, and the question of whether or not we can really call this science-fiction seems ridiculous, even irrelevant.

Or a transporter accident involving A.E. van Vogt and Ivor Cutler, if that works better for you.