Modern British Science Fiction

8 May 2008

Modern British Science Fiction

Dr Roger Luckhurst

Thanks very much. I just wanted to say what an honour it is to be asked to Gresham College. Working at Birkbeck College - I always think of Birkbeck as the sort of sullen teenager to Gresham, because we're a mere 175 years old, whereas Gresham is considerably older.

I was thinking this afternoon that the way that this symposium has been structured is kind of heliocentric really. We started with the great star at the centre, Neal Stephenson, we've heard all of these wonderful, very inhabitable, rich planets, and now I'm the outer piece of rock who's going to do an eccentric orbit around and probably get demoted from being a planet at the end! That's partly because of this title that I was given - "Modern British Science Fiction". I think we've all had a difficult task to try and condense down, but this is really hard. Not only is science-fiction a problem, as we've seen, defining it, "British", my god, that's a problem to define and I'm not even going to go there today, but "modern" is possibly one of the hardest words to think about and define, and in many ways, what I'm going to do today is try and think about that word "modern" and what it can do for us, so I'm going to try and do that in 25 minutes.

Okay, what I'm going to do is offer a number of different ways of thinking about that word "modern", and I?m then going to use these ideas to offer some routes through what we might think of as British science-fiction of the last 100 years, offering a spine that can take us from Wells, via Aldous Huxley, through Arthur C. Clarke in the '50s, J.G. Ballard in the '60s, and so on up to the present day. And as with other speakers, I'm going to end by suggesting that in recent times we've seen a kind of progressive dismantling of rigid genre boundaries, a condition of what has been called the post-genre fantastic, that actually, following on from what Martin was saying, looks very much like the pre-genre fantastic.

So first, let's take aim at that word "modern", because once we break it open, it offers some good clues about the emergence of this literature that we're loosely calling, and worryingly calling, science-fiction. In proper teacherly mode, I might start etymologically and note that "modern" derives from the Latin meaning "of today". The modern, in other words, focuses always on the contemporary, on nowness or the Zeitgeist. Now that is completely unhelpful, until we reflect that a concern with valuing the present, or nowness, over the past, is actually a very new condition.

When the poet Charles Baudelaire wrote "The Painter of Modern Life" in 1863, commanding artists and writers to capture the fleetingness of contemporary urban situation in Paris, it was something of a scandal, just like the paintings of Corbiere, because it threw over the primacy of classical models and the authority of history. Baudelaire was part of a new movement that valued contemporaneity in art. We therefore need to realise that a focus on the modern is actually a very modern thing. Again, this is a tautology - to be modern is modern - unless we break it open a little bit more conceptually.

So I'm going to split this term into three different strands - I know it's late in the day, but take a deep breath! We're going to call modernity, modernisation, and modernism. These terms obviously overlap, but they also start to make some useful distinctions.

So, modernity is a term that is often applied to a historical epoch that starts in the 18thCentury. It is associated politically with the revolutions that bring us the modern broadly democratic nation state, the American and French Revolutions, which overthrow the divine right of kings, feudalism, rule by aristocracy, and so on. Obviously, we had that revolution here and then we changed our minds! Modernity is also associated with a philosophical revolution, in which we see the rise of the Enlightenment thinkers who dispense with rational authority and, for some anyway, religious belief for a secular, empirical, broadly scientific rationality. One thinks here of philosophers like Hume or Cant, but also the emergence obviously of modern scientific theory and practice. Modernity is therefore an outline of a particular epoch that we still occupy, so starting roughly, as John Clute was saying, in about 1750. It divides us, we might say, from traditional societies.

Modernisation, the second term, has a different emphasis. It suggests the economic and technological transformation that came with the first Industrial Revolution and with the remorseless assent of the capitalist mode of production from the 18thCentury to the present day. It was Karl Marx, ironically, who gave us the greatest hymn to the power and energy of capitalist modernisation, this sense of ceaseless drive and change, of constant innovation and transformation, the way that the fabric of the city is always in motion, torn up, rebuilt, thrown over, built again. Under capitalism, Marx famously said, "All that is solid melts into air." For Marx of course, this energy was also one that led to economic misery for the majority and a sense of alienation, as authentic life was abstracted into monetary exchange and machines. In a system driven by perpetual modernising tendencies, the boundaries of the human are being consistently challenged and re-defined. The experience is always one of flux.

Finally, we associate the term "modernism" much more narrowly with the radical experiment in art that really took off at the start of the 20thCentury, with the avant garde manifestos that denounced all traditional art forms and sought to invent a wholly new basis for aesthetics. Futurists were followed by Fauvists, Cubists, [?], Dadaists, but the foundations for these attempts to outrage respectable taste were laid by the bohemians and dandies of the 19thCentury, of which Baudelaire was an exemplary figure, suitably diseased with syphilis and sleeping with prostitutes and so on - all these decadent things we'd like to do.

This experimental art had a complex, very complex, relation to modernity and modernisation. Sometimes, it obsessively celebrated the tearing up of traditions and was in love really with hard, new, shiny technologies and the savagery of modern war, as with the Italian Futurists of course, who composed songs to fast cars and military hardware and demanded, in their famous 1909 manifesto, "burn down the museums".

Just as often though, modernists were appalled by the modern world, and sought to retreat into abstraction, difficulty and elitism, and I suppose one thinks obviously here of T.S. Elliott, who grudgingly announced in 1949 in "Notes Towards the Definition of Culture" that culture had "ceased to exist", or Henry James perhaps, in his late style, his really opaque late style, and his disgust really at American commercialism and mechanical mass culture.

Okay, so this brief excursus gives us some means for thinking about how to define modern science-fiction. We have to say that science-fiction is a literature of modernity, that is, it is oriented to the present and the future, not the past or traditional or cyclical time, and it's sometimes centrally defined as the bearer of that secular, rationalist, and enlightened philosophy that emerged in the 18thCentury. This is certainly how big figures of the field like Robert Heinlein or Isaac Asimov define science-fiction, and this insistence on being a literature of critique and scientific rationalism persists into many modern definitions - Darko Suvin being an obvious one.

I think we have to be looser than this. After all, it is worth pointing out that the 18thCentury culture produced not only the new world of the empirical, realist novel, accumulating details of everyday life to reflect back and render meaningful the real to its middle class readership, but also the weird and disordered underside of modernity that was typical of the gothic romance. Modernity might have valued rationalism, but it also spawned nightmares of the Sleep of Reason.

More specifically, we might see science-fiction as perhapstheliterature that tracks the cultural impact of economic and technological modernisation. The key works of science-fiction typically condense ambivalent reactions to the unsettling of what it means to be human by new technologically-saturated environments. The understanding of the human is re-calibrated by scientific breakthroughs, thus giving us a fantasy of galvanic reanimation in Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein", or the horrors that result from Darwinian spans of time in H.G. Wells' "The Time Machine". But in this regard, science-fiction might best be thought of as a surrogate history of fantasies unleashed by the new technologies of modernisation. Fears of mechanised culture prompt dystopias that stretch from E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" to present-day narratives of rebellious machines in "The Terminator" or "Battlestar Galactica."

One of the most savage science-fiction satires of the 20thCentury was Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World", which took as one of its targets the dreams of Henry Ford, the creator of the first industrial assembly line in his car plants, and he'd used time and motion studies to break down the individual actions of each worker to maximise their productivity. The assembly line for the Model-T Ford has given us one of the abiding images of technological modernity. As the critic Peter Wallen comments: "Fordism turned the factory into a kind of super-machine in its own right, with both human and mechanical parts." In "Brave New World", these principles are extended to every area of human life, including sex and reproduction, thus fulfilling technocratic and eugenic dreams of complete mechanised control over the human. The only escape from this totalised system seems to be suicide.

The Second World War is another grim stage in the history of modernisation, to some a logical outcome of modernity rather than the irrational departure from it. The war effort produced an economic regime that bound government, military and factory production into something the Republican President Eisenhower termed, in 1959, "the military industrial complex".

Science-fiction has a weird and convoluted relation to the key technological innovation of the Second World War - the atomic bomb. Science-fiction is a literature that had dreamed, since the discovery of radioactive energy in the 1890s, of a perfect atomic super-weapon, and envisaged scenarios of total war from the turn of the century. Once the bomb, in an instant, inaugurated the final extension of technological modernity to cover the globe itself, science-fiction helped embed all those post-nuclear, apocalyptic fantasies that moted the Cold War imaginary in the wake of Hiroshima. As a literature of modernisation, science-fiction's ambivalence is most explicit in the nuclear epoch.

In British science-fiction, this stretches from the post-apocalyptic fiction of J.G. Ballard to the apparent optimistic, outward-looking science-fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, and even to the apparent whimsy of something like Mervyn Peake's "Titus Groan".

Ballard's early work repeatedly and delightedly destroyed the world, leaving a minority of ambiguous survivors in aftermaths littered with redundant technologies. Unlike gung-ho American survivalists, those in the ruins seemed only to be shockingly searching for the proper way to die. Ballard controversially suggested that science-fiction needed to turn its back on outer space and explore the landscape of the traumatised mind. One story, "The Terminal Beach", was set on Eniwetok, the Pacific island used for atomic testing in the 1940s and 1950s, and suggested that the essential nature of being human had been turned deathly by what the atomic bomb had unleashed.

When Ballard published his autobiographical novel, "The Empire of the Sun", he addressed his own war experience as a child civilian interned in a camp in Shanghai by the occupying Japanese Army. His extraordinary visions of post-catastrophic landscapes were, he suggested, rooted in his traumatised and disassociated reactions to this imprisonment, defining events he has just returned to recently in his memoir "Miracles of Life".

Arthur C. Clarke would seem to be the absolute opposite of Ballard's dystopian world view, a scientific optimist and lifelong advocate of space exploration from his teenage years in the British interplanetary society as a teenager in the 1930s. He came to fame in the 1950s as a commentator who conceived of satellite communications that were very soon realised in the early-'60s. Even so, Clarke's visions of the evolutionary leap of mankind, most famously in "2001", are driven by a desire to transcend the disasters of 20thCentury modernity that culminated in the Second World War.

At the end of "Prelude to Space", from 1953, an elderly man looks back at Earth from the Moon and names everything that has just been escaped. "Out of the fears and miseries of the Second Dark Age," the book ends, "drawing free from the shadows of Belsen and Hiroshima, the world was turning towards its most splendid sunrise. After five hundred years, the Renaissance had come again." Clarke's distant futures are still measured against the crisis that the Second World War induced in modernity.

Anxieties about total war even haunt Peake's "Titus Groan", published in the late '40s. The castle of Gormenghast might well be seen as an autonomous, eccentric, fantasy world, or perhaps a distant phantasmagoric account of England as a decaying castle citadel, ruled by pointless and half-forgotten traditions and on the bring of transformation, yet fearful of change. Peake composed "Titus Groan" in army barracks in various parts of England between 1940 and 1942, waiting to be assigning. This bizarre, eccentric trilogy takes on a different aspect given the knowledge that Peake travelled across liberated Europe as an illustrator for the War Office in the spring of 1945. He arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp a few weeks after it had been liberated, with sick and dying former inmates still being treated in the compounds. Many have read this traumatic experience directly into "Titus" alone, although that might be over-literal.

My point is simply that the literature of science-fiction doesn't have to deal with the traumas of modernisation directly in its content. It can also be read as determining the direction of other apparently exotic fictions, such as fantasy. After all, Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" was another book conceived and worked over initially in the trenches of the First World War. The Orcs mass in territories that bear startling resemblances to No-Man's Land, where, Tolkien commented in his preface, most of his friends and comrades were killed. Writing to his son during the Second World War, Tolkien lamented, to quote him, that "The first war of the machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter, leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed, and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the machines."

We can follow this determination of the trauma of total technological war into contemporary fantasy works, such as Robert Holdstock's "Mythago Wood" or Graham Joyce's "The Facts of Life". These are also literatures that reflect on the condition of the human under the relentless turbulence of modernisation exemplified by war.

If this suggests that science-fiction ought to be a significant literature of modernity or modernisation, which I think it certainly is, otherwise I wouldn't be here, it is when we get to modernism, finally, that the problems for the genre begin, for modernism has been crucially defined against the emergence of the kind of mass culture from which genre SF developed in the late-19thCentury and early-20thCentury. In Britain especially, key modernists, such as Henry James and Virginia Wolfe, explicitly constructed a new, subjective, impressionistic aesthetic of the novel against the crudities, as they saw it, of H.G. Wells' scientific and social romances. The modernist novel was precisely the opposite of Wells' discursive engagement with modernity and modernisation.

The war of attrition been Henry James and H.G. Wells was one of the crucial sites where the literary novel came to be defined against low fictions, and Wells has long been understood to have lost this debate, catastrophically, meaning that the Jamesian art of fiction has dominated conceptions of the modern novel ever since.

In Britain as well, there was a certain conflation of writing on technology with a kind of anti-humanism ascribed to technology. The engineers who became the culture heroes in America and the central figures of early American SF were despised as agents of mechanism and barbarism in England. Culture was sweetness and light, as Matthew Arnold put it, that transcended the dark satanic mills of the Industrial Revolution: "Choose culture, and not anarchy," the latter, for Arnold, merely another word for mechanism or technology.

Typically then, in Britain, I think, there was a class factor that led to lower cultural valuation of popular genres like science-fiction. It is artisanal, a product of mechanical reproduction. It is trade, not refined culture.

So, paradoxically, just as the 20thCentury human experience came to be increasingly enframed by different kinds of technological environment and many critics and philosophers attempted to capture the nature of this new saturation, the very literature that reflected on these changes was cast out of the cultural world as a despised emanation of one critic memorably termed "the spreading ooze of mass culture".