Tag Archives: John Christopher

Most Underrated/Overrated SF

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We’ve done music and film in these posts before; thought I’d see if anyone read books.

So in terms of the most overrated sci-fi author, I’d go with Isaac Asimov. He’s hugely famous, but his books are really mediocre nothings (at least as I remember them; it’s been a while.) Gimmicky, outlandish plot, paper-thin characters, serviceable prose; just not a whole lot there. Heinlein is at least genuinely weird; the only thing to say for Asimov’s books really is that they thump along and are for the most part inoffensive.

For underrated — hardly anyone knows about John Christopher or Gwyneth Jones, both of whom I think are fantastic writers. (I’ve written quite a bit about both at the links.) (Oh…and one more piece about John Christopher here.
 

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The Nigerians Invade London

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screen-shot-2012-06-03-at-4-30-20-pmJohn Christopher’s novel, The Possessors, is (among other things) a metaphor of imperial reversal, in which Westerners have the tables turned on them and become colonial victims of space invaders. Christopher’s fantastic Tripods Trilogy also flips colonialism, this time more specifically focused on Christopher’s native England.

Christopher’s “The Long Winter” from 1962, though, seemed like it would be different. I’d heard that it was an apocalyptic tale of a new ice age. No invading aliens; no imperial metaphor.

Shows what I know. The Long Winter is indeed about a new ice age; due to some typically vague scientific gobbledygook, the sun’s rays start to weaken, temperatures plummet, and the British isles, not to mention a large portion of the rest of the world, becomes so cold as to be virtually uninhabitable. Fuel stocks are used up, food becomes scarce, and civilization quickly and efficiently collapses into savagery.

But all of that is really just a set-up for the heart of the novel — which is an elaborate, gleefully mean-spirited excuse to shuffle the English center and the colonized periphery. As Britain disintegrates, all those who can flee desperately to warmer climes — especially Africa. The influx of wealth in that continent creates a new, flush black upper-class. The white immigrants, meanwhile, have, in most cases, lost everything, and become a despised, racial underclass — living in filth and poverty, eking out menial jobs as maids or laborers or prostitutes.

Christopher’s detailing of this reversal is both remorseless and brilliant. In one sequence, the protagonist Andy and his lover, Maddy, having just discovered that their currency is worthless, spend a night on a Nigerian beach rather than pay for lodging they can’t afford — only to be almost arrested under a newly passed white vagrancy law. In another passage, Christopher describes several white boarding school boys talking among themselves with a “fencing unsureness…[a] glib pretense of acceptance into a society which, they knew at heart, would always deny them.” Andy, overhearing them, connects their attitude instantly to that of some Jews he had himself known at boarding school in England.

What’s best about the book, however, is that Christopher is smart enough about the workings of empire to know that it can’t simply be inverted. Oftentimes, narratives which flip power relations simply assume that those on the bottom will behave like those on the top if given the chance. The “moral” ends up being that everyone would misuse power if given the chance — which may be true, but is certainly banal.

Christopher, though, knows that empire can’t be separated from history. Africa in his world is on top…but it wasn’t always so, and that fact matters a lot. Whites may be discriminated against just as blacks used to be, but the exact inflections of that discrimination are slightly different. Sometimes, this difference makes the whites’ situation even worse. Many of the Nigerians that Andy meets clearly relish the Europeans’ come-uppance — they remember suffering under the English boot, and they are eager for payback.

In other ways, though, the legacy of colonialism is a boon for the fallen Europeans — or at least gives them more options in some situations. Andy’s ex-wife, for example, is able to attach herself as a mistress to a wealthy Nigerian in part, Christopher implies, because European beauty standards remain in force. Similarly, many white men who served in European colonial armies are wanted as trainers by the Nigerian military, which is perpetually preparing for war against the white regime in South Africa.

Perhaps Christopher’s smartest reversal, though, is saved for the end of the book, when a Nigerian expedition travels north to colonize England. Andy goes along on the expedition, which is (after some power struggles) led by his Nigerian friend and benefactor, Abonitu. Abonitu repeatedly says that Andy serves as a kind of totem; a sort of living good luck charm. In some ways, this mirrors the manner in which European narratives often rely on a magic Negro — a black marker of authenticity, who provides the hero with spiritual, earthy wisdom. Andy, however, serves a slightly different purpose; he is not a marker of authenticity, but rather an icon of empire. He represents the shining white city of civilization, the position Abonitu, and Nigeria, is trying to occupy. Abonitu dehumanizes Andy, but the dehumanization functions differently than the way that, say, Tonto is dehumanized. Power is inflected by history; for the Nigerians the magic of conquest is not a seductive, humid heart of darkness, but a seductive, cold heart of white. Thus Abonitu describes his desire to take over London:

“I am excited by the idea,” Abonitu said. “And disgusted with myself, a little. When the princesses and queens of ancient Egypt died, they used to keep the bodies until putrefaction set in before handing them over to the embalmers. That was because they found that otherwise the embalmers used them for their lust. London is a dead queen.”

But London isn’t quite as defenseless as a dead queen. Again, history matters; the English — who, after all, still have modern technology, including guns — are able to fend off the Nigerian invasion. On the one hand, I enjoyed the way that Christopher made Abonitu so much more appealing than the English, so that you (or at least I) end up essentially rooting for the colonizer. But still, it is hard to avoid noticing that, in his imperial set pieces, Christopher pretty much always finishes up with a happy ending in which the plucky English throw off their oppressors. However clever his reversals, and however clearly he sees their hypocrisy and their faults, Christopher’s English background is determinative — his people still, somehow, always have to be the good guy. Even if you know how history works, I guess, it’s extremely hard to keep it from working on you.

Colonizing the Colonizers

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Science-fiction draws many of its themes, and much of its emotional force, from colonialism. So argues John Rieder in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, and he makes a pretty compelling case. To take perhaps the most obvious example, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds derives its plot from a reversal of colonial roles; instead of the invaders, the British become the invaded. The book’s horror is derived from imagining oneself undergoing the trauma that one has inflicted on others — the terror of first contact; the subjugation to superior weapons; the wholesale destruction of one’s civilization; even the ultimate humiliation of watching your fellows betray you to the new overlords. The book can be seen either/both as a satire or critique of colonialism, and as a self-serving disavowal of responsibility — a way to see oneself as sinned against either to sympathize with the oppressed or to deny one’s status as sinner.

John Christopher’s novel The Possessors was written in 1964, long after the period that Rieder discusses. Yet here to colonialism is an important touchstone — and in similar ways. The novel is (a probably intentional variation on John W. Campbell’s short story “Who Goes There?”) is set in an Alpine skiing chalet. An alien spore, long buried in the snow, is exhumed by a rockslide, and begins to possess the vacationers one by one. The novel features unusually deft and vivid characterization, which makes the possessions especially frightening. Christopher gives us real people with complicated pasts and presents, and then erases them.

Imperialism here, of course, is not by sheer force of arms — in fact, when they are taken over by the possessors, humans become less physically threatening — they are slower and clumsier (though better able to survive extremes of cold.) Instead, the invasion occurs through stealth and corruption — an extension of the cultural betrayal that Wells touches on in the War of the Worlds when he mentions humans hunting other humans on behalf of the Martians.

The shift from overt to covert overthrow has, presumably, something to do with the Cold War. The enemy operates through misdirection and persuasion; conquering first by weakening from within. This isn’t so much a variation on Wells as it is a completion, or perfection, of his themes. Again, in the War of the Worlds, the invaders take the place of the invaded; here, the same thing happens, only moreso. In this sense, for Christopher science fiction tropes don’t merely become a metaphor for the Cold War — rather, the Western narrative of Communism is actually revealed as itself a science-fiction trope. The nightmare of Communist infiltration, the fear of turning into the enemy, is a story first told by sci-fi writers, for whom imperial invasion was preceded/enabled by becoming the other.

Again, it’s possible to see The War of the Worlds as a satire of imperialism if you squint a little. In more fully embodying the tropes, though, the Possessors closes down some of the ambiguity. Identifying with the enemy is a possibility, but one that is explicitly condemned and linked to weakness when Mandy is mentally persuaded to join the possessors “freely”, implicitly because they prey upon her alcoholism and loneliness. Moreover, the transformation/invasion of self is explicitly compared to a rape — or, as Christopher puts it, to “a grotesque and hideous mass rape of the soul rather than the body.”

In The Possessors, then, it’s much clearer that the image of the self as invaded is not a way to sympathize, but is rather a justification for not sympathizing. Indeed, it becomes an excuse for genocidal violence, as Selby, a plastic surgeon who gradually becomes the book’s protagonist, explains:

If this thing is an intelligence, and alien, then there is one thing it must know — that there can be question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.

This isn’t actually especially logical. The humans know little or nothing for sure about the alien. Indeed, they don’t even know it’s an alien, really. They now that a bunch of folks have gone nuts, and appear to be acting in concert to recruit others. That’s it. They don’t know for sure that talking wouldn’t help; they don’t know that reconciliation is impossible — they don’t even know what they’re reconciling with, or whether the folks out there — who sure look like their former friends — could be bargained with or talked to.

Nonetheless, the book makes clear that Selby is right, about everything. Christopher provides us with a little narration at the beginning and in other parts of the book so that we know what the threat is better than the characters do. So we find out that the characters are facing an alien intelligence and that that intelligence does in fact take over entire planets. Extermination is necessary. And so, when children and one’s own sisters and wives are all burned to death in the cleansing fire, there is sadness but no guilt or questioning. Invasion must be punished by death, even if (especially if?) the invaders look just like us.

This truth is re-affirmed, with a brilliant twist, in the much-lauded 1946 novella, Vintage Season, by C.L. Moore, a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore. In the story, the protagonist, Oliver Wilson, rents his house to a group of three mysteriously awe-inspiring strangers for a surprisingly large amount of money. Here’s a description:

The man went first. He was tall and dark and he wore his clothes and carried his body with that peculiar arrogant assurance that comes from perfect confidence in every phase of one’s being. The two women were laughing as they followed him. Their voices were light and sweet, and their faces were beautiful, each in its own exotic way, but the first thing Oliver thought of when he looked at them was: Expensive!

It was not only that patina of perfection that seemed to dwell in every line of their incredibly flawless garments. There are degrees of wealth beyond which wealth itself ceases to have significance. Oliver has seen before, on rare occasions, something like this assurance that the earth turning beneath their well-shod feet turned only to their whim.

Eventually, Oliver discovers where that aura of certainty comes from. These are not visitors from another country; they are visitors from the future. They have traveled back in time to Oliver’s day because it is a historically glorious spring.

Or so they say. As it turns out, the attraction was not exactly the spring, but its end. The visitors have come to watch a catastrophic asteroid hit, which impacts near Oliver’s house. The asteroid unleashes a plague which kills we-don’t-know-quite-how-many, but presumably millions, if not billions. Moreover, Oliver realizes, the visitors — including a women who becomes Oliver’s lover — are inoculated against the plague. They could have saved Oliver, and everyone else, if they wanted to. They did not because they liked their own time, had no wish to change it by changing the past…and perhaps most of all, because they couldn’t be bothered. Thus Oliver’s thoughts after the asteroid.

Revulsion shook him. Remembering the touch of Kleph’s lips, he felt a sour sickness on his tongue. Alluring she had been: he knew that too well. But the aftermath —

There was something about this race from the future. He had felt it dimly at first, before Kleph’s nearness had drowned caution and buffered his sensibilities. Time traveling purely as an escape mechanism seemed almost blasphemous. A race with such power—

Kleph—leaving him for the barbaric splendid cornoation at Rome a thousand years ago-how had she seen him? Not as a living breathing man. He knew that, very certainly Kleph’s race were spectators.

The visitors, then, are tourists, whose entertainment is the suffering and death of those who have made their luxurious lifestyle possible. As John Rieder writes, “The inevitability of history becomes rather difficult to tell apart from a naturalizing ideology that protects and disavows responsibility for the hierarchical difference between the tourists and the natives.”

It’s also worth pointing out, though, that “difference between the tourists and the natives” is in fact no difference. Oliver’s description of the visitors — wealthy, powerful, uncaring, decadent, spectatorial — is also, and surely intentionally, a description of Oliver’s own Western society, which also entertains itself with visions of apocalypse — like, for instance, the novella “Vintage Season.” This parallel is further emphasized by the introduction of Cenbe, an artist from the future who makes artwork incorporating footage of terrible disasters throughout history. His final triumph is a piece involving the events of this story — a piece, which arguably, does the same thing that the novella does.

Like Wells and Christopher, then, Kuttner and Moore present the possibility of our own colonialism being done unto us. And, again, as in those other narratives, the reaction to such self-violation is self-vengeance; the judgement on the callousness of the decadent tourists is fire visited upon decadent tourists — even if, ostensibly, the wrong ones. In most such narratives, of course, the elimination of the other who is the self is seen as the ultimate triumph, a quintessential apotheosis of integration and mastery. For Kuttner and Moore, on the other hand, it is presented as a kind of tragically banal inadequacy, almost as if colonialism, whether for colonized or colonizer, is not a narrative of triumph at all.