Tag Archives: Joachim Boaz

critical theory, science fiction

Testament of Andros—James Blish

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fig.1. The cover of Future Science Fiction, January 1953, edited by Robert W. Lowndes. Cover illustration by Milton Luros, “symbolizing the distortions of ‘Testament of Andros’ ” (page 4).

Testament of Andros (1953) James Blish

‘Testament of Andros’ is a remarkable early example of SF that is self-consciously modernist. It joins works like Kornbluth’s ‘The Last Man Left in the Bar’ (1957) as an example of a formally “experimental” literature predating and pointing the way to the 1960s New Wave in SF.

Like many works of modernist fiction, the form of the story is, perhaps, the most important aspect of its content.

The explicit, science fictional content—an impending disaster that involves the sun and its impact upon Earth—is told in a succession of numbered parts. Following on the experimental discovery of the “disturbed sun” in the first part, the following sections make up so many fragmented testaments of an apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic world that results from a solar disaster.

Or do they?

Blish anchors the story with a final reveal that calls into question the previous accounts—a reveal that is, nonetheless, appropriately ambiguous.

Joachim Boaz of Suspect Ruminations writes that “an organizing principle [for the story] is suggested by the ending”, such that the final testament but one (#5) could be read to say that the entire tale constitutes the delusions of T. V. Andros, criminal, rapist, and reader of “those magazines that tell about going to other planets and stuff like that” (p. 83). This certainly helps to explain the way such diverse testaments like those of “Andrew” (#2) and “Admiral Universe” (#4) relate to each other—the latter of which is a wonderful pastiche of SF pulps. Joachim further speculates that perhaps the first “four visions are fragments of what [Andros] read as a child […] manifest[ing] themselves after psychiatric treatment”.

But then, in the final paragraph of his testament, does Andros write himself into his own fantasy while sitting in prison, or is the world rather on the verge of destruction by errant solar flares?

“Outside the cell the sun is bigger […] there is something wrong with the air. […] Maybe something is going to happen.” (p. 84)

The divide between reality and fiction is finally dispensed with. Was it even there in the first place?

Unfortunately, immediately after the chilling conclusion to Andros’ testament, Blish provides a superfluous final testament. Superfluous in the sense that it seems to me that the author is tacking on a science fictional twist to try and make his story less threatening to the average 1950s SF nerd:

It was Man all along!

Or maybe I am being too ungenerous. The final fragmentary testament (#6)—Man’s Testament as it were—really doesn’t detract from the overall effect of the piece. And despite this, Blish rescues his story from a dread twist by going full ouroboros. And so, the narrative devours itself, the first and last lines making a neat couplet:

“Beside the dying fire lie the ashes. There are voices in them. Listen: […]
“Here the ashes blow away. The voices die.“ [pp. 70, 84]

Could this be the final testament? The final, inescapable, absurd twist?

The total effect of ‘Testament of Andros’ is to undermine the sense of a coherent and reliable narrative, even at its most “realist”. Not only is the testament of T. V. Andros (#5) itself ultimately called into question, the “realism” of other parts of the story is also attacked from within—and not just by way of the possibility that they are aspects of a deluded imagination. Thus, the first numbered part of the story, the somewhat “realist” testament of Dr. Andresson’s, is also seeded with striking touches of surrealism.  For instance, Andresson’s ageless wife, Marguerita, who reappears in the later parts of the story under different guises: Margo, Margaret, St Margaret, Margy II, the Margies, Maggy. The role of this spectral woman bears comparison to the surrealists’ somewhat questionable evocation of woman as dreamlike muse. It is, for all that, one of the most effective moments of the modernist styles on display here.

In part, Blish also anticipates Ballard’s metamorphic Travis/Traven/etc—in ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and The Atrocity Exhibition (1966-1970)—deploying the trope of anti-realist, fantastic repetition borrowed from the modernist avant-gardes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. A more apt comparison, perhaps, would be with contemporaries like Jorge Louis Borges, or the writers of the French Nouveau roman, then most of his SF contemporaries. Which is not to say that Blish is alone in the SF ghettoes of the 1950s. Philip K. Dick, Damon Knight, C. M. Kornbluth, Judith Merril, Walter M. Miller, Robert Sheckley, and William Tenn, among others, were also experimenting with form and content. But such experimentation made up a small and marginal part of what passed for SF at the time.

Highly recommended for fans of literary modernism in SF.

Note that all references to section and page numbers refers to the version of the story as it appears in Future Science Fiction, January 1953. It can be found online here and here.

And thanks to Joachim for bringing yet another story to my attention.

fig. 2. Robert W. Lowndes perceptive, if somewhat defensive comments, accompanying ‘Testament of Andros’ in its appearance in Future Science Fiction, January 1953, p. 71.
critical theory, science fiction

Babylon in the Sky—Edmond Hamilton

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fig. 1. Amazing Stories, March 1963, cover by Lloyd Birmingham, “illustrating Babylon in the Sky” according to the editorial page.

Edmond Hamilton’s late work, Babylon in the Sky (1964), is not a great work. It may not even be a good work. And yet it is competently written and relatively short and to the point. If I were to choose a Hamilton work to recommend to a newcomer, it would not be this one. A better place to start would be among his wonderfully elegiac late works like Requiem (1962) and The Pro (1964); his bleak What’s It Like Out There? (1952); or, not to neglect his early pulp efforts, the melancholic In the World’s Dusk (1936), the superlatively fecund Alien Earth (1949), and his rip-snorting horror adventure—and first published work—The Monster-God of Mamurth (1926).

So why write about Babylon in the Sky? In short, you will lose little if you just skip reading it. Nonetheless, the work itself has a fascinating central conceit: a world split between the creative thinkers and doers ensconced in orbital cities, and the rest of the populace back on Earth rendered largely superfluous to the requirements of a fully automatic production process.

Why were we left behind? an earthbound lay preacher muses as the story opens:

Because we weren’t good enough. Because we don’t worship the right gods, the gods of the machine that can’t make a mistake. Because we don’t speak the right language and don’t have a lot of fancy letters after our names.

Unfortunately, Hamilton does little with his interesting premise. As has been pointed out by another reviewer, the story does not rise above banal propaganda, reading more like a compressed paean to an Ayn Randian division of the world, no doubt beloved of many a fascist SF fan-boi then and since. His viewpoint character, Hobie—literally hobbled by the hierarchical class structure projected into space—turns from anger at his treatment at the hands of the overlords of the Earth to one of actively accepting their rule, once everything has been rationally explained to him. Ah, science.

fig. 2. Two page spread opening the tale in Amazing Stories. The Lloyd Birmingham illustration is possibly the best thing about the story, fist raised against the sky…

I read Hamilton Babylon in the Sky hoping that I could find aspects that would resonate with the near contemporaneous “New Babylon” of that sometime member of the Situationist International, Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka “Constant”—see my discussion of the science fictional aspects of Constant’s “New Babylon” here). The resonance, though apparent in the story, transmits on an opposing wavelength. Whereas Constant’s New Babylon poses the breakdown of the capitalist hierarchy founded on alienated wage labour and the accumulation of capital, Hamilton’s Babylon in the Sky is the further projection of this self-same hierarchy into space. Indeed, the idea of the ruling elites ensconced in space cities above the bulk of humanity reminds me of nothing so much as Marx arguing—with and against Ludwig Feuerbach—that the divine hierarchy is no more than the earthly one projected into an imaginary beyond:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice.[1]

In Hamilton’s story the ruling class have literally established themselves “as an independent realm in the clouds”. However, Hamilton’s rulers have finally resolved the “the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness” of their earthly basis: automation has rendered all manual labour superfluous. By the early 1960s the trope of the coming world of automation, material abundance and “leisure” had become something of a cliché, in the capitalist West as much as the state-socialist East. What today seems horribly naïve given the industrialised destruction of the planet alongside the ongoing domination and intensification of alienated work, was then a central plank of the reigning ideology.

In truth, the capitalist utopia of a world finally “freed” of labour is nothing more than the guilty conscience of a ruling class. Having turned the entire world into a vast workhouse of exploitation and profit, the capitalist class have long waxed lyrical about the moral and material benefits of an order built upon genocide, outright slavery, forced labour and concentration camps. That their order has produced more misery, not less, can today be simply gauged. After all, what other society has brought the entirety of the human species—amongst others—to the brink of mass extinction?

No doubt it is too much to leave these charges solely at Hamilton’s doorstep. That he produced an uninspired and even boring take on the question of automation, material abundance and the class division surely does not mark him out from many of his contemporaries. For more assured and interesting science fictional takes I would recommend Philip K. Dick’s Autofac (1955) or Frederick Pohl’s The Midas Plague (1954) for starters.

Hamilton is a peculiar figure in SF. From his first published fiction in 1926 he quickly established a reputation in the burgeoning pulp science fiction scene of the US in the late 1920s and 30s. He flourished throughout the 1930s and 40s, and reached a zenith of sorts with his dominant involvement in the Captain Future pulp series (1940-51), and the first of his Star Kings novels (1949). Hamilton’s star began to fade, however, under the impact of the so-called revolution brought on by John Campbell in the late 1930s and 40s. Nonetheless, Hamilton was never simply a one-dimensional pulpster. One of his great shorts, What’s It Like Out There? (1952), was worked up from an earlier draft dating from the 1930s. Its grim tone and downbeat ending found no home in the pulp scene of the ’30s and had to wait until the more stylistic tolerant 1950s—not to mention a substantial rewrite. Check out Joachim Boaz’s review and extensive discussion of this work for more information.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach [1845]’, in Karl Marx & Frederich Engels Collected Works, Vol.5, New York: International Publishers, 1976, p. 4 (thesis 4).