sf, page 25 of 33

It’s always been a problem, what to do with young men, bundles of sex and violence that they are. Each age has to come up with new ways of channelling their youthful energies, or face the consequences. The Middle Ages, all too aware of the dangers of having a bunch of steel-plated, lusty young knights roaming the countryside, developed a pair of social codes: chivalry, which said that only a fight between equals was truly honourable (so, no bashing peasants just for the hell of it), and courtly love, which said that the purest expression of a knight’s devotion was to dedicate himself to the service of a (preferably married, certainly chaste) woman, whom he could worship from afar, obey her every command, and pine for. The fiction of the times is full of honourable knights and sighingly tragic longing. Lancelot was the ideal, and though nowadays he’s most known for his massive failure to merely worship from afar, Malory, at least, was convinced of his virtue, saying that anyone who didn’t believe in it was corrupted by the cynicism of the times:

“…nowadays men cannot love seven nights but they must have all their desires… But the old love was not so; for men and women could love together seven years, and no lecherous lusts were betwixt them, and then was love truth and faithfulness. And so in like wise was used such love in King Arthur’s days.”

A Princess of Mars – Bruce Penngington cover

Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars is a direct descendent of the same school of fiction. I first read it when I was 19 or 20, and perhaps because it was so short and so very readable, quickly moved on to its sequels, which proved just as moreish. (I think I got as far as The Master Mind of Mars (6th in the series), or perhaps even Synthetic Men of Mars (9th) — things get a bit blurry after the first three. It’s the uber-cliffhanging ending of the second, Gods of Mars, which has stuck with me.) Even while caught up in them — and they really did have that read-it-in-a-single-sitting compulsion — I knew they were basically an endless series of riffs on a single formula. The thing was, the formula was so primal, it worked even though I was aware of it.

A Princess of Mars – Michael Whelan cover

It’s the romantic male daydream of rescuing a beautiful princess, either from death or a fate-worse-than, again and again and again, raised by the power of its exotic setting (one of Dejah Thoris’s would-be ravishers, Tal Hajus, is “the most hideous beast I had ever set eyes upon… like some huge devil-fish”), and delivered at such a breathless pace, the narrative barely gives you time to recover from one iteration before it lands you in the lap of the next. The hero, John Carter, goes from death-defying extreme to death-defying extreme, at one point having his flying machine shot down to crash in the middle of warring hordes of savage Tharks (six-limbed, twelve-foot-tall green Martians who think the death agonies of their enemies the funniest thing going), only to find himself fighting next to (and saving the life of) the one Thark on all the planet who knows him. The plot has enough holes to sink a heavier vessel (why does Carter, having just freed Kandos Kan in Zodanga, instead of going on to free his beloved Dejah Thoris in the same city, elect to fly all the way to the distant city of Helium, a place he’s never been to before and in which he will not be recognised, in order to get help?), and I felt, on this re-read, some of Carter’s actions were more barbaric than heroic (to rescue Dejah Thoris from being wed to the warlike Zodangan prince, Carter assembles a horde of Green Martians to massacre and imprison the whole city, many of whose inhabitants, it has been pointed out, are against the actions of their leader) but the whole thing stays buoyant through sheer narrative pace as it zings from one romantic peril to the next. Like a shark, it survives only because it keeps moving. But this shark moves fast.

A Princess of Mars – Frank Frazetta cover

It’s not just physical peril, though, that stands between John Carter and the beautiful Martian princess Dejah Thoris (she lays eggs, don’t you know). The exotic setting allows Burroughs to put problematic cultural barriers between the two of them, from Dejah Thoris taking insult at the culturally-ignorant Carter’s unintentional faux pas at the beginning, to her later telling him that, having promised her hand in marriage to the hated Sab Than because she thought Carter dead, honour dictates not only that she cannot go back on her word, but that, should Carter kill Sab Than, she and Carter will never be able to marry.

It’s courtly love all over again.

(Apparently there’s a film out, or something.)

A couple of bits of news. First off, my story “The Realm of Lost Things” has just been published in Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine issue 53! I haven’t seen the magazine yet, though I’m sure it’s winging (or perhaps floating) its way to me from Australia right now. I’m thrilled for this story to be published, and in such a long-running zine, too. It can be ordered in print, as a PDF, as a Kindle-compatible MOBI, or an EPUB, all from this page. I’m doubly thrilled because this is the first story I’ve been paid for!

Also, a cartoon I did of SF writer Gene Wolfe, in a mewsings post a year and a half ago (“The Secret of Reading Gene Wolfe“) is being used as part of an upcoming event, “An Evening to Honour Gene Wolfe”, in which the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame will be awarding Gene the first ever Fuller Award, by which the city honours its greatest living writers. As a result, I appear on the award’s behind-the-scenes page. It sounds like a great event, with a lot of notable special guests attending. If you’re in the area, you might want to buy a ticket. All details here.

The latest Doctor Who DVD release, The Sensorites, has got me thinking about my eccentric Doctor Who buying habits. I get all the Tom Baker and Patrick Troughton DVDs on principle, but pick and choose from the William Hartnell and Jon Pertwee stories, perhaps because I like the comic Doctors better than the cranky ones. I’ve only just realised, though, that the First Doctor stories I buy are always the science fiction ones, never the historicals. To me, those early stories are usually too slow-paced to succeed as dramas, so my enjoyment of them has to come from their atmosphere. And when it comes to atmosphere, the old TV shows couldn’t help doing minimalist sci-fi better than they did history.

I love the aesthetic of old sci-fi (the sort of thing that begs to be called sci-fi, rather than SF). Despite Coleridge’s most famous remark on the subject, I think there are two ways to make fantasy work. One is, indeed, through the suspension of disbelief, but the other is what I might call suspension by disbelief — by which I mean the sort of thing that kicks in when you’re presented with something so strange it doesn’t matter whether it’s convincing or not, it conquers by aesthetics alone. Limited by budget and technology as they were, the old Doctor Whos, to be successful, had to rely on artistry as much as craftsmanship. A single fault (a sticking-out zip or a wobbly mask) will puncture the “convince them it’s real” suspension-of-disbelief approach, but the alternative, “convince them it’s alien“, works top-down, not by the evidence of the senses, but through the sense of wonder. Doctor Who’s early aliens work by being so weird you don’t so much believe in them, as bask in their strangeness.

“Does he mean me?”

It’s impossible to see the Daleks in this way nowadays, due to overfamiliarity, but their extremely unconventional, not-a-man-in-a-suit design goes to the heart of it. The Dalek design looks like a very alien solution to the problem of how to survive in an overly radioactive environment (encase yourself in a life-support machine and stay indoors, after which you’re bound to get a bit cabin feverish and want to conquer the universe). A more obvious example is the Alice in Wonderland sensibility of The Web Planet, with its stagey, almost balletic make-believe world of man-sized moths and giant ants, as well as those crawling things that were a cross between The Magic Roundabout‘s Dougal and a hairbrush. It would take a billion dollar budget to convince you the Web Planet was real, and perhaps another billion to make sure you didn’t laugh, so why not just convince you it’s so strange it’s worth doing away with your disbelief altogether? With this approach, it’s the surprising details that convince, not the realistic ones, so the Sensorites’ circular feet — the first detail of theirs you see, after that spooky scene where one peeks into the spaceship from the outside — as much as their long, wispy-bearded, old-man faces, that goes towards making you believe in these alien creatures.

Most of all, I love the original Cybermen, from William Hartnell’s final story, The Tenth Planet. I would probably have first seen them on the wonderfully Art Nouveau-ish cover (by Chris Achilleos) to the Target novelisation, where their peculiarly feminine looks make them all the more spooky, like futuristic mummies in white bandages. Watching them in action (via YouTube, though I long for them on DVD), the awkwardness of their design only makes them all the more alien. Those huge chest units they lumber around with are exactly the sort of thing a Cyberman would design — all function, no ergonomics — as are the chillingly minimal childlike doodles of their faces. In fact, watching them waddle about with all that front-loaded weight, and their head-mounted guns, I can’t help feeling they look like robotised pregnant women in beehive hairdos, which makes their ultra-modernist emotionlessness all the more scary. And a world apart from the tramping little-boy militarism of their latest incarnation. In this way, it’s the rough edges, the feeling of those early Cybermen’s make-do approach to self-design, that convinces.

Perhaps this is why William Hartnell’s alien stories were always set away from contemporary Earth. Except for the Daleks (who had already invaded everyday life by the time they hit the Earth on TV), the First Doctor’s encounters with alien life took place on other planets, or on spaceships, or in the future, and I’m sure it was only this happening-in-another-place feel that made the aliens work. Were a Menoptera or a Sensorite to appear in contemporary London — except for Carnaby Street, where it might get invited to a Love-in — it would undoubtedly wither before the glare of reality. But out in space, where no-one can hear you say “It’s got a zip up the back!”, they’re in their own weird, modernist, minimalist, unnatural environment, where it’s not belief, but sheer strangeness, that wins the day.