The Voyage of the Space Beagle

 

I’d never read A.E. Van Vogt. I was aware of him, though. I recall being of the opinion that his stories were largely Space Operas. Where I’d heard this escapes me. Perhaps it is because of this very “novel.” I place that word on quotation marks because a great many of Vogt’s novels are what he called “fix-ups.” A fix-up was his habit of taking a number of his published short stories and rewriting them, linking them together into novel form. How successful he was in this is open to interpretation.

Maybe I ought to introduce A.E. Van Vogt. He was Canadian, later residing in California. He was primarily a short story writer, a regular contributor to Astounding Science Fiction magazine during the Golden Age of Science Fiction, and has been cited as being of profound influence to a great number of SF writers who followed after him: Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison, Robert Sawyer, to name a few. He “was the first writer to shine light on the restricted ways in which I had been taught to view the universe and the human condition", declared Ellison. A great many others concur, it would seem, from what I've read of him; but recognition was a long-time coming. That might be because his prose had a fragmented, and sometimes bizarre narrative style. Or it may be because of his bizarre beliefs, and his short-lived involvement in L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics. Who knows why some authors bask in notoriety, and others languish in relative obscurity; why some are buried under awards and praise, and others not.

I submit that Vogt was denied praise for so long may be because his output, however imaginative, was uneven. In turns out that Vogt was in the habit of recycling his stories a lot. Indeed, as I noted above, this novel is one such example. The Voyage of the Space Beagle is actually a collection of four short stories, “fixed up” into what is presented here. Those stories are/were “Black Destroyer” (1939), “War of Nerves” (1950), “Discord in Scarlet” (1939), and “M33 in Andromeda” (1943). Although mostly the same as the originals, there are differences: In “Black Destroyer,” for instance, there is no mention of Beagle’s central character, Elliot Grosvenor, nor his scientific pursuit of Nexialism, Vogt’s all-encompassing meta-system prevalent throughout. Grosvenor’s role is taken up by the ship’s commander (later Director), Morton. Archeologist Korita is present, as is Chief Chemist Kent, and Biologist Smith; but not Nexialist Grosvenor. Nor is he (or Captain Leeth) or his field of expertise in “Discord in Scarlet,” either. This might be why …Beagle feels uneven, at times, why Grosvenor’s expertise feels forced. Shoed in. Nexialism feels like an impossibility, really. That someone should know just enough about every other field of study and able to make sweeping conclusions about every possible outcome of a crisis with limited input is a stretch, at best; impossible, in reality, to my mind.

The Coeurl - from "Black Destroyer"

What is far more possible is that Beagle (a reference to Charles Darwin’s voyage, his ship, and his book) is very possibly an inspiration for Star Trek. The Space Beagle is primarily an exploration vessel. Both Darwin’s voyage and Kirk’s Enterprise were both on a five-year mission (the Space Beagle’s mission length is not actually mentioned, but is in the order of years) to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no man has gone before! (Well, maybe not Darwin’s…) Indeed, it ultimately leaves our Wilky Way galaxy, plunging into Andromeda. Along the way, it explores the ruins of a dead civilisation, encountering the Coeurl, a starving, intelligent and vicious cat-like carnivore with tentacles on its shoulders (suspiciously identical to D&D’s Displacer Beast), that kills a number of “red shirts” on the ship.

Ixtl - from "Discord in Scarlet"

The Beagle then encounters a telepathic race whose communications plunge the crew into homicidal madness. It must then survive the Ixtl, another “monster of the week,” that lays its eggs in the hollows of human cavities to reproduce. In the last story, the Beagle encounters a will-o’-the-whisp encompassing the whole of Andromeda, that unless overcome, will surely consume all life in the Milky Way in time. One cannot definitively conclude that Beagle did inspire Gene Roddenberry, but one cannot dismiss the similarities. What is conclusive is that “Discord in Scarlet” did inspire Ridley Scott’s 1979 film, Alien, however O’Bannon (the author of the screenplay) might deny it (he does), but there was enough similarity that Twentieth Century fox settled Vogt’s lawsuit, out of court, in the order of $50,000. One imagines that where’s there’s smoke there’s fire.

Illustration from "Discord in Scarlet"

The Voyage of the Space Beagle is an interesting study, if not a fabulous book. I found it dated. It might imagine an epic future for humanity, but its tech is firmly rooted in the 20^th Century. They still use atomic energy, paper, and there is a postal system aboard the ship, despite their having computers, and communicator “plates” (screens). The crew’s choice of language is a little cringe-worthy, too, referring to the Coeurl as “pussy.” I doubt they'd have been so dismissive of an obviously dangerous creature, however feline it appeared.

My greatest complaint is how clumsy Vogt’s writing is. It ain’t High Lit! His descriptions of tech sometimes left me baffled. So too descriptions of rooms. I found myself going over passages a number of times, thinking, “what are you saying!” Not a good thing. Also, why refer to video screens as "plates," when TVs existed, albeit in their infancy? Or Lazer weapons as Flame-throwers, regardless their being “atomic,” just because the beams were hot enough to melt the walls, literally?  And if they had Lazer weapons, why should the crew carry handheld “vibrators”? I expect they emitted tightly confined emitted vibrations. But can one tightly confine vibrations? One wonders whether they were merely a salacious inside joke....

My reservations aside, I’m pleased I read this time-capsule. If only that it was a precursor to Star Trek and Alien. It was a harbringer of what was to come.

Ice

 

I profess that I was (and am) an SF fan. I’ve read a lot of it. But judging from some of the videos I’ve seen on YouTube, I can safely say that I’ve only read a sliver of what is out there. Honestly, that’s a good thing. If I’d focussed on SF (and Fantasy – which I’d also read my fair share of – that once subgenera of SF that has now all but overwhelmed its supposed parent) I’d have missed out on far more personally inspirational works.

But that, here, is neither here nor there. What is, is that in those heady days when I passed by the bulk of the bookstore for those SF/Fantasy shelves, I had once perused a great many of what’s now considered classic SF titles and authors: Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein; Burroughs, Bradbury, and Ballard. To say nothing of the new kids on the block, then: Bova, Gibson, Sterling, and Robinson. To list them all would be tedious, so let’s just say I thought myself well versed in what was out there.

Need I say that after that lengthy preamble that I was wholly unaware of this now classic 1967 SF novel by Anna Kavan. Indeed, I have to say that I can’t even recall Anna, herself. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that Anna Kavan was not an SF writer.

I can’t concretely say when I first became acquainted with her novel Ice. It may be as recently as Charlie Kauffman’s surrealist film I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Kavan’s book was one of a number of somewhat famous/somewhat obscure works of art referenced within it. I did not pick it up then. I can’t say it (or many other of the works referenced) made much impression then, while I struggled to understand the unreal things happening on screen while its plot twisted in and out of my grasp. I only began to search for this novel after seeing it referenced and critiqued by a number of YouTubers singing its praise.

Now that I’ve read it, I question whether it is indeed an SF novel at all. It certainly is one on the surface. It’s post-apocalyptic: an undisclosed world war has come to its inevitable conclusion, and in its wake a nuclear winter is racing across the globe, a runaway mile-high ice advancing upon populations either in frantic denial, or succumbing to totalitarian autocracy, fracturing everywhere. The story is less about that than about a man obsessing about a woman, chasing after her, desperate (in his mind) to find her, protect her, to save her. As the story unfolds it becomes apparent that he wishes, not to protect her, but to possess her. She is forever being whisked away by another character, the Warden, of whom she is a prisoner, locked in rooms, abused, nearly catatonic in his “care.” She hates the Warden. But she also hates our unnamed protagonist, who is equally as brutal and abusive as is the Warden.

Everything is not as it seems, however. It’s right there, in black and white, at the very start, when our unreliable narrator declares: “Reality had always been something of an unknown quantity to me.” ― Anna Kavan, Ice

Kavan is telling us that nothing is here as it seems.

A couple pages later, our narrator tells us: “the consequences of the traumatic experience were still evident in the insomnia and headaches from which I suffered. The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams, in which she always appeared as a hapless victim, her fragile body broken and bruised. These dreams were not confined to sleep only, and a deplorable side effect was the way I had come to enjoy them.” ― Anna Kavan, Ice

Everything unravels from there. It takes a while to reorient oneself while navigating the oddly fragmented timeline – unless the above excerpts jumped out at you. Whole passages appear as dreams within the text, seemingly out of context from the narrative. Are they memories, imaginings, fantasies? Then, the story resumes. It’s all a bit unsettling. Hallucinogenic.

What’s germane here is Anna Kavan, herself. Kavan’s life was a bit of a tragedy: an unhappy childhood, failed marriages, drug abuse, suicide attempts, hospitalizations. Which brings me to what I believe the book is really about. Her style has been called slipstream fiction. And Ice is a great example of it. It is supposed to be unsettling, hallucinogenic, because, like much of her work (none else of which I have read, I will admit; I got most of her biographical information from the book’s introduction, and Wikipedia) it is perhaps an exploration of her self. Bear with me. Others have come to the same conclusions, I’ve discovered.

Everything in Ice is allegory. The Ice is heroin. The Warden is her periodic hospitalization. And our unnamed “protagonist” is her addiction. The Ice closes in. The Warden whisks her away, locks her up, the confinement painful. She hates the Warden, but is reluctant to leave her repeated confinements. Our narrator always finds her as the temperature plunges and snow falls, the Ice mere miles away. He “rescues” her, yet he too treats her roughly. She does not want to go with him. He insists. She hates him, and tells him so; yet he persists in his pursuit of this meek and compliant woman, regardless of her stated desire that he leave her forever. He refuses to listen. His rescues are all but kidnappings. But even when he “abandons” her she waits for him. She knows he will come back for her. And he does. Obsessively. She appears to love him. Taken this way, it all makes sense: the surreal context, the hallucinations, the obsessive nature of the love/hate relationship.

So, is it SF? It is. It is not. Is Ice a difficult read? It could be. But it is not.

Could I have read this in my early reading, had I know about it? No. Not at all. I would have been helplessly adrift. I preferred hard SF then. Less so now. Now, I prefer explorations of the human condition. More Bradbury, say, than Clarke. So, it is probably a good thing that it took me as long as it has to find this book, the last of Kavan’s published in her lifetime.

The Road

 

There are quite a few apocalyptic stories: On the Beach, I Am Legend, The Stand, Oryx and Crake, Station Eleven; the list goes on. In them, the world parishes by nuclear fallout, disease, climate disaster; it burns, it drowns, it bakes, it starves. It matters not, in this genus, how it dies that fascinates; it is how we cope during its dying.

This one, Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel, The Road, is fascinating in that regard. It details the journey of a father and son, unnamed, travelling south to the sea. Where they began their journey is as undisclosed as their names. So too is the method by which the world is dying. All we know is that their world is by all accounts dead, burned and blackened, adrift in black soot that shifts underfoot, its sky as grey and colourless as the bleached buildings they pass. It’s perpetually twilight. Choking. Dust, kicked up, takes its good time settling. Perpetually astir. No amount of rain cleans the air. It remains acrid and gritty, regardless how much falls from the relentless blanket of clouds that all but block out the sun and moon. The man coughs, despite his always wearing a rag mask to filter out the soot, its inner face as bloody from his breath as the outer is black by what it can never wholly hope to filter. The boy fares better; perhaps because the man tends to his every want and need, abstaining his own comfort and safety, even his own sustenance, in hope that his child will survive, even if he, himself, may already be doomed. Food is scarce, starvation always mere days away. Far more immediately dangerous, however, are the gangs of murderous maneaters roaming the same roads they do.

Have I enticed you to read this masterpiece? Probably not. How can you read something like that, you ask? But you should. McCarthy paints a far more vivid picture than any other who’ve approached the same canvas. J.G. Ballard attempted a similar desperate world in The Drought, albeit his was as sunburnt and dry as McCarthy’s is duskish and wet. But where both depict desperation in what appears to be the end-of-days, Ballard’s prose does not reek of it like McCarthy’s does. Cannibalism is hinted at in The Drought, whereas in The Road it is held up to the light. In The Drought, the cast of characters retain the semblance of civilisation, despite their need. Their presumed cannibalism does not horrify; indeed, one character has grown fat on it, yet remains altogether amiable to its protagonist. Not so in The Road. Predatory humans prowl the road, armed with homemade mediaeval weapons. Their slaves haul waggons, are locked in cellars, their amputated limbs cauterised to keep the meat alive for perhaps weeks of judicious paring. The victims are as dehumanised as their wardens. It’s all terribly horrifying. Yet our glimpse of these horrors is sparing. The true horror remains the landscape, the environment, and impending starvation. The man and the boy subsist on what can be scavenged: canned food, scrapings of seeds and flour and cornmeal, all of it suspect until ingested. The fatigue of hunger looms over them. As does injury and infection. Perhaps the greatest horror of all, though, is the hopelessness of their seemingly pointless journey.

Why are they headed south? The man tells the boy that it will be better down there. It will be warmer. He does not outwardly suggest that there will be more food – he knows that there won’t be. It is implied, however. How can there be? The world is burnt, after all. It remains unchanged, no matter how many miles and months they travel. If anything, it gets darked. Colder. Snowier. And wetter. I suspect the only reason they are headed south is because all hope had been depleted from wherever it is they began from, and to give the boy hope.

I will leave their fate undisclosed. Being a McCarthy novel, it is as painful and uncertain as all his are. But, it's a beautiful book, nonetheless, despite its bleak narrative. It is striking in its style. Its prose is as terse as Hemingway’s, succinct, sharp. Its grammar is explicitly McCarthy’s. His use of contractions is not what I would call conventional. He disdains dialogue punctuation. Dialogue is terse, seemingly pointless, yet pregnant with emotion. There is stream of consciousness. Sentence fragments. It does take a moment to get accustomed to, but it is always clear, as Faulkner’s (similarly stylistic, to my eye) rarely is to me.

This might be McCarthy’s best novel (I’ve not read them all, so take this with a grain of salt). I’m not saying this because The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, I’m saying this because I found it the most horrifying and emotionally gripping of all his that I’ve read.

The Drought

 

“He looked at the craft beached around him. Shadowless in the vertical sunlight, their rounded forms seemed to have been eroded of all but a faint residue of their original identities, like ghosts in a distant universe where drained images lay in the shallows of some lost time.” ― J.G. Ballard, The Drought

For someone who’s taken pride in my love of SF, I must humbly admit that I was wholly ignorant of the works of J.G. Ballard, until recently. For shame, some may say. In my defence, I might mention that my choice of reading material, living in Northern Ontario, might have been described as limited. To be fair, we did/do have a bookstore, albeit a chain. We even had an independent bookstore, for a while, too. Neither was all that large. Neither was small either – I’ve been in used bookstores whose selection beggared both combined. So, it goes without saying, before the internet, what we saw was what they had. And that was what we knew, that and word of mouth, and those lists of titles available from the publisher we might find in the paperbacks purchased. We, here, also live in the American sphere of influence, further limiting what might be had – its America-centric, but I guess you figured that out (indeed, even Canadian authors are not as widely known here in Canada as they ought to be). So, it comes as no surprise then that British authors would/could be somewhat unknown to us/me.

That’s no excuse, you might say, citing it’s been a long time since the internet made titles and authors once largely unknown in that foggy, mythical land of Before available. All true. But tastes and interests migrate. And it’s only now, in these years of nostalgia, that I’ve been looking back, revisiting old loves, and discovering new ones along the way.

I can’t say that I’m all that familiar with Mr. Ballard, even now. I know of a number of books that he wrote, that he’s a celebrated member of the New Wave of science-fiction, and that his Empire of the Sun is autobiographical. I also know that Crash was adapted to the screen, a Cronenberg film that baffled me then, and confuses me still. Perhaps that’s why it’s taken me some time to read Ballard. But Ballard kept coming up in YouTube videos I was watching, largely praising this, to me, unknown master of speculative fiction. It was their praise that convinced me to give him a try, despite my tepid dislike of Crash.

Was The Drought (1965, originally published in the UK as The Burning World, 1964) my first Ballard? It was not. That was The Drowned World (1962). Both are part of Ballard’s apocalyptic tetralogy, beginning with The Wind from Where (1961), culminating in The Crystal World (1966). In each, the world as we know it has come to an end (or is in the process of) from destructive winds, from solar disturbances that melt the ice caps, from industrial pollution bringing an end to rain over landmasses, or by the crystallisation of the world. Each stand alone. One need not read them in order, or in total, either.

I can’t comment on the first and last, but the middle two are good. Some might refer to them as masterpieces. I preferred The Drowned World, personally. I found The Drought to be a little uneven; indeed, I found the main character of The Drought to be less a protagonist than an observer. He barely plays a part in even his own narrative. Granted, he’s in shock; and despite his being a doctor, his skills are in limited use, considering the lack of materials and facilities available to him as society brakes down and the populace is in a destructive, predatory, self-preservation, downward spiral. Relationships are largely disposable, understandably, each out for themselves, for the most part; but this is a novel, and narrative arcs are what hold a story together. Story ought not to drift, as the characters here would be expected to do, unearthing water sources and food supplies. As they understandably would. There ought to be an actual plot beyond mere survival. That said, the horror of surviving in this dying world is only hinted at, glossed over, even comic in its portrayal; unlike how vivid those horrors are depicted in Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Ballard's survivors are far less horriying in their loss of humanity as are McCarthy's. I expect that is why McCarthy's apocolyptic world is the greater and more famous of the two.

The Drought, by Criss Foss

I might add that I was somewhat distracted by the world itself. It is imaginary. Though British, Ballard’s Burning World is not England. It is not the continent, either. The characters all have English names. They travel hundreds of miles south to the sea (a ludicrous direction on an island nation), leading me to believe that this book must take place in a fictional North America, and that the riverbed they follow must be the Mississippi (otherwise why not head north to the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence, or east towards the coast). Yet the book is replete with English jargon, leaving me wondering from time to time, what the hell is a…. So too flora and fauna. We have precious few rooks here in North America, for instance. He was obviously writing for his English audience and peppering his books with things he and they would recognise.

I did enjoy it, however, despite my grievances. In fact, I'm glad I've found him and his voice. Ballard reminds me of Ray Bradbury and John Wyndham, insofar as his stories are not really about tech or even how the world came to drown or burn, his books are about how people would be affected by what if happening to them, on how they might cope with their new paradigm: altruistically, predatorily, or even catatonically. Perhaps that is why J.G. Ballard remains popular, decades after his death.

I recommend you have a dictionary hand while reading Ballard, or a search engine, just so that you can translate his Britishisms, if you are not familiar with his vernacular. Don’t be put off by that, either; the British have likely had the same criticisms of American vernacular, too.