sf, page 1 of 33

Bug Jack Barron is one of those novels you keep hearing mentioned if you read about the history of science fiction, particularly the New Wave that revolutionised the genre’s literary palette in the late 60s and early 70s. It was initially published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds between December 1967 and October 1968 (which, if you don’t have your countercultural periodical publication frequency calculator handy, is six instalments), but the novel’s liberal use of swearing, drug use, and sex caused WHSmith, the largest magazine distributor and vendor in the country at the time, to refuse to stock its March 1968 issue, after which (because New Worlds had an Arts Council grant) “questions were asked” in the House of Commons. (Which you can read here. It’s quite short and mild and, despite the legend, Spinrad never gets called a “degenerate”. He’s not even mentioned by name.) The novel was published in book form in 1969.

It’s set a couple of decades into what was then the future (at least twenty years after Bob Dylan recorded “Tombstone Blues”, according to the novel, so after 1985). Jack Barron has a one-hour Wednesday-evening TV show, in which he invites members of the public to video-phone in and tell him what’s bugging them, after which he phones up those responsible, live on air, and gets them to explain. Things kick off when a man phones in to complain he’s been denied a place in one of the Foundation for Human Immortality’s cryogenic freezers. It turns out this is for legitimate reasons—the Foundation demands a certain amount in liquid assets to be assigned to them for the duration of a person’s freezing, but the man included his home and business in the calculation—the man, though, says he was refused because he’s black. Barron pursues the issue anyway, just to stir up trouble. The Foundation, at that very moment, are trying to get a bill passed that will grant them a monopoly on cryogenic freezing, and Barron has just enough clout (an audience of one hundred million Americans) that he can impact political decisions. This brings him to the attention of the Foundation’s president, Bennedict Howards, who tries to recruit Barron to his cause, by offering him a free place in one of their freezers.

But Barron has had an equally tempting counter-offer: politicians from opposite sides of the left-right spectrum who oppose the Foundation’s bill have realised Barron is the one man who could unite their supporters and get them into power as a coalition. So which does he want, immortality, or to be President of the United States?

So Howards ups the stakes. First of all he finds Barron’s ex-wife Sara, who left him shortly after he began his media career, feeling he’d abandoned the progressive political ideals the two shared in their student days. (Back then, Barron formed the Social Justice Coalition party, which he left so as not to compromise his TV show’s political neutrality.) Somehow knowing that Barron and Sara are still hung up on each other, Howards convinces her that if she can get Barron to sign his contract for a freezer-place, she’ll get one too. Then he ups the offer again, telling Barron that the Foundation has actually developed an immortality treatment, and that he and Sara can have it whenever they want. They just have to sign the contracts.

Barron, though, starts to suspect there’s something odd about the immortality treatment, and when Howards gets annoyed when Barron covers a seemingly unrelated issue on his show—a poor black man in the deep south who sold his daughter for supposed adoption to a rich white man for $50,000—things start getting complicated.

The novel’s style placed it firmly in the experimental, literary New Wave. Aside from the free use of the sort of street-talk (and a lot of swearing) that was probably how people spoke then anyway, there are occasional passages in a sort of Beat-style stream of consciousness (though these get a bit repetitive as the novel goes on). (I have to say I found the first chapter almost incomprehensible, but fortunately things settled down after that.) Probably the thing that would make it impossible to publish today is its racial language, though the irony is that it uses this language to say what was progressive for its day. On the other hand, its treatment of women is pretty poor. Sara, despite leaving Barron when he gave up on his progressive politics, gives up her own when offered a shot at immortality, and basically exists to worship him (“oh, this is a man”). Once she’s reinstalled into his life, she’s not involved in any of the decision-making, and doesn’t even seem to want to be.

But the novel is really about the battle of wills between two men of power, Barron and Howards, and the worlds (media and business) they represent. In this, it reminded me of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which is also about the contest between two world-sized personalities (Bester even gets name-checked here: “Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like a Bester mnemonic jingle.”). But Bester’s plots had far more incidents and ideas, and both of his characters really did feel world-sized. One complaint I have about Bug Jack Barron is that Howards, as a villain, is too easily needled into giving his secrets away. As soon as Barron even touches on a sensitive area, Howards breaks into a seething rage. He’s a cartoon villain, and how he ever made it to being CEO of a major corporation is hard to imagine. He couldn’t even play a round of poker.

Read in terms of the time it was written, Bug Jack Barron is a study in the aftermath of 60s-countercultural hopes and ideals (Bob Dylan, in the novel, is dead), in which once-idealistic people have been led into a world of “use me and I’ll use you politics” and world-weary cynicism:

“What happened to all the no-more-war n*****-loving peace-loving happy got nothing need nothing love-truth-and-beauty against the night Baby Bolshevik Galahads. Years happened, hunger happened, and one day, age-thirty happened.”

(Asterisks not in the original publication.)

Immortality, in the novel, is the ultimate corrupting Faustian pact, the one thing that would cause anyone to give up their ideals. As Spinrad says in an LA Review of Books interview from 2012:

“The initial inspiration for Bug Jack Barron was the way the question of immortality was generally treated in science fiction—that is, no one had seriously dealt with the inevitability that it would initially be very expensive, and that it would confer enormous political power on whoever controlled it, indeed on whoever might even be able to promise it one way or another…”

Against this, he says:

“…the only such power that could stand up to the power of the promise of eternal life was the power of television to transform, control, mutate, and manipulate individual and cultural consciousness…”

The perceived importance of TV back then is captured in this diagram from a Michael Moorcock article in the same issue of New Worlds as the final instalment of Bug Jack Barron, which places television right at the centre of the “Media Web”:

(Though I couldn’t help thinking of what would be the closest UK equivalent in the day, Esther Rantzen in That’s Life! — hardly Bug Jack Barron stuff. Maybe it’s a UK/US difference.)

Nowadays, with broadcast TV flailing for viewers in the same way cinema did when TV came along, Bug Jack Barron has nevertheless attained a new prescience. Barron, alone before the camera in his small studio, sharing screen space with video-callers, feels like an influencer of a certain type, even more so when you consider his emotive stirring-up of his viewing public. Back then, the idea that a media personality such as Barron could be considered for President of the USA was satire (Ronald Reagan was Governor of California at the time); nowadays, reality is so busy satirising itself that Bug Jack Barron reads more like a how-to manual—Machiavelli’s The Prince, updated for the video age.

As a novel, I perhaps found it a little too long (entire chapters were taken up with Barron coming to a decision), and only Barron himself felt like a convincing human being, but it shows how even SF from over fifty years ago can still feel relevant.

(Another thing reading this novel caused me to check out: What happened to all those real-life companies offering cryogenic freezing what seems like only a few years back? Some are still about, yes, but some went out of business. And the freezers were turned off.)

Olaf Stapledon’s second novel, published in 1932, is not so much a sequel to Last and First Men (1930) as a sort of pendant to it (as his next novel, Odd John, started out as an appendix to this one). Like that first book, it’s dictated by a Neptunian from the far-future final race of humankind, who have developed the ability to project their consciousnesses into minds of the distant past, and not just witness events, but influence them to a certain extent, too. (Stapledon gets over the difficulty of the future being able to influence the past with a little handwaving: “Thus when I am observing your mental processes, my activity of observing is, in one sense, located in the past.” Or, for a little more detail: “though future events have indeed no temporal being until their predecessors have ceased to exist with temporal being, all events have also eternal being. This does not mean that time is unreal, but that evanescence is not the whole truth about the passing of events.”)

Instead of the vast, thousands-of-millions-of-years sweep of Last and First Men, Last Men in London concentrates on one comparatively tiny sliver of time, but one that is nevertheless “a crucial incident in the long-drawn-out spiritual drama of your species”: the First World War and its immediate aftermath. And the Neptunian chooses to approach this period through the consciousness of one individual, a relatively ordinary man called Paul. His intent is to present a deeper understanding of the causes of what was then known as the Great War, but also, by introducing Paul to glimpses of the more cosmic worldview of the Eighteenth Race of humankind, to see how this affects a man of our age. “It is my task,” he says, “to tell you of your own race as it appears through the eyes of the far future…”

After the immensely compressed tale of multiple human species in his first novel, focusing on a single individual might make it sound as though Last Men in London would read like a more straightforward narrative. In fact, it’s even less of a traditional novel (in terms of character, plot, and so on) than Last and First Men. After an initial chapter which details life on far future Neptune, we get a brief glimpse of Paul as he hesitates before an army recruitment centre in London, wavering between social pressure to join up and his more deeply held belief in pacifism. But this is one of the few conventional scenes in a book that has only about three or four named characters, and almost no scenes with dialogue, action, and so on. Following the introduction of Paul, the narrator digresses for two long chapters on the causes of the Great War (whose roots are not in the messiness of Imperial European politics as you might think, but in the very nature of our simian ancestry), before returning to Paul and his personal experiences in the war, and then onto his life in the years that followed.

This is only partly a criticism—you come to Stapledon for ideas, not realism—but I have to say I still find Stapledon at his most readable when he’s following a narrative, whether it be of the human race as a whole as in Last and First Men, or the life of an intelligent dog in Sirius. (To be fair, Stapledon declares early on: “Though this is a work of fiction, it does not pretend to be a novel. It has no hero but Man.”) Here, he has his exposition dials turned up to eleven—which isn’t a criticism as such, but I have to say I did find these sections, though interesting, a bit of a slog.

But Last Men in London could also be a kind of autobiographical novel. Like Paul, Stapledon refused the call-up into the army, but elected to serve in the Friends Ambulance Unit as an expression of his pacifism—and, like Paul, he won the Croix de Guerre, and was intensely aware of the irony of a pacifist winning a war medal. Also like Paul he spent time as a teacher. All this leads me to suspect you can probably read Paul’s education in a wider worldview as Stapledon’s own philosophical awakening, with the Neptunian narrator/educator a sort of fictional stand-in for Stapledon’s inner, guiding, slightly alienated deepest self. (It might even be better to read this novel as Stapledon’s attempt to write about the causes of the First World War being derailed by an inner need to tell the story of his own philosophical development.)

As to the causes of the Great War, from the Neptunian perspective it comes down to humankind’s “practical intelligence” getting ahead of its deeper self-understanding, plus a tendency in the First Men (as the Neptunians call us) towards “the importance of personal triumph over others in the great game of life”—the tendency to value heroic individuals over humankind itself, with a corresponding belief in nations as a sort of communal hero-self, with one nation necessarily triumphing over others being the accepted state of things. From the Neptunian point of view, the Great War was on the cards from the moment we came down from the trees (we have “a will that is still in essence simian, though equipped with dangerous powers”), but awaited the technological breakthroughs of the nineteenth century for its fruition:

“…your ‘modern’ world came too soon. In the century before the war it developed with increasing acceleration. You had neither the intelligence nor the moral integrity to cope with your brave new world.”

More interesting from a present day perspective, perhaps, is Stapledon’s insight into the mood during and after the Great War. There was, he says, a “suspicion in all the combatants that human nature had failed”, its ultimate effect being to “undermine man’s confidence in his own nature”. He goes on, in perhaps his most passionate and forthrightly critical section of the book, to detail how various sectors of society—politicians, religious leaders, teachers, artists and writers, common people—contributed to the war by turning a blind eye or justifying it to themselves. Perhaps the most useful passage to read today, as it still has such relevance, is this:

“Many people seemed to Paul to unearth a new self to cope with [the war], a simpler, less doubting, more emotional self, a self that concealed under righteous indignation a terrible glee in the breakdown of old taboos.”

Post-war, Stapledon describes the mood as one of:

“…a deep and deadly self-disgust, a numbing and unacknowledged shame, a sense of huge opportunities missed, of a unique trust betrayed, and therewith a vast resentment against earlier generations, against human nature, against fate, against the universe.”

Though Paul, in moments of particularly Stapledonian insight, still finds himself thinking:

“How can things be so wrong, so meaningless, so filthy; and yet also so right, so overwhelmingly significant, so exquisite?”

Which is perhaps one of the things that led John Kinniard to write, in Starmont Reader’s Guide 21: Olaf Stapledon, that “Stapledon’s philosophy is best approached as a challenge and a corrective to the disillusionment that became the dominant attitude of the Nineteen-twenties.”

So, what is Stapledon’s answer to all of this? It can be summed up in ideas that were already present in Last and First Men: “loyalty to man and worship of fate”. Or, as the Neptunian narrator puts it in a way that perfectly sums up Stapledon’s mix of the acceptance of cosmic doom with a defiantly joyous optimism:

“The story of your species is indeed a tragic story, for it closes with desolation. Your part in that story is both to strive and to fail in a unique opportunity, and so to set the current of history toward disaster. But think not therefore that your species has occurred in vain, or that your own individual lives are futile. Whatever any of you has achieved of good is an excellence in itself and a bright thread woven into the texture of the cosmos. In spite of your failure it shall be said of you, had they not striven as they did, the Whole would have been less fair.”

Does this help us at all, though, in the prevention of future wars? Stapledon’s notion of “loyalty to man and worship of fate” is a little too vague to be practically useful (unless one were to be faced with a catastrophe that really did threaten the species as a whole like, say, an increasingly unstable climate). Who is to say what best serves “man” or what should be regarded as “fate”? Elsewhere, Stapledon criticises the pursuit of happiness for this very reason:

“For if happiness alone is the goal, one man’s happiness is as good as another’s, and no one will feel obligation to make the supreme sacrifice. But if the true goal is of another order, those who recognise it may gladly die for it.”

Reviews at the time, though fewer than for Stapledon’s first novel, were mostly positive: “one of the most impressive things I have read” (The Birmingham Weekly Mercury), “engrossing and equally stimulating to the imagination and the reflective capacity” (The Aberdeen Press and Journal), “approached seriously, it will be found a rich, stimulating book” (The Daily News). Hugh I’Anson Fausset, in the Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, though, offered up a criticism of the Neptunian narrator:

“He may personify ‘the mature individual who has wholly escaped the snares of private egoism,’ and whose will is for the racial good, but only by ceasing to be a person with a real unity of being and a spiritual centre.”

Around the same time, Fausset reviewed (positively) David Lindsay’s Devil’s Tor, a novel which has a few similarities with Last Men in London: both are books in which events and characters are manipulated by science-fictional beings (one from the future, one from space); both touch on the early evolution of humanity and talk of a coming, better race; both make use of sometimes quite intense examination of characters’ inner motives; and both ultimately move towards the metaphor of music made up of many individual instruments as a way of apprehending the cosmic story (and Stapledon’s declaration that “There is no music without the torture of the strings” might have interested Lindsay).

John Wyndham’s Chocky (1963) is a much more readable take on the theme of the alien/futuristic visitor inside one’s own head. I’m sure Wyndham must have read at least some of Stapledon’s works, and wouldn’t be surprised if he’d read them all. Whether he remembered it while writing Chocky is debatable, but there’s a hint of Stapledon’s cosmic vision in Chocky’s parting statement about intelligent life being “the rarest thing in creation, but the most precious. It is the only thing that gives meaning to the universe. Without it, nothing begins, nothing ends…”

Last Men in London is not one of Stapledon’s essential works, but it does make interesting reading as a historical document (its insights into the postwar mood), and as a transition point in Stapledon’s own creative direction: here, he’s working out how to take the themes of Last and First Men and apply them to his evident interest in the philosophical development of an individual. His treatment of Paul’s life is rather distant and unengaging, but he ends the novel with a short episode in which Paul, as a teacher, encounters a weird-looking child prodigy who proves to be, like the next novel’s “Odd John”, a throw-forward to the next step in human evolution. Writing Last Men in London, then, perhaps showed Stapledon the way he should be going, and which he’d do more successfully in both Odd John and Sirius.

I’d long meant to read The Purple Cloud, partly because it appears in a number of “Rare Works of Imaginative Fiction” lists alongside David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus and The Haunted Woman. I think I’d been aware of it, though, since reading King’s The Stand, on which it had a minor influence (The Stand’s “Trashcan Man” and The Purple Cloud’s Adam Jeffson are both post-apocalyptic pyromaniacs). But perhaps the closest he comes to any author I’ve covered on this blog is John Wyndham in Day of the Triffids. Shiel’s is, in some ways, more of a “cosy catastrophe” than Wyndham’s: at one point, Shiel’s narrator reflects how, in the post-catastrophic world, “Everything, in fact, is infinite compared with my needs”—food is somehow preserved forever in Shiel’s world, and there are no pesky triffids to upset his narrator’s wanderings; on the other hand, for the bulk of Shiel’s novel, its narrator believes himself to be the last human being alive, which isn’t the case in Triffids.

The Purple Cloud was first published in 1901, initially as an abridged serial in The Royal Magazine, then in hardback towards the end of the year. Later reprints, from 1929 onwards, incorporated edits Shiel made, which downplayed some of the increasingly unfashionable religious references in the text. I read the Penguin Classics edition, based on the 1901 hardback.

The narrator, Adam Jeffson, a young Harley Street doctor, finds himself part of an expedition attempting to be the first to reach the North Pole, after his fiancé, a scheming countess called Clodagh, deliberately poisons the doctor who was due to go. Adam turns out to be the only member of the expedition to reach the Pole (a massive pillar of ice, inscribed with indecipherable writings), but returns only to find that an enormous volcanic cloud of poisonous gas has swept the globe, killing all human and animal life. He searches for survivors, initially in towns and cities, later in mines, where he believes people might have sealed themselves in to escape the gas, but finds no one—no one alive, anyway, for everywhere is thick with preserved corpses, including the many people fleeing foreign countries as the gas cloud advanced. (Shiel is particularly effective in peppering his narrative with numerous tableaux of the dead caught in a variety of end-of-life dramas, including a massive, tight-packed crowd of “the standing dead… propped by their neighbours”.)

Eventually, he has to accept he’s the last human being left alive, and it’s at this point he starts to indulge a new hobby: the burning of entire cities, starting with London. After a long bout of this, he flips to the other side of the creative/destructive coin, and decides to build, single-handed, a combined temple and palace, complete with gold roofs and wine-filled pools (not, he insists, out of luxuriousness, but for reasons of aesthetics and practicality). Finally, in one last bout of pyromania (Constantinople, if I recall), he accidentally sets free a young woman who was born, and spent her entire life so far, in a large, sealed cellar (which fortunately was filled with a lifetime’s supply of white wine and dates—how this must have affected her digestive system is never discussed).

Used to having the world to himself as he is, Adam’s first impulse is to kill her, and even when he finds himself incapable of that, spends most of the rest of the novel believing they should live a world apart, to prevent the slightest chance of restarting the human race. (Aware of the irony of his own first name, he quickly dismisses the idea of calling this young woman Eve. He opts for Clodagh, as a warning reminder of his poisonous fiancé, but she insists on Leda.) Eventually, after one final attempt to kill either her or himself, hints that another purple cloud of volcanic gas might be on the way (though this might be a fib of Leda’s to force him to rethink their relationship), Adam renounces his murderous impulses, admits his love for her, and a new human race is begun.

The main argument against this being what Brian Aldiss called a “cosy catastrophe”, is Adam’s descent into madness once he accepts he’s the last of the human race. He first of all passes through a phase of cosmic-level horror at the situation (“and I can feel now that abysmal desolation of loneliness, and sense of a hostile and malign universe bent upon eating me up”), then comes to feel that, no, this is how things are meant to be:

“…the arrangement of One planet, One inhabitant, already seems to me, not merely natural and proper, but the only natural and proper condition…”

It’s only when he sees Leda, and decides to murder her, that he realises (or the reader realises—it takes Adam a while longer) how far he’s gone. But though he later admits that “after twenty years of solitary selfishness, a man becomes, without suspecting it… a real and true beast, a horrible, hideous beast, mad, prowling…”, and that “man [is] at his best and highest when most social… for the Earth gets hold of all isolation, and draws it, and makes it fierce, base, and materialistic,” there is also a sense in which Adam is quite glad to be free of the bulk of humanity (“putrid wretches—covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes”, as he says, at one point).

Shiel belonged—or wanted to (he was published by John Lane, but never appeared in the aesthetic movement’s defining journal, The Yellow Book)—to the aesthetic/decadent crowd of the 1890s, and I can’t help reading The Purple Cloud as being driven by the key themes of literary decadence. When Adam sits back to watch London burn—itself a scene redolent of that founding myth of cultural decadence, Nero fiddling while Rome burns—he does so in Oriental dress, and having supplied himself with “a jar of pale tobacco mixed with rose-leaves and opium, found in a foreign house in Seymour Street, also a genuine Saloniki hookah, together with the best wines, nuts and so on, and a golden harp of the musician Krasinski”. (He uses to the harp to play Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” as the city burns—Wagner being the Decadents’ favourite composer. It’s an image that would conjure thoughts of Apocalypse Now!, if only it weren’t so hard to imagine “Ride of the Valkyries” being played effectively on a harp.)

The complete depopulation of the world can’t help feeling like a Decadents’ dream—so much of literary decadence celebrates solipsism—while Adam’s creative impulse to build a temple/palace is just as Decadent as his burning of cities:

“I will build a palace, which shall be both a palace and a temple: the first human temple worthy the King of Heaven, and the only human palace worthy the King of Earth.”

It’s perhaps telling he can’t separate the ideas of temple and palace—or whether it’s dedicated to God, the King of Heaven, or himself, the King of Earth—as a luxuriant materialism combined with guilt-ridden hints of intense religiosity is another characteristic of the Decadent movement.

There are elements of the fantastic in The Purple Cloud. It’s hinted, for instance, that the North Pole is a forbidden place, and that it was Adam reaching it, and touching it, that released the purple cloud. (Another, more misogynistic reading, is that the “sin” which leads to the unleashing of the purple cloud is Clodagh’s poisoning of Adam’s rival, making her a sort of anti-Eve.)

More explicitly fantastic is that Adam has, all his life, been aware of two voices in his head, urging him to good (the “White” voice, as he calls it) or evil (the “Black”), and that these may have been behind the whole story of his reaching the Pole, surviving the purple cloud, going on to burn entire cities (which eventually releases Leda) and finally restarting the human race.

Leda herself is an element of The Purple Cloud that pushes it into cosy catastrophe/daydream territory. Because she has spent her life in a cellar, she’s entirely innocent of the world. She’s so much younger than Adam that he can, effectively, overrule her in everything and, through education, shape her how he wants her to be (he even says “For she is my creation, this creature”). Her lisp, by which she replaces every “r” with an “l” (perhaps meant to be endearing, quickly becoming as irritating as Van Helsing’s cod-Dutch accent in Dracula) can’t help but infantilise her, which is particularly troubling considering the revelations that came out about Shiel in 2008, that he spent a year in prison for sexual relations with a twelve-year-old girl—certainly not the only such incident in his life.

Lovecraft mentions Shiel in his essay, “Supernatural Horror in Literature”, and the reaction is pretty similar to how he felt about Hodgson’s Night Land: the book as an imaginative narrative is great—in fact, it’s written with “a skill and artistry falling little short of actual majesty”—but “Unfortunately the second half of the book, with its conventionally romantic element, involves a distinct ‘letdown’.” Shiel’s “romantic element”—mostly consisting of Adam’s trying to bring himself to murder Leda, or at least abandon her—is hardly conventional, but all romance was, I suspect, “conventional” for Lovecraft: he simply couldn’t understand any other reason why it might be there.