Collected Essays. Brian Aldiss
the theme, and includes a portrait of Captain Weinbaum as seen through an extra dimension: ‘a foot thick, two feet wide, five feet five inches in height, and five hundred and eighty-six trillion, five hundred and sixty-nine billion, six hundred million miles in duration’.
Blish in his introduction makes a typically prickly defence of his book, quoting a critic’s comment that it is ‘not redundant with physical action’. That may be so. But ‘Beep’ achieved immediate popularity, and has proved unforgettable. There is no rule which says that science fiction has to be packed with action. Better a tale of real imagination and ingenuity—like this one.
One of the most ingenious features of the original story lay hidden in its title, ‘Beep’. ‘Beep’ contains a wealth of meaning just like the beep in the story. Noise is information in disguise, Blish tells us. To ram the notion home, he has two people in disguise, plus a popular song, also disguised. And free will disguised as rigid determinism.
We are not taken into the galactic empire. All we are allowed is a peep, because we are stuck here in the present, without benefit of Dirac transmitters. But that peep, like the beep, contains infinite worlds, once you consider it.
Quincunx is really a clever bag of tricks. No wonder readers loved it. Its story-line is shaped in an odd spiral, the world-line of which whirls you into a fiery heart of speculation, then out again.
I just wish Blish in his introduction had taken the opportunity to explain his new title, since that task now devolves on me.
The title refers to the five-dimensional framework within which the affairs of the story are conducted. A quincunx is an arrangement of five objects at four corners with one in the centre, in the figure of a lozenge or other rectangle. The structure of the story leads us to believe that Blish may have visualized his small cast of characters set out in some such quincuncial fashion:
This figure lines up the males on the left and the women on the right, with the indeterminate figure of J. Selby Stevens in the middle to represent the vanishing fifth dimension.
Blish seized upon the idea of a mystical all-pervasive quincunx from Sir Thomas Browne’s curious work, The Garden of Cyrus, or the Quincuncial Lozenge (1658). Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire, restored the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, planting out saplings in lozenge configurations. Our word ‘Paradise’ comes from the Persian word for garden, and Quincunx depicts a kind of paradise, where sins and crimes are easily forgiven and young lovers have guardian angels—in the shape of Event Police—watching over them.
Browne’s tract is a discourse upon all the manifestations of quincunxes in nature, in mankind, on earth, and in the heavens. According to Browne, it is an all-pervasive sign, although little commented upon. This, of course, fits in with Blish’s conception of the world-lines and the math behind them. Despite all of which, I still think that ‘Beep’ is the better title.
But Blish liked such archaic systems of knowledge as Browne’s, and his books are choked with their fossils. We both had a passion for Browne’s writings, though I lack Blish’s ferocious appetite for archaic systems. Also by his bedside, that last time we saw him in Battle Hospital, lay a copy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. Coleridge described this book as ‘sketches of my literary life’, but it consists mainly of discussions of Wordsworth’s poetry and the philosophy of Kant, Schelling, and the German philosophers. I had a vision of Blish about to enter the complex realm of Coleridge’s thought. He seemed too frail to traverse those gusty corridors of metaphysics. Here was one more ramshackle structure of thought, tempting him in. But Time, with which he wrestled in Quincunx and the other works, had run out.
When James Blish and his stalwart wife Judy received visitors in their Harpsden home during the last stages of Blish’s illness, he would not be able to speak at first. In any case, he was not a man all found it easy to feel at home with, though his intimate friends had no problems on that score. When he had drunk a neat tumbler of whisky, he would liven up, and then would begin to talk. He spoke impersonally for the most part, eyes darkly gleaming in his skull; perhaps he could talk about opera, to which he listened on LPs. The operas of Richard Strauss especially appealed to him. He made dry jokes as he went along, creaking with mirth. He had great admirations, great hatreds.
At one time, when our mutual friend, Harry Harrison, was also present, Blish was going on at some length about Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, on which he was an enthusiastic authority.
Harry grew impatient at last.
‘Come on, Jim’, he said ‘it’s only a bunch of krauts singing’.
At which Blish broke off into tremendous fits of laughter.
All Blish’s novels repay reading and re-reading. He was never one of the most popular writers in our field, although his Cities in Flight series received great acclaim, and certainly A Case of Conscience—which won a Hugo Award—became popular even beyond the confines of SF. Perhaps it is because most of his books are ‘not redundant with physical action’ that he has otherwise been less widely enjoyed. He is, however, one of the most original of writers, and The Quincunx of Time one of his most original books.
He would have been delighted to see this new edition.
Time has gone by since the above was written. Books do not get reprinted as once they did, as the babble of voices grows higher. Jim Blish’s name is no longer greatly remembered.
I remember him. He died during a heatwave, on 30 July 1975, which happened to be the day I finished writing The Malacia Tapestry. It fell to my wife and me to find a burial place for Jim in Oxford. His last wish was to be buried in an Oxford college—he who was the graduate of an American college. It proved no longer possible to be buried in a college, unless one was perhaps a principal: the sacred but limited ground is choked with bones of earlier scholars.
‘They lie three deep’, one sexton reported to me, leaning on his divining rod.
We found Jim a resting place finally, in the overgrown St Cross cemetery. He lies within sight of the walls of Magdalen, not too far from where Maurice Bowra is buried, and another story-teller, Kenneth Grahame, author of Wind in the Willows. I often pass the cemetery when going through Oxford, and think of my old friend, whose imagination travelled beyond the limits of our universe. R.I.P.
Is it Worth Losing Your Balls For?
The learned papers on the SF of Kingsley Amis—even with titles like Revisionary Right-Wing Hermeneutics—have been few. I cannot compete in that area. However, some reflections might be set down with a view to reminding readers of an author, remarkable in his own right, who also took a great and amiable interest in SF over a number of years. During that period he produced two novels which should be better known to all those seriously interested in SF.
Since New Maps of Hell was published as long ago as 1960, we perhaps need reminding how widely influential it was. It was witty and knowledgeable, cocking a snook at the establishment, and served to silence many ill-informed critics. Indeed, it contributed to the slow upward climb (‘if that’s what it is’, I hear some say) of SF into respectability.
With that respectability, Amis and his friend Robert Conquest were soon to quarrel. Their argument was that SF was best within narrow compass under John W. Campbell’s jurisdiction, that the so called avante-garde experiments merely replayed much work of a similar disastrous kind done in the 1920s, and that respectability inevitably meant forsaking a previously unembarrassed muse.
On another front, Amis was conducting a war against educationalists, at a time when educational establishments were opening their doors to more students—and, Amis argued, thereby diluting quality. His slogan was, ‘More means less’.
In view of what has been happening since, we can see that if this slogan is applied to