This World and Nearer Ones. Brian Aldiss
irrational idea into the rationalism of Campbellian SF. Such creatures earn themselves a book title – The Night Shapes. This is not one of Blish’s best novels; perhaps Darkest Africa, with uneasy references to Rider Haggard – though E. R. Burroughs is nearer to the mark – suited the Blishian temperament less well than the Arctic. A terrible valley, likened to Eden, ‘burns out’ (and so becomes Hell?), releasing the night shapes. ‘The night shapes aren’t animals, or men, or demons, even to begin with. They’re the ideas of evil for which those real things only stand. The real things are temporary. They can be hunted. But the shapes are inside us. They’ve always lived there. They always will.’
The context does not support the premise. But the premise of such night shapes often supported Blish.
Not only did he see them as convenient shorthand for an alien system of thought intruding itself on the cartesian universe, he had a markedly individual belief in Good and Evil. Through his windows on eternity he watched the Fall re-enacted. His purest version of the Fall is played out on Lithia, the planet in A Case of Conscience, the first volume of After Such Knowledge. That ponderous title, After Such Knowledge, is a quotation from T. S. Eliot: ‘After such knowledge, what forgiveness?’ Nobody earns forgiveness in Blish’s worlds; the math is against it. Religion’s no help. Even the Devil has to suffer by taking up the burdens of God at the end of The Day After Judgement.
Not that Blish believes in or asks us to believe in actual devils. But he has an interest in them which some might find excessive. He likes to hold the proposition open, if only as one of ‘the multitude of great ideas belonging to other cultures’ (devils being far from a Christian prerogative); perhaps he teased himself by the quotation from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters used in Black Easter: ‘There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive or unhealthy interest in them.’
The night shapes in the African valley soon found more sophisticated embodiment. When devils materialise in Death Valley (in The Day After Judgement), the whole world is under threat. Language is used as a defence against them, as language has conjured them, US military intelligence protects the troops from the dreadful knowledge of demons by use of typical military double-talk:
‘Enemy troops are equipped with individual body armour. In accordance with ancient Oriental custom, this armour has been designed and decorated in various grotesque shapes, in the hope of frightening the opposition. It is expected that the American soldier will simply laugh at this primitive device.’
Earth has become a hinterland of Hell. This is the Blishian law: close to home, devils appear. Farther away from Earth, apparitions become more celestial. Not only is Mother Earth inescapably soiled by her fecundity; Blish shares the belief, common to many American SF writers of his generation, that for Man to remain on Earth is to invite stagnation (as if the Chinese show any signs of stagnation by remaining in China).
Lithia, only forty light-years away from Earth, may or may not be the province of the devil. But far away, far from home in the centre of the galaxy, in the light, in the Heart Stars, there we find angels. ‘Inside that vast dust cloud called the Greater Coal Sack, the Angels orbited and danced in their thousands, creatures older than the planets, older than the suns, many of them as old as the universe itself.’
What, we may well wonder, lies behind the fantastic notion of a localised evil, and of a heaven accessible to star-travellers? Are we to regard this as just another mad sci-fi idea, or take it seriously, perhaps as an extended version of John Donne’s lovely paradox:
At the round earths imagin’d corners, blow
Your trumpets, Angells, and arise, arise
From death?
Deploying this vision through several books, Blish demands we take serious notice of it if we are to take him seriously.
So what are all these angels and devils doing, flitting so anachronistically through modern science fiction? The answers are complex, and spring from the complex nature of James Blish, who contained in himself much of the crabbed knowledge and temperament of his star, Roger Bacon. Sometimes, we are meant to take the devils literally, as in Black Easter and The Day After Judgement; sometimes, they are deployed more metaphorically. As for the vast distance wherein we are purified, where we may meet with angels, they also represent passages of time, during which knowledge and judgement can be achieved. Several Blishian heroes make at least part of the journey, and acquire part-purification.
One who makes it all the way is Mayor John Amalfi. He becomes more than angel, God (a reversal of the way in which the Devil becomes God by visiting Earth in Day After Judgement – here the factors of the equation are transposed). For it is Amalfi, of all Blish’s human characters, who travels farthest; and the anti-agathics which make him nearly immortal ensure that he can travel almost forever. So in Blishian terms he has to head away from Earth. At the end of Clash of Cymbals, he reaches metagalactic centre, where a new universe is coming into being. Amalfi virtually creates that new universe, in one orgasmic burst of parthenogenesis.
This climax is Blish’s most daring reach for balance, for a treaty between good and evil, armistice between love and death. But the longing for treaty, for balance, is continually expressed, often in metaphor. There is a wish to see standard religion take its place beside a rigorous science (typically, in A Case of Conscience); then demons will become mere humans in armour and humans angels without armour.
The contradictions between antipathetic systems are ones Blish is constantly driven to bridge. In a memorable story entitled ‘Bridge’ (later incorporated into the tetralogy Cities in Flight, as part of the novel They Shall Have Stars), he dramatises the journey of a man across a perilous ice bridge on Jupiter, a bridge which represents the joining of two incompatible systems, since the man is not on Jupiter in actuality but illusion. An actual crossing of the ice bridge can never be achieved. Oppositions admit of no real bridges, or not under any math at present accessible to us.
It was towards such a bridge that Blish worked. His writing slowly becomes more concentrated towards the problems of knowledge and evil (that is, if we exclude the volumes of Star Trek which Blish turned out – for money but also, presumably, for relief from his pursuit of his dark quarry). The devils become thicker, the angels fewer.
In two renowned stories, Blish subsumes the symbolic angels and devils into mathematical functions.
In ‘Common Time’, Garrard is the pilot of an experimental inter-stellar vessel, capable of accelerating to near-light velocities. He finds himself undergoing extreme time-dilation.
‘During a single day of ship-time, Garrard could get in more thinking than any philosopher on Earth could have managed during an entire lifetime. Garrard could, if he disciplined himself sufficiently, devote his mind for a century to running down the consequences of a single thought, down to the last detail, and still have millenia left to go on to the next thought. What panoplies of pure reason could he not have assembled by the time 6,000 years had gone by? With sufficient concentration, he might come up with a solution to the Problem of Evil between breakfast and dinner of a single ship’s day, and in a ship’s month might put his finger on the First Cause!’
The passage carries a reminder of Sir Thomas Browne, physician of Norwich whose writings Blish enjoyed (‘Julius Scaliger, who in a sleepless fit of the gout could make two hundred verses in a night, would have but five plain words upon his tomb …’). The quotation from ‘Common Time’ gains vigour from deployment of similar antitheses. It is the mark of a genuine writer that, in the fibres of one characteristic sentence, he delivers a minute image of his whole thought, much as physicists once believed the whole solar system was modelled in the atom.
Without being aware of any contradiction, Garrard leaps between sentences from dreaming of ‘panoplies of pure reason’ to solving the Problem of Evil, as if he (or rather Blish) believes Evil could be resolved by Reason; the two questions are presented not as oppositions but complementaries. ‘Common Time’ was published in 1953, in the same year as first publication of A Case of Conscience.