Fred & Geoffrey Hoyle - Fifth Planet (1963)

 

I promised myself I wasn't going to have any more on the grounds of 1970's Seven Steps to the Sun having bordered on unreadable, but here I am. Seven Steps to the Sun featured this sentence:

A duck looked at him from the water and laughed in cynical fashion.

Fred Hoyle, as you may recall, was the astronomer who briefly taught Stephen Hawking and became one of his most vocal opponents, actually coining the term Big Bang while taking the piss out of the theory. Fifth Planet is better than Seven Steps - which was also cowritten with his son - although it suffers from traces of the same clunk. Domestic scenes abruptly focus upon the musings of Conway, the main character, and segue without preamble into five or six pages of theory concerning rocketry, orbital dynamics of planets, gravity or whatever. These digressions are reasonably interesting and doubtless Asimov would be proud, but the switch from one form of description to the other is clumsy, particularly when the straightforward narrative passages are themselves distinctly weird in tone:

Mike was waiting for her. He was a big, powerful fellow, with shortish hair, handsome rather than good-looking. In his official dossier he was described as well coordinated, and the figures for his reaction times were very good indeed.

Fifth Planet is set about one hundred years in the future, at least as of 1962, and writing in the introduction, Fred himself admits that attempts to predict the shape of future society usually end up looking pretty silly, so the world of Fifth Planet is conspicuously extrapolated from 1963, but 1963 as experienced by an unswinging science guy who probably doesn't play well with others, doesn't fully understand women, and fucking loves equations. Anything outside his somewhat sheltered existence seems to be drawn from movies, television, or cheap paperbacks, at a guess - James Bond mashed up with bits of kitchen sink dramas, retold by someone either on the spectrum or who is simply wound too tight. To be fair, the limits of such a perspective are acknowledged if not actually understood by the main character, and presumably at least one of the authors.

Although he could hardly believe it, Conway realised that to most people things were the other way round. It was usually the calculations on paper that seemed obscure. To most people calculations only acquired a meaning when they were translated into material terms. It was a question of the way you saw the world. Conway saw it in terms of the abstractions of the mind, not in terms of concrete everyday things. 

This goes some way towards alleviating the otherwise uneven and slightly rigid tone of the opening chapters, and once we're done with this admission, the novel starts to look up.

Conway is married to a woman he doesn't understand, a smashing dolly bird - as they were known back then - who isn't very bright and openly shags other men, with hubby obliged to accept that this is simply the way she is. Meanwhile, an alien solar system crosses celestial paths with our own, close enough to shift a few of our local planets into slightly wobblier orbits, but also close enough to visit in rocket ships not much further advanced than those which would take us to the moon at the end of the decade - and the technology involved seems to be the only concession to this being set in 2087. Expeditions are sent to Achilles, the planet of this roving system which most resembles Earth. They find plants but no animal life, and both teams, Russian and American, experience difficulties weird enough to have been drawn from the zone in the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. Some of them make it back to Earth, but there's an alien consciousness among them, one which ends up migrating to Conway's wife.

If the novel retains its clunk in certain respects, this is easily forgotten by the second half, which compensates for any literary shortcomings with disquieting surrealism founded in some of the weirder claims of theoretical physics, and even the unflattering portrayal of Conway's wife is redeemed by the story. This is probably the best Hoyle I've read, which I didn't expect. It opens as a humourless version of Confessions of a Window Cleaner and yet somehow ends up making Arthur C. Clarke seem frivolous.

Arkady & Boris Strugatsky - Roadside Picnic (1972)

 

I've spent the last forty years of my life avoiding Tarkovsky's Stalker - although it's actually more a case of not bothering with than actively avoiding. The reason for this is that it was shown by the film club when I was at art college, and somebody told me I really needed to see it because it was amazing and just the sort of film you love which, as usual, was pretty much the kiss of death for me. It wasn't that I even disliked the woman who told me this but, for all of her many wonderful qualities, I simply didn't trust her judgement on this occasion.

This unfortunate initial impression was cemented a couple of decades later when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my cousin's lectures, this time inspired by his having just got back from some Tarkovsky related event. As always, his lecture took the form of a leisurely paced droning monologue so delivered as to make it very difficult for anyone to interrupt, and composed with the apparent assumption of my never having heard of Tarkovsky, and possibly having no idea of what films are either. My cousin is five years younger than me but went to a much better school, you see, so has often felt duty bound to impart his greater wisdom.

I tried to explain that I hadn't seen the film and had reason to believe it might not be my sort of thing, but he took no notice. After about thirty fucking minutes of this, as he paused to draw breath, I took the opportunity to quip, 'Go on, then - push your glasses up your nose and say, as my producer said to me.' This was an allusion to Ronnie Corbett's shaggy dog stories from The Two Ronnies, and an attempt to reiterate my lack of interest in a light-hearted and humorous way so as not to give offence. He momentarily gave me the blackest of black looks, then continued for another twenty minutes, the condescending fucking cunt.

What eventually brought about my own personal Tarkovsky glasnost was my friend Carl telling me he'd been reading Roadside Picnic - on which Stalker is based and which I hadn't heard of because my cousin was apparently right about me being a massive thickie; but I tend to trust Carl's judgement on most things, so I took the plunge and finally watched it on Netflix or Hulu or one of those.

It was good, as I probably knew it would be, and it looked amazing, but then Blade Runner also looks amazing, and I don't know if Stalker was quite worth the forty year wait. It felt like it should do more than just look amazing whilst hanging about on the screen for far too long.

'It's based on a book that's supposed to be great, although I've never read it,' I told my wife as we sat down to watch. Then, after about seven hours, I added, 'You know, I don't think I'll bother with the book after all.'

I wasn't actually aware that she'd ordered me a copy from Amazon as we were watching because our birthday* was coming up. I'd assumed she was just fiddling with her phone as usual. Amazingly she didn't say anything.

To get to the point at long last, I finally understand the reputation this thing has garnered over the years, and I suppose Stalker is an extension of that, although the movie is very much a remix of the novel rather than a faithful rendering. the premise is, as you may know, that aliens have visited our planet leaving behind all sorts of fascinating super-advanced garbage just as we might leave crisp packets and plastic forks behind following a roadside picnic, if we're louts. The visitation sites coincidentally foreshadow the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in so much as that you wouldn't want to live there and all sorts of weird and deadly effects apply, and so we have stalkers - as they are called - who brave the Zones and retrieve flying saucer detritus which they sell to the scientific community. Much of the detritus is bewildering or just plain deadly, but occasionally something will turn out to be a self-recharging battery, so here we have the ancestral form of all those shitty science-fiction shows about what secretive government departments do with all the stuff that falls from the sky; except Roadside Picnic is mostly wonderful, fairly close to being a masterpiece, and is also entirely believable and true to life, being about the people more than it's about the weirdness. As Ursula K. LeGuin writes in her introduction:

There are no superbrilliant intellects; people are commonplace. Red, the central figure, is ordinary to the point of being ornery, a hard-bitten man. Most of the characters are tough people leading degrading, discouraging lives, presented without sentimentality and without cynicism. Humanity is not flattered, but it's not cheapened. the authors' touch is tender, aware of vulnerability.

The use of ordinary people as the principal characters was fairly rare in science fiction when the book came out, and even now the genre slips easily into elitism—superbrilliant minds, extraordinary talents, officers not crew, the corridors of power not the working-class kitchen.

I punched the air when I read that, and the pages that follow live up to the promise of the introduction; although that said, I found I got a little lost around halfway, mainly because I was subconsciously trying to match the narrative to what I could recall of the movie, which wasn't actually a whole lot. Anyway, having recognised that the movie was only loosely related, I started again at the beginning which, oddly enough, was a pleasure more than it was a chore.

Roadside Picnic is about the people, how they relate to the unknown, and the fact of the aforementioned unknown being absolutely unknowable - which is a pleasure to find in a genre that has tended to be more concerned with figuring it all out. Because we all live with the unknowable, even if we're just talking about death, Roadside Picnic feels like real life in a way which can't be said of your Asimovs or your Heinleins; and so it can also be read as being about religion, or even about the Soviet state as was - without actually criticising the Soviet state in any direct sense for obvious reasons. If Roadside Picnic is about anything, then it's arguably about everything.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason, he felt a wave of despair. Everything was useless. Everything was pointless. My God, he thought, we can't do a thing! We can't stop it, we can't slow it down! No force in the world could contain this blight, he thought in horror. It's not because we do bad work. And it's not because they are more clever and cunning than we are. The world is just like that. Man is like that. If it wasn't the Visit, it would have been something else. Pigs can always find mud.

If anyone is still reading, sorry for taking so long getting to the point and so inadvertently summarising how long its taken me to recognise the brilliance of this novel in some form or another, but we all got there in the end. Whatever garbage you were about to read, read this instead.

*: We have the same birthday.