Strokes

by John Clute

Genres: Literary Fiction; Magical Realism; Science Fiction

Synopsis

For more than 50 years John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Strokes is a collection of reviews from a wide variety of sources - including Interzone, the New York Review of Science Fiction, and Science Fiction Weekly - about the most significant literatures of the twenty-first century: science fiction, fantasy and horror: the literatures Clute argues should be recognized as the central modes of fantastika in our times. It covers the period between 1966 and 1986.

Release date: November 24, 2016

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 320

Sample

Thomas M. Disch

I can say I knew him when, when being in this case a quarter-century ago in 1961. We were at N.Y.U.’s Washington Square College, taking the same two courses — The Quest for Utopia (4 points, taught by Professor Patrick of the English department) and Western Intellectual History (3 points, with the History department’s Professor Falnes). Those two courses, those two teachers, and John represent the most palpable dent that my college years managed to make on my sense of myself as a pure autodidact, for whom schooling was no more than a rite of passage that had to be performed with ceremonious correctness while the essential process of education was carried on at home and at the library.

Clute was much the same sort of conceited know-it-all, yet here (in these two courses) were texts neither of us had read, nor even known we ought to. Here were bibliographies and vistas of history that made a mockery of our fledgling shelves of paperbacks, of our ability to discourse on the deeper meanings of Kafka and Joyce and the other Modern Masters who formed that era’s canon of what an English major should have read. In fact (at last I dare confess it), Clute had actually read more of those books than I had, and knew more about the world they shadowed forth than I did, and this despite the disadvantages he suffered (as I then supposed) of being the son of the chief officer of a New York bank (entrusted at times with his father’s limo). He’d read the hard poets, like Crane and Stevens, whose oeuvres I only pretended to have read; he’d penetrated deep into the thickets of the most mandarin critics, like Empson and Frye, and, more, he’d assimilated their critical (and poetic) vocabularies and was able to use them himself to tie just the right bow on the term papers in which he practised his first acts of criticism.

These were peculiar attainments for an undergraduate in the early 60’s at N.Y.U., where the most ambitious students were on a career track to medical, law, and business schools. But what was still more peculiar in John’s appetite for belles lettres was his indifference to distinctions of highbrow and lowbrow. In those days literary academics were much more confidently disdainful of “mass culture” than has since come to be the case. A few credentialed intellectuals like Barzun and Auden would admit to having occasionally read and enjoyed a mystery or two, and there was a small pantheon of film directors who could be discussed by the truly Serious. But science fiction? That was entirely outside the pale of literary respectability.

Nevertheless, John read the stuff, and he read each novel and story with the same passion for squeezing out all its hermeneutical juices (“hermeneutical” is a word I picked up from John) that he would have given to texts by Pound or Eliot. He enjoyed the stuff (or he didn’t, as the case might be), but he also paid it the compliment (which its authors would often be happier to have remained unpaid) of critical attention — not in the blinkered, self-protective context of genre “criticism” as it then existed, but as though science fiction were an adult citizen of the Republic of Letters, responsible for its prose and its subtexts, not permitted the classic evasion of genre hacks that they’re “only telling a story.”

John’s view of the critic’s role was unconventional — or at least non-academic — in one other respect, since John also was ambitious to write fiction of his own. (He still is, and it is very good, but that is another matter.) One of the things that had prompted us both to take Patrick’s Quest for Utopia class was that instead of writing a term paper for the course you could design your own utopia instead. I remember Clute’s utopia at least as vividly as my own. It was a Borgesian prospectus for the world’s most perfect and entire library. The underlying assumption was that nothing matters but books, their taxonomy and proper arrangement, and that the best society is that which most successfully achieves this end. I don’t believe such conventional utopian issues as housing, family life, or garbage collection were considered even en passant. My memory may be at fault, and the actual paper Clute wrote might differ in detail. Yet it has struck me over the years what an uncannily prophetic account Clute had written. The perfect library of his paper for Professor Patrick was to take concrete shape over the years in Clute’s own holdings and attainments, in the physical library he had amassed and the even more impressive mental datafile of all he has read, taken just estimate of, and remembered.

Readers who browse through The Science Fiction Encyclopedia, which Clute co-edited, if they take the trouble to note who wrote that volume’s many critical surveys of individual sf authors, will be astonished at the sheer number for which Clute was responsible. No less astonishing is the range and judiciousness of his taste, qualities usually very much at odds in genre fiction. Happily, with the publication of this first collection of his critical writings it will be possible for readers who are less systematic than Clute himself has been at tracking down everything germane to a critical understanding of sf to have an opportunity to read what I consider the most far-ranging, authoritative, and sheerly enjoyable body of critical writing in the field.

Early this year I went to Mexicon, a literary-track sf convention held on this occasion in Birmingham, in the dying compost of the Midlands of England, and a couple of the things that happened to me there it might be unoffensive to repeat. Most importantly, I met Jerry Kaufman, the co-publisher of Serconia Press, and we agreed on the spot with dreamlike speed to work together on the book I’m now forwarding. To Colin Greenland, the mutual friend who introduced us with Strokes in mind, I at least will remain grateful, on and on. Less importantly, because panels are always less important, I appeared on a panel with the shared remit to discuss something about the creative process, or maybe it was something about criticism and the creative process, or even criticism versus the creative process. I’m not sure I remember; nor am I entirely sure what anyone else — Alan Moore and Jan Mark and some others were there — had to say. Oddly enough, I retain some memory of what I said myself.

When I try to understand the creative process (I said) I often find myself thinking of the author Georges Simenon who, in a career extending from somewhere around 1921 to the present, has published way over a thousand stories, about 500 novels, and a dozen or so volumes of memoirs. Besides its delirious fecundity, what has most interested me in Simenon’s career is a distinction he made for most of it between two kinds of novel — two kinds of writing which involved him in two varieties of the creative act. His secondary novels are the ones he is most famous for, the 70/80 books about Inspector Maigret; but it is the non-Maigret novels (well over 100 of them — we get to the 500 total only after including the 100s of pseudonymous books he wrote before he was 30) which have always meant most to him. Most of these primary texts follow a similar pattern. We begin with a situation of some rigidity, and a protagonist who is trapped in that situation. Something external, or something welling up within him, provokes a climate of extremity, a moment in which the protagonist is stretched to his uttermost, and breaks, or does not break, murders or does not murder his wife or mistress, flees or fails to flee. The novel then ends, often in a state of chaos: for the world when deranged, the psyche when liberated, crosses the borderline into the unknown, where habits no longer work, and reality, for an instant, may just possibly be seen entire, unendurable, profound and cold. The Maigrets are completely different. In these novels we begin in chaos, in the aftermath of some terrible breakdown in consensual reality; a murder has almost always been committed. Maigret appears. He senses the chaos and incompletion of the world, and within him something begins to knit the raveled sleave. Slowly, surely, intuitively, cognitively, implacably, he puts things together again. He finds (and forgives) the murderer. At the end of the novel he leaves the world like an egg (to quote one of Philip Larkin’s most extraordinary poems) unbroken. For me, the process of writing a work of fiction can most readily be illuminated by the rage for chaos exemplified by Georges Simenon’s non-Maigret novels; it is a process which has also been given theoretical substance by Morse Peckham in his Man’s Rage for Chaos (1965). On the other hand, the art of writing criticism is the art of Maigret: it is an art of reconstitution, but also of closure; for in the critic, as for Maigret, there is a rage for order. Both the rage for chaos and the rage for order, though one may be higher than the other and more profound, are impulses of the creative spirit; and it is in this sense that I feel, when I am acting as a critic, that I am acting as a kind of creator. Accusations that the critic is inherently parasitical have always seemed fatuously self-serving to me, and it is with the countervailing sense that the critical act is a form of shaping that I allow myself the presumption of reprinting a few of the reviews and essays I’ve managed to shove into print over the past 25 years.

Three things have been done to these pieces. First, original typescripts have been used, rather than edited copy. Second, a few syntactical clumsinesses have been removed, but in the reviews no opinion, however stupid, has been given a hindsight edit. And three, I’ve inserted in unique brackets and dated [thus 1986] some comments and second thoughts. Of the pieces included, the terminal essay on Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun is entirely new. For the others, I have to thank the journals involved for the necessary permissions. More particularly, I’d like to thank, in chronological order, for their kind sharp wits and their sacrificial permissiveness: Michael Moorcock, Ed Ferman, Hilary Bailey, Mike Dirda, Ev Bleiler.

London/Florida/1986

Late on this chill Sunday I walked south on Huron Street to Dundas, and passed a cold Volkswagen, and suddenly the sun shone from distant space low in the west, and its rays hit University Avenue and the glassy Shell Building there which did not topple but glowed infernally. And I thought, in my peajacket, staring, that I was of the first or maybe the second generation of us mortals to see so flat and so vast and so vertical a reflection on this curved Earth, third planet from the sun.

And I grew dizzy, and willed myself aloft above Toronto, for I had been reading much science fiction — and possibly for that reason the Shell Building and the streetcars and the sewers and the timid innovations of plastic, all seemed suddenly insubstantial and on close view as imperfect and plywoody as a mockup of a new vacuum cleaner. The whole spume of technological 1966 seemed a clay preamble at that moment, for I was physically risen, rising above Toronto till the world curved visibly, so that I left the air of this quack bubble and entered, out there in space with a clear view, into the maturity of mankind, some several years hence, by when this prototype of the real world, where we now live, will have been urged into the rococo and through-composed City of God of our science-fiction dreams, and man will go travelling.

For some day we will have left all this world behind and our descendants will be in command: but not us because we were born too soon and all we have is the Shell Building for our time travel. We were born too soon and will — or our offspring will — be thought of as mankind’s last generation of children, mankind’s last mortals. And always I feel cheated. I want to be immortal too, I want to have a computer network interfaced with my frontal lobe so that I can think, I want to be polymorphously perverse, I want to partake of the physical potential of my species but it looks like I was born too soon and I look about and isn’t it all too incompetent and incomplete for words, our world?

About a decade ago I read a science fiction story by Theodore Sturgeon in Galaxy, and as I recollect it was called “The Acrophobe,” after its hero, who was afraid of heights, terrified that he might tumble blackly to earth. So he kept to the ground, and was in due course contacted by a group of men who (as I remember the story) promised to cure him of his terrible acrophobia. They gave him an address where he went at the appointed time; he was led down a tunnel into a small chamber, and there he was drugged.

He awoke to a vibrating floor. They came to him. “We are glad we found you,” they said. “You are the last to have been stranded by the wreck of your ancestors’ ship. Your home is here, not down there on Earth, here in the ship!’ And they punched some buttons and uncovered a viewscreen and there, miles below him, he could see the cities and the whole of the Earth. He paled and choked in fear. “No,” they said, “don’t be afraid of the height. You must realize that you were yourself never afraid of falling. What you were in reality afraid of was that the Earth was falling on you.”

And the former acrophobe looked, and saw that they were right, that the great stifling heavy sphere of Earth was too close: too close: that it was above them: that they were too close to the alien planet. And I’ve been haunted by that story ever since, for I’ve taken it as a parable of our present condition: that we are stifled here in our own juices, and that this is not our home.

Which is why I read so avidly in the literature of escape, I suppose. Because this congenital and tiny world is falling on top of me. As I rose level with the sun above Toronto I said Lord make me waterproof, but I remain mortal. I remember very clearly how I continued to walk south on Huron Street going waesuck waesuck, how the world kept hitting my feet like tons of lead.

Toronto Varsity//November 1966

As long as John W Campbell edited Analog you could still pretend it was really Astounding in drag, at dusk with the light behind her, if you squinted, and you’d swear the old girl looked all of 1940 again, just as fit as she ever was in the great days when science fiction bootstrapped upwards from a swamp of pulp, Aphrodite reborn as Hugo. More virginal than ice she was. In the palmy preWar days, when the genre could be defined as those prose fictions published under the name of science fiction in American pulp journals and ingested by a fandom, indeed it was Campbell who “blotted out the purple of pulp,” as Isaac Asimov reminds us in his introduction to Astounding: John W Campbell Memorial Anthology (Random House, 1974; edited by Harry Harrison), and while he lived Astounding doppelganged Analog with the legend of a moment in sub-literary history whose nature seemed apprehensible, under a rubric, to a chosen readership. A Golden Age in short.

During this Golden Age, Asimov goes on, “writers lifted the field from minor pulp to high art” under Campbell’s influence, a claim possibly more muscular than litcritical, and aimed more at fans in the paddock than at those who happen to read prose fictions, some of them generic — but then what better place for eulogies to homesick dreams of life as a secret garden than the rather freemasonical anthology under review, comprising as it does thirteen newly-written stories in honour of Campbell and his universe, by old Campbell authors, carrying on old Astounding themes, stories and avoidance tropes in some of the old Astounding styles. Campbell’s world was manipulable, positivist, tangible, solvable, a dream of mastery very much like America’s then; Campbell’s protagonists, like America’s in 1940 before John Wayne glued on a wig and became a bellhop, were seen as equals of greater gumption, not victims; heroes, not targets.

Neither Van Vogt or Heinlein has contributed to the volume, nor does Asimov’s offering us what is apparently his final Thiotimoline gag do very much to commemorate the tone of his typical 40s work, even as self-parody with love, but otherwise the Astounding of that decade is respectfully homaged by several of its trademark authors. George O Smith brings back his Venus Equilateral crew, to what must be deliberately comic effect, as Don Channing and Walter Franks, after hearing a lecture on the obsolescence of vacuum tubes, trot right off to invent a matter transmitter with the help of some of the new thingumajigs, whatchewcallum transistors; Clifford D. Simak closes off the City sequence with the departure of Jenkins for the stars at last, giving the author ample excuse (as though he ever needed it) to mourn a chunk of temps perdu; Hal Clement adds a clean, affectless pendant to Mission of Gravity; and Theodore Sturgeon (who must be rather a trial) renders the blurb (as they say) inoperative and vitiates the point of the anthology itself by showing up with an ancient coy blooper of a tale that Campbell rejected in 1939 for falling between stools, and it still does.

These stories and symptomatic gags all share a low creative heat (and slight air of embarrassment) that seems to demonstrate how difficult it is for an author to recreate themes and modes he has cast off or outgrown, but more to the point demonstrates how ineluctably the gates of Paradise have slammed shut on this particular Golden Age. Astounding can no longer flare into the mind its fluorescent Can-do, Captain. The icy euphoria in the Garden, when all seemed new to the eye, when that which exceeded your grasp was putty in your waldo’s, has turned into literary and cultural fugue, a sign of terror at the corrosive, dying, genre-dissolving century — for any one at any rate who tries to hold on as maybe Campbell himself did, which is another topic. So the weakness of these stories could signalize maturity in those who wrote them, you might claim.

Most of the remaining contributions come from authors whose careers took off in the broader shallower 50s, with Astounding a little past its prime, one magazine among others, but holding on, especially in the constant introduction of new series. Several of these are officially terminated in this volume. Poul Anderson shuts down his loose Polesotechnic League sequence with a dumpy and surprisingly disjointed story in which doubts are cast on the very episteme of robber-baron capitalism itself, though the issue remains in no doubt for Mr Anderson, and in which van Rijn shows his age at last; Gordon R Dickson duplicates the theme, imagery, strategies and protagonist of “Warrior,” an earlier episode in the Dorsai Cycle, with a re-run at twice the length (and you rather wonder what Campbell would have done to all that fatty tissue); Harry Harrison supplies a Pyrran jeu in his later, offhand, jokier style, a style which just might reflect a touch of boredom with dinAlt, di Griz, et Cet; Mack Reynolds concludes his El Hassan series with a return-of-the-Dirty-Dozen-to-die-with-a-laugh episode in which the children of the original corps ready themselves to carry on saving Africa, crying Can-do, Captain! at underdevelopment (and Africans); and the best story in the book comes from Cogswell and Thomas, involving a literal transmutation of the Imperial Space Marines: it might very well be the only contribution to this anthology which could have appeared, unaltered (though there is a sexual note or two), in Campbell’s Astounding.

It’s obviously anyone’s guess what in fact Campbell would have made of these etiolated remembrances of an era he never visibly abandoned, except regarding the Sturgeon item, where he seems to have made himself clear; a speculation comes to mind, however, that he might well have evinced a certain editorial discomfort with these stories, because they are slack, and because the elegiac note they share points to the contingent reality of that which they commemorate (and bury), and there seems no evidence to hand that Campbell ever thought of Astounding as a lucky contingency, or a moment of innocence out of the deflowered world beyond the gates. Collectors will want the book for its series terminations.

Conscience Interplanetary (Doubleday, 1974) by Joseph Green comprises a group of linked stories originally published in magazines and presumably recast, plus a coda written especially for the book to wrap up all the loose ends — all of which puts it very awkwardly, but as there isn’t any decent critical term in the lexicon to designate linked stories originally published in magazines and presumably recast (plus coda), how else can you put it? [I retain this awkward formulation as a minor historical note. In 1976 when, with Peter Nicholls as General Editor, I began to think about how to organize information for The Science Fiction Encyclopedia (1979), I came across A E van Vogt’s term for assembled books of the sort described; and in the Encyclopedia, and in any other piece I wrote after 1976, the term fixup is always used 1986.] Publishers usually call these things novels, but that’s marketing not criticism.

As it stands, Conscience Interplanetary has more false climaxes than a tv-movie, though no commercials, and gives the general effect of rapid transit through a railroad flat. H. . .