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David I. Masson
Some Book Reviews

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Strontium and Soda

The Eighty-Minute Hour: a Space Opera
by Brian W. Aldiss
(Cape, 1974, 286 pp., £2.25, ISBN 0 224 00941 9)

Here we are once more in surprise-packed Aldissia, one of my favourite continents, reaching from pole to equator of the hypersphere. Which country, however? Ah, this time our team takes you to the relatively infertile terrain of Pushdefiggazaroundferalaffia. We have been there before, folks, for example in “Comic Inferno”, a truly enjoyable experience; and in one or two more nihilistic. Grand for a short stay – but 278 text pages? You have to have a tough constitution, a super-keen memory, and a contempt for reality, to survive. (Yes, yes, reality deserves our contempt, as five minutes’ listening to the news will demonstrate; but there are other solutions.)

Mind you, this book is rich enough in a way. More logodaedaly to the square inch than the most Celtic of modern Celtic fantasies; an improbable quip every other sentence (sometimes several in one); a cast (as the blurb points out) of thousands; invention (and inventions) fizzing all the time; but as much real human interest as a set of carnival floats. At times it reads as though Marty Feldman had written A Torrent of Faces for Kenneth Williams.

This kind of extended gambol will score if played as a rip-roaring farce, or as a savage satire, or if it has some sort of mythic power. But despite a little sport with clichés, stock figures and ham situations, the book has no obvious bite. To make it the work of one of the characters isn’t quite an excuse.

We grin, we enjoy perhaps, but the total effect is triviality and emptiness. Aldiss’s brilliant racquetry with the insanity of things is being squandered where it should be concentrated.

Besides some contemptuously slick scientific gobbledegook, the author’s habitual fun with personal names brings up ones like Chambers Technical Dictionary, and some puns: for instance, a Croatian Lady Myrtr Tjidvyl, a (quite amiable) Devlin Carnate (but originally l’Inglese italianato è un diavolo incarnato) and his sister Javlin, or one Monty Zoomer (who is actually quite a good send-up as a personality). In short, Aldiss seems to despise his characters as well as the pseudo-science he invents, or indeed the whole action.

Then there are the songs and verses. Aldiss has almost libretto’d a musical here, with lyrics, duets, trios etc. (No good him hiding behind his character-author or the subtitle, either.) I could never, I confess, make out the raison d’être of those jazzy lyrics in Gravity’s Rainbow; and they had more snap to them. A musical about world politics, that’s 20th-century entertainment for you. Is that what he is trying to say? Or wait: it couldn’t be, could it, that Pynchon and Aldiss are hoping for ...? After Ken Russell I can believe anything.

So now, what’s the story about? It is A.D. 1999 and three (or five) years after the end of World War III. Britain has literally sunk beneath atomic bombardment; the Danube, dammed, has created the Pannonian Sea; Australia and north-western North America have been virtually destroyed; the Pacific has been dammed artificially across the Bering Straits. Although it’s only 25 years ahead of today, all sorts of impossibilia have been invented or discovered and are now commonplaces: space-travel and spy-vessels with deep-frozen crews as far out as Jupiter; Mars used for concentration camps and supporting human life at its surface with surely inadequate oxygenation and cold-protection; partition and transportation of planetary bodies; polywater windows; a mysterious microspace or “ecopicosystem”; multi-sensory audience-surrounding holodreams or holodramas; holmen (artificial working copies of individuals); cyborgs; universal controls secretly implanted in everyone’s brain; and so on: in other words, just possibly 2099 (if Earth’s resources last that long) but never 1999. This fantasy implicitly accepts the usual escapist axiom of everlasting growth. OK., fun is fun; but once you’ve said “World War III” and “1999” you must play for true, or make a definite point with nonsense: if you call up the Devil it is unwise just to smirk at him. Yet despite the opening epigram, some chat about population-destruction, and some fun with the “envirocrats” wiping out Amazonia (p.187-8), there is little sign of awareness of the effects of 25 years’ plunder of Earth’s dwindling resources, and of a nuclear war, upon the lives of surviving humanity. However, the bombs have induced spatially bound but moving time-slips which seriously disrupt the Solar System and the lives of some of the figures. Russo-America, the Cap-Comm world, is opposed by the Dissident Nations (a shrewd touch, that). Sinister and invincible, Computer-Complex oversees all.

A series of plots and multiple surprises, many affecting the control of humanity, takes us over much of the globe, into microspace, beyond the asteroid belt (with planetary landings), and far into the geological past. Nobody seems to worry overmuch. There is at least one perpetual-causation loop (A causes B causes A). As a salad, or maybe an emetic, we keep getting slices of a sword-and-sordidry quest; Aldiss waits till near the end to explain this: too long.

Oddest image (?): “The cameras followed them, silent as hepatitis” (p.29). Highly commended: “‘Wuh-uh ...’, said Zoomer, low in his throat. It was his personal way of saying, ‘See, see, where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament’” (p.179); “The happy ending fled shrieking to the horizon and disappeared into the Mediterranean” (p.279 – I know the feeling exactly). Also appreciated: in connexion with person-duplicating, “the massive doppelgangster ovens” (p.32); “the signal scrambled, hopping from megahertz to megahertz with the abandon of a hot tin cat” (p.98); the ebullient paragraph on p.95 about the corpse-flotsam from Britain; the loudspeaker on p.129; and Thunderbird’s speech on p.255. Good: the names of Mars’s new satellites (p.14O) and of super-boss Attica Saigon Smix. Bad: name of Martian poet (p.142: some of us appreciate French literature). Misprints: “peole” (p.96); “Bibbie Gentry” (p.165); Ispahan with a ph (p.255); “dopple” is presumably deliberate. There are too many exclamation marks. I never worked out the truth about Mike Surinat and Becky Hornbeck’s public transport flight.


Up the Jungle Down the Aeons

Midsummer Century
by James Blish
(Faber, 1973, 106pp, £1.60, ISBN 0 571 10330 8)

Blish’s great virtue, his inescapable le style c’est l’homme même, is the pyrotechnic dance of comment, reasoning and technical allusion by which he “blinds ’em with science”. Darting round the action, and living at five times the normal rate, James Blish (and sometimes the brain of his protagonist) sews it all up. This is a very intense, very super-conscious, very American thought-style. A reader, hypnotized, accepts all he sees at face-value. This approach was brilliantly successful in A Case of Conscience, and even in such ventures into the Absolute Other as “Common Time”.

But here it may not fool all of us all of the time. This tale could almost have been one of Blish’s sf stories for the young, subsequently varnished and garnished with erudite allusions, etc. (it expands a Fantasy and Science Fiction 1972 story). Most of it would be quite enjoyable at a juvenile level, and why not? But one would like to think that Blish was roughing out a recipe for the Philosopher-King whom Plato sees as dragged from his contemplation to serve mankind; here, a coalition of brashly-sophisticated instant-Aragorn and meditationist Denethor.

An accident propels the mind of young astrophysicist Martels 23,000 years ahead to what used to be Argentina, into the grounded brain-case of a former ruler, still consulted as oracle by tribesmen of a tropical-phase Earth. (I seem to have met scientists kicked into the future before.) Mankind will succumb in five years to the Birds, mutated, intelligent, ruthless, telepathic. Round about half-time the two warring minds invade a tribesman who is forced to enter Bird territory, is imprisoned, but finally escapes. Rescued by the Antarctic remains of the former glaciation-phase high-energy civilization, Martels, inside the heart of their computer, a mystical Platonic entity, comes, after some metaphysical perils, to control – you’ve guessed it – human destiny against the Birds. We have an (Arthur) Clarkean aeonic promise at the end.

In all the story the vision of the Tower on Human Legs, especially of its interior (whatever its basis may owe to the Hut of Baba Yaga) is the most vivid, bizarre and compelling passage. Some other parts are a bit thin. There are some sharp images: a flight of birds “like a flock of carets” (p.80), or the flexing drumhide “giving off a deep ronronner, like a cheetah purring in French” (p.67). We meet our old friend the Dirac beep again (p.86). I find the account of a mystical experience (p.94-5) interesting, including the (verbal) spatial diagrams, though plainly “Nescio, nescio” would be more in tune.

Some doubts. Martels is unable in the brain-case to move or sleep for two and a half years, shorn of all senses but sight and hearing, with the Autark mostly silent, and with often six months between visits of petitioners. How is it he remains conscious and sane under such sensory deprivation? To write of “boredom” was not enough. Then, how can Martels’ “own” characteristic voice be reproduced by its apparatus, when he has no pharynx? How did the Birds construct the Tower? Isn’t the human gliding improbable? Further back, I cannot imagine a Doncaster accent barring a graduate from a lounge or saloon bar. And is Martels a Doncastrian name? “Levin-stroke” for a metaphorical lightning stroke sounds affected in Britain. Besides a dropped apostrophe there are two misprints: p.65, “heirarchy” for hierarchy; p.16, “tintinnus” for tinnitus. I rather like “tintinnus”.

What is “juganity”? For such a barbarous word I refuse to suspend disbelief. In meaning it is virtually opaque, though it seems to refer here to “psionic” phenomena. But if we are all yoked together by juganity, my ear tells me that our destiny must be nasty, brutish and short of imagination. If the coinage was made by Rowland Bowen or Dr. John Clarke to whom Blish mentions indebtedness, I think the less of them. If he coined it himself (and see p.73) what right has it, unexplained, in an English translation (for the reader) of two future languages which the characters are supposed to be using? And why (p.90) is its adjective “juganetic” (or is this a misprint for the still rather repulsive compound “jugamagnetic”)? Endings in -anity are Latin in origin: inanity, insanity, profanity; those in -etic are Greek: eidetic, pathetic, emetic. And “juganetic” is an impossible bastard since jug- cannot be Greek.

Right at the end, with the triumphant smile of a conjuror or genius, the author produces from his sleeve three crucial specialized ordinal numbers. Were they corrupted from ultimately Latin roots during the 230 centuries, ending up in the new languages? They are “qvant” with a -v-, “quinx” with a -u-, and “sixt”. As inventions these sound schoolboyish. (But I recall the muddled accounts of Lithian graphemes and phonemes in A Case of Conscience.) Spelling out my objections one by one: (1) if “qvant” is pronounced kvannt, on what grounds is it first given a q- at all? (2) if “IVth” has a qv-, how in the name of linguistic probability could “Vth” possibly retain a normal qu-? (3) if “IVth” and “VIth” end in -t, how could “Vth” between them, with the same initial sound as “IVth”, end in -x? (I suppose Blish was fascinated by the pattern called a quincunx, brought in correctly on p.48.) Careless, James, careless. Dare I suggest that if Blish ever revise this tale for a new edition, he substitute throughout it (he knows what I mean) some such word as “en-kwaar”, and at the end also “en-kwing” and “en-zeks”? The ordinal or ceremonial prefix en- could have come from a future language. And I urge him to get rid of “juganity” and all its crew completely.


Life Sentence: In My End Is My Beginning

The Embedding
by Ian Watson
(Gollancz, 1973, 254pp, £2.20, ISBN 0575 016876)

A first novel of enormous competence. The author has done his homework and learnt the tricks of his trade, to some purpose. What purpose? Read on.

Who should read the book? Anyone who is disturbed at world news nowadays. Anyone who is fascinated by TV programmes like Horizon or The World About Us. Those who are turned on by James Burke, and those who turn him off with a shudder. Anyone who is concerned at the manipulation of human beings by human beings – as experimental material, as propagandist material, as torture material, as political pawns. Anyone who supposes that the English language bears a one-to-one mapping relation to reality, and anyone who thinks reality inexpressible. Anyone who is seeking new modes of religious experience. I don’t say they will find an answer, but they will all find something good. It’s not, of course, for the innocent or shockable – if there are any in this year of disgrace 1973.

This is not a forecast novel. It is not a Doomwatch novel. It is not a conservationist/eco-logistical novel – the only mention of a steady-state world is a government-inspired parenthetical repudiation on p.203. (So far as I know, the great conservationist novel has yet to be written. I can’t think of anyone who could tackle the task alone. It will be a vast three-decker like The Lord of the Rings, with appendices, and present various alternative futures stage by stage in slices. By the time such a work is completed events will have caught up with it: humanity will be in its main Resources crisis.)

The Embedding is not a neo-mythological fantasy or allegory, a satire, or a single-minded extrapolation-exploration of a particular theme. It is not a political novel, an adventure novel, or a quest pure and simple.

It is one of those stories set in the near future, in which a few individuals, with whom we may empathize, are involved in great issues and ultimately in world events. My sympathies were not really deeply engaged by the characters, nor did I feel an irresistible fascination with the shifting issues, but the author has done very well.

Why “embedding”? Well, this term gets used like a musical theme, but stands for quite a number of different things, including especially one aspect of sentence-structure in recent American linguistic theories about the infantine neurological basis of all human syntax in “transformational” and “generative” grammar. (Stay with me, we are coming to the plot before long.) In “embedding”, expressions get encapsulated in mid-sentence while the short-term memory has to store the first links in the main chain of statement till the encapsulated expressions are over. To illustrate how the thing may he carried too far, I may quote or misquote a super-embedded German joke-sentence to the effect that the lorry, which on the bridge. that on the road, that between Mainz and Darmstadt runs, lies, stands, has broken down.

Carried beyond normal complexity, this structural phenomenon becomes in the book an incarnate symbol or sacrament of a new mode of experiencing reality, in three manifestations (never quoted, alas): a French surrealist poem; the excruciatingly distorted syntax tax in which some isolated experimental orphans are being secretly reared in an English institution; and Xemahoa B, the druginduced second mode of speech of a Brazilian tribe.

The author does not actually say so, but Raymond Roussel and his poem are real. Roussel was born in 1877, and the Nouvelles impressions d’Afrique, a volume whose title harks back to his prose Impressions ..., came out first complete in 1932. Its four sections total 1,276 lines, including those 286½ that are printed as long verse footnotes, and each section (one has 644 lines) incorporates immense parentheses within parentheses, the major ones being enclosed within successively one, two ... five brackets, thus – (((((. Roussel would actually have preferred the use of different-coloured inks. Cutting across all this, and looping remorselessly into the footnotes and up again, the line-structure is one of common alexandrine couplets. The syntax of phrases is more or less conventional (unlike some of Mallarmé). Generally the first “argument”, soon relinquished, in each of the four great sections, has to wait till nearly the end to be resumed. (To pad the book the poet commissioned unsuitable illustrations.) The poem can only be “read” by back-tracking on the pages, i.e. it is primarily visual, plus perhaps long-term articulatory memory where mental cues can be attached. The question has to arise, whether any merely auditory-articulatory short memory mechanism could cope (no matter how brain-development were stimulated) with actual discourse so introvoluted and elephantine.

But the plot of The Embedding is lively enough. The English “linguist” Chris Sole has a wife whose young son is her child by a French ex-lover, while Chris is more interested in one of his experimental orphans. (These orphans are Indian or Pakistani – why not Vietnamese?) This situation precipitates a final crisis. The ex-lover, ex-Frelimo (Mozambique), an anthropologist, is studying the Brazilian tribe and falls under their spell in every sense. His letter to the Soles, and his notes, keep the current of information flowing which ultimately sparks off a world crisis. The tribe, meanwhile, with all its complex culture, is due to fall victim to a vast Amazon-basin flooding project. Chris is brought over (as linguist) for a confrontation in Nevada with some very credible aliens from outer space. A secret official deal is made with the aliens, who are on an age-old Quest; a deal which requires the most horrifying betrayal (lightly accepted) of six (or seven) individuals whose language-structures are needed for the aliens’ plans: and this also involves the Xemahoa. In the end, cross-purposes, miscalculation, national paranoias and greed, and power-politics, wreck almost everything (though amid a lot of short-term disasters, the tribe at least is saved). The tribe’s drug-experience is discredited (or so I read Chris’s and Pierre’s disillusioned disgust) and the orphan’s linguistic-neurological miseducation goes hideously awry.

What are we left with? I am not certain. Perhaps the author merely wanted to write a successful sf novel without profound conclusions. Perhaps he is telling us that the daily round of human culture de son jardin should not be tampered with. Or perhaps he is expressing an apathetic fundamental despairing cynicism in the face of human ruthlessness. From the book’s silence about the larger ethical issues one might suppose that the moral cataract into which we are all drifting has already cast its fogs over spiritual vision in the novel.

Watson’s mental imagery, I should guess, is rooted in visualizing rather than in utterance: so often he “realizes” something in visual terms. He sketches each new arrival’s appearance, behaviour and manner, bringing him to life. He is full, too, of brilliant incidental touches illuminating the scene throughout:

He was a small, once muscular man, whose muscles had turned to flab since his days in the army ... The knobbly upturned end of his nose stood out from his features, softened with large greasy pores and slightly too large – as though he’d spent a few years with a finger up each nostril stretching them ...

And his dialogue fits its speakers well. But I would have liked more about sound. And how about some “real” examples of self-embedding orphan speech; we really need to experience this in action. Aldiss would have done it with relish.

The author does well, too, with introspective states (for instance, Chris’s mood-swing on p. 215). Perhaps because this is a first novel, the book contains many strictly irrelevant similes and fancies, which for me actually help the sense of reality (it is a mistake to be too brisk and functional). Here and there, though, they over-reach into over-writing – for instance (p. 237) on explorers aloft on an exploded spacecraft:

... this vast metal fruit ... like wasps they had flown out to suck the juice ... Flies to a hunk of rare venison.., in the icebox of space ...

(And so on.) SF too often lends itself to this sort of bogus poetry. Similarly, perhaps, when his speakers, however hardened or intellectual, get euphoric, I find their reasoning and their expressions become naively fantasist. (The author should keep in check his penchant for wisecracking). But there’s a very good presentation (p. 247-251) of a terrifyingly bizarre mental state (not drug-induced).

The book is firmly rooted in parts of the present-day scene, and a great deal that might have been garnered from recent popular scientific and anthropological programmes and writings (and news) has found its way in: threatened tribal ways, tribal mythologies and customs (details brilliantly invented), tropical life, guerrillas, torture, Pentagon and White House thinking, the RAND Corporation, Skylab, spatial optical illusions, orbital scanning, stimulation of neural development, experimental psychologists, Chomskyan linguistics, and so on.

The Xemahoa bird-feather-reference system for number and timemarkers is a well-invented curiosity. Why, talking of linguistic world-view oddities, was a Hopi speaker not one of the victims selected for the aliens? However, the man who made the choice of victims was not a linguist but an opportunist in a hurry. Else why select three speakers of Indogermanic syntax out of six? (There’s “redundancy” for you!) Couldn’t a hapless Turk, Finn or Magyar have been shanghaied, and how about some African-language speakers, and an Australian aboriginal?

“Xemahoa” ought presumably to be pronounced Shemaawa, and “Bruxo” Broosho. The author ought to have told us so, to save some aficionados going around putting their feet in their mouths with Ksemma-HO-a and Bruck-so. And how, for some Amerindian tribal words, does a w manage to be written in Brazil or by a Frenchman?

I give full marks to the aliens and their language-realities quest, also to the bits of information they throw out about other beings, etc. Even their mode of travel is fair enough for an sf convention. Perhaps the bit about cosmic dust-whales was a bit rash?

Echoes? John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar paved the way for easy acceptance of stylistic and scenic sandwiching, perhaps. Arthur C. Clarke could have inspired the down-to-earth treatment of the aliens? The fungus-drug and state of the miracle-birth babe reminded me of the brain-stimulating morel in Brian Aldiss’s Hothouse. The aliens’ twin worlds and their millennia-old encounter with para-beings whom they have been vainly seeking ever since, reminded me of the “twin radioceles” and the so-Other beings and speech in Blish’s “Common Time”, which Garrard vainly and deeply longs to return to.

Best of the author’s verbal time-bombs in the official memoranda (excellent jargon and double-think there, by the way): “Welles Farrago”.

I would like to see Ian Watson, or someone, attempt some time a different kind of reality-language concept, where instead of the ordering of clauses, the nature of the word-categories was changed. Chomsky and others consider noun, adjective, verb and so on to be essentially natural to humanity. How about (say) a being which conceives conditions and transitions where we conceive things? Can a language be constructed without concrete nouns or pronouns? What sort of self-identity, if any, could such a being be aware of? How would it act? If, say, a slime-mould had a language, what kind of language would it have?


Review of The Embedding first published in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 5, January 1974. Reviews of The Eighty-Minute Hour and Midsummer Century first published in Foundation: The Review of Science Fiction 7/8, March 1975. Text copyright © David I. Masson, 1974, 1975.

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