1960s, page 1 of 5

If the “cosy catastrophe” is the archetypal post-WWII English SF story, surely the quiet invasion comes a close second (The Midwich Cuckoos or Quatermass II being prime examples). They’re quiet because they either occur in an isolated location (a cut off village in Cuckoos) or by hiding in plain sight (an industrial processing plant in Quatermass II). John Christopher’s The Possessors (first published in 1965) is of the former type, being set in a ski-chalet high in the Swiss Alps, which is further isolated from its nearest village when an avalanche blocks the one mountain road leading to it.

At first, the holidaymakers (all Brits, having chosen this chalet for the English-American couple who run it) continue as normal, expecting the pass to be cleared in a couple of days. They’re a hung-up bunch, many of them recovering (or not recovering) from a variety of losses: Jane Winchmore is a widow in her thirties, Douglas Poole is on the rebound from an abruptly ended affair, while hostess Mandy Hamilton left the three children from her first marriage behind in America. Others have clear compromises or unbalances in their relationships: plastic surgeon Selby Grainger is the eternal dallier-with-women, while his wife, the cooly beautiful Elizabeth, puts up with it, confident he won’t actually leave her, and Ruth Deeping clearly favours her younger son Andy over ten-year-old Stephen, whom she constantly nags. Perhaps the only fully happy one of the bunch, in fact, is eight-year-old Andy, so beloved by his mother, which is perhaps why he’s the first victim of the alien invasion. Thinking he’s found a glowing blue ball in the snow, he touches it and instantly drops to the ground. Selby declares him dead, and he’s put in a makeshift coffin in the cellar—only for him to get up and leave the chalet sometime in the night. Everyone joins in the search, though only his mother, Ruth, has any faith that a boy in so few clothes and no shoes can survive for any length of time in the snow. But he does return—only, not quite himself. Significantly colder to the touch and slightly less human, he has (as we, the readers, know from the book’s opening section) been taken over by an alien spore, flung out from its dying home planet millions of years ago, which landed by chance on the Earth and was uncovered by the recent avalanche.

The alien—symbiotic or parasitic, depending on whether you take its point of view or ours—needs to isolate the humans, one by one, so as to infect them. And of course the humans take a long time working out what’s happening, speculating first of all that it’s some new kind of illness, or an infectious mass hysteria, or even demonic possession. And all the time, the survivors are becoming increasingly besieged in the chalet, boarding themselves up against the possessors trying to get in, get them alone, and take them over.

For most of the book the story is driven by suspense and the increasing tensions between the already flawed characters. In this, there’s an obvious contrast to be drawn between the aliens (who work effortlessly together, and tempt in at least one character with the promise of an end to human struggles) and the humans, whose only working relationships are those founded on long-held compromises. Chalet owner George Hamilton, for instance, is a good husband to his wife Mandy because he ignores the bottles of gin she’s got stashed about the place, and is pretty much an alcoholic himself. (There’s a lot of drinking in the book. Interviewed in a special issue of Interzone, Sam Youd—the real name of John Christopher, and meant to rhyme with “cloud”, apparently—admitted: “It’s the way I live, yes, I do drink alcohol, and quite a bit of alcohol, though only wine…” Though it seems to have been pretty much part of the times anyway.)

It’s hard not to compare Christopher with his contemporary John Wyndham, both of whom were the face of general-readership SF in Britain at the time. Christopher’s characters are much more evidently flawed, and come with a greater dose of cynicism about human relationships, a sense that there can never be anything more than a “total failure of comprehension” between people. Offered the slightest sign of sympathy for her widowhood, young Jane just wants to escape, and instantly regrets it the one time she shares her feelings of despair with someone else. The sense is that isolation and compromise are built-in to the human condition, whereas the characters in, say, Day of the Triffids, though they have to overcome external difficulties and the occasional dangerous human, will eventually find some sense of community, even family, in the end. For Wyndham, decency is a struggle but a worthwhile one; for Christopher it feels, at times, like a lost cause.

But there are resonances with other SF-horror, too. The most obvious to me was The Thing, for its icy setting and its alien that takes on human form, but also for its sense that if the invasion isn’t stopped here, the whole of the human race is at risk: “there can be no question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.” Invasion of the Body Snatchers is another, as is one of my favourite Doctor Who serials, The Horror of Fang Rock (where, as here, the isolation is prolonged by a lingering thick fog).

It’s certainly a suspenseful read, and I’m surprised it hasn’t been filmed (it was optioned, apparently), because it could surely be made on a reasonable budget. (Special effects: one glowing blue sphere.) It perhaps has less of the weird feeling I might have liked—I’d have preferred more of what seems to be promised by the German translation of the book, titled Die Unheimlichen (“The Uncanny Ones”). This is far more of an adventure/disaster tale (and the cast of flawed characters, each with their cross to bear, recalls the set-up to so many 70s disaster movies), and a successful one, at that. I’d definitely like to read more by Christopher. I’ve been meaning to read The Tripods since around the end of the 1970s…

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.)

I’ve previously written about Joan North’s The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze; The Whirling Shapes came out between those two, and so completes the trio of her gently mystical early-teen novels. (I assume I’ll never find a copy of her first published book, The Emperor of the Moon, which is so rare the only review on Amazon is from North’s own daughter wanting to find a copy!)

Published in 1968 in both the UK and US, The Whirling Shapes begins with 14-year-old Liz Blake going to live with her Aunt Paula, Uncle Charles, and their 16-year-old daughter Miranda, while her mother has to spend time in a sanatorium (it’s not said why in the book, but one reviewer says it’s a TB sanatorium). Aunt Paula is a bit of a North type: a busybody, always rushing out to this class or that event, usually to do with some faddish idea (she herself teaches the “Helen Tregonna method of dancing”), while also imposing her busyness on others: “an overwhelming sort of person”, “it never occurs to her that she could possibly be wrong about anything” . Fortunately, she’s out most of the time, so is too busy to make much of an impact on the story.

Far more to Liz’s liking is Great Aunt (but just called Aunt) Hilda, who lives at the top of the house. A retired anthropologist, her grandfather was the famous explorer Sir William Harbottle, and she’s currently writing her memoirs. Aunt Paula has already introduced Liz to the paintings of a young man called James Mortlake—all of vaguely whirling shapes, which Liz finds rather depressing. At Aunt Hilda’s she meets the man himself, and he turns out to be as morose as his art. (It’s only later revealed, and pretty much as an aside, that his father, a millionaire, shot himself when James was only four years old, after which his father’s business collapsed and his mother took an overdose of pills. Nobody seems to think of this when considering the generally dark tone of James’s art. When later speculating on why this young man paints such miserable pictures, and is somewhat miserable himself, Liz says he can’t help it, it’s just the sort of face he has!)

Strange things begin happening from the first night of Liz’s stay. The house is on the edge of a London heath, and looking out of the window that first night, Liz sees another house that, the next day, isn’t there. Later, the whirlwind-like shapes from James’s paintings begin to appear in reality, and a fog—only visible, at first, from inside the house—starts to surround the household and cut it off from not just the rest of the world, but reality itself. Aunt Paula and Uncle Charles disappear, and pretty soon the others find they can’t get far from the house before the whirling shapes surround them and threaten to make them disappear, too. Finally, though, the little group—Liz, Miranda, Aunt Hilda, James Mortlake, and Miranda’s medical student/poet boyfriend Tom—have no choice but to set out into the fog and find their way back to reality, before the house itself fades away entirely, and them with it.

What caused this incursion of the unreal? James’s paintings are a key part of it, as well as his insomniac wanderings on the heath, but another part is Aunt Hilda’s use of an artefact brought back from an anthropological trip, an egg-shaped thing carved from the wood of “the sacred tree of the Dingas—the Tree of Dreaming True” (the Dingas being “a very exclusive and retiring Central Indian tribe”). She had been holding this object and thinking of the house she grew up in when that very same house started to appear on the heath—the house which Liz then saw. As Aunt Hilda explains, “when I hold it in my hands, my thoughts have great power”. So, James’s depressiveness has been attracting the attention of the whirling shapes, but Aunt Hilda seems to have been the one to finally open the way from their world to ours. (The odd thing is, once things get desperate in the fog-enshrouded house, nobody thinks of using the power of this sacred artefact again. It’s utterly forgotten.)

As for the whirling shapes, they are, it turns out, “spiritual scavengers”, who “feed on dead mechanical desires”. Dementor-like, they surround their victims, chilling them both physically and spiritually, before making them disappear. They aren’t so much villains (though they’re described as the “messengers of greater and darker powers”) as simply one of the perils of the otherworld where Liz and co. find themselves—a dream-like realm of symbolic trials and archetypal landscapes.

As this is the last of North’s books I’m reviewing, it’s worth looking at the similarities between them. North evidently likes a feisty, no-nonsense but open-minded heroine, though often one more inclined to speak her mind than think about the effect of her words. This heroine is sympathetic towards others, though, and it’s one of the strengths of North’s books that although she presents us with casts of characters with widely different temperaments, they’re generally quite accepting of one another, and there’s rarely any real tension between them. Her feisty main female characters, for instance, are often paired with a slightly sorry-for-themselves older boy, but get on well. (And even busybody Aunt Paula isn’t presented as a villain, merely one of those annoying types of people you have to put up with when you’re a child.)

There are often understated aspects of loss and even tragedy lurking in the background of North’s books. The younger main characters are always parentless, even if only temporarily (as in this book), but there are also the genuine tragedies: here, the twin suicides of James’s parents, in The Cloud Forest the death of Raymond Annerlie’s brother’s family in a car accident, and in The Light Maze the sudden disappearance of Sally’s husband. These never impose themselves too much on the narratives, but it’s notable there’s always something of the sort present.

The fantasy element in her books is the presence of another realm that quite clearly represents the imagination or the inner world, but which is nevertheless a very real place, with genuine dangers. This realm is formless and changeable rather than being a solid otherworld like Narnia, and the presences within it are representative of psychological or spiritual dangers, but (as in the serpent and eagle guardian figures Liz meets in this book) also of positive forces. The general feeling is that humans, though connected to this realm, shouldn’t be interacting with it in such a direct way, and it’s only misguided or greedy people (as with the occult-tinged groups of The Cloud Forest and The Light Maze) or those with unhealthy unconscious preoccupations (James Mortlake’s gloomy art in this book) that threaten to bring that realm directly into contact with human beings, making it much more perilous. The message is that this realm, and the imagination or unconscious generally, should be treated with seriousness, respect, and disinterest rather than power-hunger or desire.

Throughout, though, North’s writing is light and gently humorous. (I particularly liked her description of Uncle Charles as looking “like a gently enquiring camel”, though there’s not a lot of that Wodehousian use of language.) Her plots take their time (perhaps too much for a modern readership—I certainly wondered why Liz and co., trapped in a fog-beset and slowly disappearing house, didn’t do something about it far earlier), and though they’re about genuine dangers, they’re never oppressive or overly dark.

In general, North’s books seem to belong to that end-of-the-sixties period of spiritual seeking, where they veer mostly towards a Buddhistic detachment from worldly passions and a moderation in all things, along with an easy tolerance of the many sorts of people to be found in the world (though, at the same time, a lightly satirical eye cast on those that North disapproves of: the faddish, the busybodies, and those who want power). But her books aren’t really part of the trend that most interests me in YA fiction as it headed into the 70s, with that greater sense of socially-conscious realism, starker drama, and darker fantasy from the likes of Alan Garner, William Mayne, Louise Lawrence, and so on. Perhaps the closest equivalent is Penelope Farmer’s Castle of Bone—though North is no way near as outright weird as that book.