Chapter 1: "First, we kill all the novelists..."

Damn. Ursula le Guin makes me uncomfortable. Not least because it reminds me, as Nabokov used to say, that I am a mostly homosexual reader: my shelves are filled almost exclusively by male authors. Blame my Catholic upbringing all you like, but the problem is actually what I choose to read, I suspect.

The first two books I remember having were a massive illustrated bible, in English, and a beautiful little book called ‘Where do I come from?’, in Spanish. The book in Spanish was one that my mother, a nursery school teacher, had brought with us from Vina del Mar, when my family first went to live in Edinburgh in the early Seventies.

I was three; I loved both those books unconditionally: The Bible for its somewhat Wagnerian overtones, and the sex-education book for its colourful collages of itemized body-parts and birthing babies. Neither did me any harm, certainly not compared to my next two books: Arthur Clarkes’ short-story collection ‘All the Time in the World’, and Isaac Asimov’s understated ‘Foundation’ series (of which – not to sound like a Star Wars groupie here – only the first three count, m’kay?).

Clarkes’ ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ has always struck me as the perfect short-story; Borges himself would have admired it, for its deceptively unfussy narrative and its soaring themes. Its last lines are remarkable: two computer techies, George and Chuck, are escaping on donkeys from a remote Tibetan monastery, thinking that the Buddhist monks they’ve left behind with their new mainframe, installed to help speed up what they believed was Man’s mission on earth – collecting all God’s names in a single volume - will hold it against them when the world doesn’t finally end according to plan:

“We'll be there in an hour,“ he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, suddenly remembering, “Wonder if the computer's finished the list. It should be just about now.“

Chuck didn't reply, so George turned his head to look back at him. He could just see Chuck's face, a white shape turned towards the sky.

“Look,“ whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to the sky. (There is always a last time for everything.)

Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

I was six, and my mind was suitably blown. I loved all the Greek and Norse myths I was reading at the time too, but science fiction was different: it was, for me, far more meaningful; more real. Of course, if Jung was right, then Thor and Venus should have been speaking straight to my core. But, no: It was Outer Space that filled my inner space. There were no real archetypes in science-fiction; freed from the sturm und drang of Eros and Psyche, the ideas could fly as close to the sun as we wanted them to.

Asimov’s Foundation series was another, you know, story: he wrote in what seemed like capital letters. The ideas were laid out like seminar papers, the only one of his characters who could survive that crushing intellectual weight was, apparently, himself: he had the ego to actually to put himself into one of his own novels, once. I was too young to hate him for that at the time, caught up as I was with a narrative that had a thousand-year story-arc, about the rise and fall of empires and civilizations... Hmm: maybe that bible had more to do with my reading habits than I thought.

Still, I devoured everything else I could on my parent’s shelves too, of course; so I remember clearly the first science-fiction I read that I actually didn’t like: Doris Lessing’s ‘Shikasta’; I was ten, and I had met my match at last. ‘Shikasta’ was too slow, too Sufic; in fact, it was not playing fair with any of my conceptions of science-fiction: It was set on Earth, but written from the point of view of a visiting alien emissary, and my young mind had obviously not been sufficiently exposed to the concept of satire to accept it for what it was.

It was my first grown-up science-fiction book, so it was right that I struggled with it. It took me many decades to figure out that most really good science-fiction is almost always satirical at some level; if only because, as Douglas Adams obliquely illustrates in ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, with his description of the Total Perspective Vortex, here we have a type of fiction that specifically does not place Man at the centre of the universe, but instead points out the immensity of our possibilities; then, in one small corner, adds a tiny sign for us saying: ‘You are here’.

So, back to the present, and to Ursula le Guin’s essay, ‘Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown’, the set text for our class of the 4^th September. Reading this, I have had that same old feeling of reading from the grown-ups’ books again; again, I immediately didn’t like it, for how it made me feel. This essay was too sure of itself, and too dismissive of my favourite pastime, it seemed to me. But this time, I am not ten; I cannot run from this battle, and must now get to the dark heart of what science-fiction has become for me.

Where to start? As usual – as always – I begin with my ignorance. I don’t know much about art, but I know what I don’t like: and I don’t like my fiction beginning with an old lady in a corner, for starters. I don’t agree with Dr. le Guin’s definition of fiction either: for me, fiction as we know it starts with Freud – suddenly, because we now ‘see’ into the mind, we have every character as a subject, and not as an object.

The proof of this for me is when I read, for the first time, Dumas’ ‘Three Musketeers’, recently: when we need to know what a character is thinking, Dumas has to actually get his characters muttering under their breathe for the reader to hear! Post-Freud, and we are jockeying side-by-side with the protagonist to keep atop of his or her bucking subconscious. We are the subject, and the subject is everything, in here and out there.

Again and again, I felt slighted when le Guin talks about science-fiction, then uses Tolkein as an example: the gall, I thought! But it made me question why I hate fantasy-fiction so much; why do I prefer the practically improbable to the perfectly impossible? It may come down to the fact that I am just ashamed of the name: fantasy is escapism, after all; and science was the future...

Very macho, I’m sure – but, in this modern world, I had to have a better reason to dislike le Guin’s thesis than: it wasn’t muscular enough. Ursula le Guin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and all the other women authors are more subtle than the blokey hard-science types of science-fiction’s so-called Silver Age; to not accept them into this mostly male club goes against one of Science’s own most important unwritten tenets: just because you don’t understand it, doesn’t mean it’s wrong.

So, I think that le Guin is right about most of what she says about fiction, in her quite beautiful essay, written in 1975, at just the time I started seriously reading; but, then, science was dying in the human spirit as the answer to all human woes, and le Guin reflects this new and jaundiced paradigm in her thesis about science-fiction. We are nearly forty years on from that age, and we should act accordingly: I believe le Guin’s prejudice against Science was colouring her view about science-fiction as she saw it then. But, I believe we are better than that, now; we are more.

My though is that Science began its ascendancy just as Religion was taking a bow from our spiritual stage. Thomas Huxley, atheist and ardent defender of his close friend Charles Darwin’s theories, wrote in the 19^th Century: ‘Every great truth begins as heresy and ends as superstition.’ Science seemed to have all the answers now, in an age when Religion up until then had been all-wise.

As the 20^th Century rolled on, more and more of the mysteries of our increasingly-complex lives and societies were seemingly answered by Science. At the same time, science-fiction provided us with an endless optimism about our bright new futures and our brave new worlds. But, too soon, the rose of the world was shown to be sick, and the invisible worm destroying it appeared to be the very thing that had once been its saviour: Science itself was shown to have become death, the slayer of worlds. For almost 40 years, wars were kept cold only because of the promise of atomic hell.

So, it was natural that le Guin in the Seventies would want a more human science-fiction: by then, we were realising that Science, like Religion for the thousands of years before that, was not coming up with the answers. We were lost and alone again, with only our own selves for company.

And here we now are: without our bibles and other fictional classics to do our thinking for us, we may be coming to the next stage of our consciousness. It started at around the time when le Guin was writing; when we realised that Science had no answers, as Religion had had no answers before it, and for the same reason: it was never there to provide us with answers; it was only there to get us to ask the right questions.

We know, now, that we, all of us, will find our answers, together, and that Science may help, if we are allowed to be free. We’ve lost our science, as we had earlier lost our religion: its answers were too simple, and we were becoming more complex.

God, they tell us, is dead. So is Clarke and Asimov, now. Le Guin, Lessing, and Atwood are not; they may still help us, if only to continue to help free us from what was once seen as a heresy, and is now just the superstition, of Answers in Books.

And may science-fiction keep helping us humans with our asking the right questions.