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.