The Man with a Thousand Names

A.E. van Vogt The Man with a Thousand Names (1974)
John Clute reckoned van Vogt's drive had gone by the seventies, and whilst it's probably true that his greatest work had been written a couple of decades earlier - greatest at least in terms of generating an atmosphere so weird as to smooth over instances where the narrative fails to join up - I'd say his success rate remained mostly undiminished. Sure there were a few duds, which was as true in the forties as in the later years. The Man with a Thousand Names kicks off in typically bewildering fashion, so I paid attention and held on tight, skipping back to re-read anything I wasn't too sure about; and for at least the first half it began to feel as though this might even be his greatest work after The Violent Man, possibly due to A.E.'s customarily foggy disregard for cause and effect being written with unusual clarity; meaning that providing one is resigned to the fact that not everything is going to add up, it sort of makes sense.

Our main guy is the thoroughly obnoxious heir to a private fortune, an amoral playboy who is used to getting what he wants without having to care less about the consequences. This seemingly presents a problem for Goodreads types who expect relatable characters, but never mind. Our guy pilots a spaceship to Mittend, our nearest habitable planet, then instantaneously finds himself back on Earth inhabiting the body and life of Mark Broehm, a bartender he once wronged. This occurs a few more times, zapping his brain into the bodies of others he's screwed over, with no real explanation as to why it's happening, and it doesn't even seem to be karma catching up with our boy who remains a heel regardless, even committing rape at one point, suggesting - at least to me - that he's probably not supposed to be relatable. Eventually we learn that this is something to do with Mother, a sort of psychic gestalt representing the first wave of an invasion from another galaxy, by which point I was lost despite my best intentions.

The narrative zips about at least as much as that of Null-A and presumably for similarly non-Aristotelian reasons, and is accordingly dreamlike, albeit a dream reported with the hard-boiled pragmatism of detective fiction; and the whole somehow reminds me of David Lindsay's Voyage to Arcturus in so much as that it feels heavily allegorical, even symbolic to the point of meaning eclipsing the demands of linear progress from one part of the story to another. I still don't know what it's about beyond that it's obviously about something, but as exercise for my brain, it felt good and was mostly gripping.

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology

Justin Isis & Daniel Corrick (editors)

Drowning in Beauty: the Neo-Decadent Anthology (2018)
I'm not particularly well informed when it comes to the history of literature and the movements which have come and gone, excepting in relation to science-fiction or where writing has occasionally intersected with painting. I tentatively associate the Decadents with Symbolist art of the late nineteenth century, implying ornate, even florid prose following the logic of the mythic more than the crudely realistic, which at least squares with Huysmans' Against Nature, and possibly David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, plus a load of others which I've never read. Happily, these potential gaps in my knowledge don't seem to matter too much because the Neo-Decadents aren't in the revival business, at least not in the sense of certain sniggering twats with cogs and watch-springs glued to their top hats; and these Neo-Decadents are additionally defined by what they're against, much of which has me punching the air because up until now, I thought it was mostly just me. Crucially, for the sake of this review, amongst that which they reject we have writing which aspires to be something in another medium, writer's workshops, writing advice with all of its attendant careerist bullshit about character development, story arcs - basically all of the rote tedium which gets in the way of the actual writing, and which is usually only necessary if you can't actually fucking write and therefore have no business attempting to do so. Not everyone has a book in them, and maybe we should leave it to those who have.

The collection kicks off with an informative introduction and a couple of manifestos setting out the stall, much of which brought me great joy for reasons already stated, and which promises great things to come in the pages which follow; and for what may be the first time in publishing history - if you'll excuse the apparent hyperbole - great things do indeed come in the pages which follow. Drowning in Beauty seems to be loosely themed around varying notions of beauty, but without feeling as though anyone has been at work with a shoe horn, and even where the beauty is weird and upsetting from certain angles, its pleasure aesthetic is nevertheless communicated without recourse to any of the usual clichés - ironic contrast, or the sort of button pushing I'm sure you'll learn all about at the writers' workshop. These twelve authors work with different levels of realism, telling quite different kinds of story but with the same love of rich, expressive language where a single sentence may undertake more than one crudely descriptive task. It's ornate but never purely for the sake of design and even where that which is described may remain mysterious, the voices are clear, with nothing one could call impenetrable.

That said, I personally didn't quite connect with Avalon Brantley's Great Seizers' Ghost - more down to setting than the way it was told - but that was the only one. Initial skimming gave me cause to raise an eyebrow and roll an eye at all the transgressive weirdy music references in James Champagne's XYschaton, but upon reading the story I found it did the exact opposite of what I'd anticipated, justified what would have seemed clichéd under other circumstances, and was ultimately unlike anything I've read before - somehow deeply appalling and yet unmistakably descriptive of a form of beauty. Other highlights include Justin Isis' The Quest for Nail Art, Colby Smith's Somni Draconis, Brendan Connell's Molten Rage and Ursula Pflug's Fires Halfway, and I'll stop there rather than simply typing out the contents page because it's all good - great even, frequently startling and strange without having to pull silly faces, all of which makes Drowning in Beauty an absolute joy to have read, and a breath of fresh air the size of continental Europe after Conan fucking Doyle's droning train timetables. If you like to read, meaning actual writing, meaning anything you might read for reasons other than that it reminds you of something else and will probably do what you expect it to do, then you need the Neo-Decadents in your life.

Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight

Robert Moore Williams Love is Forever - We Are for Tonight (1970)
Having discovered that this novel, sold as science-fiction, is actually an autobiographical ramble through Williams' peculiar life, I had to own it at any cost. Luckily the cost was peanuts because no-one remembers or cares who Robert Moore Williams was, which is an enormous shame. I've read three of his novels and they've each been strikingly bizarre, undeniably pulpy, but suggesting the dream imagery of A.E. van Vogt turned towards ponderous allegorical or philosophical ends, like a Gernsbackian update of nineteenth-century Symbolist novels such as A Voyage to Arcturus or Lilith - and yes I know Lindsay's novel dates from 1920 because I've just looked it up. Anyway, it seems obvious that there was a lot more going on here than a guy hacking out tales of rockets and aliens for the sake of making a living.

Williams' story begins with him growing up on a farm in Missouri, inspired by the writing of Abraham Merritt - also a big influence on both Lovecraft and Richard Shaver, with whom Williams' writing shares certain conceits - so clearly a name I'm going to have to investigate. I'd say Bob wasn't the full ticket, and his understanding of reality suggests possibly schizophrenic or otherwise psychologically unorthodox tendencies, but I don't know how much use it would be; and certainly there's not much point reading this thing with the opinion of it having been written by a nutcase. Williams experienced, not quite visions, but certainly voices and inexplicable occurrences, and whether or not they were all in his mind probably shouldn't matter.

Williams fixates on love early on, not just by the terms we already acknowledge, but as though it should be considered an ethereal force roughly akin to the animating yolia of Nahua mythology, or - if you must - the force of Star Wars. From then on he dabbles with Hubbard's Dianetics, specifically the notion of contemporary ills deriving from engrams of long forgotten trauma; then takes part in a new age commune in Colorado Springs, a group he refers to as the wild bunch; invents something called the colourscope with which he put on light shows for an audience towards some spiritual purpose; finally ending up dropping acid on a ranch in California.

Checking out this kick that the kids had going, using minimal quantities of LSD, the experimental work being done in nearby Mexico, I discovered that the kids knew exactly what they were doing! LSD opened a channel into this higher love that had been coming to me in other ways!

What the kids had found was love! Perhaps they had also discovered a way around the meaning of hydrogen!

They were doing exactly what I was doing, but doing it differently and better. They were seeking a path into tomorrow. And so was I! Love was not restricted to writers who lived in lonely mountain cabins and who were sometimes up at dawn to talk to weaning colts beside a horse corral. It was in these wonderful kids too. On university campuses and in little coffee houses the talk was of this astonishing love. Sometimes the regents of various universities were annoyed at demonstrations they could not understand, but my strong feeling was, and still is, that these young people with the shining faces were closer to the heart of life and nearer the path to tomorrow than all the regents who ever existed.

The seemingly esoteric reference to hydrogen stems from Williams' horror at the creation and use of the hydrogen bomb, which comes to symbolise the antithesis of the force he identifies as love.

Of course, on many levels it's all bonkers, but I'm sure we've already established as much, and simply being bonkers doesn't necessarily have any bearing on whether or not Love is Forever has value as a piece of writing, which I believe it does. Williams takes a sort of shamanic journey through his own existence which, incredibly, is actually fairly coherent, and works because it is seasoned with self deprecation, just enough self-doubt to render it  readable, and the author's insistence that he is himself nothing special in the great scheme of things. As with so many others of his generation, Williams was simply looking for the way forward in human terms, perhaps not quite dreaming of supermen so much as a species which could at least move past the desire to blow itself up; and even with the testimony coming from the very edge of what the rest of us tend to regard as sanity, there are plenty of worthwhile truths in this book because it comes from a place of great honesty.

At the end I found Williams a likable character, a somewhat driven man who believed in his own experiences and wished only to share them with others; and it gives me cause to regret that he isn't better remembered. His work may not have been what you'd call mainstream, and at least two of the four novels I have are amongst the strangest things I've read, but he's not inaccessible, and at heart he was a populist.

Back when I first took to picking up old science-fiction paperbacks with lurid covers, I always hoped I'd discover some long forgotten master of the art. I just didn't imagine it would be anything quite so peculiar.

Robert Moore Williams, June 19th 1907 - May 12th 1977.

King of the Fourth Planet

Robert Moore Williams King of the Fourth Planet (1962)
Here's another one of those forgotten science-fiction authors who dominated book stands for the first half of the last century - a million novels to his name and yet remembered at best as typically adequate by The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. The description seems to square with a boggle-eyed cover promising the god-king, the man-wolf, and the I-machine, a cover I encountered only when I flipped over an Ace Double partially inhabited by the wonderful Katherine MacLean. Had it not been for her, this probably wouldn't have found its way into my collection, which would have been a shame.

The promised man-wolf is actually just some bloke with a bit of a shitty attitude rather than actual lupine characteristics, and the pop-eyed cover star turns out to be the hero, contrary to expectation; and contrary to everything else suggested by both the cover painting and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, whilst this one may fall short of masterpiece status, it's a long way from being the work of a hack churning out one space opera after another for the sake of paying a bill.

King of the Fourth Planet has some of the functional hard-boiled cadence of its supposed type whilst reading like a more coherent van Vogt - all of the surrealism forced to stand in a straight line and act like a proper narrative. The story occurs on Mars amongst native Martians and deals with John Rolf, the main character, having created a machine which allows the user to read the minds of others. So far so Flash Gordon you might think, but as the narrative progresses it begins to feel increasingly allegorical, and allegorical in the sense of A Voyage to Arcturus and related novels of the Symbolist era rather than William Shatner noticing how the really ugly aliens are actually polite and fairly helpful. The setting is Suzusilmar, described as a Martian holy mountain comprising seven distinct levels. I don't know enough of Dante's Divine Comedy to say whether there are any intentional parallels with Mount Purgatorio, but I imagine Williams had something of the sort in mind given that each level is associated with the advance of technology, culture, and spiritual thought, with the peak of the mountain representing the pinnacle of each. Moving from one level to another is the King of the Fourth Planet, a Messianic figure whom we initially fail to recognise because he appears only as a blind beggar on the lower slopes of the mountain. The key to John Rolf's machine is that it allows one to see into the minds of others and to understand their true motives; so for the sake of the story it is regarded as an innovation which will put an end to all the shitty stuff - wars and what have you - and is thus much sought after. Those doing the seeking represent companies from Earth fearful that Rolf's I-machine will bring about the end of marketing, greed, consumerism, capitalism, and even materialism.

Of course, one might read all of this as no more than an episode of Star Trek wearing a kaftan, but the emphasis on spiritual journeys and the like, couched as they are in terms which pay very few concessions to either space opera conventions or alien biology, suggests that Williams' intention was more ambitious. Whether he succeeded or not is debatable, but this is a weird little book, very engaging, and anything but average.

Destiny Doll

Clifford D. Simak Destiny Doll (1971)
Destiny Doll is a quest and is as such one tale of a particular type which Simak clearly enjoyed writing at this stage of his career as he assembled peculiar bands of misfits and sent them off in search of something that was usually allegorical to a greater or lesser extent. He'd already done this in Out of Their Minds and would do it again in Enchanted Pilgrimage, The Fellowship of the Talisman, and others. I tend to dislike quest narratives on principal as they always seem to derive from authors who can't be arsed to come up with an actual story, but Simak always tackles the form with such vivid imagination as to sidestep most reasonable objections, and his quests feel more akin to The Wizard of Oz or even Alice in Wonderland than Tolkien and his legacy of grizzled ale-quaffing tedium.

Here a group of humans, one of whom is Friar Tuck - although no direct link to the Robin Hood legend is stated - all set off in search of a lost traveller and Roscoe, his telepathic robot. Along the way they encounter a race of probably robotic aliens resembling rocking horses, and Hoot, a sort of land-bound squid who joins their more-argumentative-than-merry band. Similarly askew with narrative convention, Ross our intrepid main man, is either a bit of a dick or at least significantly more cynical than the traditional hero, and treats Friar Tuck with near limitless contempt for reasons which remain unclear to the reader, at least unclear unless we simply accept that Ross is a bit of a dick. The quest itself is conducted in search of  some vague higher knowledge or understanding of the universe as supposedly achieved by the aforementioned lost traveller and his robot, and there seems to be a possibility that Simak himself either wasn't sure what they would find, or had no clear idea how best to express it. Ross and Friar Tuck respectively may represent cynicism and faith, and Tuck vanishes before the group come to the end of their quest, perhaps suggesting the view that the goal of a quest must by definition be unattainable, the journey being the point.

But there was no way to turn it off; for some reason I was committed and must keep on and could only hope that at some point along the way I could reach a stopping point—either a point where I could go no further or a point where I had learned or sensed all there was to learn and sense.

On the other hand, the disappearance of Friar Tuck may serve to highlight the supposed redundancy of blind faith, as Ross sees it in contrast to his own realism. Whichever the case, it becomes clear that Destiny Doll is an allegorical journey in the general tradition of David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, similarly impenetrable in places, but generally more readable.

The goal, when they get there, turns out to be an illusion - a 1960s Star Trek-style idyll complete with toga dress code concealing rot and decrepitude. At this point the choice becomes whether to accept the illusion as valid and hang around, or insist on the smellier, less pleasant reality. Ross initially opts for the latter, which may be where the Destiny Doll of the title comes in - a wooden fetish found by Friar Tuck which seems to represent utter despair, with destiny as that which will be, namely the inevitability of death, termination, confusion and so on - or realism as Ross would have it. All of this is debated within the greater environment of Simak's version of dualism, roughly speaking fellowship and the bond of all that lives in opposition to solitude and loneliness.

The conclusion, if there really is any one single conclusion here, depends either on the reader or repeat reading, this being the sort of novel which invites further investigation and poring over the subtle, more mystifying elements; not least because it's also a lot of fun, and certainly more successful than the next one, A Choice of Gods which attempted to take some of these ideas further.

After that issue of Granta, it's quite a relief to find that I am indeed still able to enjoy science-fiction, and so - as I suspected - Simak was a good choice as I clambered back into the saddle, so to speak. Destiny Doll is bewildering in places, but probably amongst Simak's more consciously literary efforts, and as such serves as a good example of why this author really deserves to be remembered with a little more fanfare than presently seems to be the case. Spaceships, gnomes, rocking horses, and folksy ontology - what's not to love?

First He Died

Clifford D. Simak First He Died (1951)
First He Died is better known as Time and Again, the title it gained upon reprint. I read Time and Again only a couple of years ago, but saw a copy of this earlier incarnation amongst the titles some person had up for auction on eBay. I'd already bagged Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique collection, David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, and George MacDonald's Lilith off the guy, and somehow I just couldn't leave this one behind, even given that the bid would mark my crossing over from reader to collector.

Anyway, I still can't tell if this is quite the same as the retitled version. There are scenes I don't recall having read first time around amongst other apparent discrepancies, although quickly comparing the two, flipping from one copy to the other, I strongly suspect  they're identical and this is simply a book which improves quite dramatically with repeated reading. Certainly I don't remember it striving for quite such philosophical depth last time, or at least not doing it so well.

First He Died is yet another curiously early novel about a time war, predating Fritz Leiber's The Big Time by nearly a decade, and of course the All-New Doctor Who Comedy Slam by half a century, and whilst we're here, let's not hold back from pointing out that Asher Sutton, the novel's protagonist returns from a mysterious region of space cut off from the rest of the universe, reborn with two hearts and a secondary nervous system - not sure if that one rings any bells.

Sutton, who somehow arrives on Earth in a ship which should never have flown - the engines don't work and it isn't even airtight - discovers he will one day publish a philosophical text entitled This is Destiny which discusses the fundamental truths of existence, the universe and the place of humanity therein. The trouble is that humanity isn't going to like what he has to say, not least because of the immense influence this book will have on future history; and so war has broken out between those factions who wish to prevent Sutton writing his book, and those sympathetic. Curiously, this results in two future versions of This is Destiny, only one of which is true to Asher Sutton's vision, which in turn presents an odd parallel to the alternately titled editions of the novel we're reading; and if this weren't in itself sufficiently self-referential, Sutton travels back to 1977 in search of an ancestor and finds himself discussing the subject of his magnum opus with a character called Old Cliff:

'But destiny? you said something about destiny?'

'Interested in it, lad,' said the old man. 'Wrote a story about it once. Didn't amount to much. Used to mess around some, writing, in my early days.'

For some time I've regarded Clifford D. Simak as something like the rural Philip K. Dick, a cleaner living, more traditional counterpart to the urban paranoia of his junior, but nevertheless similar. As authors, whilst they may be worlds apart, they both speak from a blue collar perspective, telling stories of the little guy who works hard and generally tries to do the right thing; and their respective careers were in each case engaged with repeated attempts to reach a broader understanding of the universe. Dick regarded that which we experience as the universe to be possibly illusory, whereas Simak held it to be real, but perhaps ultimately beyond our comprehension. Also they both made use of a middle initial and had some of the same letters in their names...

Whereas Dick made frequent and occasionally inscrutable reference to historical philosophy, Simak kept it simpler - just a brief nod to Henry Thoreau in First He Died and the rest otherwise discussed without bringing in anything beyond that which is directly experienced by the characters of the novel.

'We've lived by faith alone,' said Sutton, ' for eight thousand years at least and probably more than that. Certainly more than that. For it must have been faith, a glimmer of some sort of faith, that made the Neanderthaler paint the shinbones red and nest the skulls so they face toward the east.'

'Faith,' said Dr. Raven gently, 'is a powerful thing.'

'Yes, powerful,' Sutton agreed, 'but even in its strength it is our own confession of weakness. Our own admission that we are not strong enough to stand alone, that we must have a staff to lean upon, the expressed hope and conviction that there is some great power which will lend us aid and guidance.'

This idea is the foundation of Simak's writing, and one which in its deceptive simplicity has probably denied him a posthumous reputation of the kind now enjoyed by Philip K. Dick. Simak writes simple, communicative sentences in the voice of occasionally somewhat homespun characters. That which Asher Sutton will one day write in his great work is likewise straightforward:

We are not alone.

No one ever is alone.

Not since the first faint stirring of the first flicker of life on the first planet in the galaxy that knew the quickening of life, has there ever been a single entity that walked or crawled or slithered down the path of life alone.

Read a little too quickly, it seems to amount to hey like we're all brothers so let's all just try to get along, mkay? but of course such would hardly require elaboration by means of an entire book; and with this arguably being Simak's first full novel - Cosmic Engineers and Empire both having been guided by John W. Campbell to varying degrees - you can tell he's really going for it, piling on all his biggest ideas, making concessions to no-one but his own conscience and hoping some sense will result; and it sort of does, or at least it did for me during this second reading.

Destiny by Simak's terms might almost be considered an inversion of all those 1950s supermen, utopian science-fiction futures with man - and it usually was quite specifically man - stood at the technological pinnacle of creation. Sutton's Destiny is more like an understanding of the equilibrium of existence, or at least its potential, with all that lives as part of an indivisible whole, and one illustration Simak provides of this is that not even a cell can be considered a single discrete organism given the presence of mitochondria. In essence, First He Died strives to communicate a quite subtle philosophical model without recourse to either religion or even the language by which it might best be communicated; and this seems to provide a glimpse of Simak's almost existential view of the universe, a view which, by the by, might also be characterised by his writing time travel as a psychological rather than temporal process - an idea later revisited in Time is the Simplest Thing in which the past is revealed to be an empty stage from which all trace of life has vanished; and all this even without getting into Asher Sutton as a man returned from death with the potential to save humanity from itself...

First He Died or whatever you want to call it is a bit of a mess in terms of traditional narrative, and yet seemed to me quite straightforward first time around, mainly due to Old Cliff's insistence on communicating everything through the medium of folks who just like to sit on the stoop awhile with their faithful hound chewing a straw and maybe getting in some whittling; but don't be deceived, these still waters run surprisingly deep.

Lilith

George MacDonald Lilith (1895)
Along with Ballantine's Clark Ashton Smith collection Zothique, this was one of a handful of titles I picked up from a charity shop several decades ago. Being in those days considerably less intelligent and without much of an attention span to speak of, I got around to just one of the aforementioned handful, then ended up giving the rest away unread. More recently, in an effort to set right some nebulously defined act of cosmic injustice that I felt certain I had committed, I bought them all again on eBay for annoyingly inflated prices probably representing karma as much as collector's value.

MacDonald's Lilith was one of those titles, a book which I have now owned twice and read once. It was famously an inspiration to David Lindsay's similarly impenetrable A Voyage to Arcturus, to C.S. Lewis with that whole mysterious allegorical land accessible via a broom cupboard motif, and to J.R.R. Tolkein according to everyone except Tolkein himself. The novel's protagonist finds himself in a mythic realm of children - distinguished by their virtuous purity and referred to as Little Ones - and giants, who turn out to be the children grown up and turned bad through worldly experience. The realm is subject to a possibly philosophical power struggle between characters representing Adam, Eve, and Lilith - Adam's wilful and hence morally ambiguous bordering on evil first wife - although as an aside it might be worth pointing out that this specific matrimonial detail does not seem to have appeared in any record prior to the eighth century and is of doubtful canonicity in Biblical terms.

As Christian allegory, Lilith seems to be about the redemption of sin, and reads very much as the musings of an author approaching his final years and subsequent reckoning with higher authorities; but with my not being much of a scholar where Biblical matters are concerned - a fact of which I am not necessarily proud, I should perhaps point out - I found it all somewhat bewildering. Much as I disliked what C.S. Lewis said in at least the last two books of his Cosmic Trilogy, I could at least follow his argument despite relative ignorance regarding certain aspects of the underlying theology, but with Lilith I was lost. Characters seem to appear and events to transpire without obvious reason or explanation so far as I could tell.

Although I'm no more an expert on literary trends of the late 1900s than I am on the nuts and bolts of that whole Christian thing, I'm reasonably informed about the Symbolist movement of the time, at least in terms of its painters. The actual prose style of Lilith is fairly rich and rewarding, providing you take it at an even pace, so I appreciated the novel almost as a series of images which could easily have drawn inspiration from Watts, Redon, Segantini and others - A.E. van Vogt let loose on the Book of Genesis, sort of. The problem here is that this sort of suspension of expectation becomes more and more difficult to maintain as the novel continually fails to deliver anything that helps one make at least some sense of what has gone before; and after two hundred fairly repetitive pages laced with just a little more sentimentality than I like, it becomes increasingly difficult to give two shits about whatever the hell MacDonald was trying to say.

I'm glad I finally got around to reading this, but it does feel like a bit of a kick in the nadgers that it turned out to be quite so lumpy after all that.

A Choice of Gods

Clifford D. Simak A Choice of Gods (1972)
After Revelation Space, I felt the pressing need to self-medicate with Simak, probably not so much for his being the literary equivalent of comfort food as for his reliability. Even leaving aside novellas and short stories, of nineteen Simak novels I've read, only Why Call Them Back From Heaven? has been not entirely to my taste. His writing rarely fails to engage, never seems to sacrifice quality to quantity despite a prolific output, always throws up a few surprises, moments one would never have anticipated: in short, he can usually be trusted to come up with the goods.

I should probably qualify the comfort food metaphor (or simile, or whatever the hell it is) as a lazy comparison deriving from Simak's customary pastoral themes reminding me of The Waltons - in a good way I should stress - for said pastoral themes, on close inspection, tend towards an underlying pessimism that is anything but soothing. A Choice of Gods is no exception in this respect.

The novel is set many thousands of years after the depopulation of Earth by an unknown cosmic power with a handful of humans and robots left behind in the rural idyll as nature reclaims the planet. It's a familiar Simakian setting explored in other novels - notably City - yet  here remains very much its own story. Whilst falling short of full allegorical status by the terms of, for example, David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus, A Choice of Gods certainly wanders some way in that direction, its rhetorical gait more pronounced than I've noticed in other works by the same author. However, his message remains open to interpretation. Simak tended to ask pointed questions and let the readers argue it out amongst themselves. Like his contemporary, A.E. van Vogt, he would leave things open or unexplained, an oddly refreshing habit given that it so closely reproduces a subjective experience resembling real life.

A Choice of Gods is about humanity and nature and the place of the former within the latter as understood by different means. Simak's robots tend to be innocents, and here they form a religious order which recognises that its own understanding of God will never transcend the limitations of their collective ignorance, and from this ignorance is born their fanaticism - although mild by the terms one might ordinarily associate with fanaticism. Anyway, in order to achieve a better understanding, the robots embark upon the Project, the creation of a machine more intelligent than themselves which they hope will communicate with the Principle, the cosmic power responsible for depopulating the planet - interestingly enough representing a prediction of technological singularity a full decade before Vernor Vinge popularised the idea.

The Principle, a force seemingly residing at the centre of the galaxy, is probably not God; the humans have moved some way beyond religious belief in conventional terms, and the Native Americans comprising a sizeable proportion of their numbers never really held with such ideas in the first place - a pleasantly authentic variation on the usual stuff you might expect about the Great Spirit and chanting around a campfire. The Principle seems to be nature itself, a force which, whilst not necessarily evil, is certainly amoral or indifferent. For reasons we probably wouldn't understand despite both humans and robots having their own ideas, the Principle depopulated the Earth by moving most of the people to three very distant planets, and after five centuries, they've decided they're coming back.

Simak draws no conclusions, preferring to ask questions and leave you to it. A Choice of Gods might therefore be deemed an unsatisfactory novel in terms of ripping yarns with neat solutions, but that was never its purpose. As 175 pages of a very literate writer  thinking aloud and seeing what happens, it probably has no right to be quite so enjoyable, but that's Simak for you.

A Voyage to Arcturus

 

David Lindsay A Voyage to Arcturus (1920)
The greatest science-fiction novel ever written according to some, an incoherent pile of shit according to others, and a significant influence on the first two volumes of C.S. Lewis' Cosmic Trilogy. The most common complaint, if three minutes spent looking around on the internet are any indication, seems to be that A Voyage to Arcturus is  badly written, a complaint which I gather has gained such momentum over the years as to imprint the novel's cultural presence with a halo of testy defences. It's not very encouraging when even the back cover blurb quotes a review politely suggesting that its merits are conditional to sympathetic reading.

Typically, one summary nestled deep within the underpants of cyberspace and supplied by someone named Darius runs:

This really isn't a novel, and certainly not science-fiction. It is a bunch of parables, and parables that really make no sense. The book is mostly without any purpose. The only thing that kept me reading it was that I could not believe how bad it was, nor could I believe that anyone could recommend it or refer to it as a page-turner.

Followed immediately by:

Well, Darius, that just reveals the limited reach of your mind. Arcturus is a philosophical allegory, a post-Nietzschean Pilgrim's Progress. The inadequacy of successive perceptions is the point - all ultimately is illusion, facade and suffering. Twentieth century Gnosticism? A multidimensional Zen mandala? Probably both, and more.

This rebuttal, the work of someone named Schopenhauer, signs off with the suggestion that Darius should look elsewhere for phasers or lightsabers because clearly anyone picking up Lindsay's masterpiece and failing to recognise its genius would have been better off sticking with The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and yes, I am being sarcastic just in case that wasn't obvious.

Whilst Schopenhauer defeats his own argument by revealing himself to be a bit of a wanker, and by suggesting that A Voyage to Arcturus might not be so much a novel as a multidimensional Zen mandala (there's no such thing by the way); and whilst the views of Darius may be perhaps a tad harsh, the sad truth lies, as always, somewhere between the two poles.

A Voyage to Arcturus, paradoxically contrary to the protests of its defenders, really isn't that badly written. The prose tends towards a certain purple quality with tinges of melodrama, but no more so than, for example, H.P. Lovecraft or A.E. van Vogt, but it does little to suggest anything fumbled for want of literary ability. The problem is that it just isn't very engaging. The visionary narrative unfolds with the pacing and logic of a dream, building up a steady rhythm of pleasantly strange images and experiences which ultimately amount to very little. Its supposedly great philosophical insights are not well expressed, and nor do they seem particularly profound - excepting I suppose the views of cretins who might be impressed by phrases like multidimensional Zen mandala.

As a tale in which a man is fired into space by dubious methods in order to have philosophical experiences amongst strangely allegorical beings, A Voyage to Arcturus is not so much early science-fiction as one of the last in a long line of novels in the loose tradition of Cyrano de Bergerac's comical history. It's fine so far as it goes, although D.H. Lawrence achieved the same brooding insights to  greater and more lucid effect without firing men into orbit or writing anything too closely resembling a philosophical shopping list.  Neither awful nor brilliant, just...