All posts tagged aliens

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (1971)

Coming to this novel was a shock after reading five of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, science fantasy novels in a row. The Hainish stories are set in a remote future on remote planets and feature a range of humans, humanoids and aliens with Lord of the Rings-type names like Shevek, Ong Tot Oppong or Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe, who travel vast interstellar distances in spaceships or ride flying tigers, use telepathy and fire laser guns.

So it was a surprise to read this 1971 novel which is:

set on earth
in the very near future
above all, features recognisably ‘normal people with names like George, William and Heather

George Orr the dreamer

The premise is disarmingly simple: George Orr is an ordinary, unassertive 30-year-old office worker living in Portland, Oregon, who has started to have particularly intense dreams which come true – his dreams alter reality and retrospectively change history!

The dreams started fairly modestly – as a shy teen he was irritated by an aunt living with his family who kept trying to hit on him. One night he dreamed the aunt had died in a car crash 18 months earlier and when he woke up – it was true! He was living in a new reality in which the aunt had died 18 months earlier, and his parents and all his relatives and the authorities all accepted the fact, had never known any other reality, lived entirely inside the alternative history he had dreamed into being. George’s dream had not only changed reality but he was the only one who knew it had changed.

The narrative opens a few years later with George on the verge of a nervous breakdown because he is dosing himself with high-powered drugs to try and stop himself doing any more dreaming. When he nearly overdoses and a local doctor is called in who refers him to a psychiatrist, a certain Dr William Haber. Haber is a specialist in dreams and the human brain and is working on an invention, the Augmentor, a device which detects and amplifies a person’s natural brainwaves, with a view to treating the people with mental problems who are referred to him by identifying and restoring their ‘normal’ brainwave patterns.

In their first interview, Haber slowly wheedles out of George his incredible story and, of course, as a scientist and psychiatrist, dismisses it as one more of the many florid hallucinations and delusions he’s dealt with over the years. He puts George to sleep with a combination of hypnosis and pinching his carotid artery which he has perfected over the years and, as he goes under, suggests he dream of a horse running free. When George awakes, the big picture of Mount Hood on Haber’s wall has changed into a big picture of the horse he saw running wild and free in his dream.

Did Haber notice the change or is he like everyone else who lives in whatever new reality George dreams into existence, as if it has always been that way?

Over subsequent sessions, George realises that Haber, being at the epicentre of The Change, right next to the Dreamer, does notice the change. At the next session Haber witnesses George’s dream turn the horse picture back into a view of Mount Hood. Haber insists they continue the ‘sessions’, but George starts to realise the doctor has plans to plant evermore ambitious suggestions into his head.

Thus soon Haber is transformed from a struggling researcher in the cramped room on the 64th floor of a rundown building, but the head of a prestigious dream research institute with a big office and a stunning picture window commanding a view over the surrounding landscape. And each successive phase of the story records Haber’s increasingly ambitious attempts to restructure the entire world to make it a better place.

Unfortunately the human mind, the unconscious dreaming mind, or George’s mind anyway, responds to Haber’s prompts in unnervingly indirect or unexpected ways. Thus, when Haber puts George to sleep, turns on the brainwave Augmentor and suggests to him that he overcome his fear of people, of being claustrophobically trapped in the overcrowded transport system and inadequate housing of modern Portland – George responds with a particularly vivid dream in which mankind has experienced a horrific plague a few years earlier, which devastated the earth’s population, reducing it from 7 billion to less than 1 billion. In this new reality everybody has experienced and refers to the Crash (p.79) a carcinomic plague caused by toxic chemicals in the air from car and industrial pollution.

And when he wakes up – it is true: George’s dream version of events has become human history, the overcrowded city of Portland with its gleaming skyscrapers has morphed into an underpopulated town of 100,000 whose outer suburbs were looted then burned down in the social chaos which followed the Great Plague. Both Orr and Haber manage to accommodate to this new reality – and to the fact that all their loved ones, parents and wives, have died in this vast global holocaust.

Even more drastic is Haber’s next attempt to make a better world. Throughout the narrative characters have been referring to a war bubbling away in Eurasia, which seems to involve Israel, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan and threatens to drag in other countries. So at their next session Haber puts Orr under and, as he goes into deep sleep, suggests that George creates World Peace.

Unfortunately, Orr’s imagination does this via the unexpected route of inventing an attack on humanity by aliens from outer space who capture the moon, murder the handful of earth colonists living on a moonbase and then threaten earth itself. George has certainly achieved peace on earth, and united the squabbling nations of the world – but at the cost of threatening all mankind with attack by ferocious aliens, methane-based forms of life from the planet Alderbaran (pp.132,142).

And so, bizarrely, on – each successive dream world session raising the stakes, and plunging George into deeper and deeper panics and bewilderment.

Even more dramatic than the Crash, the next sequence in which the aliens suddenly attack Portland, leading to the US launching nuclear weapons and bombing raids against them which go horribly wrong and end up doing far more damage to the city and its inhabitants than to the aliens. They even trigger the dormant volcano, Mount Hood, into having a full-blown volcanic eruption and raining lava bombs onto the terrorised city. Chaos!

In the midst of this pandemonium, Orr makes his way across the ruined city dodging bombs and flying lava and makes it up to Haber’s office, where, ignoring the pandemonium, Haber puts George into deep sleep just as an alien appears, hovering at Haber’s smashed-out window and threatens to blast them all, and….

George’s dream once again transforms reality. For now it turns out the aliens are peace-loving, the attack on the moon settlers was a misunderstanding, they don’t have any weapons, there are only a thousand or so of them and they came in peace. So much so that, in this new reality, aliens are integrated into human society, walking the streets (admittedly in their eight-foot-tall spacesuits which make them look like giant turtles), Portland is restored to pristine condition and Dr Haber has been promoted once again, becoming a leading light in the World Planning Centre, the chief agency of the new, global ‘Federation of Peoples’ (p.126).

The future

So far I haven’t mentioned an important element of the novel which is that it is set in the future – not the remote, far-distant future of the Hainish novels but what was then – for Le Guin writing in 1970 – a mere thirty years in the future: the novel is set in 2002.

Quite apart from the mayhem caused by George’s dreaming, this futureworld is quite a lot to take on board, for Le Guin sees it as a dystopia. In this future, the global population is over seven billion, with the result that there isn’t enough food: many foodstuffs we are familiar with have disappeared, such as meat and any interesting alcoholic drinks. The doctor who first treats George casually mentions the incidence of kwashiorkor, a disease caused by malnutrition, among the city’s children. An oppressive aspect of George’s life in the early parts of the story is the horrifying cramped and packed conditions of public transport (private cars have long since been banned) – an anxiety which eventually leads him, as we’ve seen, to dream of a global plague which kills off most of the human population.

(I smiled as I read the ‘horrifying’ descriptions of George being pressed up against the other commuters on Portland’s packed trains and trams – that’s what I and tens of thousands of Londoners experience every day, trying to fight our way onto tube and overground trains every morning and evening.)

But by far the most striking aspect of Le Guin’s mentions of Global Warming. 1971 and she is talking about Global Warming! As Le Guin envisions it, the huge increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from industrial output and unfettered internal combustion engine usage has set in train global warming, which, by the time the novel is set – 2002 – has become unstoppable. The polar ice caps are melting, New York is going to be drowned, the average temperature has gone up – with the result that Portland experiences a permanent warm drizzle:

the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.

It is like, George reflects, walking around in a thin warm soup.

It is quite a thing to be reading, in 2019, a novel which warns so accurately and prophetically about the catastrophic impact of manmade pollution and global warming. Shows you just how long anyone who cares about the environment, or understands environmental science, has known about the threat – fifty years! And yet what has been done to reduce carbon emissions, to limit car and plane and ship use, industrial emissions or ruinous agricultural practices in all that time?

Nothing.

Love interest

The other big thread I haven’t mentioned yet is the love interest. On page 40 George goes to visit a lawyer, Heather Lelache. Characteristically for the original version of the ruined dystopia, Heather works at a law firm whose offices are in a converted multi-storey car park – remember that, by 2002, private cars are a thing of the past and the huge concrete infrastructure built around them has had to be repurposed.

As with all Le Guin’s novels, it is nothing like a conventional love affair. Heather is described as being festooned with bangles, hard and clacking, a loud brass necklace, and is hugely unsympathetic to George when he comes to see her. He wants her to intervene with Haber somehow, maybe under privacy law. Heather listens with ill-concealed boredom as George tells his increasingly mad tale about how his dreams can change the world. She finally reluctantly agrees to arrange to visit Haber’s practice in the guide of a health and safety lawyer – but he persuades her to attend a session with Haber under the guide of a kind of health and safety inspector and arrange it so she sits in on a session with George.

This she duly does, and is present to witness the dream in which George dreams of the Great Plague, the Crash, which wiped out six-sevenths of the human population. She is staring out Dr Haber’s window over the skyscrapers of downtown Portland as the Change kicks in and she watches them shimmer, melt and disappear, to be replaced by the ruined low-rise town which Portland has become six years after the Crash (p.61).

Whereas Haber is a megalomaniac who quickly seizes upon the situation to implement his world reforms, Heather is more like you and me and responds to the change with terror and confusion. From that moment on she believes George but struggles to really accept the implications. A few days later she goes to see him at his rented apartment and discovers him in a terrible state, having tried to stay permanently awake. She persuades him to leave the city and drives him to the cabin in the countryside (which he has awarded himself as winner of a state lottery, in one of his many dreams) and here she cares for him, feeds and waters him, loads him onto the cot bed and falls asleep beside him.

They are both jerked out of their sleep by sirens and explosions. It is the invasion of the aliens I mentioned above, in which the US responds by firing nuclear missiles into space, some of which are deflected back to earth and explode setting off the vast volcanic eruption of Mount Howe, and so on. It is Heather who helps George drive back to the city and make it up to Dr Haber’s office, be wired up to the Augmentor and go into deep sleep just as a weird ovoid alien vehicle smashes through Haber’s office window…

In the new peaceful world which follows George sorting out this crisis, Heather and George become close. She is black, one of many black or non-white leading characters which populate Le Guin’s novels. She explains that her father was a radical black activist back in the 1970s (i.e. when the novel was written) and her mother a rich man’s daughter who rebelled against her privileged background (p.102).

Heather is, potentially, an interesting character and yet… Le Guin never really conveys her as a character apart from having lots of clacking bangles and clicking handbags and projecting a tough armature.

Humour

Le Guin is not a very funny writer. There is hardly any humour and certainly no warmth in her novels. I find them cold and heartless. But, unlike any of the Hainish novels, this one does have some attempts at humour.

There is some fairly crude satire in having the President of the United States named President Merdle (Albert B. Merdle, in fact):

the association with the French word merde meaning shit and
the other association, with the fictional character in Dickens, the millionaire financier Merdle in Little Dorrit who turns out to be a complete fraud

There is a flicker of humour in the start of the scene where Heather visits Haber’s office, and uses a pocket tape recorder to record their conversation which goes teep every few seconds and at one point Haber’s phone goes off, making a deep bong noise, the two sounds creating an antiphonal piece of minimalism.

And there’s humour of a sort in the unintended shape some of George’s dreams take: – I suppose it’s ‘funny’ that when Haber tries to get him to create World Peace, George does so at the cost of inventing an alien invasion!

Along the same lines, once the alien situation is dealt with and it turns out that they were friendly all along and are perfectly integrated into human society, Haber has a go at solving another social problem, the ‘race problem’ (like the references to global warming, it’s salutary and rather shocking to be reminded how long topics which are in the headlines as some kind of ‘news’ have in fact been around).

Anyway, when George comes round from this dream it is to find that he has indeed solved the ‘race problem’ – by turning everyone grey! There are no longer white or black or brown or yellow people. Everyone is the same uniform shade of battleship grey.

I suppose that’s sort of funny, but Le Guin has a way of draining the life out of everything. What could possibly have become a funny theme is made to feel tragic when George realises that Heather – who he has come to love who, indeed, in one of the worlds he creates, he has made into his loving wife! – as George realises that his beloved Heather is gone. Gone. Everything he loved about her, the tone of her jet black skin, the shape of her skull, her black physiognomy, and the feisty, no-nonsense attitude it gave her…. all these have disappeared in a world of same-colour but drab and rather sad humans.

Le Guin is making a sort of interesting point – that maybe the inequalities and frictions between races, genders and classes are precisely what make life interesting – but the reader – well, this reader – experienced it simply as a loss. The same kind of loss as when Falk leaves behind Parth or Strella is revealed to be a treacherous alien in The Lathe of Heaven or when the swashbuckling Lord Mogien, who we’d got to like in Rocannon’s Planet, is killed off, or – much more seismically – when Lord Estraven, one of the two central protagonists whose strange alien condition we had grown to understand and respect in The Left Hand of Darkness is simply machine-gunned to death, pointlessly, to no-one’s advantage, by overzealous border guards.

So many of the details are what old hippies called downers. In a tiny example, in the post-alien-war peaceful world where Dr Haber has become a senior official at the World Planning Centre, George is walking across of futuristic plaza when he witnesses a ‘citizen’s arrest’ i.e. a public-spirited citizen has tracked down a man who was diagnosed with a terminal cancer and gone on the run. But now he’s been tracked down and, once he’s rounded up the ten witnesses required by law, the public spirited one euthenases the cancer sufferer with a poison dart gun.

It’s a throwaway detail, a moment in a much larger narrative and I can see it’s making a point about a new and different type of dystopia which George has dreamed and yet…it’s harsh and cruel, and… unnecessary. Cruelty is thrown in; the extra detail will always be brutal.

Le Guin’s fiction seems to me to be full of these moments of loss or cruelty and, after a while, I find the cumulative effect to be emotionally draining and upsetting.

Pessimism

So the occasional flickers of possible humour cannot outweigh the relentless negative pessimism of her worldview. It is a bleak future indeed that she foresees for us, living in an over-populated planet characterised by food shortages and malnutrition, many familiar animal species wiped out, much of the forest chopped down, the thin permanent polluted drizzle falling on everyone, the sea levels rising and drowning coastal cities.

And, as if this wasn’t bad enough – there’s a horrifying moment in the middle of the novel where George revels his really big secret to Heather; not that his dreams change reality – but that the world has ended. The over-pollution and radioactive waste was so severe that by April 1998 most of humanity had died out, and he, George, was sick and ill and dying and staggering through the corpse-strewn streets of Portland and, as he collapsed on a cracked concrete step, with his last flickering moments of life, he dreamed, dreamed of a better world, dreamed that humanity survived.

In other words the badly polluted, overpopulated, malnourished world the novel opens in, is a saved version of the world. The real one came to an end in April 1998 (p.104). He explains to a horrified and disbelieving Heather that all the subsequent versions of reality they have lived through together are not only dreams, they are essentially lies, fictions, inventions. The real world ended ‘and we destroyed it.’

Eastern mysticism

A lot is made of Le Guin’s abiding interest in Eastern mysticism, which informs her whole approach to character and plot, and underlies her interest in alternative states of mind, of perception, of consciousness. Indeed the title of the book is a quote from the writings of Zhuang Zhou, specifically a passage from Book XXIII, paragraph 7, quoted as an epigraph to Chapter 3 of the novel:

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.
Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

And at moments, very characteristic Le Guin moments, the narrative steps back from what you could call its Western technocratic mindset to create epiphanies of peace and detachment. In particular, at several points George – for most of the book a whining, stressed individual – is portrayed as momentarily monumental, the still point of a chaotic world, somehow the centre of something awesome.

George himself is aware of the value of silence and contemplation. In a central scene (pp.136-140) Haber tells George that all the tests he’s run on him indicate that he is dead centre, totally average, average height, weight, brain patterns, EEG; in a weird way he is kind of at the dead centre of the human condition.

‘If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor submissive. Independence / dependence – same thing. Creative / destructive, on the Ramirez scale – same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.

(Either/or. Aha. Now we see the meaning of George’s name. George Orr, a kind of permanent doorway into alternatives…)

This scene evolves into a confrontation where the pair challenge each other with speeches outlining the aggressive, technocratic, always-busy, improving and building western mindset (Haber) – and George’s intuition that humans are also capable of just being, and of going with the flow of nature and the universe – the Le Guin worldview.

So her feel for apparently Taoist, Eastern values threads in and out of the narrative, with sometimes very powerful effects in some scenes, butwith fortune cookie glibness at others. The aliens from Aldabaran have a very detached pint of view, if you can call it that. After all, they are inventions of George’s passive, middle-of-the-road imagination. As one alien tells him,

To go is to return

And yet, for me, whatever associations Eastern mysticism is meant to have with detachment and serenity are utterly overshadowed by Le Guin’s very Western obsession with technology, cities, urban living, drugs, dystopias, end of the world, science fiction, spaceships and aliens and murders and death. There is nothing detached, serene or blissful about any of these subjects. The Taoist thread is there to light a scene and gild a few perceptions. But for me it is totally outweighed by a heavy, endless acid rain pours grim and unrelenting pessimism over all her books.

Heather returns

Distraught at losing Heather, George drops into an antiques shop run by one of the now-friendly aliens. The aliens have their own language and somehow seem to know that George possesses a skill which they have a word for, iahklu. After a weird Zen conversation which may, or may not, mean anything, the alien apparently on the spur of the moment gives George an ancient 45rpm single vinyl record. George takes it home to his modest apartment, pouts it on the turntable, and plays it over and over again. It is Help From My Friends by the Beatles. He falls asleep and dreams.

Suddenly we are in the mind of Heather, as she awakens in George’s apartment, watching him sleep, listening to the Beatles on a loop. She’s back! He’s dreamed her back! Although it becomes clear this version of her has not experienced the Change and so doesn’t know about George’s dreams.

At almost every turn of the story Le Guin wrings the maximum amount of confusion from her characters.

The end

The narrative had been heading for the moment when Dr Haber perfected his ‘dream augmentor’ and this is the trigger for the book’s climactic scenes.

Haber puts George under one last time and instructs him to dream that his dream skills have gone, disappeared, ended. George awakens, and they have.

Haber thanks George for all his co-operation and bids him and Heather goodbye and they set off across the now, finally at-peace city — but they have got only a mile or so away when the entire world begins to fall to pieces.

Haber has hooked himself up to the Augmentor and is copying and augmenting the brain rhythms he’s spent the book recording off George. Now he is having his own reality-changing dream and it is a nightmare. Because he has no personality, no inner life apart from his burning ambition, the dream is the first genuine nightmare we’ve experienced, in which everything disintegrates into a terrible swirling maelstrom of emptiness.

George makes his way through the mounting chaos as the city and landscape melts into a tornado of meaninglessness, by sheer effort of will maintaining just enough physical reality to allow him to walk up melting stairs, cross disappearing floors, and ride disintegrating escalators to the collapsing office where Haber is lying wired up to the Augmentor and with one, final, terrific effort of willpower… to turn it OFF.

Coda

The scene cuts to a few months later, and the world is still struggling to come to grips with what everyone refers to as The Event. The world was restored to a kind of reality after Haber’s nightmare, but seriously out of kilter, with buildings, roads and so on half-built or built in two zones or clashing styles, starting and ending abruptly. As do people’s personal lives, and human history, which is now full of all sorts of inexplicable and nonsensical non-sequiturs – a kind of world of solidified chaos which has given rise to an epidemic of mental illness. Among whose victims is Haber, who is now confined to a mental home, silent, withdrawn, catatonic.

In this topsy-turvy world George has got a job in an antiques store, working for a detached, courteous ten-foot-tall, turtle-suited alien named E’nememen Asfah (now there’s the Ursula Le Guin I’m used to, with her silly made-up names).

George mourns for his lost wife, beautiful black Heather. Then one day he bumps into her in the shop being sold kitchenware by her boss. But she is not the same Heather. She is back to black (the grey world has gone) and is much harsher and harder than the grey woman who became his wife. She tells him she is married and his heart quietly breaks. She tells him her husband died in that war in the Middle East and his heart quietly soars.

She vaguely remembers meeting him once or twice at some doctors’ office; wasn’t he the guy who thought his dreams changed everything. Is he cured now? Yes, quite cured he say. And he invites her for a cup of coffee, both of them with a whole new unknown future to pay for.

Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels

1966 Rocannon’s World
1966 Planet of Exile
1967 City of Illusions
1968 A Wizard of Earthsea
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 The Lathe of Heaven
1972 The Word for World Is Forest
1974 The Dispossessed

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

>1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undergo a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population un

Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin (1966)

This was Le Guin’s second published novel and her modus operandi was well established:

Imagine a planet with a set of really unique or distinctive circumstances
Work out in great detail the implications for the kind of intelligent life forms which would inhabit said planet
Then, almost as an afterthought, devise a ‘plot’ or series of events, often fairly stereotyped or clichéd, whose real function is to help us explore – and allow Le Guin to explain – the ramifications and consequences of the strange world she has conceived

The premise

Thus – Planet of Exile is set on the planet Werel and the key facts about it are astronomical:

Werel has a moon, and Werel and its moon orbit around each other, taking four hundred days to complete each ‘moonphase’.
Together this orbiting couple circle their sun – known as Eltanin to the locals but Gamma Draconis to outsiders – in sixty moonphases – in other words, 24,000 days! (p.132)

Thus a ‘year’ – and one cycle through the traditional seasons – for the inhabitants of Werel, takes 65.75 earth years – in effect, one human lifetime.

So most inhabitants of Werel expect to experience just one spring, one summer, one autumn and one winter during their lives, and the seasonal changes we take for granted happening relatively quickly on earth (leaves turning brown and falling, it getting colder and starting to snow) last for years and years on Werel. With the result that it has flora and fauna, but they all behave in eerily different ways, ways which crop up as disconcerting details throughout the story. And the entire experience of life for the humans which inhabit Werel are utterly different from ours.

Background to the story

The farborn Over ten generations ago, colonists came from earth by spaceship to settle on Werel. To be precise, we are told on page 134 that it is the 391st day, of the 45th moonphase of the Tenth Local Year of the colony. I calculate this to be nine local years (216,000 days) + 44 complete moonphases (17,600 days) + 391 days = 233,991 days / 365 = 641 years since the colonists arrived on the planet (p.134).

They built a city they named Landin and a few others along the coast (one named Atlantika is mentioned a few times). Soon after the original settlement, however, the spaceships and some of the colonists were called away to deal with the threat of conflict with the Enemy – presumably the same extra-galactic Enemy referred to in Rocannon’s World – and since that date there has been no contact whatsoever with the mother planet.

Over this long epoch, the colonist population has been steadily declining in number due to miscarriages and infertility, and the colonists have slowly lost interest in much of the knowledge their books contain. They are very slowly reverting to barbarity. They can still read but no longer understand many of the references in the books they have carefully treasured since the Founding. As a small example, they have a good and effective doctor (Wattock) but in a scene late in the book it is made clear that, although he has read about bacteria and bacterial infections, he doesn’t actually believe in them (p.205).

The Arkatevarans The colonists live among a native population which is much more primitive, who they call ‘hilfs’ (which we learn stands for Highly Intelligent Lift Forms, p.148). The natives refer to themselves as Arkatevarans and live in what sound like mud huts, paint themselves with tribal markings, smoke a kind of marijuana, carry out primitive tribal dances and so on. Later on we learn that, much to some farborns’ contempt, the Arkatevarans have still failed to invent the wheel.

The story concerns a particular group of natives who live in a settlement they call Tevar, and so are referred to as the Tevarans. They are led by a wise, old, wilful, obstinate survivor named Wold. The Tevarans call the colonists the ‘farborn’, distrust and dislike them. They differ in a host of small ways, the oddest being that the farborn are unafraid to look directly at someone they’re talking to, while the Tevarans have a taboo about this, and always avert their gaze.

Another difference is that the colonists appear all to be black. Half a dozen passages refer explicitly to their black skin – not dark skin – black (pp.147, 156, 203, 205, 206).

Lead protagonists in later novels are also of African descent. Without some biographical reference or explicit statement, it’s difficult to know whether this represents an explicitly political move on Le Guin’s part – as a liberal academic, no doubt the was brought up to support the Civil Rights movement etc – or is part of the general science fiction strategy of ‘othering’ or making strange, comparable to the way all of her characters in all her books have made up and exotic-sounding names.

The story

What about the plot, I hear you ask. Well, the story opens as news comes to both Tevar and Landin that the Gaal are coming.

The Gaal? Yes, the Gaal are native tribes who live in the remote North but migrate south during the harsh Werel winter. Once a Werel year i.e. once in the average lifetime of our characters, the southerners have to confront this annual migration, which they call The Southing.

But whereas Wold is confident that the Tevarans have prepared and are ready for the Gaal incursion, the leader of the farborn colonists, Jakob Agat Alterra, thinks otherwise. He has heard from farborn messengers they sent out, that this year the Gaal have organised their various tribes into one massive horde and are not skirting the inhabited cities as they did in previous years, but are systematically besieging, defeating and occupying them.

So at the core of the story is going to be: Can the Tevarans and the farborn bury their differences and work together in order to prepare for the onslaught of the approaching barbarians?

As garnish to the tale, there is a burgeoning romance between Rolery, a young Tevaran woman, and Jakob Agat Alterra, leader of the farborn. They first meet when she has whimsically ventured out onto the huge mudflats by the coast, marvelling at the extraordinary causeway build on arches in the Former Times, which runs out to the black island which hosts some kind of bizarre architectural or artistic structure.

Ace paperback edition of Planet of Exile, showing one of the Tevarans admiring the long, strange causeway across the dry sand out to the weird island

As she approaches the cliffs of the island she suddenly hears someone shouting in her head to run towards the cliffs. Confused, she does so and she is scooped up into Alterra’s strong arms just as the 30-foot tidal surge comes rushing in over the mudflats. He has saved her life. The cynical reader suspects this will lead to kissing and maybe worse and, ten or so page later, it does just that. After going their ways back to their respective peoples, they bump into each other again in the forest as night is falling and go to one of the remote hunting hides where… they consummate their love.

Alliance – love – ambush

Next day Agat is back at the Tevaran ‘city’ where he agrees with canny old Wold that the two peoples should form an alliance. They agree a plan: next day a Tevaran war party led by the biggest and strongest of Wold’s sons, Umaksuman, will head north and rendezvous with as many men as the farborn can spare – about 300 young and fit enough to fight – and form a common front to be ready to confront the supposed Gaal horde.

But the plan goes belly up within hours because that evening, against his better judgement, as Agat is making his way through the dense forest to meet Rolery for another night of passion in their secret hideaway, he is ambushed by a posse of Tevarans. These young braves are led by one of Wold’s many grandsons, Ukwet, who is furious that Agat is consorting with a woman from their Kin group without their permission. They beat him to the ground and are heartily kicking him in the ribs and – we learn later – Ukwet had a knife and was ready to castrate Agat, when Umaksuman bursts in on the scene and stops them.

Le Guin describes the incident from Agat’s point of view, giving his subjective feelings, as the blows rain down on him, wanting to curl up deep into the warm mud and hide. Hours later he recovers consciousness, sort of, and it is a beguiling thread in the plot that Agat is capable of mind-speech i.e. telepathy. We are shown a number of his colleagues back in Landin suddenly overcome with unease, because he is ‘sending’ even though too damaged to make the effort to put his messages into words. But Rolery demonstrates the deep bond they have, by receiving the telepathic message, and going out into the forest, discovering him badly beaten and – she initially thinks he’s dead – before she rigs up a travois and drags him back to Landin.

Here, safe in bed and tended by the womenfolk, the badly battered Agat is told that the alliance broke down before it got started. The Tevarans refuse to rendezvous; all his own people, the farborn, would prefer to attack the Tevarans rather than fight the common foe.

The attack on Tevar

Back in Tevar we are shown the scene where headstrong Ukwet calls a tribal assembly and stands up for the tribe’s honour re. Rolery, and accuses Umaksuman of being a coward for stopping them gelding Agat. The confrontation quickly spirals out of control into a duel, while old Wold realises his time is over, he is no longer leader, and shuffles back to the big wooden communal hut where he huddles into the fire among the old women and babbling children.

I found the character of Wold very persuasive and a lot more appealing than the two heterosexual leads, Agat and Rolery who have the same kind of heterosexual love affair that I’ve read in thousands of novels or watched in millions of movies. By contrast, going inside the mind of an ancient, battered and increasingly senile leader of a primitive tribe was a genuinely novel experience, and Le Guin does it very very well, because she makes him wry and funny as well as old and wise.

When the women being him the decapitated body of Ukwet he isn’t surprised. Umaksuman – who killed him in the duel we didn’t see – is send into exile. Wold realises the city is doomed.

Next day the Gaal horde comes into sight and, sure enough, it is nothing like Wold’s experience of one long Werel Year (i.e. 65 earth years) ago. It is a vast mass of humanity, 30, 40, 50,000 men women and children swarming over the north hills and pouring into the valley. Soon enough the warriors come and there’s a vivid and exciting description of the tribal settlement being besieged then broken into, with fighting through the narrow alleys between thatched huts, mostly – again – seen from the eyes of ancient Wold, who manages to spear one of the attacking Gaal, but then retreats to his leader’s hut, ready to die.

However, we cut to Agat, patched up with bandages, and still a few aching wounds and bruises, but nonetheless up in the hills overlooking the vast tide of humanity and the siege and invasion of Tevar, with a small band of farborn fighters. Agat is surprised when out of the foliage emerges huge strong Umaksuman, looking the worse for having to live and forage in the hills. Quickly they establish a warrior-rapport and Umaksuman lustily agrees to join Agat’s men. They’re planning to swoop down into Tevar, take the Gaan by surprise and sweep through the settlement rescuing what women and children they can.

And this they do in another thrillingly described battle-cum-raid scene, in which they rescue women and children and old Wold finds himself picked up and carried out the burning village.

Later, safely in Landin, Agat and the others of the Council discuss next steps and they decide to dispatch all the Tevarans, along with Wold and their own women and children, along the mysterious Causeway to the looming Stack island. The drawbridge can be withdrawn, there’s a spring/fresh water, and provisions to sit out a siege.

Winter is coming

Now the whole reason the Gaal are heading south is because winter is coming. That phrase ring a bell? It is, of course, a central theme George R.R. Martin’s epic series of novels, Game of Thrones, set in a world which also experiences the seasons as extremely long, where ‘winter’ can last several years or even an entire generation, and where the coming of winter threatens the invasion of the north by the White Wanderers. I imagine tens of thousands of fantasy fans have pointed out the similarity between Game and this book. And Le Guin clearly has an affinity for winter, for snow and ice and cold – the award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet its discoverers nickname Winter, and the core of the narrative is a gruelling description of an eighty-day trek over snowy mountains up onto storm-swept glaciers.

Anyway, the point is that, as the Gaal arrive and the siege of Landin commences, so falls the first snow of winter which quickly turns into snowstorms and blizzards.

Siege of Landin

Sure enough, Gaan warriors invest Landin and the siege begins amid the first heavy falls of snow. Like everything else in the book, I found the description of the five-day siege gripping and plausible. On successive days the attackers try various weak points, manage to scale an undefended part of all and open a gate triggering a fierce fight to repel them, forcing the defenders to retreat to the central square whose four entrances can themselves be closed and barred.

As the fighters defend, the women and boys drag provisions or heavy stones or planks to the fronts to create barricades or to arm the catapults used in the early stages of the battle. Beaten back into the square, Rolery joins the nurses in the converted Records Room of the Old Hall, tending the never-ending stream of wounded who are brought back from the front, working alongside irritable but effective Doctor Wattock.

Throughout very heavy snowstorms blanket the city, blinding attackers and defenders alike giving rise to thrilling scenes where figures loom out of the snowfog, nobody is sure whether friends or foe. Rolery finds her senses sharpened and the inner mindspeech which Agat used on her alert to cries or messages from him, separated as they are for long stretches. The desperate situation also prompts various characters, from the doctor to the senior women on the city council (wise old Alla Pasfalto; Seiko Esmit, the last member of one of the founding families who is in barely concealed love with Agat) to discourse about various issues, from their long abandonment and exile from their home planet, to the possibility of their ever living in peace with the primitive natives.

We hear more about the Cultural Embargo under which all the space-travelling peoples of the League of All Worlds operate, namely not to prejudice the development of the peoples they land among by showing them advanced technology. Hence they had to hide their guns and whatnot, only allowed to retain dart guns which, in line with native culture, they are allowed to tip with poison (and which saves Agat’s life right at the end of the story).

(This Cultural Embargo is, of course, identical to the so-called Prime Directive of the Starfleet referred to throughout Star Trek, the original TV series of which launched in the same year this novel was published, 1966. Someone copied someone or it was just a piece of sci-fi commonplace.) Anyway, this explains why the colonists never flexed their full technical muscle, hid a lot of their devices and have now themselves forgotten how to use most of them.

Saved by the snowghouls

At the moment of direst extremity, our heroes are saved by a deus ex machina, namely the arrival of the snowghouls. Yes, snowghouls, white humanoid monsters with long waving necks which scare the Bejasus out of everyone, especially the besieging Gaals. The majority of the host had already left, leaving a small besieging force behind to either capture or lob in flaming brands to destroy Landin – but even those now head for the hills and our heroes and heroines go up onto the battlements, glimpse a few of the ghouls in action, and realise they are saved.

In the last few pages, there is time for a last few adventures: Agat unwisely leaves the barricaded part of the city to wander through the wrecked areas the Gaal have abandoned under the light of Werel’s dimly twinkling winter stars… and is attacked by a lone snowghoul, having just enough time to fire off his dartgun, before being thrown to the ground. The thing is just about to bite through his neck when the venom from Agat’s dart takes effect and the snowghoul falls off, shivering and dying beside him.

Chastened, he makes his way warily back to the heavily defended central square and to his beloved Rolery. The last act takes place the next morning, when the survivors of the siege march in triumph along the huge causeway out to the island with the strange building on it, and the Taveran defenders let down the drawbridge. At first Agan is full of joy until he realises that the women emerging from the Stack’s fastnesses are daubed in ashes and tear-stained. Their leader Wold died in the night. A new era has begun.

In one of the many intense conversations which took place in the Record Room during the siege, doctor Wattock had explained to Rolery that slight differences in their DNA explained why the farborn rarely get ill from Werel infections, heal quickly, but by the same token, have difficulty digesting Werel meat or crops without artificial enzyme additives.

He goes on to speculate that maybe, maybe this is why the conception rate has been so low among the farborn, and why there are so many abortions. Maybe… maybe it has been natural selection weeding out those who are really allergic to the subtle differences of the planet… maybe the survivors are steadily more acculturated to living on Werel… maybe they’ll be able to interbreed with the natives…

And with this thought planted in our minds, we watch Agat return from Wold’s Viking-style funeral pyre, back to the arms of his Tevaran wife. Maybe they will be the first to successfully interbreed. Maybe a new race will arise from the blend of Tevarans and Terran colonists, born into the generation-long wastes of winter.

Five thousand nights of Winter, five thousand days of it: the rest of their youth and maybe the rest of their lives. (p.212)

Credit

Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin was published by Ace Books in 1966. In 1996 it was republished along with Rocannon’s World and City of Illusions in an omnibus volume titled Worlds of Exile and Illusion. All page references are to the 2015 paperback edition of the combined Worlds volume.

Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels

Other science fiction reviews

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – planetary romance or sci fantasy set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who attacked his spaceship
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – the story concerns an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – who has been sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the real focus is on exploring the condition of hermaphroditism which is the state of the planet’s inhabitants, as Genly goes on the run with a disgraced lord, Estraven, and during a long, gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north, the develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the spare, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells (1901)

This is the seventh of Wells’s classic science fiction novels. He had also, by 1901, written over 60 science fiction short stories. Single-handedly he had created a new genre for the English-speaking world, which was quickly taken up and copied.

It wasn’t just that he wrote a lot, it’s that the early books each tackled, described, thought through and realistically presented some of the founding tropes of science fiction – time travel and attack by aliens from another world, being the two outstanding ones – which have been recycled thousands of times since.

The First Men in the Moon is not quite in the same league because it didn’t invent the topic of travelling to the moon – Jules Vernes had written a novel on the same theme thirty years earlier (From the Earth to the Moon, 1865) and in fact a number of fantasies and romances on the subject had been written for centuries (including the version by the 17th century writer Cyrano de Bergerac whose illustrations by Quentin Blake I recently reviewed – Voyages to the Moon and the Sun, based on the Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon, 1657).

Also, the scientific basis of the story – the mechanism by which the protagonists get to the moon – using some kind of anti-gravity metal – the way it’s discovered and handled, isn’t as persuasive as some of the earlier fantasies. Nonetheless, the story is still compelling because of the thoroughness with which Wells thinks through the practical details – and then because of the avalanche of astounding discoveries which his heroes make once they’ve arrived on the moon, and which keeps the reader on the edge of their seat.

Amateur hour

As usual in Wells, the whole thing is invented by an inspired amateur – the notion of government-sponsored scientific research being still decades away, pioneered by the Manhattan project of the 1940s.

Instead the story is narrated in the first person by a rather disreputable bankrupt, Mr Bedford, who retreats to a bungalow on the Kent coast where he hopes to scribble a best-selling play in order to make a quick buck, but gets into conversation with an eccentric neighbour, Cavor, and gets drawn into the latter’s scientific experiments.

The ‘scientific’ basis is simple, or simple-minded, enough. Cavor points out that we now know the universe is full of rays and waves that act at a distance – light rays, x-rays, electricity and gravity. And we know of materials which block some of these rays – light and electricity and x-rays. So why can’t we create something which blocks the effect of gravity?

Bedford immediately sees the vast amounts of money to be made from such a material in a hundred and one commercial applications:

An extraordinary possibility came rushing into my mind. Suddenly I saw, as in a vision, the whole solar system threaded with Cavorite liners and spheres de luxe. (p.27)

So Bedford persuades the rather other-worldly Cavor to take him on as a ‘partner’, and becomes a regular visitor to the latter’s house down the hill (incidentally observing the comic rivalry of the three working class labourers Cavor has working in his various workshops).

An enormous explosion and then a terrific hurricane announce to the narrator that Cavor has indeed succeeded in making the new material. it happened by fluke, when a substance they’d been working on was left to cool and crystallised into the material they now decide to christen ‘cavorite’. (It all takes place on 14 October 1899, as Bedford faithfully records.)

What caused the hurricane is that, as soon as it came into existence, the cavorite blocked the earth’s gravitational pull from working on the air above it. This meant that that air – which normally presses downwards at a pressure of 14 pounds per square inch – ceased doing so, and instead floated freely upwards. This created a column of ’empty air’ directly about the square of cavorite. Into this gravity-less tube rushed all the surrounding air which, on finding itself also liberated from the earth’s gravity, also lost its downward weight and was itself forced upwards by the rest of the surrounding air rushing in. And so on and so on. In a split second the pull of pressurised air into the column of unweighted air created a huge inrush of air from the surroundings, in which everything which was not tied down was immediately dragged towards it at tremendous force.

For the few moments that this happened all the air in the neighbourhood was sucked into the gravity-free tube – which explains the sudden hurricane Cavor and Bedford felt. But then they themselves saw the little sheet of cavorite itself get sucked up by the empty vortex and they both watched it soar up through the column, up, up and – presumably – right out of the earth’s atmosphere… at which point everything returned to normal. ‘By Jove, old chap.’

Bedford and Cavor look at each other. This thing could escape the earth’s atmosphere. It could fulfil man’s oldest dream of leaving earth. But how to steer or control it? Cavor goes off pondering and the next day has come up with a solution: encase the cavorite in steel plates which mask its anti-gravity effect, and only open the plates facing in a certain direction when you want the anti-gravity cavorite to work in that direction.

(You can see why Wells has his narrator, Bedford, continually lament that he didn’t keep notes, didn’t make a record of the process by which cavorite was made, didn’t follow all of Cavor’s abstruse thinking and so on. This is because Well’s idea doesn’t really make practical sense.)

So the pair construct a sphere, with an inner layer made of glass, then covered in warm cavorite paste, then steel divided into plates. (In fact it’s less a sphere than a polyhedron made of flat plates. And the plates are more, in fact, like ‘blinds’ which can be opened and closed. I’ve always found this quite hard to visualise.) Once everything is in place they heat the cavorite paste to securely bind it to the ‘sphere’ and then, as it cools, it assumes the magical properties and – whoosh!

Illustration for The First Men In the Moon by E. Herring (1901)

Illustration for The First Men In the Moon by E. Hering (1901)

The idea is that to steer the sphere you open a plate in the direction you want gravity to cease working and are repelled away from any nearby object (the earth or moon or sun) which would ordinarily exert the attractive power of gravity. Once in space, close the plates and you’ll be pulled towards the nearest big object. Like the moon.

Bedford climbs into the sphere and Cavor shows him how he’s furnished it – the blankets, some frozen oxygen in cylinders, some food, an electric light and some carbolic acid device to get rid of the carbon dioxide they inhale. But while Bedford is still pondering whether he wants to go, Cavor opens the earthside shutters, the cavorite works and whoosh! they are flying towards the moon.

Wells’s story races at top speed to prevent you from realising what tosh it is, and to enchant you in his narrative spell. Wonder follows wonder. First of all there is weightlessness. Maybe earlier writers had realised that we would be weightless in space but Wells gives a very accurate prophecy of what it feels like, the tingling in the blood and the way everything inside the sphere floats around bumping into everything else.

It was the strangest sensation conceivable, floating thus loosely in space, at first indeed horribly strange, and when the horror passed, not disagreeable at all, exceeding restful; indeed, the nearest thing in earthly experience to it that I know is lying on a very thick, soft feather bed. But the quality of utter detachment and independence! I had not reckoned on things like this. I had expected a violent jerk at starting, a giddy sense of speed. Instead I felt – as if I were disembodied. It was not like the beginning of a journey; it was like the beginning of a dream.

They open some of the plates to see where they’re headed and a) are dazzled by the brightness of the sun and b) looking the other direction, are stunned by the profusion of stars, millions more than you can see through earth’s atmosphere.

Cavor makes last-minute adjustments and they come to land in a vast crater on the moon. Here the reader is bombarded with vivid impressions. It is dark and the ground is covered in soft white stuff which they only slowly realise is not dust but frozen atmosphere. They have arrived just at sunrise over the crater and are astonished to watch the frozen white stuff all around them melt and then evaporate, to form an atmosphere, tingeing the sky blue.

Is it breathable? Cavor performs the ludicrously amateur experiment of opening the manhole which they use to get in and out of the capsule and discovers that – yes, it is thinner than earth’s but the moon’s atmosphere turns out to be perfectly breathable. (No ill effects from sunlight, radiation, burning, toxic gases, nothing! Convenient, eh?)

They climb outside and are astounded to watch small pebbles shiver, pop, put out roots, and then stalks. They are plants and shrubs and strange tree-sized flora, which grows even as they watch. Of course. The moon’s ‘year’ – the length of time it takes the sun to rise and set over the lunar surface – only lasts for 14 earth days. In that fortnight, life forms have to spring, grow, mature, produce their own seed, and decline.

But the thing they are most enraptured with is the low gravity. Only a sixth of the earth’s. Off they go springing and bounding in giant leaps amid the surreally growing and blossoming fruits of the moon. Until – oops – they both realise they have forgotten where the sphere was and, looking back, see only an immense rustling growing forest of moon flora.

And it is then that they hear an ominous boom boom boom noise from beneath the surface and a grinding as of great gates opening. Not long afterwards they see the first of the Selenites herding a vast slug-like creature with tiny closed eyes and a horrid red mouth which is slurping and munching its way through the foliage, like a farmer herding a monstrous cow.

Illustration for The First Men In the Moon by E. Herring (1901)

Amazement

Wells’s aim is to amaze, stun, astonish and astound. The basic, foundational trope of a visit to a strange land is reminiscent of any number of late-Victorian yarns – Vernes’ Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), Rider Haggard’s journeys to darkest Africa (She, 1886), or Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger trip to a Lost World (1912) in the remotest Amazon.

But science fiction has the advantage over mere adventure stories in that it can make things up purely to astound, astonish, shock, disgust and amaze the reader.

Because the text is available online, it is searchable, and so I searched and counted no fewer than 415 exclamation marks, as the characters, and the author, continually signal their amazement at their astounding discoveries!!!

Then, for fun, I searched all the instances of the word ‘amazing’.

It comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident.

[Cavor’s workshop] looked like business from cellar to attic – an amazing little place to find in an out-of-the-way village

It was an amazing piece of reasoning. Much as it amazed and exercised me at the time.

And then, sudden, swift, and amazing, came the lunar day.

With a steady assurance, a swift deliberation, these amazing seeds thrust a rootlet downward to the earth and a queer little bundle-like bud into the air.

Cavor panted something about ‘amazing sensations’.

What the Selenites made of this amazing, and to my mind undignified irruption from another planet, I have no means of guessing.

Amazing little corner in the universe – the landing place of men!

… returning after amazing adventures to this world of ours.

There were several amazing forms, with heads reduced to microscopic proportions and blobby bodies.

Amazing and incredible as it may seem, these two creatures, these fantastic men insects, these beings of other world, were presently communicating with Cavor by means of terrestrial speech.

The dictionary definition of to amaze is ‘to cause someone to be extremely surprised’. Synonyms for ‘amaze’ give a sense of the aim of Well’s fantasies (and of the thousands of pulp sci-fi writers who followed him). It is to:

astonish, astound, surprise, bewilder, stun, stagger, flabbergast, nonplus, shock, startle, shake, stop someone in their tracks, stupefy, leave open-mouthed, leave aghast, take someone’s breath away, dumbfound, daze, benumb, perplex, confound, dismay, disconcert, shatter, take aback, jolt, shake up

Taken prisoner

Back in the story our heroes sneak away from the ghastly apparition of the Selenite and realise they are hungry. Not having any provisions from the sphere they are driven by desperation to nibble one of the growing lunar ‘trees’ and Wells gives quite a humorous account of the way that the ‘food’ does them no harm but makes them both very drunk. Through their drunken bickering they are aware of Selenites surrounding them and of some kind of struggle, then it all goes dark.

They wake up with hangovers in a dark cell in handcuffs and shackles. One or two individual Selenites come to see them before they are raised to their feet and led by a posse of Selenites, some of whom are carrying the sharp spiked goads they’d seen one using on get the big fat mooncalf earlier. Our heroes are fascinated and disgusted at the Selenites’ appearance, a kind of giant ant. The shapes of their heads appear to vary, indicating different brain size and probably advanced specialisation of job or function in what they come to realise is the complex Selenite civilisation.

They are taken through caverns measureless to man, past enormous machinery which appears to be pumping out some kind of liquid which glows blue and provides illumination here. Cavor speculates wildly that there may be a whole civilisation here, under the surface of the moon. Maybe networks of caverns descending via tunnels down to some inner sea. Scooped out and developed over thousands of years.

When they come to a narrow plank going out over what appears to be a vast bottomless pit, Bedford rebels. One of the Selenites goads him with the spiky implement and he sees red. He punches the Selenite and is astonished to watch his fist go right through its head and out the other side. They are clearly far less sturdy and strongly made than humans. Before he knows it he is attacking all of them and then grabbing Cavor to make a getaway.

This is actually the turning point of the book, because the rest of the main narrative describes their panic-stricken escape back to the surface of the moon. It is a chase narrative. As you might imagine, it involves climbing up clefts and stumbling into vast caverns and a lot more fighting, with the unpleasant discovery that the Selenites have a sort of crossbow which fires spears.

Nonetheless, triumphing over all these perils our heroes finally blunder out into a huge circular shaft with spiral steps running up along the wall (the kind of thing we’ve all seen in sci-fi and fantasy movies) leading up to the surface. Up it they run, emerging into the lip of a ‘crater’ – and they now understand that the moon’s ‘craters’ are in fact an immense network of circular ‘lids’ which can be retracted to reveal the labyrinth of tunnels created by Selenite civilisation and which allow the Selenites to emerge onto the surface to farm their herds of moon cows.

The sun is visibly waning: some 14 days have passed underground though they haven’t noticed, and is now threatening to set with all that entails in terms of losing the breathable atmosphere. Where is the sphere?

Afflicted by despair as they survey the vast area of lunar foliage, now visibly browning and declining, they pin a handkerchief to a nearby bush and set off to explore in opposite directions, taking vast moon leaps as they go.

Nearing exhaustion and plagued by fear that search parties of very angry Selenites will be out after them, Bedford is on the brink of giving up when he is momentarily dazzled by a shaft of light and realises it is sunlight reflecting off a panel of the sphere. Weeping with relief he bounds over and confirms it’s true. But what of Cavor? He leaps to a nearby peak and shouts Cavor’s name but – as Wells had pointed out from the first (in the kind of scientifically accurate detail which are such a joy of these stories) moon air is a lot thinner than earth air and so sound doesn’t carry very well: even when they’re shouting at each other it sounds like they’re whispering.

He can see the hankie in a bush a few miles away and so leaps over towards it. Here he yells Cavor’s name again, then looks down and sees an archetypal adventure story sight: broken bushes, churned-up soil, all the signs of a struggle. Going down he finds a scrap of paper in which Cavor has hurriedly written that he’s hurt his knee in landing awkwardly in a ditch and can hear the Selenites closing in, any moment they’re going to come, oh my God –

And here his message breaks off and the paper is marked by… a red liquid. Blood!!!!

The Selenites have got him. The crater is closed. All entrance to the interior is blocked off. The sun has almost set. Bedford realises he must save himself. I found his flight back the sphere quite gripping. Wells convincingly describes the sudden drop in temperature as the sun declines, the air grows thin and cold and then the first snowflakes will fall. The temperature will ultimately drop to Absolute Zero and Bedford will freeze to death unless he can make it to the sphere in time. At last he is there. Crawling on hands and knees. Barely strength to reach up to the manhole, Twists. Can’t do it. Twists again. Pulls himself up and is… inside!

An exhausted Bedford just about makes it back to the sphere as snow falls, illustration for The First Men In The Moon by Claude Allin Shepperson

Food. Blanket. Warmth. Recovery. Sleep. Wakes rejuvenated. Grasps the grim reality of his situation. Opens the cavorite plates. Silently flies into space. More by luck than judgement he steers a course back to earth.

In an outcome so ludicrous it is like a pantomime, he not only lands back on earth, but he lands back on the south coast of England, barely a few miles from where they took off. On the sea, but conveniently close to a beach which he is then washed up on. Some jolly English chaps are coming down for their morning swim. ‘Crikey, old chap, you look a bit peaky let us take you up to the old hotel.’

Here he tucks into bacon and eggs and is drinking coffee when there’s an explosion and bewilderment outside the door. Some young lad had been hanging round as the chaps took dirty, dishevelled Bedford up to their hotel. He’d looked a bit shifty. The young wretch must have gone back to the sphere, climbed in and opened a plate, making it lift off. Damn and blast! There go Bedford’s dreams of setting up an interplanetary travel agency.

But he still has the gold. Did I mention the gold? Amid their adventures Bedford had realised that the shackles and manacles the Selenites had bound them with were made of gold. He had grabbed a couple of tyre lever-sized gold rods during their breakout. In fact he’d found them handy for fighting their way through the Selenites.

At least he still has them. He is rich.

A coda from Cavor

Wells could have stopped his tale there. Instead, there is a coda which takes up a surprising amount of space, pages 150 to 186 in the Everyman paperback edition.

To the outrage of all common sense, a Dutch electrician and early radio ham, picks up radio messages… from the moon! Yes, Cavor was captured, as Bedford had described: but his captors were kind to him, and, once he’d recovered, they took him on a Cook’s Tour of their vast civilisation. Part of this was learning that there was an apparently infinite variety of types of Selenites and soon Cavor was being introduced to the brainy ones: he could tell they were brainy, because they had very big heads! Big heads and thin skins so he could actually see the brain matter pulsating as they thought their deep thoughts.

Turns out that some of the Selenites are specialists in language and set about teaching Cavor who quickly catches on and starts to teach them English. Thus, within a few weeks, Cavor is communicating with the Selenites who explain how their society works, confirm that the moon is a swiss cheese of underground caverns and passages, that the phosphorescent liquid and much else is produced by immense machinery, that at the centre of the moon there is indeed a vast and tempestuous sea – and much more besides.

These visions of an alien civilisation, as so often, develop a strong flavour of being social criticism of the author’s own civilisation. Cavor discovers that the Selenites breed all the different types of workers in the equivalent of test tubes, distorting all aspects of their bodies and brains to suit them to the work they’re destined for. (Anticipating Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World by 30 years).

Harsh? Yes, he is a bit disgusted by it and especially by one particular sight of an embryonic Selenite having its forelimbs artificially lengthened to do manual work, but – and here is the Author’s Message –

of course it is really in the end a far more humane proceeding than our earthly method of leaving children to grow into human beings, and then making machines of them.

On another occasion his guides – the preposterously named Phi-oo and Tsi-puff – bring him to a great field of mushrooms being grown for food, where they find all the workers drugged and fast asleep, until they are needed for the harvest when they’ll be woken. Again, the character Cavor becomes a mouthpiece for the Fabian Socialist H.G. Wells:

To drug the worker one does not want and toss him aside is surely far better than to expel him from his factory to wander starving in the streets

Cavor’s tour climaxes with a presentation to the Grand Lunar, Master of the Moon – at which point the book definitely feels more like a lampoon or a parody than a ‘serious’ fantasy, a kind of ludicrous Wizard of Oz vibe.

Except that here it also reaches a kind of height of teenage socialism. Cavor radios back to earth a lengthy version of his interview with the Grand Lunar which begins with harmless stuff about the structure of the earth, why we live on the surface and not underneath like the Selenites, what weather is like in a place with 12 hour days, and so on. Little by little Cavor describes human civilisation, cities and factories and trains, how we do not breed different types of human to perform different tasks, not yet anyway.

But, when asked whether there is a Grand Earthly as there is a Grand Lunar, he finds himself having to explain the idea of ‘nations’ and ’empires’ and, before he realises it, is describing ‘war’. His brutal description of this absurd folly fills the Grand Lunar and the huge entourage of Selenites listening to Cavor’s account with horror.

Yes, wars in which men flock to the flag, train and arm and proudly wear uniforms, before clashing in huge armies designed solely to kill as many of the opponents as possible. As he proceeds, Cavor notes the moans of disappointment and disillusion rising from the crowd and the ‘expression’ on what passes for the Grand Lunar’s face.

Cover of Amazing Histories magazine, featuring an illustration of Cavor addressing the Great Lunar

A week later comes the final broadcast we are ever to hear from Cavor. It is a panic-stricken sentence, ‘I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know – ‘… and then a few words attempting to convey the secret of cavorite. Then silence.

Bedford imagines the dismay Cavor’s revelation about the true nature of human beings must have caused among the Selenites, and how the mood turned against Cavor, and how the moon people then realised that he was broadcasting messages to his violent brethren back on earth, with the risk that these psychopaths might return in one of these ‘armies’ and conquer the Selenites.

Gulliver

When I read this as a teenager I was awed by Wells’s profound insight into human nature. Now it reminds me of Gulliver’s Travels, in which the hero also describes human behaviour to the peace-loving King of Brobdingnag, who replies, accurately enough:

‘I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth.’

True or not, the point is that, bolted on to the science fantasy, this coda reads very much like a variation on the time-honoured satire on contemporary civilisation and, by extension, of human nature, which goes back before Swift to Thomas More’s Utopia and before that to any number of Roman and Greek authors.

Commentary

There are three obvious features about a Wells novel like this, what he called his ‘fantasy novels’:

1. Fast

It’s fast-moving. Bedford has bumped into Cavor, built the sphere, gone to the moon, watched the desert bloom, been captured and taken below, escaped and fought his way to the surface, found the sphere and escaped, crash-landed on earth and had a hearty breakfast, all in a mere 150 pages (in the Everyman paperback edition I read).

2. Fantastic

The speed prevents you noticing its preposterousness. It’s so fast-moving you don’t notice how quickly you leave the world of Edwardian England, with its pubs and evening strolls along the Downs, completely behind. It only requires ten or so pages from Bedford meeting Cavor, to him thoroughly involving him in his theoretical speculations, and then – whoosh! they’re off to the moon.

It is fast-moving because it is, in a sense, pulp. Only by moving fast from one astounding moment to the next can it stop you pausing to reflect and thus breaking the spell.

3. Mundanity

But, contradicting a little what I’ve said above, just as important as the speed and fantasy, is its air of mundaneness and normality.

I think it was Tom Shippey in his book about Lord of the Rings who explained that what made the book such a success was the invention of the hobbits. Tolkien had been working on his private-world mythology for decades, inventing languages and complex histories for his elves and dwarves and so on, and had produced quite a few texts narrating whole eras in his legendary Middle Earth. But they were boring and flat.

It was the invention of the down-to-earth, small, beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, no-nonsense, common-sensical hobbits which gave him a vehicle to take the reader into his world. We are introduced to the hobbits first and thoroughly identify with their idealised pastoral English life – before the first hints of other-worldly menace ever appear.

This explains why Lord of the Rings is regularly voted the greatest novel of the 20th century, while I’ve never met anyone who managed to complete The Silmarillion, another of Tolkien’s epics, describing a different era in Middle Earth’s history, but which lacks hobbits and, therefore, all charm and – crucially – representatives of the ordinary reader; imaginative vectors allowing us to enter into his imaginative world.

It’s an overlooked element of Wells that his best books also require this dichotomy – the interlocking of two opposites, the fantastic and the mundane.

We all know about the fantastical in his books, for example the idea that Martians launch an attack on earth or a man invents a time machine and travels to the distant future. Those are certainly the ideas at the core of the books. But when you actually read the texts what comes across almost as powerfully is the very mundane details of the places where this all happens – that the Martians land in Dorking and head towards London across the humdrum landscape of Surrey, blasting well known landmarks on their way (which is why there is a striking sculpture of a ‘Martian’ in Dorking town centre).

Wells himself was well aware of doing this:

For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader play the game properly he must help him, in every possible unobtrusive way, to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. (Quoted in the critical afterword to the Everyman edition)

And one mark of this is the way the people who witness and generally write up the narratives are always very ordinary, everyday chaps, who are often a bit confused, puzzled, don’t quite follow what’s going on, miss important details, don’t quite follow the scientific whatchamacallit, and, in their bumbling innocence, stand in as a kind of stylised representative of the innocent reader.

They are all Dr Watsons to a succession of fierce, eccentric or visionary Holmeses, respectively:

1895 The Time Machine – first person unnamed narrator
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau – first person narrative by shipwrecked sailor Edward Prendick
1897 The Invisible Man – (third person narrator)
1898 The War of the Worlds – first person unnamed narrator
1899 When the Sleeper Wakes – Graham, the eponymous sleeper
1901 The First Men in the Moon – first person narrative by Mr Bedford
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth – third person narrative
1906 In The Days of the Comet – unnamed first person narrator
1908 The War in the Air – featuring Bert and Tom Smallways
1914 The World Set Free – third person narrator

Making this list shows that this isn’t exactly a hard-and-fast rule, but that most of the most effective fantasies are told in the first person by someone undergoing the adventure themselves.

It goes some way to explaining why of the early stories The Invisible Man stands out as particularly unlikeable and negative: it is one of the few not told by a more or less reasonable chap, who we’re meant to identify with.

As a footnote, this helps explain the presence of the three working class men who Cavor employs in his lab, in the earlier pages of the book. They are each jealous of each other’s specialisms, argue and often down tools to go off to the pub and argue some more and so perform the function of the rude mechanicals in Shakespeare, offering comic interludes but also throwing into relief the more serious activities of their middle class superiors. Anchoring them to a humorous everyday reality.

This also explains why Bedford, at an early stage, after he’s had an argument with Cavor, goes off for an epic walk across Kent, enjoying the countryside, stopping for lunch in a pub, chatting with the local yokels while he puffs on his pipe. All designed to embed the wild fantasy in a comfortable, relaxing coat of verisimilitude.

Books & Boots

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The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (1971)

George Orr the dreamer

The future

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Eastern mysticism

Heather returns

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Coda

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Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin (1966)

The premise

Background to the story

The story

Alliance – love – ambush

The attack on Tevar

Winter is coming

Siege of Landin

Saved by the snowghouls

Credit

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The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells (1901)

Amateur hour

Amazement

Taken prisoner

A coda from Cavor

Gulliver

Commentary

1. Fast

2. Fantastic

3. Mundanity

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