This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss
is given form in Fallen Star, for instance, by the little pebble which Farnsworth embeds in an ordinary ice cube.
The pebble is a tektite fallen to Earth from the region of the asteroid belt, and consists of sedimentary rock. The implications of this find are tremendous. An asteroidal protoplanet once existed which supported oceans for a long period. So its climate must have been warmer than Mars; it must have had an atmosphere. A later discovery carries these theories further. There was life on the planet. And it was destroyed by the Martians within the period of Man’s span on Earth. There has been War in Heaven. As Farnsworth says – ‘Cosmic history in an ice cube!’
These and similar preoccupations explain why Blish felt such admiration for C. S. Lewis, to whose memory Black Easter is dedicated. Yet Blish is of what we may term the Campbell Generation; his work bears at least superficial resemblances to the other writing forged on John W. Campbell’s anvil. The Okie series, for example, gathered into book form as Cities in Flight, ran in serial form over a number of years in Campbell’s Astounding. Beneath the galactic gallivantings, however, lies something more hard-headed than anything in Heinlein, more intellectual than anything in Asimov, and more immense than anything in Van Vogt. Moreover, that something has little in common with the two SF writers Blish most admired, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth, for he rarely attempts the romantic and satiric modes in which Kuttner and Kornbluth are most successful.
In their spirit of enquiry, Blish’s novels are centrally science fictional. It is in the direction of that enquiry that Blish’s originality lies. We can only hope that some critic will come along and investigate his whole considerable oeuvre for us, revealing Blish’s true stature. I hope to point to a few lines of enquiry in this essay.
One main topic in the Astounding to which Blish contributed his early stories may be summed up in that striking phrase of Winston Churchill’s: ‘The Stone Age may return on the gleaming wings of science.’ Campbell’s writers, whatever they might profess on the surface, were ambivalent regarding the virtues of the future world to which they saw themselves progressing as the outriders of culture. Time and time again, their stories dramatise experiments which – like those of Wernher von Braun in real life – metaphorically aim for the stars but hit London. Only in the stories of Isaac Asimov do we glimpse some kind of ordered and rational future. Yet, in the most popular of all sagas to emerge from Campbell’s forge, Asimov’s Foundation, (the title of that civilisation which Hari Seldon must preserve against the forces of decline) culture has nothing to do with the arts and humanities: it signifies merely an extrapolated twentieth-century technology which encases Trantor in metal, opposed by a barbarism which rides in spaceships.
Blish’s conception of culture and of science is more profound: he sees beneath them to their warring source. He perceived how every civilisation is dominated by a few major ideas and how these ideas become gradually outmoded, dooming the culture concerned; the fate of the Martians in Fallen Star is not that their planet has lost its atmosphere, but that they ‘have gone frozen in the brains’. Blish appreciated the seminal value of the pre-Classical culture in Greece, and dismissed out of hand Campbell’s assertion that ‘Homer was a barbarian’. Ideas infused from other sources can regenerate older cultures, as is demonstrated in Dr Mirabilis, the biography of the ‘miraculous doctor’, Roger Bacon, over which Blish laboured so long. The same seminal thought moved Blish to yoke four totally distinct books, A Case of Conscience, Black Easter, The Day After Judgement, and Mirabilis, together as an uncomfortable tetralogy entitled After Such Knowledge. His obsession with the true scientific nature of cultures is dramatised in The Seedling Stars which owes much to Olaf Stapledon. There an Adapted Man is not so much a man as an Idea from Earth, inserted into an alien environment to regenerate it (the reverse of the situation in Fallen Star).
The Seedling Stars is ultimately crude because the grand experiment of seeding stars takes little account of the feelings of the living beings forced to participate in the experiment, despite the moralising about the venture which goes on. Blish was interested in morality as a consciousness structure, while singularly lacking conventional moral tone. Individual lives rarely moved him. What concerned him was connecting together incompatible structures; he had come to believe, through Oswald Spengler, that there were no eternal verities, not even in the mathematics which is the basis of culture; hence his pre-occupation with eschatology.
A passage in Spengler’s Decline of the West must have attracted Blish’s attention, and certainly is relevant to the present day.
‘The modern mathematic, though “true” only for the Western spirit, is undeniably a master-work of that spirit; and yet to Plato it would have seemed a ridiculous and painful aberration from the path leading to the “true” – to wit, the Classical – mathematic. And so with ourselves. Plainly, we have almost no notion of the multitude of great ideas belonging to other Cultures that we have suffered to lapse because our thought with its limitations has not permitted us to assimilate them, or (which comes to the same thing) has led us to reject them as false, superfluous, and nonsensical.’
Our culture, sensing that the numbers in the Renaissance hour-glass are running out, is now trying belatedly to derive notations from other cultures previously ignored. Hence such manifestations as Tao Physics – and possibly SF itself.
Throughout Blish’s writing, we find two predominant preoccupations: that some culture or phase of culture is coming to an end (generally with a new beginning implied in that end) and that fresh ideas transfigure culture. Both these preoccupations find resolution in concepts of number. What excites him is not the individual – how could it, given those preoccupations – but the alembic of mathematics.
So his books conclude with cryptic sentences, the like of which never was on land or sea.
‘Earth isn’t a place. It’s an idea.’
God is dead.
‘And so, by winning all, all have I lost.’
Creation began.
Then he, too, was gone, and the world was ready to begin.
This last is the final line of one of Blish’s less appreciated novels, A Torrent of Faces, written with Norman L. Knight and, like Dr Mirabilis, a slow growth. It concerns – so the author tells us – a utopia of over-population. Blish did not regard this as a contradiction in terms. Again, numbers exercised their appeal. He says, ‘Our future world requires one hundred thousand cities with an average population of ten million people each. This means that there would have to be seven such cities in an area as small as Puerto Rico, about twelve to sixteen miles apart, if the cities are spread evenly all over the world in a checkerboard pattern.’ This culture survives only because a large portion of mankind lives under the oceans.
A Torrent of Faces is a cascade of figures. Every conversation seems to flow with them. As Kim and Jothen fly towards the mountain range of Chicago, she tells him, ‘Somewhere inside is the headquarters of the Civic Medical Services. I was born there. Every day approximately fifteen thousand babies are born there. The nine outlying regional centres produce about the same number daily …’ And so on. It is all rather like the scene at the end of A Clash of Cymbals where, heading for the collapse of the universe at the metagalactic centre of the universe, Hazelton borrows Amalfi’s slide-rule to do a few setting-up exercises.
This is not just a ploy to baffle us with prestidigitation; the power of numbers is a real thing for Blish. In A Clash of Cymbals, it creates a new universe. Amalfi, the hero of the Okie saga, becomes the godhead, the very substance of the new universe (‘the elements of which he and the suit were composed flash into pleasure …’). Never was life everlasting achieved on such a scale.
This apocalyptic idea of one state of being leading to another is fundamental to a number of Blish’s novels and stories: one system of thought similarly supersedes another. Poor scientific Roger Bacon, arriving at Westminster, occupies a room foul with marsh gas from the sewer below; when he ignites it and blows himself up, he believes it to have been a visitation by the devil.
Blish’s work as a whole is remarkable for the visitations