This World and Nearer Ones

With the past so corrupting, the present so uncertain, and the future so threatening, we might wonder if there can be any escape. The secret of survival in Dick’s universe is not to attempt escape into any alternate version of reality but to see things through as best you can; in that way, you may succeed if not actually triumphing. The favoured character in Martian Time-Slip is Jack Bohlen, whom we last see reunited with his wife, out in the dark garden, flashing a torch and looking for someone. His voice is business-like, competent, and patient; these are high ranking virtues in the Dickian theology. It is significant that Jack is a repairman (‘an idiot who can fix things,’ says Kott), a survival job, since it helps maintain the status quo. Similar survivors in other novels are pot-healers, traders, doctors, musical instrument makers, and android-shooters (since androids threaten the status quo).

The characters who survive are generally aided by some system of knowledge involving faith; the system is rarely a scientific one; it is more likely to be ancient. In Martian Time-Slip, it is the never-formulated paranormal understanding of the bleekmen; Bohlen respects this vague eschatological faith without comprehending it, just as Kott despises it. The I Ching, or Book of Changes, the four thousand year old Chinese work of divination, performs a similar function in the The Man in the High Castle, whilst in Counter-Clock World Lotta Hermes randomly consults the Bible, which predicts the future with an alarming accuracy. In both Dick’s two early masterpieces, Time-Slip and High Castle, this religious element – presented as something crumbling, unreliable, to be figured out with pain – is well-integrated into the texture of the novel.

Dick’s next great book, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, was written very soon after Martian Time-Slip, and the two are closely related, not only because Mars is in both cases used as a setting. To my view, Eldritch is a flawed work, over-complicated, and finally disappearing into a cloud of quasi-theology; whereas Martian Time-Slip has a calm and lucidity about it. But in Eldritch we also find an ancient and unreliable metastructure of faith, in this case embodied in the ferocious alien entity which fuses with Eldritch’s being.

‘Our opponent, something admittedly ugly and foreign that entered one of our race like an ailment during the long voyage between Terra and Prox … and yet it knew much more than I did about the meaning of our finite lives, here; it saw in perspective. From its centuries of vacant drifting as it waited for some kind of life form to pass by which it could grab and become … maybe that’s the source of the knowledge: not experience but unending solitary brooding.’

So muses Barney Mayerson. Jack Bohlen desperately needs a transcendental act of fusion; he is estranged from his wife, sold by his first employer, threatened by his second, invaded by the schizophrenia of the boy he befriends. He sees in this mental illness, so frighteningly depicted in the book, the ultimate enemy. From this ultimate enemy comes the time-slip of the title and that startling paragraph which seems to condense much of the feeling of the book – and, indeed, of Dick’s work in general, when Bohlen works out what Manfred’s mental illness means: ‘It is the stopping of time. The end of experience, of anything new. Once the person becomes psychotic, nothing ever happens to him again.’

This is the maledictory circle within which Dick’s beings move and from which they have to escape: although almost any change is for the worse, stasis means death, spiritual if not actual.

Any discussion of Dick’s work makes it sound a grim and appalling world. So, on the surface, it may be; yet it must also be said that Dick is amazingly funny. The terror and the humour are fused. It is this rare quality which marks Dick out. This is why critics, in seeking to convey his essential flavour, bring forth the names of Dickens and Kafka, earlier masters of Ghastly Comedy.

Martian Time-Slip is full of delightful comic effects, not least in the way in which Steiner and the lecherous Otto Zitte ship illegal gourmet food items from Earth in unmanned Swiss rockets. Dick’s fondness for oddball entities and titles is much in evidence, notably in the surrealist public school, where the Emperor Tiberius, Sir Francis Drake, Mark Twain, and various other dignitaries talk to the boys. Below this easy-going humour lies a darker stream of wit. Arnie Kott’s terrible and fatal mistake of believing that reality is merely another version of the schizoid past is also part of the comedy of mistakes to which Dick’s characters always dance.

There is a deeper resemblance to the work of Dickens and Kafka. Dick, like Dickens, enjoys a multi-plotted novel. As the legal metaphor is to Bleak House, the world-as-prison to Little Dorrit, the dust-heap in Our Mutual Friend, the tainted wealth to Great Expectations, so is Mars to Martian Time-Slip. It is exactly and vividly drawn; it is neither the Mars as adventure-playground of Edgar Rice Burroughs nor the Mars as parallel of Pristine America of Ray Bradbury; this is Mars used in elegant and expert fashion as metaphor of spiritual poverty. In functioning as a dreamscape, it has much in common with the semi-allegorical, semi-surrealist locations used by Kafka to heighten his Ghastly Comedy of bafflement. (Staring at his house standing in the meagre Martian desert, Bohlen smiles and says, ‘This is the dream of a million years, to stand here and see this.’)

Dick’s alliance, if one may call it that, with writers such as Dickens and Kafka makes him immediately congenial to English and European readers. It may be this quality which has brought him reputation and respect on this side of the Atlantic before his virtues are fully recognised in his own country.

Perhaps I may be allowed to add that I feel particularly delighted to see this novel added to the growing list of titles in the Master Series. I read it over a decade ago in the American Ballantine edition, admired it greatly, and recommended it over the next few years to several British publishers. Some seemed to feel that it was too ‘advanced’ for the English market; also there were contractual difficulties. One admirer of the book was Mr Ronald Whiting, who was establishing his own publishing firm, but he was defeated by various unlucky circumstances; his firm closed down before it could publish Martian Time-Slip.

Since then, Martian Time-Slip had been floating round in a limbo of its own, in a tombworld of non-publication, with nothing ever happening to it again.

1. Martian Time-Slip, by Philip K. Dick, NEL, 1976. This edition marks its first English publication, belated but perhaps – in view of Dick’s growing reputation as a master of science fiction – not untimely.

Why They Left Zirn Unguarded: The Stories of Robert Sheckley

The early and mid-fifties formed a period of great richness for SF (although we did not notice at the time). Magazines sprouted and proliferated as never before, in a last glory before the onslaught of paperbacks – in much the same way, I imagine, that all the crack stage-coach runs in this country were at their peak in the very years the railways were making them obsolete.

Smith’s bookstalls were flooded with covers celebrating marvels of astronomy and space-engineering, much as they now sport anatomy and the freaky electronics of pop. Then it was that one bought one’s first Galaxys, F&SFs, Thrilling Wonders, IFs, Spaces, Fantastics, and the lesser but delectable breeds, all of which seemed to be edited by Robert Lowndes: Future, Original, and Dynamic. These magazines were not imports but British reprints.

Among the clever new names, one searched particularly for those of Richard Matheson, William Tenn, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, Walter Miller, and – if one was smart enough – J. G. Ballard. They were all short-story writers; the SF magazines were the ideal medium; and none of them was as much fun as Robert Sheckley.

The typical Sheckley appearance was in Galaxy, edited by the celebrated madman H. L. Gold, where he appeared beside other celebrated madmen like Alfred Bester and Theodore Sturgeon. Madmen are essential to SF. We still have madmen today, but often the madness gets into the style rather than the story, as with Harlan Ellison and some of the layabouts in New Worlds Quarterly. Sheckley kept his madness honed to a fine point by writing clear English about utterly convincing impossibilities. After all the sobersides in Astounding, it was marvellous to read a man whose characters never scored victories (though they rarely suffered utter defeat), whose planets were lunatic and draughty, whose aliens pursued totally inane rituals (like the Dance of the Reciprocal Trade Agreement), whose technologies were generally dedicated to perfecting robots which lurched and squeaked, and whose spaceships were never airtight.

That whole epoch, and the entire Sheckley thing, comes back very clearly as one reads this omnibus[1] – which is possibly an adverse criticism, for we have a somewhat one-dimensional view of Sheckley here. All the stories hail from the fifties, when Sheckley was young and clever. Now he’s old and clever, experience has had him by the lapels like one of his malfunctioning robots, and it would have been valuable to have been offered a few later fruits from his tree.

Those later fruits have a taste of acid to them, a fragrance of corruption, and a feel of loss, which makes the best of them more memorable than the earlier ingenuities which Conquest rightly celebrates.

For instance, in a 1972 short story, ‘The Mnemone’:

‘But these are futile gestures. The truth is, we have lost Xanadu irretrievably, lost Cicero, lost Zoroaster. And what else have we lost, what great battles were fought, cities built, jungles conquered? What songs were sung, what dreams were dreamed? We see it now, too late, that our intelligence is a plant which must be rooted in the rich fields of the past.’

There’s a note he never sounded in the fifties. Sheckley had roots only in the future. Nor could he write such a funny-poignant tale as his ‘Zirn Left Unguarded, the Jenghik Palace in Flames, Jon Westerly Dead’, (published in Nova 2, edited by Harry Harrison, 1972), in which Sheckley tenderly mocks the romantic-savage-analytical mode of science-fantasy of which he always had such easy mastery. And in Nova 3, there’s his ‘Welcome to the Standard Nightmare’, which is all that Sheckley ever was: the old ingenuity is still there, and a whole planet surrenders to one Earthman; but the mood is darker, the etching done with acid that bites deeper into the copper than once it did.

The story ends with the words: ‘For the Lorians were an advanced and intelligent people. And what is the purpose of being really intelligent if not to have the substance of what you want without mistaking it for the shadow?’ In the fifties, Sheckley’s characters were travelling too fast to worry about what was substance, what shadow.

My disagreement, then, is with editor Robert Conquest, not with Sheckley. He could have given us a more dimensional study of Sheckley. That has not been his intention. He admires Sheckley’s skill in telling an ingenious story, and he includes those stories which seem to him to exemplify this rare ability.

The result is a portly volume containing one Sheckley novel, Immortality Inc., and a dozen short stories, among them several well-known and beloved by the SF fraternity, such as ‘Pilgrimage to Earth’, ‘A Ticket to Tranai’, ‘The Prize of Peril’, and ‘The Store of the Worlds’. Not a bad story among them.

Many of these stories use as their material the basic Shecklian preoccupations: the awfulness of institutions and corporations, the craziness of trying to establish a relationship with anyone, the arbitrariness of society’s mores, the difficulties one can get into with women, the sheer down-at-heel ghastliness of the galaxy. These, you might say, are almost anyone’s preoccupations; no disagreements or surprises there. The nice, the odd, thing about Sheckley’s preoccupations is that they are all counterbalanced by their very opposites. The television company that exploits you to the point of death is scrupulous to a pernickety degree; the girl genuinely loved you, but it was just a financial deal; it’s as efficient to hold citizens up in the street and rob them as to collect income tax, terrestrial fashion; your wife is perfectly nice, but when you find her in her lover’s arms, it’s because you refused to keep her in stasis; uncomfortable though we may find most worlds, there are races who are worse off, and leap from sun to sun complaining of the cold. In effect, Sheckley’s madness is presented with a disarming reasonableness. At least his future’s no worse than the present; and if you think the galaxy’s hell, try staying at home. He’s telling you a story, not presenting a case.

Of course Sheckley does have a case. His importance as a writer lies in his entertaining embodiment of the underdog’s viewpoint; his AAA Ace Agency stories in Galaxy represent a way in which human beings are forced to exploit each other under a capitalist system; indeed, they go beyond that – for this is science fiction, and Sheckley shows how human beings, even given great powers, will always exploit each other under any system. It is this understanding, paradoxically exhilarating and so much more to be prized than any cheap ideological identity tag, which powers his fiction and at the same time prevents more generous general acknowledgement of his strengths.

The madness is Blakeian, and so always unwelcome to the fearful. But for Sheckley it is a necessity that human relationships should continually break down, that Zirn should perpetually be left unguarded.

Somewhere in the Sheckley hierarchy is another pre-occupation. It would be too much to call it a hope. But ever and anon comes the thought that there might be a system of non-material things when circumstances fall out less laughably than in our world. Conquest introduces us to several stories of this nature. Immortality Inc. is Sheckley’s version of the Afterlife – several Afterlives, in fact. But the Afterlife is no more satisfactory than this life – Sheckley is no Bradbury or Finney, dreaming forever of a bright childhood world; he’s too much of a realist for that.

When a somewhat Asimovian machine is invented by a superrace which can provide answers to all the most baffling philosophical questions of the universe, there is nobody around to phrase the questions properly; the God is useless. Even the Almighty makes an almighty hash of things in one of these stories, calling all the robots up to Heaven on the day of the final Judgement, and leaving mankind below on the battlefield. Sheckley’s is a universe of makeshift lives – Kingsley Amis coined the perfect term for it: a comic inferno.

The story here I find most touching (I once anthologised it myself) is ‘The Store of the Worlds’. The protagonist finds happiness. He gets a whole year of it, and it costs him everything he has. Admittedly, the year includes a maid who drinks, trouble at the office, a panic on the stockmarket, and a fire in the guestroom; but it is a year of ordinary family life, containing, in Sheckley’s phrase, desire and fulfillment. Nobody’s on the run, nothing shoots at anything, everyone is comprehensible.

Like Orwell, Sheckley is a utopianist. Unlike all other utopianists, Sheckley’s and Orwell’s ambitions are almost dauntingly humble – just to be left alone, to have a girl, a drink, a stroll in the park, a room to yourselves. Only one fancies that more fun would go on in Sheckley’s shack than Orwell’s. (An eccentric parenthesis: I’ve always suspected that Orwell wrote 1984 after reading Van Vogt; maybe he wrote Animal Farm after reading Sheckley.)

Robert Conquest hopes to introduce the civilised pleasures of Sheckley to a readership beyond the SF audience; in his introduction he likens himself to Belloc introducing Ernest Bramah, or E. C. Bentley introducing Damon Runyon. Bramah is a good touch, for there is something of a Kai Lung about Sheckley. He reminds me too of another excellent story-teller, ‘Saki’, H. H. Munro.

Unless I am mistaken, Conquest also addresses himself to the SF readers. First he warms their hearts by telling them what they long suspected (but are reassured to hear from anyone with credentials as imposing as Conquest’s), that H. G. Wells is every bit as much the artist as Henry James; then he slips it to us that James is ‘a model of unpretentious clarity compared with many more recent phenomena’. Here, one experiences three or four bodings, in anticipation of yet another Conquest–Amis tract on the worthlessness of anything in SF written since Mike Moorcock attained the age of puberty. Fortunately, the crisis is avoided; Conquest is too adroit to attempt praise of Sheckley by dispraise of lesser breeds.

However, this volume is a great success, a product of Conquest’s dedication to the art as well as a celebration of Sheckley’s skills. Many a writer would wish as distinguished an anthologist – most of us have to patch our own stories together.

1. The Robert Sheckley Omnibus, edited & introduced by Robert Conquest, Gollancz, 1973.

Nesvadba: In the Footsteps of the Admirable Čapek

Josef Nesvadba and I are about the same age. We have met twice, once when he was travelling through London, and, many years later, when I was travelling through Prague, where he lives. This seems entirely appropriate, since Nesvadba’s fictions are often filled with long and complex journeys. He is that compelling kind of writer who reminds us that our lives are really somewhat ramshackle fictions, full of unlikely coincidences and people who do not always behave in character.

The perfidious plot-lines of our lives first brought us together in 1965, when something Nesvadba said made a striking impression.

He was talking about his stories, and how he was attempting a sort of psycho-fiction, as he called it. We were agreeing, I seem to recall, that authors who called themselves science fiction writers should not regard science fiction as simply realistic simulation of an hypothecated future; we saw it more as a contemporary form of celebration of the mysteries that pervade human life. We admitted ruefully that the other kind was more commercially popular and, at this point, I underwent the experience of hearing Nesvadba say that a collection of his psycho-fiction stories had been published in Prague in a paper bag.

Prague is a magnificent city where High Baroque and Art Nouveau styles in architecture meet. At the entrance to Nesvadba’s flat in the centre of the city, two voluptuous caryatids, less demure than Artemis would have allowed, guard the door he passed through daily. In the celebrated Golem Restaurant, I bought a packet of Apollo-Soyuz cigarettes and smoked them, though I normally detest cigarettes. I stood in the apartment building where Franz Kafka was born, looking up the winding stairwell; by a lugubrious turn of fate, the building has now been taken over by one pseudopod or other of Communist officialdom. Sometimes I have nightmares, dreaming I am Kafka. So I was scarcely bowled over, or only slightly bowled, to hear that publishers in Kafka’s city should have issued Josef Nesvadba’s work in this unorthodox manner.

The more I considered, the more it seemed appropriate that his kind of fiction should receive such treatment, the more easily I could visualise readers dipping into the bag, bringing out a tale like a pastrami sandwich, and munching thoughtfully on it in one of the little cafés in the shade of Hradčany Castle.

As are many Czechs, Nesvadba is a cosmopolitan, as familiar with Hollywood as with Paris. He speaks several languages, and his English is good. However, on this occasion I had mis-heard him. His paper bag was in actuality the less unusual paperback. I’m sorry about that. I still feel that his food for thought, and his story-telling techniques, are remarkable enough to be singled out for special treatment. The present publishers have voted against the paper bag format also, but it remains a privilege to be introducing Czechoslovakia’s most distinguished science fiction writer to paperback readers in this country.

These stories[1] are set in the narrow alleyways of the mind. Black humour is scarcely dispersed by low-wattage electric bulbs. Whole life-cycles of ghastliness are displayed with gusto in very few lines.

‘The dragoons had been the pride of our town. They had ruuined my marriage. Two years after the wedding my wife ran away with Captain Imre Kovacs to Salgotaryan. Perhaps that’s what turned me against soldiers. Especially dragoons. I gave up my flat and never left my basement laboratory after that. I sleep there and a waitress brings me my meals from the restaurant. I have few demands on life.’

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