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.

Seven Days in New Crete

Robert Graves Seven Days in New Crete (1949)
Robert Graves was the renowned author of I, Claudius and a noted scholar of Greek myth, and by association mythology in general. I had no idea that he'd ever tried his hand at science-fiction, and I stumbled across this whilst seeking the aforementioned I, Claudius, and it makes absolute sense that his science-fiction should take such a distinctively mythological orientation. I say science-fiction mainly on the grounds of it belonging to the genre of Utopian writings which we may as well call science-fiction because why the fuck not, but it's a long way from even Olaf Stapledon's version of future humanity. The narrator of Seven Days in Crete wakes to find himself magically summoned by witches from the future, and so ensues three-hundred pages of typically Utopian form in which our man explores his futuristic surroundings and asks questions.

The future here follows on from some point at which the human race decided to retrace its footsteps, returning to the pre-technological idyll of Crete, or thereabouts. Magic is real. Society is divided into five basic classes or estates. What writing remains is preserved on communally held plates of silver and gold with even the complete works of Shakespeare having been reduced to a few pithy paragraphs; and the written word is the preserve of a small elite. War is conducted by means of a game resembling football, and the price paid for this Utopia is ultimately revealed to be ritual human sacrifice. I realise Graves' model for New Crete was old Crete, but I was surprised at the parallels with Ancient Mexican society - everything but the pyramids, more or less.

The problem with Utopian fiction is, by my reckoning, that it tends to be quite dull, as Thomas More is my witness. Commentary upon Utopian fiction therefore tends to work towards exposing the bodies upon which purportedly perfect societies are invariably built, which in itself can be a little predictable. Graves evades the pitfalls of the form simply through being such a good writer, one to whom the dull or merely functional sentence is apparently a stranger. He finds the wonder in the weird world of New Crete, spicing his observations with a faint tang of cynicism, but never so much as to spoil the tone; and this is significant because all of the magic and witchery and general rustic folksiness are of such a kind which commonly lends itself to somewhat more turgid narratives in my experience, the sort of thing which usually suggests the author has spent the last six or seven hours skipping amongst the toadstools in a chiffon robe saying oh wow, that's like really amaaaaazing... cough cough George MacDonald...

Being better than that, Graves steers us towards a conclusion which feels absolutely right and necessary for the purpose of the tale, even if it doesn't come as a huge surprise - excepting possibly some of the grislier details. I'm still not absolutely sure what the main theme could be as there seem to be a number of possibilities. Seven Days in New Crete may simply be a criticism of the Utopian ideal as expressed in literature, or a warning against the sort of naivety by which one may be swept up in the enthusiasm for progressive but unworkable solutions, particularly in hasty response to - for obvious example - the horror of the second world war in the case of this novel. Certain aspects suggest the story may offer some sort of commentary on the Soviet Union, albeit by oblique means, namely the parallel folksy reductionism which replaced the more progressive elements of Soviet society; or even that the novel may itself serve as an argument for a certain degree of reductionism, a return to a model of civilisation with far less moving parts to go wrong.

Maybe it's all of the above.

In any case, Seven Days in New Crete is nothing if not thought provoking, and makes for one hell of a better read than the great majority of its Utopian kind.

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.