sf, page 2 of 31

Like the first Louise Lawrence book I read (1974’s The Wyndcliffe), I bought Andra (1971) because of the wonderful Antony Maitland cover to its UK first edition. But whereas The Wyndcliffe proved equal to both its cover and my expectations of it as a slice of vintage 70s British YA folk-fantasy, the best thing about Andra remains its cover, and it was mainly interesting to read because it was Lawrence’s first published novel (she wrote four — “very bad”, in her own words — beforehand, apparently).

It’s set 2000 years from now. Our world’s surface is no longer habitable, thanks to a bomb that “swung Earth from her orbit” — the year is now four times as long as ours — “just to end one stupid war and left us with a lump of useless rock”, as the titular heroine puts it. The action takes place in Sub-city One, one of three subterranean redoubts lit and heated entirely by artificial means. (There are a further five cities belonging to the rival nation-state of Uralia, which, ruled as it is by one Gravinski, is clearly a Cold War Russia analog.)

It’s a dull, mechanistic future. Children are separated from their parents at birth and raised by E.D.C.O. (whose initials aren’t explained, as far as I recall, but thinking of it as Education Corporation works), which separates the low IQs from the high, and assigns everyone, on adulthood, with a job and a spouse. People only ever wear the colour assigned to their job, all hair is cut short and, for some reason, everyone is blond-haired and blue-eyed.

Andra, a.k.a. Citizen C/22/33/5, whose age is given as 15 (though this must be our years, not theirs, otherwise she’d be a rebellious teen of 60), is a misfit from the start, classed as low IQ for her resistance to E.D.C.O.’s production-line style of upbringing. Playing hooky one day, she’s caught in an accident that destroys the part of her brain processing eyesight. Normally, she’d be terminated (“The city would not support any person who was not physically faultless”), but one Dr Lascaux takes the opportunity to try an experimental brain graft. The only available brain that will fit is one that belonged to a young man from 1987. The operation proves a success. Andra can see.

But she does so with the added memories of someone from the 20th century, who knows what such things as the sun, trees, fields and animals are. And she feels the hunger to see these things again. (To make matters worse, her hair also turns black and her eyes go brown, to the disgust of the more conservative dwellers of Sub-city One.) Having decided she’s nowhere near as stupid as E.D.C.O. says she is, Dr Lascaux recommends she be assigned to help the three-hundred-year-old Professor Kiroyo in the archives. Yet even this unusual, and perfectly suited, opportunity — Kiroyo is researching how people used to live before the surface became uninhabitable — grates with Andra’s intensely individualistic personality. She starts to display clearly 1960s-inspired signs of unacceptable free-spiritedness, such as growing her hair long and writing pop lyrics, putting her at the centre of a burgeoning youth movement which brings her into conflict with the the city’s autocratic director Shenlyn.

Andra is mostly a pretty straightforward free-spirit-versus-stultifying-society narrative. Everything about Sub-city One is an imaginative teen’s exaggerated idea of what being a dull, conforming adult is all about:

“…in this whole horrible subterranean place there is nothing, not one thing, I would class as beautiful. The language we speak is empty and void of any real meaning. Beauty no longer exists… This is not living… This is merely existing, being kept alive to keep our species alive and feed the demands of Shenlyn and the computers… With every breath I take I long to see the sun.”

It’s saved from being a straight-out dystopia when it turns out that Kiroyo is studying how people used to live so colonists can be sent to the newly-discovered, old-Earth-like Planet 801 in a fleet of rockets — so all the young people singing songs of rebellion and freedom are going to get their wish, freedom from the city and a chance to make their own way of life. But things, of course, don’t go quite so smoothly, thanks to those evil Uralians, and the novel ends on a rather abrupt down-turn.

Perhaps this reflects Lawrence’s own situation at the time. She was in an unhappy marriage (though soon to get out of it) and the dedication, “To my husband, for his tolerance during Andra’s creation”, can’t help, with that knowledge, sound distinctly cold.

There’s plenty of what would play out in Lawrence’s subsequent books, here in raw form. Andra’s brain graft — an alien and destabilising influence that opens her up to a new way of seeing things, bringing with it a host of sometimes dangerous difficulties — recalls the microscopic alien race that infects Jane Bates in The Power of Stars, the ghost that befriends Anna Hennessey in The Wyndcliffe, or the fascination Owen Jones feels for the nature-goddess-like Bronwen in The Earth Witch. There’s also the conflict between the worlds of potentially destructive technology and the raw power of nature, as laid out most clearly in her later book Star Lord.

Andra was adapted for Australian TV in 1976, apparently with such a low budget that shop window dummies were used as extras, and the scenery was mostly large coloured blocks. The novel was republished in 1991 in the US, with Publishers Weekly complaining of “the sometimes puzzling British slang” (I’d love to know what they were referring to) and that Lawrence “seems unsure of her message”, while Kirkus Reviews mentioned “Hackneyed writing, lack of science, and general implausibility”, but ultimately found it worked, “by establishing Andra as the one striving, scornful, yearning person in a world of drones”.

I have to admit I found the writing sometimes unpolished — occasionally a character would just start speaking in a scene when they weren’t previously present, and the point of view in the early chapters slips from one character to another mid-paragraph. I’d say it’s probably best read as part of an interest in Lawrence’s work, as the opening move in a soon-to-improve writing career, rather than as an introduction to it. Those of her later novels that I’ve read are all more interesting, and prove that she was up to taking on some strong themes. (Her post-nuclear Children of the Dust sounds rather Threads-like.)

I’ll still be keeping my hardback copy primarily for the Antony Maitland cover, though.

A second collection of Suzuki’s stories, following on from last year’s Terminal Boredom, this book contains her breakthrough SF story “Trial Witch” — a title which wrongfooted me, because those words inevitably conjure the phrase “witch trials”, whereas in this case it means “apprentice witch on her trial period”. It’s the comical story of a woman who, out of the blue, is told she’s been selected by the League of Witches to become one of their number. She’s granted magical powers for a limited period, but finds her main ability is to transform her husband into a variety of new forms, which she either can’t, or doesn’t want to (he’s unfaithful), undo by the time the trial ends. It’s fun to imagine this story as the image of Suzuki herself, self-trialling herself as a writer in the fantastical vein. Only, unlike with the story’s protagonist, Suzuki turned out to have, with this story, won herself a place as a writer of SF in Japan (though not, it turns out, to have been allowed into the all-male SF Writers Club of Japan).

The main feeling I came away from in my review of Terminal Boredom was of emotional disconnection in human relationships, edging its way into emotional disconnection from oneself. With some of the stories of Hit Parade of Tears, that aspect is ramped up, with sometimes quite extreme self-alienation being a predominant theme in the longer, more serious tales.

That feeling of distanced relationships is still there, as in this, from the opening story, “My Guy”, about a young woman who finds herself picking up a man who says he’s an alien from another world:

“I guess I’d never really been in love, or even learned what was involved in ‘liking’ someone. This could be why I always seemed to wind up in relationships defined by mutual distaste and an inability to walk away.”

The alien man tells her things are the same on his world:

“Back home, everyone starts making love, so to speak, once they reach adulthood, except only with the partner that the government assigns them. Then they spend the rest of their lives as a happy couple who never fight. But that isn’t what you’d call ‘love’ now, is it…”

But elsewhere in the book — in what I feel is probably a later tale — Suzuki seems to have hit on something of a solution, only a messily human one, when in the story “I’ll Never Forget” she presents us with an ever-squabbling-and-making-it-up couple, who keep their relationship fuelled by the failures of previous ones:

“They were a strange pair, these two. They each prodded at some past infidelity, real or not, and that’s what formed the basis of their relationship.”

Which leads to the realisation:

“…love isn’t like a house you can just kick back and live in once it’s completed. No, it gets more worn and tattered day by day. So unless you keep on making it up, day by day, it disappears in all but name.”

But it’s the alienation from oneself that dominates Hit Parade of Tears. In what may be the longest tale, “Hey, It’s a Love Psychedelic”, a woman, initially called Reico, then Reyko, then Reiko, finds herself transplanted to what seem to be alternative versions of her own life. In each, she’s aware that things are wrong, usually through her knowledge of popular culture — an album that should have been out, or a brand of cigarettes that shouldn’t be available yet. The time-stream of her life is being manipulated by someone, taking her further away from the life she knew: whereas in the first section of this tale, she’s actively involved in the 1960s/70s rock music scene, by the last section she’s merely reading about it in a trashy novel called Groupie.

“The Covenant” starts with a somewhat useless-seeming husband figure who claims to be telepathic and in contact with aliens from another world, who he somehow helps with his mental powers. Then we meet a girl whose self-alienation starts out as an emotional self-disconnection similar to other Suzuki characters:

“Akiko had been alone ever since she was a child. She’d never had friends. She’d been a taciturn, expressionless, polite child. Her good grades had made her something of a teacher’s pet, but she never cared about any of that. After many long years of resenting the fact that no one loved her, she had conceived a vague hatred for this world.”

But she comes to realise these feelings are because she is (or so she believes), an alien from another world, here on Earth to fulfil the covenant of the story’s title. She forms a friendship with another similarly outsiderish girl, and things get a bit Charles Manson-ish.

The starkest image of self-alienation, though, is in “Memory of Water”. Here, the main character is a woman whose agoraphobia has led to her being mostly cut off from the world, and barely leaving her flat. But there are inexplicable (and, to her, alarming) intrusions into even that safe space, such as phone calls from a man who seems to know her, and items of clothing she’d never wear suddenly appearing in her wardrobe. Unknown to herself, she has a second self, one who is not anxious, depressed and sick, but whose idea of a free, adventurous life is one she’s so afraid of, she has cut that whole self off to the point that it has managed to break away and live an independent life. But instead of embracing this new self, the anxious woman only retreats further.

This feeling of being linked to another person, one whose mental and physical ill-health is dragging you down, also pops up in a tale I’ve already mentioned, “I’ll Never Forget”, which is actually a sequel to the story “Forgotten” from Terminal Boredom. “Forgotten” presented us with an alien but humanlike race, the Meelians, who never forget, which is why they don’t have war on their planet. In “I’ll Never Forget”, though, we learn there’s a downside to this never forgetting, as Meelians’ emotional experiences never fade; as a result, when “their heart has exceeded its capacity”, they tend to take their own life. (Human beings, on the other hand, merely descend into “a sort of hellish torment”. Thanks.) The main character, a Meelian woman who’s on Earth to do some modelling work, finds herself unconsciously targeted by the telepathic emanations of the human woman from “Forgotten”, who loved a Meelian man, Sol, who’s now dead. Alongside this feeling of being burdened by a stream of negativity that mixes physical ill-health, depression, and a feeling of life-failure, there’s the helplessness of not being able to do anything about it. In this sense, both “I’ll Never Forget” and “Memory of Water” are quite despairing tales.

As with Terminal Boredom, there’s no indication of when the Japanese originals from Hit Parade of Tears were first published, but I’m willing to bet that “The Memory of Water” and “I’ll Never Forget” date from the end of Suzuki’s career. That feeling of being burdened by longstanding physical ill-health, as well as mental ill-health and a feeling of the failure of human relationships chimes too much with Suzuki’s biography to ignore. (And I realised I should have taken my own advice from my review of Terminal Boredom: “I’d like to read some more stories by Suzuki, though perhaps I wouldn’t read them back-to-back, as that malaise of disaffection can be hard to read too much of.”)

There are some tales in Hit Parade of Tears that escape this negativity, though. Perhaps my favourite is one of the most explicitly genre-science-fictional, “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise”, about the human crew of a spaceship exploring other planets, not for the purposes of scientific advancement — there are just too many planets out there for every one of them to be treated with such care and attention — but as part of “a get-rich-quick scheme to collect unusual animals for Earth’s leisure class”. This mismatched, flawed, and very un-military-SF crew, collect a bunch of animals from various planets, half of which die, some of which injure or poison the crew. On this planet, they find what seems to be a human baby, and their disagreements about what to do with it lead to a near mutiny. But the captain, who is equally fed-up with their mission, decides to take a new, and very un-Captain Kirk-ish solution: she says maybe they should give up and just live on this planet as they are.

It would be interesting to know when this story was written. The idea of a crew setting down on an alien planet and collecting specimens has been done in SF before, but the crew’s mismatchedness, and the detail that, back on Earth, there’s a “nerve centre linking the computers used by the various government ministries” called “MOTHER”, recalls the fact that the Nostromo’s computer is also called “Mother”, which makes me wonder if this isn’t a jokey take on Alien.

I think I like Suzuki most when she’s engaging explicitly with the sort of big ideas you find in genre SF — she inevitably has a fresh and meaningful take on them, alongside a carefree sense of humour and a wide acceptance of human foibles. But elsewhere there’s that overpowering emotional malaise and feelings of despair that just can’t be channelled into the sort of punky kicking back at society that would give this collection the life it needs. I really didn’t enjoy that aspect this time around.

Swastika Night is described by the Encyclopedia of SF as “the first Hitler Wins tale of any significance”, and the interesting thing about this (and the thing that made me want to read it) is that it was published in 1937 — i.e., before World War II. At least one contemporary review notes that “Murray Constantine” is a pseudonym, but it was not generally known that the author was in fact Katharine Burdekin (1896–1963) until the 1980s.

The novel is set in the Year of Our Lord Hitler 720 — presumably measured since the end of the “Twenty Years War”, or what we would call World War II. The globe is, at this time, divided between two empires, the German and the Japanese, which have been in a static truce for centuries. There are no uprisings (the Germans “ruling with such realistic and sensible severity that rebellion became as hopeful as a fight between a child of three and an armed man”), and Nazi rule is ensured via a religion in which Hitler is a god, not born of woman but exploded into existence, who took the form of a seven foot tall, blond, bearded giant. The catechism of this religion enforces a rigid hierarchy, beginning “As a woman is above a worm // So is man above woman”, and goes on to place Nazis above all foreign men, and the elite Knights (hereditary descendants of the Teutonic Knights created by Hitler) above everyone else. (As well as worms, women do get to be above one other thing: Christians.)

Women are kept separate from men, in huts in caged compounds, and are allowed only once each month into the swastika-shaped temples to worship Hitler. Their hair is kept shorn. They have no right to refuse any man, and if they give birth to a male child, it is taken from them after eighteen months.

Not unsurprisingly, their numbers are declining, though this is not something anyone but a few Knights have noticed, at this point. In fact, the German Empire as a whole is in a state of deep stagnation, and the only thing that prevents it being attacked and defeated by the Japanese is that their empire, equally hierarchical and militaristic in nature, is in a similar state.

The story follows a middle-aged English mechanic, Alfred, on a once-in-a-lifetime pilgrimage to the Holy Land (i.e., Germany). He seeks out a German friend, Hermann, who spent some time in England, and who is clearly in love with Alfred. A rather happy-go-lucky man unafraid to speak his mind, Alfred tells Hermann that he knows how to defeat the German Empire: not through violence, but ideas. It only rules, after all, thanks to the ideals and values it forces on its subjects. Key among these is the notion of “the Blood”, the hereditary nature of the Nazi that makes him essentially superior to all others. Alfred has decided that such a belief is in fact a weakness, and that “acceptance on my part of fundamental inferiority is a sin not only against my manhood but against life itself.” The Nazi ideals of “pride, courage, violence, brutality, ruthlessness” are, he points out, “characteristics of a male animal in heat”, and “A man must be something more, surely?”

Hermann, loving Alfred too much to do the patriotic thing and turn him into the authorities, merely groans helplessly. Later, the two meet a German Knight, Friedrich von Hess who, sensing something in Alfred, takes him into his confidence and shows him (and, at Alfred’s insistence, Hermann), two things that will give a new focus to his airy talk of bringing down the German Empire. The first is a book containing an account of the true history of the world before the founding of the German Empire (which has taught its subjects they were savages before it civilised them); the second is a photograph of the real Hitler, proving him to be not a blond giant but a shortish, dark-haired man with a silly moustache. But Hitler’s true physical nature isn’t the real revelation of that photograph. Perhaps the best moment in the book is when it’s revealed to Hermann and Alfred that the youthful, vigorous and attractive long-haired blond creature standing next to Hitler is not a boy, as they immediately assume, but a girl…

The bulk of the book is devoted to conversations between von Hess and Alfred, about how the German Empire set about consolidating its power — by destroying all knowledge of the before-times, and eradicating all culture except music. The result is that the Empire has come to a dead end:

“We can create nothing, we can invent nothing—we have no use for creation, we do not need to invent. We are Germans. We are holy. We are perfect, and we are dead.”

The moment when the “boy” in the photograph with Hitler is revealed to be a girl is an illustration of what this book does so well: capturing how deeply people justify their irrational beliefs, all the better to cling to them. As someone in this book says of women with their shorn heads:

“Why, if they were meant to have hair on their heads they would have it on their faces. Have you ever seen a woman with a beard like mine?”

As with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which this novel is often compared to (there’s no evidence, apparently, Orwell read Constantine’s book), Swastika Night has encapsulated some essential ideas about how power warps reality in order to entrench its rule, and how difficult it can be to make one’s way out of the dead end this creates, once all alternatives, and even the possibility they once existed, have been eradicated.

Contemporary reviewers seem generally united in finding the book “as entertaining as it is frightening” (from The News Chronicle, 23 June 1937), but some reveal surprising caveats about the focus of the book’s attack — surprising, anyway, from the position of looking back with a knowledge of subsequent events.

Phyllis Bentley, for instance, in The Yorkshire Post, felt it was unfair of the author to project such a horrible future and blame it on a real people:

“That it is fair, right, and civilised, even in a work of fiction, to throw the onus of creating such a nightmare of a future on any specific nation, whether German or Japanese or other, I have strong doubts; but if we will take the satire ourselves, and regard it as the results of those human tendencies towards fear, greed, and stupidity which must be conquered if they are not to prove fatal, the lesson is striking enough.”

H S Woodham, in The Daily Independent (in Sheffield), makes a statement I still can’t quite fathom, unless it’s a comment on how so many intellectuals between the wars sought to condemn nationalism of any type — both the war-like and the prideful — as a means of preventing future conflicts:

“Murray Constantine is the nom-de-plume of a very able individual who seems to dislike the Nazi system without also disliking his own country—which borders on the unusual.”

He goes on to conclude:

“I do not imagine that the author believes this fantastic picture for one moment; he has exaggerated and caricatured with deliberate intent. Even so the story is fascinating, whether we agree with its trend or not.”

That “with deliberate intent” sounds oddly like the accusation of a crime, and is surely nonsensical, as the alternative is that Constantine wrote the book without intent, i.e., by accident.

Perhaps the fact that Swastika Night is about Nazis specifically (rather than, as with Orwell, an invented and therefore multiply-applicable ideology) might obscure its insights into the workings of power generally, seeming to relegate its problems to history (though it was certainly prescient in its time) and not the ongoing need to prevent the rise of any such form of totalitarianism. But its core lesson, that you must look to the most ill-treated members of society to understand how the forces in power achieve their ends, remains valuable. (As Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addition puts it: “How you treat the weak is your true nature calling.”) I have to admit I found the conversations in the book a little too long, particularly when they weren’t dealing with the book’s themes but its plot (which is slight), but Swastika Night remains a classic for its key ideas, as well as its boldness in stating them before a world that was, at the time, perhaps not quite ready to listen.