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Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010)

In Africa an archaic social organisation collides with the supremacy of a technical civilisation that causes the former to fall apart without replacing it…simply by being ourselves , we destroy traditions that were sometimes hard but venerable, and we offer as a replacement only white trousers and dark glasses, in addition to a little knowledge and a vast longing.
(from the diary of Vladimir Drachoussoff, a Russo-Belgian agriculture engineer in the 1940s)

Kimbanguism

Simon Kimbangu was born the son of a traditional Congolese healer in 1899. Taken in by British Baptist missionaries, he became a catechist i.e. highly instructed in the faith, before, in 1921, having a revelation that he himself had miraculous powers, given directly by Jesus Christ. Simon healed a dying woman (named Kintondo, p.146) and stories about his healing powers spread like wildfire, that he healed the deaf and blind, that he even raised a woman from the dead. From all over the region people abandoned their fields and markets and flocked to behold the saviour.

The authorities in the shape of district commissioner Léon Morel quickly became alarmed, van Reybrouck saying the Protestant missionaries (who had trained Simon) took a moderate and sympathetic view of his teachings, but the Catholics lined up with the colonial authorities to find Kimbangu a threat to order and conformity (p.149).

Kimbagu was arrested and put through a show trial, without the benefit of a defence lawyer. Van Reybrouck gives us extensive quotes from the transcript of the trial and points out its similarities to the trial of Jesus Christ, another religious zealot shopped by the religious establishment who the prosecuting authorities found difficult to convict of any particular crime. The part of Pilate was played by commander Amadeo De Rossi (p.149). The result was a foregone conclusion and Kimbagu was sentenced to death when, to everyone’s surprise, he was given a personal reprieve by the Belgian monarch, King Albert, the sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and he did indeed spend the rest of his life in a Belgian prison, most of it in solitary confinement, 30 years in a small cell, longer than Nelson Mandela.

The authorities tries to suppress Kimbagu’s followers, arresting them, sending them to remote parts of the Congo, outlawing his sect, sending his chief followers to camps fenced with barbed wire where they were subjected to forced labour, as many as one in five dying in the process (p.152). But this policy had the perverse result of spreading the faith throughout the country, with witnesses appearing all over to testify to miracles and healings performed by the imprisoned master. The result is that Kimbaguism has become a solidly established religion, a spinoff from Christianity in the style of the Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormons. Today around 10% of the population of the Congo are followers, with devotees and churches established in many other countries.

Van Reybrouck not only devotes an extended passage to Kimbagu’s biography and trial but makes a personal pilgrimage to what has become the Kimbanguists’ holy city, Nkamba, where he describes the peaceful atmosphere, and then interviews a leading figure in the church, Papa Wanzungasa, one hundred years old and still going strong. Indeed Kimbanguism is now a recognised religion. Some 10% of the population of Congo are followers. Papa Wanzungasa tells van Raybrouck about the early days of the movement, and describes how his own family members were forced to convert to Catholicism or sent to labour camps in the 20s and 30s, how the true believers held secret conventicles in the jungle, using coded messages to rendezvous at safe spots like the early Christians meeting underground in ancient Rome (p.153).

Van Reybrouck broadens the story out to place the Kimbanguists in context among a number of other charismatic religions which broke out in the Congo between the wars: Ngunzism, a spinoff from Kimbanguism which was overtly anti-colonial; Mpadism, founded by Simon-Pierre Mpadi, whose followers engaged in ecstatic dances; Matswanism, founded by First World War veteran André Matdwa; the Kitawala, the name a corruption of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ magazine, the Watchtower; and many more.

And then van Reybrouck gives a brilliant sociological explanation for all this, explaining that the new charismatic sects arose in precisely the parts of Congo where traditional life and beliefs had been most disrupted by European intervention, Kimbanguism in the coastal region of Bas (or Lower) Congo, the Kitawala (which grew to become the second largest indigenous religion after Kimbanguism), in the highly developed mining region of Katanga, in the far south-east of the country.

In all instances, then, it was a response to the disruption or destruction of the old tribal beliefs and social systems, their very imperfect replacement by zealous but thin Christianity, and maybe most important of all, to the simple fact that most Congolese, after half a century of promises, remained second rate citizens in their own country, most of them caught up in conditions of semi-forced labour to vast European mining and agricultural businesses, which ruthlessly exploited them and their entire families, uprooting villages, relocating entire populations, with no hope of any end in sight.

All these charismatic native religions offered hope to their adherents that a new and better life, one the colonial authorities had completely failed to deliver, was at hand. The Tupelepele (meaning the Floaters) followed Matemu a Kelenge (known to his followers as Mundele Funji, or ‘White Storm’) who hoped for a return to the time of the ancestors who would restore balance and prosperity for all. Its followers threw their identity papers, tax receipts, bank notes and all the other symbols of the European capitalist system which had ensnared them into the river in anticipation of a Great Liberation (p.162).

David Van Reybrouck’s history of the Congo is a brilliant and stunning achievement, a history like no other, and his extended treatment of Kimbanguism (pages 142 to 154) exemplifies many of its many strong points.

1. Van Reybrouck is not British

Van Reybrouck is not British. Much of the writing about the nineteenth century explorers is by British chaps about British chaps and, despite its best intentions, can’t help falling back into the gravitational pull of admiration for the plucky epic exploits of someone like Livingstone or Burton or Stanley. Van Reybrouck is completely clean of all this cricket and tiffin cultural baggage. He is Belgian. It’s quite a relief to read a book about colonial Africa in which the British are barely mentioned. In this book the European power which takes centre stage are the Belgians, their kings, parliaments and civil service, with walk-on parts for the French, Germans and Portuguese.

(I was pleased to read the first hand account of a Congolese who fought in the Second World War describing his initial transfer to British-run Nigeria where he found that local Africans were treated hugely better than they were in the Congo – properly fed, treated with respect, and he was amazed to discover that black Africans held senior posts in the Nigerian army, something still unthinkable in the segregated Belgian Congo of the 1940s).

2. Van Reybrouck is not a historian

Van Reybrouck is not a historian, at least not by training. He trained as an archaeologist and his first publication was of his doctoral dissertation, From Primitives to Primates. A history of ethnographic and primatological analogies in the study of prehistory, in 2010. Since then he has gone on to write historical fiction, literary non-fiction, novels, poetry and plays, but somehow this archaeological background helps or might explain why his book feels open to a far wider range of influences and sources than a more narrow and conventional history by a professional historian would.

For example, it explains the brilliant and illuminating passage in the Introduction where he imagines five slides, each depicting the life of a 12-year-old boy in the Congo at widely separated moments of time, namely:

90,000 years ago on the shore of Lake Edward (the time and place where the bones of a group of prehistoric humans have indeed been found)
a Pygmy boy in the rainforest two and a half thousand years before Christ
AD 500 as the slow spread of agriculture (specifically, the fast growing ‘new’ crop, the plaintain) as well as basic iron tools arrive at the village where our 12-year-old lives
1560, when the 12-year-old lives in a society where small isolated villages have given way to clans of villages, themselves building up, especially on the savannah, into complex societies which can be called kingdoms, like those of the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba and the Kuba
1780, when there’s a fair chance our village 12-year-old will have been trafficked by enemy tribes down to the coast and bought by European slavers who ship him off under terrible conditions to Brazil, the Caribbean or the American South

So by just page 23 van Reybrouck has already given us a breath-taking sense of the historical and geographic scope of his account, that it will be a wide-ranging and, above all, beautifully imaginative and creative history.

3. Van Reybrouck is interested in byways

A conventional historian might mention the rise of charismatic sects and religious leaders in the 1920s and 30s as a result of the ongoing deracination of the Congolese population, but it is distinctive of van Reybrouck that he finds the story or angle which brings such a theoretical topic to vivid life. He not only gives us transcripts of the trial of Simon Kimbangu but then travels to the Kimbanguists’ holy city to interview leading adherents for himself.

What I’m driving at is that van Reybrouck’s account not only covers the conventional history and dates and events, but turns over all kinds of odds and ends and details and fragments and insights which bring the country, the Congo, and its people, really vividly to life.

He stumbles across the huge statue of Stanley which used to dominate the main square in Leopoldville, now taken down and dumped inside one of Stanley’s own early steamers in a junk yard in Kinshasa (p.99).

He explains the origins of the pop music and jazz which took Kinshasa by storm between the wars, and its mix of African languages and American jazz with the (rather surprising) importation of Cuban rhythms and sounds to create what is called Congo rumba. He tells us about Camille Feruzi, the great accordion virtuoso of Congolese music, and Wendo Kolosoyi whose guitar playing laid the basis of Congo rumba ‘the most influential musical style in the sub-Saharan Africa of the twentieth century’ (p.168). African Jazz ‘the most popular band in the Congo on the 1950s’ led by Joseph Kabasele.

He mentions the godfather of Congolese literature, Paul Lomami-Tshibamba, who published elegant essays immediately after the Second World War questioning colonialism and was arrested and beaten in prison for his trouble before fleeing into exile in the (French-controlled) Republic of Congo, across the river (p.170). I immediately went looking for his first novel, Ngando, and am very irked to discover it has never been translated into English.

His book is studded with scores of other facts and byways and insights about Congo and its social and cultural and musical and artistic and social life which combine to build up a much more vivid and colourful portrait of the country than any purely ‘historical’ account could do.

4. Van Reybrouck has carried our many interviews

Van Reybrouck makes the commonly made observation that so many histories of Africa omit the voices of actual Africans – the difference is that he has done something about it. From his first trip to Congo in 2003, van Reybrouck sought out and interviewed the oldest people he could find, eye witnesses who saw at first hand the events they describe, or had them from parents or grandparents.

It is typical of van Reybrouck that he travelled to the Kimbanguist holy city to see for himself. Historians working from colonial records in libraries and archives don’t do that. Van Reybrouck combines history with the vivid sense of journey and place of a good travel writer. And then, the qualities of a good journalist who knows how to make an interviewee at ease and extract the good stuff from a wide range of old timers.

So there are two types of Congolese testimony, written and oral.

a) People van Reybrouck spoke to

One had informants who had seen a lot but had little to say, and one had informants who had little to say but talked a lot anyway. (p.220)

‘Étienne’ Nkasi (introduced page 6), over a hundred years old, who remembered the name of Stanley as a living presence, who knew Simon Kimbangu when he was a boy, who remembered the building of the first railway from Matadi to Stanley Pool, and much more. His story weaves in and out of the main narrative so he appears on page 117, witnessing the early development of Kinshasa.

Victor Masundi (introduced page 75), aged 87 and blind, grew up in the Scheutist mission in Boma, and Camille Mananga (page 76) aged 73 recounted his grandfather’s memories of first being taken into a Christian mission.

Colonel Eugène Yoka, a former air force colonel, tells van Reybrouck about his father who had been a soldier who served in World War 1, and that his grandfather, a Bangal tribesman from Équateur province, had been one of the first recruits to the Force Publique (p.77).

Albert Kudjabo and Paul Panda Farnana, two Congolese who volunteered to fight in the Great War to defend the ‘motherland’ Belgium and were promptly captured by the Germans and spent four long years in a prisoner of war camp. Liberated after the war, Farnana lived for a while in Brussels where he eloquently made the case for the Congolese being treated as adults in their own country (pages 138 and 178).

André Kitardi, veteran of the First World War (pp.129 onwards) and again on pages 185 and 199 where he ends up serving in Palestine. Libert Otenga, the Congolese medic who was transported north into Egypt, then the Middle East, to India and ended up serving in Burma (p.188). Louis Ngumbi who fought for the Allies during World War Two (p.185).

Martin Kabuya, 92, whose grandfather took part in the Sudan campaign, who enrolled in the Congo army, describes his rgandfather’s experiences in the Great War (p.135) and his own role as a Morse code operator in the Second War (p.187).

Hélène Nzimbu Diluzeti, mother of Colonel Yoka, 94-year-old widow of Thomas Masamba Lumoso, a Great War veteran who served for only a few weeks short of the entire duration of the war (pp.135 onwards).

Père Henri de la Kéthulle de Ryhove, a Jesuit missionary in his 80s, nephew of the most famous Belgian missionary to the Congo, Raphaël de la Kéthulle who shares memories of his famous uncle who, alongside schools, built soccer stadiums, swimming pools and the huge Stade Roi Baudouin (pages 172 to 175).

Longin Ngwadi, aged 80 when van Reybrouck speaks to him in Kikwit, largest city of Kwilu Province, in the southwestern part of Congo, born in 1928, baptised by Jesuits, who wanted to become a priest but was rejected by the church hierarchy, so drifted to Kinshasa like so many young men in the 1930s and went on to become one of the first black professional footballers (pages 207 to 211).

Sister Apolline, also 80, a mixed race Congolese nun who started her career as a schoolteacher (p.211). Victoria Ndjoli, the first Congolese woman to get a driving licence (p.212).

Jamais Kolonga subject of a famous Congo rumba song, who’d had a long and varied life, who worked on the docks at Kinshasa as a young man, how his grandfather was converted to Catholicism and sent away two of his three wives, how his father was sent to Catholic school, taught to read and write and got a job with the Belgian company Otraco as manager of the housing district for the native workers, inspected their homes, made speeches to visiting directors and dignitaries and, once, even the king! Appointed to the Otraco works council and then the local council he was one of the first Congolese to have even a slight say in the administration (p.222). Jamais was born in 1935. At home he spoke French with his father, Kikongo with his mother, and Lingala with everyone else (p.223). Jamais went to work for Otraco in 1953 (pages 219 to 224).

b) Written texts recording African testimony and voices

Disasi Makuli (introduced page 29) was born in the early 1870s, son of tribalpeople, grew up in the tribal world and, aged ten, first heard rumours of outsiders raiding into their territory, who they nicknamed the Batambatamba, meaning the slave traders (p.41). Disasi was kidnapped by a gang led by the famous slave trader Tippu Tip. Then he is purchased by Stanley and set free, handed over to the case of the Englishman Anthony Swinburne who managed the small early settlement at Leopoldville. When Swinburne died he aged just 30 in 1889, Disasi found a new home with the British Baptist missionary Anthony Grenfell (p.68). In 1902 he set up one of the first black-run missions in Congo, at Yalemba (p.71). He witnessed at first hand atrocities caused by the Red Rubber Terror (p.89) and had many more adventures before dictating his life story to one of his sons before his death in 1941.

In 1895 a young man named Butungu left for England with a Baptist missionary, John Weeks. A year later he returned home with tall tales of sailing ships and salt water and the miracles he’d seen in London and wrote his stories down in Boloki. ‘It is the only known text by a Congolese from the nineteenth century’ (p.65).

Testimony recorded in official reports about the rubber terror: for example given by Eluo, a man from Esanga, about red rubber atrocities (p.89).

The long and colourful life of Lutunu, born at the end of the nineteenth century, as recorded by Belgian artist Jeanne Maquiet-Tombeau (The Life of the Congolese Chief Lutunu, 1952), given as a slave by chief Makitu to Stanley (p.102).

The memories of Joseph Njoli, a man from Équateur province, as recorded by a missionary and describing the imposition of the heavy tax burden on native workers levied from after the Great War (p.128).

Excerpts from the articles of Paul Lomami-Tshibamba (pages 170 and 216). An editorial from one of the colony’s most popular papers, L’Avenir Colonial (p.177).

The memoirs of André Yav, who worked all his life as a ‘boy’ in Elizabethville and wrote his recollections in the 1960s (p.123). He is quoted remembering the big miners strike during the war, which was violently suppressed by the authorities in December 1941 and the long and bitter legacy it left (p.192).

The wonderfully insightful diaries of wartime Congo kept by Vladi Souchard, pen name of Vladimir Drachoussoff, ‘a young Belgian agricultural engineer of Russian extraction’, pages 194 to 199.

Chapters

The quickest way to convey the structure of the book is to list its chapters. Each one has a ‘colourful’ title, such as a quote, and then a factual sub-title indicating the period covered. Here are the factual sub-titles and dates covered:

Central Africa draws the attention of the East and West 1870 to 1885
Congo under Leopold II 1885 to 1908
The early years of the colonial regime 1908 to 1921
Growing unrest and mutual suspicion in peacetime 1921 to 1940
The war and the deceptive calm that followed 1940 to 1955
A belated colonisation, a sudden independence 1955 to 1960
[Assassination of Patrice Lumumba 1960]
The turbulent years of the first republic 1960 to 1965
Mobutu gets down to business 1965 to 1975
A marshal’s madness 1975 to 1990
Democratic opposition and military confrontation 1990 to 1997
The Great War of Africa 1997 to 2002
New players in a wasted land 2002 to 2006
Hope and despair in a newborn democracy 2006 to 2010

Between the wars

All the books I’ve read recently were about the Victorian explorers of central Africa and ended around 1910 with the death of King Leopold and his handing over the Congo to the Belgian state to become a proper colony. It’s the period after that which interests me, from the Edwardians to independence and van Reybrouck’s does a wonderful job of explaining that period, both in terms of conventional history, but also with his extensive use of individual biographies, memories, interviews and anecdotes.

The period saw the real entrenchment of colonialism but also the development and changing phases of that colonialism. Much happened but the key strands were:

Incorporation into global capitalist economy

In the 1890s the economy was a barter one. Even King Leopold’s rapacious Force Publique in effect bartered for rubber or paid forced labour exclusively with rations. The period through and after the First World War saw the introduction of money, Congo was incorporated into the global capitalist economy, with the introduction of contracts and wages (pages 127 and 157).

The budding industrialisation of Congo led not only to an initial form of urbanisation and proletarianisation, but also to a far-reaching process of monetisation. (p.127)

And once you have money i.e. once you have transitioned a population from barter and traditional forms of exchange, to money, the state can control huge aspects of life, starting with contracts for wages, all kinds of laws about commercial dealings. Previously individuals worked out their own forms of exchange; now the state intervened in everything. Most of all, the state can now introduce and collect taxes. Taxes for what? Why, to pay for the state.

These economic, trade, financial practices had been introduced across Europe over centuries (think of the evolution of money and banking) and so, like the frog in the slowly heating up saucepan, everyone in the West had not only got used to them but regarded them as ‘natural’.

It’s only when you see all these instruments of state and social control being imposed on a completely virgin society that you realise how exploitative and controlling they were.

Industrialisation and proletarianisation

Industralisation and ‘development’ all sound fine until you realise their inevitable concomitant, which is the creation of a proletariat. Again, since many of the workers in the new factories or in the huge mines being created in the east of the country or on the vast new plantations growing coffee, cotton, tobacco and other export crops were only one generation removed from illiterate tribal villagers living on subsistence agriculture, the process was all the more dramatic and defined (p.125).

Between 1908 and 1921…Congo experienced its first wave of industrialisation, thereby prompting the proletarianisation of its inhabitants. (p.125)

You can see why Marxist ideology gained such traction in the developing world or Third World as it came up to independence. In Europe and America capitalism had developed a very large middle and lower middle class which benefited from it, which enjoyed a standard of living to which the more skilled workers aspired. These acted as a kind of social ballast, meaning that the industrial proletariat or working class, whatever you call it, even at their most radicalised, were never in a majority, never had the potential to overthrow the state.

Whereas in most countries coming up to independence, the clear majority of the population was treated as second class citizens and the great majority of them exploited by European employers and screwed for ever higher taxes by a state biased entirely to protecting Europeans and maximising their wealth.

When you add in the race aspect, the notion that whites exploited blacks, so that when the whites were overthrown and blacks were in power, paradise would come – and you have a very heady mix of ideas and ideologies and hopes.

Population explosion

Schools, hospitals, better nutrition, a more varied diet and medical advances such as inoculation against the worst tropical diseases, meant that the 1930s and 40s saw a population explosion (p.164). This took a very particular form, namely the explosive growth of cities. Word spread there were jobs, decent housing, money and all the excitements of modern urban life just a hundred miles from the traditional village where you lived. The village denoted crushing poverty, a corrupt chieftain and wizened elders who married all the young women. Farming was back breaking work and the crops grown were specified by the state according to unknown plans or you might be dragooned into one of the mandatory road building schemes.

So you upped sticks and hitched to the city to take your chances. Between 1920 and 1940 the population of Kinshasa doubled to 50,000. (Remember that Stanley founded it from nothing and named it Léopoldville just 40 years earlier, in 1881.) Elizabethville (named after the wife of King Albert of Belgium), centre of the mining industry in the south-east of the country, double in size between 1923 and 1929, from 16,000 to 23,000. Huge investments in the 1920s in both the mining industry and in transport infrastructure led to Katanga province becoming one of the world’s major copper ore producers.

In 1919 the big Union Minière de Haut-Katanga corporation based in Katanga employed 8,500 workers; by 1928 it was 17,000. In 1920 there were 123,000 salaried black in the country; in 1929 there were 450,000 (p.127). By 1945, what with the huge demand for metals and foodstuffs generated by the war, the number of payrolled workers had risen to 800,000, possibly as many as 1 million (p.191).

Van Reybrouck uses the decision of Union Minière to allow workers to bring their wives to the workers’ accommodation as a symbolic moment when many black employees stopped being transitory single men on short term contracts and began to become families with careers. Black men acquired the skills required by a modern urban economy, carpenters, masons, woodworkers, as well as white collar roles such as nurses, clerks, warehouse foremen. And bar and music hall owners and the new jazz musicians who played in them. In the late 1930s the first pensions were introduced by some of the corporations. It was during the 30s, 40s and 50s that a Congolese society was created. The Boy Scouts were introduced. Football. Music.

Repression

As the colonial state extended its grasp out across all regions of the country, it faced two kinds of revolt: one the old traditional, rural one from the country and the other a new, urban one, fomented by workers and unions. This explains why ‘almost all the prisons in Congo were built between 1930 and 1935 (p.160).

When a young Belgian named Maximilien Balot, visiting a village in Pende country to collect taxes, mishandled the situation, was murdered and his body hacked to pieces, the colonial government sent in soldiers who killed at least 400 natives, probably more (p.163).

Elsewhere, strikes among mine workers or dockers were put down with force, although actual unions weren’t very active. Most were set up by the white employers and so were another symbol of repression rather than vehicles of protest and negotiation. As late as 1955, of about 1.2 million Congolese on payrolls, only 6,160 belonged to a union (p.214).

What is an évolué?

Against this background of industrialisation and modernisation, the rapid growth of urban centres with all the features of urban life i.e. modern jobs, modern accommodation, electricity, telephones and entertainment in the form of clubs and bars and cinemas, it’s no surprise that an educated black bourgeoisie emerged. The Belgian authorities used the French term ‘évolué’ meaning, literally, people who had evolved from their primitive illiterate tribal culture to become well educated, assimilated urbanites, people who dressed, walked and talked like Europeans.

An évolué had benefited from post-primary school education, had a good income, was serious about his work, monogamous (polygamy was one of the great indicators of the tribal mindset), dressed, walked and talked in the European manner. He was proud of owning Western consumer goods like a bicycle or record player (p.215).

Like any other class rising up into one above, they were very conscious of their new status and formed groups, clubs and circles to protect it. They read and they wrote. The first Congolese writers come from this caste such as Paul Lomami-Tshibamba. But they were in the classic piggy-in-the-middle position. After the Second World War they wrote the first tentative essays about greater equality and autonomy for blacks but deep down they wanted to live like whites and be treated like whites. The irony was that, after the war, more white women came and settled in the Congo, a new white middle class came into being, more consumer orientated, with big villas and chauffeur-driven cars and children at private school.

And at exactly the historic moment when a new black middle class and intelligentsia reached out to them, van Reybrouck portrays white bourgeoisie as withdrawing into its gated communities and enforcing a new, more unbreakable colour bar. If a white journalist took a black colleague into a European bar, conversation stopped. Trains were segregated into black and white. If a black man dived into a swimming pool at a European club, the whites got out (p.216).

They had done everything asked of them, but still the évolués were treated as second class citizens. Van Reybrouck quotes a plaintive petition from the évolués of the small town of Lulabourg, who describe themselves as ‘a new social class…which constitutes a new sort of native middle class’ and concludes plaintively: ‘It is painful to be received as a savage, when one is full of good will’ (p.217).

The authorities made what, in retrospect seem like pitiful attempts to mollify these pleas. In 1948 they declared the évolués could apply for a ‘certificate of civil merit’. Holders of this grand certificate would no longer be administered corporal punishment and, if charged with an offence, be tried before a European judge. They had access to white wards in hospitals and were allowed to walk through white neighbourhoods after 6pm (!).

Unsurprisingly this was met with resentment and so the authorities introduced the carte d’immatriculation in 1952 which gave the évolué exactly the same civil rights as Europeans, most notably the ability to send their children to European schools. However, in order to qualify you had to submit to a humiliating inspection of your home life, which scrutinised every aspect of your home from the sleeping arrangements right down to the state of the cutlery and the kitchen.

Very few évolués volunteered to undergo this humiliation and even fewer passed the stringent criteria with the result that, in 1958, from a population of 14 million, only 1,557 civil merits were handed out and only 217 registration cards (p.219).

All of which explains why so many of the early leaders of the African nationalist parties in the Belgian Congo were members of the frustrated évolué class.

A succession of raw materials

Congo was victim of a kind of ironic curse: the conquering Europeans discovered the country possessed a whole series of raw materials which brought the exploiting whites vast wealth but very little benefit and a lot of forced labour and misery for the native population. Van Reybrouck points out these raw materials formed a kind of relay race: just as one material ran dry or ceased to be needed by Western countries, another took its place (p.119).

Thus ivory was the commodity which attracted traders to Congo in the 1870s and 80s. But just as supplies of ivory were being exhausted in the 1890s, there was a sudden explosion of demand for rubber sparked by the invention of pneumatic tyres for bicycles and cars and Congo turned out to be home to millions of wild rubber vines, which the population was terrorised into milking throughout the 1890s and 1900s.

Then the rubber boom collapsed because so many rubber tree plantations were opening in the Far East. In 1901 rubber had accounted for 87% of Congo’s exports, by 1928 just 1% (p.119). But just as the bottom fell out of the rubber market, Congo was discovered to be one of the world’s great sources of precious metals and minerals, chiefly copper, which underwent an explosion of demand during the First World War.

The British and American shells fired at Passendale, Ypres, Verdun and on the Somme had brass casings made from 75% copper mined in the east Congo region of Katanga. The bullet shells were made of nickel, which is 80% copper (p.137). There was steady demand between the wars, and then another huge spike 1939 to 1945.

And then, just when demand for copper dropped following WW2, its extensive supplies of uranium made Congo’s mines out east of permanent interest to the Americans (p.191). And when demand for this fell with the end of the Cold War in 1990, a new demand was opened up with the spread of personal computers and then mobile phones, which require cobalt and other rare metals which are found in the eastern part of the country.

Conclusion

My reading of Eric Hobsbawm’s history of the industrial revolution and the age of capital is that the industrial revolution was a kind of catastrophe. Contemporaries marvelled at the power and size of the new machines, especially the new railway engines unleashed on the world in the 1840s, but were puzzled and horrified at how such incredible ingenuity and engineering prowess seemed to make a large part of the population poorer than it had been before, the puzzle Karl Marx set out to solve and which his devotee Hobsbawm echoed 100 years later.

Nobody knew then what we know now about the cyclical nature of capitalist boom and bust, about successive waves of technological, consumer and marketing innovation. After the second industrial revolution provided a cornucopia of new inventions into the 1870s and 80s it was possible to believe that the new sciences of economics and sociology would guide society towards a technological utopia.

What is quite obvious is that nobody at the time understood the forces driving Western societies and the entire world forward with such relentless energy to a series of disasters: from the prolonged depression of the 1870s and 1880s which nobody understood, through to the gathering rivalries of the 1900s which led to the unprecedented cataclysm of the Great War and then to the thirty years of chaos which followed – the instability in Europe, America and Asia crystallised by the collapse of the entire financial system in 1929 followed by the rise of totalitarian regimes in Europe and Asia which ten stricken years later plunged the world into an even greater cataclysm.

My point is that Stanley and Leopold and the sadists in the Force Publique and then much of the colonial administration and the white Belgian masters certainly made countless mistakes, indulged in lies, extortion, torture and murder, or the relentless humiliation of colonial racism. And I’m not suggesting we ‘forgive’ them or let them off the hook. But at the same time this epic account, for me, brings out how humans in all areas, at all levels of society, don’t really know what’s going on. How could we? We can’t see the future from whose perspective the general trends of things even begin to make some sort of sense.

Who today can really predict the long-term impact of the digital revolution, of COVID-19 or global warming? After all the colour and vibrancy of van Reybrouck’s brilliant account I was left with a profound sense of humanity’s helplessness, a blinkered inability to understand the situation or manage ourselves which the next sections of the book – about the rush to independence, followed by civil war, military coups, corrupt dictatorship, political chaos, catastrophic war and social collapse are not, I suspect, going to do anything to disabuse me of.

Credit

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck was published in Dutch by De Bezige Bij in 2010. All references are to the paperback version of the English translation by Sam Garrett, published by Fourth Estate in 2015.

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Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1960)

‘All we want to do is to give people something. To make an old, old dream come true. We can offer them life, with time to live it; instead of a quick scrabble for existence, and finish. Time to grow wise enough to build a new world. Time to become full men and women instead of overgrown children.’
(Diana Brackley, Trouble With Lichen, page 123)

Wyndham’s wish to write literature

It’s quite a surprise to come to Trouble With Lichen after Wyndham’s big four science fiction, apocalyptic, adventure novels – The Day of the Triffids (1951), The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957). Each of those adventure yarns throws you into the strangeness of the Big Event early on, and then keeps up an unrelenting pace of mounting crisis and urgency.

Wyndham doesn’t appear to have written much about his own practice as a writer and took pains to destroy much of his correspondence and private papers. The two-page Foreword to the short story collection The Seeds of Time is all I’ve come across so far. In this he makes it pretty plain how limiting and constricting he found the trashy, adventure-story formula you had to write your short stories in in order to get them published in the 1930s. He explains that all the stories in The Seeds of Time were post-war attempts to break free of the space opera limitations of sci fi and explore other genres and tones. It quickly becomes obvious from those stories that his natural inclination is for the comic; many of the stories are comic in shape and plot or, even when dealing with serious subject matter, filled with humorous asides.

Thus it is this side of his character Wyndham channeled into Trouble With Lichen which contains extended sequences of gentle comedy and social satire. In fact, stepping back a bit, the entire story is in effect a prolonged satire on contemporary obsession with beauty and eternal youth.

And with romance. Wyndham has a soft spot for soppy love stories, or for relations between men and women depicted in a wonderfully quaint old world way, all darling this and darling that. Chronoclasm, Pawley’s Peepholes, Opposite Number, Time To Rest from Seeds of Time, they’re all stories about men and women cast in a ‘Honey, I’m home’ cheeriness.

All this helps put Trouble With Lichen into perspective. It’s as if, after writing four brilliantly thrilling and logically conceived stories in which the world we know is turned upside down as witnessed by characters who are little more than functions of the plot, he decided – or felt confident enough – to try and write a more character-based story.

And it is symptomatic of all the tendencies listed above that he makes the lead figure in Lichen not a rough tough guy, but a woman. She is Diana Brackley, a famous biochemist.

Like Kraken the story starts at the end, with a brief description of Diana Brackley’s funeral, attended by hundreds of women; in fact it is described by a (fictional) newspaper as the biggest tribute from women to a woman since the funeral of famous suffragette Emily Davison in 1913. Why the big turnout, why so many women, why was Diana Brackley so important to so many women? Well, in a thoroughly traditional and comfortable way, the narrative then goes back to the start of the story and set out to tell us why, in three parts divided into 15 chapters.

Part one

The narrative proper sets the tone by opening at the leaving party held at St Merryn’s High School for girls. One of the teachers gravitates over to slender, striking Diana Brackley who has just won a scholarship to Cambridge. Diana is not a smooth small-talker and manages to ask her teacher unsettling questions, before she can navigate away. We are introduced to Mrs and Mrs Brackley, the latter of whom thinks it is foolish of Diana to take her studies so seriously, she should really be focusing on finding a nice husband to settle down with and produce babies. All this biochemistry stuff sounds frightfully complicated!

In other words, these opening scenes establish the subtle and not so subtle psychological pressures brought to bear on intelligent and enterprising young women in the 1940s or 50s (it’s not specified exactly when) to conform to gender stereotypes.

‘After all, a woman ought to be married; she’s happier that way…’
(Diana’s mother to her when she turns 25, page 43)

Diana’s Cambridge career is dealt with in a few sentences in order to hurry along to the next phase, which is a job. She is recommended to try a private biochemistry research company, Darr House Developments (in the fictional town of Ockingham), set up by:

Francis Saxover, Sc.D., F.R.S., sometime Gilkes Professor of Biochemistry in the University of Cambridge, and widely regarded as an intellectual renegade.

Intellectual renegade, eh? Golly.

There’s a fascinating passage devoted to Saxover’s interview of fresh-faced new graduate Diana, which devotes a couple of pages (pages 25 to 26) to the trouble and disruption previous young ladies caused Darr Developments i.e. distracting the male employees and in one case prompting a duel. Saxover discusses it with his wife, Caroline. Another of the interviewers with his wife. I think this is what Wyndham has in mind when he says he was trying to escape the constrictions of science fiction, its imprisonment within cliff-hanger melodrama. Here, it seems, he is trying to write something far more like a conventional novel with a large cast of characters, whose raison d’etre is purely their psychological interplay.

All this is well and good but a bit boring and more than a bit patronising. Something like a plot gets going on page 30 when, eight months into her role, Saxover brings Diana a bowl of milk she left out for his cat and which he has just nearly tripped over. They both notice the milk has curdled, except round a speck of something in the milk. Now Diana had recently been analysing a sample of lichen sent to the lab by an explorer they have a contract with. Some of this got into the milk and prevented it curdling. Hmm.

Further investigation is interrupted when, shortly afterwards, Saxover’s beloved wife Caroline dies. He has something like a breakdown, retires into reclusiveness. Diana finds herself looking after his 12-year-old daughter, Zephanie, who is then sent off to boarding school. Meanwhile work on the lichen extract becomes an obsession, Diana works on it day and night. A chance encounter with Saxover and his hurried answer to her enquiry whether he is working on it, strongly suggests to Diana both that he is, and that he’s keeping it unusually secret. Why?

Her studies continue for months and slowly she realises why, although it has a disillusioning affect on her that one of her intellectual heroes is breaking the great commandments of working openly and transparently together, and of sharing Knowledge.

Eventually all her studies are complete and she knows what the lichen extract can do. Soon afterwards, she turns 25 and her parents tell her about the fabulous inheritance left to her by her grandfather, the enormous sum of £40,000 (p.43). She buys some posh clothes and a zippy little car. Her mother asks her if she’s now going to leave work and live off the interest and – most importantly – find a husband. No, no, Diana says, a) marrying is just a habit, a convention b) she has more important work to do.

On one of her many walks and talks with schoolgirl Zephanie, the latter is saying how each generation of women just about gets life figured out, when it is tricked into having children, slaving away for 20 years, and then is too exhausted to hand on its wisdom… and Diana has a brainwave. She realises what she wants to make her life’s work. Back at Darr she asks for an interview with Saxover and abruptly resigns her post.

Part two

It is 14 years later. Saxover has invited his children, Paul, now aged 27, and Zephanie, a 23-year-pld post-grad, to his office along with Diana. He gives a brief explanation. What he and Diana discovered was an extract from that species of lichen provided a substance he’s called lichenin which is an antigerone. It retards the ageing process. It makes you live longer. As Diana pithily describes it later in the novel:

‘It is a chemical substance, possibly one of a class of such substances produced by micro-organisms, that has the property of retarding certain of the metabolic processes, and bears a distant chemical relationship to the antibiotics.’

Zephanie has a sudden revelation and angrily asks her father how long she is going to live. Factually, he replies: 220 years.

He goes on to explain the precise situation. The particular species of lichen grows only in a few remote places. There is probably only enough lichenin to go round for maybe three to four thousand people. How on earth do you decide who will get it and who won’t. (This reminds us of similar conversations in Day of the Triffids: if they can only save a handful of the blinded, who should it be?) In the event, Saxover has dosed himself and Paul and Zephanie without their knowledge, pretending they were annual flu inoculations. So, now Zephanie realises why she looks so youthful and Paul why it took him so long to grow a beard. They have been ageing at roughly a third of the average rate since they were 16.

And Who To Tell turns out to be the theme of part two of this book because:

– Paul gets cross with his father because he hadn’t told Paul’s wife, Jane (to ensure the secret remains a secret as long as possible to prevent the social turmoil that will ensure when word gets out). Paul storms out and, admittedly, takes a day or two to summon up the guts to tell his wife but, when he does, she passes through disbelief to anger that she isn’t getting it, and then her eyes light up with the possibilities of marketing it to millionaires – precisely what Saxover wanted to prevent.

– Zephanie returns to her flat to find her boyfriend, Richard, waiting impatiently outside. She says she doesn’t want to go to the theatre as planned, prefers dinner, where she proceeds to get drunk and starts crying, afflicted with the sense that she is going to be the only one to live on while all around her die. Richard takes her home where Zephanie continues to bemoan her fate and there is a broadly comic moment when Rich thinks she’s saying that she’s pregnant. In an interesting piece of social history he asks, ‘Why couldn’t you wait for me?’ thus suggesting that they both expected Zephanie to be a virgin when they marry.

– Diana. Remember Saxover had called his children in because he thought it was going to be a meeting with Diana? It was because after all these years Diana had been in touch with Saxover because something has gone wrong and she needs to see him. In the event, the three Saxovers get a message that she’s not coming, but she is relevant to the story because we now learn that after leaving Darr, Diana went on a round the world cruise, returned to London and set up a very high-class beauty salon for the wives of the rich and influential whom she is, of course, treating with lichenin to make them look younger. But now one of these influential women has had an allergic reaction to lichenin and is suing Diana.

– The Press So successful is Diana’s beauty company – named Nefertiti – that the gutter press take an interest. We see the meeting of an investigative reporter and the editor of a newspaper humorously, if bluntly, named Sunday Prole. Reluctantly, the editor agrees with the reporter’s suggestion that he digs into this Diana Brackley to see what the racket is all about (this section includes the investigative hack presenting a two-page potted biography of Diana which fills in a lot of the backstory of her and her parents).

– Diana and Zephanie Zephanie hasn’t seen Diana for those 14 years, but now the revelation that she’s been dosed with lichenin prompts her to travel up to London to meet Diana at her fabulously luxury pad overlooking St James’s Park. They have another of the intellectual conversations they had when Zephanie was a girl. (I haven’t reread Wyndham since I was a boy and had completely forgotten that his sci fi novels are so full of people discussing ideas about human nature and evolution and intelligence.) Anyway, Diana explains straight out that the beauty parlour she runs isn’t just a money-making business, it is part of a plan to reshape the human race.

What is wrong with the world? The fact that people have barely got a hang of what is wrong with society before they are dragooned into marrying and having kids of their own, enslave themselves to bringing them up and then emerge from the experience lucky to have enough money to eke their way through retirement, then they die. Nobody sticks around to witness the long-term consequences of their generation’s greed.

‘You know as well as I do that the world is in a mess, and floundering deeper every day. We have only a precarious hold on the forces we do liberate – and problems that we ought to be trying to solve, we neglect. Look at us – thousands more of us every day…. In a century or so, we shall be in the Age of Famines. We shall manage to postpone the worst one way and another, but postponement isn’t solution, and when the breakdown comes there’ll be something so ghastly that the hydrogen-bomb will seem humane by comparison.

‘I’m not romancing. I’m talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food. We’re letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan’t be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. “That’s their worry,” we say. “Damn our children’s children; we’re all right.”

‘And there’s only one thing I can see that will stop it happening. That is that some of us, at least, should be going to live long enough to be afraid of it for ourselves. And also that we should live long enough to know more. We simply cannot afford to go on any longer attaining wisdom only half a step before we achieve senility. We need the time to acquire wisdom that we can use to clear up the mess. If we don’t get it, then like any other animal that overbreeds we shall starve; we shall starve in our millions, in the blackest of all dark ages.

‘That’s why we need longer life, before it is too late. To give us time to acquire the wisdom to control our destiny; to get us beyond this state of acting like animal prodigies, and let us civilise ourselves.’

In Diana’s opinion the great apocalypse facing humanity (apart from the nuclear war which threatens at any moment and which Wyndham had dealt with in The Chrysalids and The Outward Urge) is overpopulation, famine and social collapse. When she stumbled across the life-stretching properties of lichenin (which, incidentally, she has given a different name, tertianin, p.91), she realised this was an opportunity to re-engineer the human race, to produce Homo superior, ‘a step in evolution, a new development that would lift us one more plane above the animals’. (‘You gotta make way for the Homo Superior’, as David Bowie sang a mere 11 years later.)

Hence Diana’s plan to recruit about 1,000 of the most highly-placed and influential women in the country, via the Nefertiti beauty business. Chances are, when news comes out about the elixir of eternal youth, there will not only be riots to get hold of it, but the powers that be will try to ban it. Why? Because institutions, in all their corruption, depend on humanity’s short life spans. If people start living to be 200 or 250 years old, the kind of continuity current institutions provide will become redundant. Realising this, chances are all kinds of organisation will band together to suppress purveyors of lichenin, maybe to murder them and strangle the threat at birth.

Hence – the thousand influential women. They don’t currently know they’re being treated with lichenin, but when Diana tells them, they will be perfectly placed to prevent any such suppression taking place. The women are, as Lady Tewley puts it, later in the book:

‘wives, or daughters, of half the Establishment. We’re married to four Cabinet Ministers, three other Ministers, two Bishops, three Earls, five Viscounts, a dozen blue-chip companies, half-a-dozen Banks, twenty-three members of the Government, eight members of the Opposition, and lots of others. In addition, we have close relations that are not quite marital with a lot of other Influences. So, you see, one way and another, there isn’t much we don’t know, or can’t get to know.’ (p.176)

Zephanie listens in amazement, at the thoroughness with which Diana has thought through the social implications of her discovery, the thoroughness of her plan, and the thoroughness with which she has carried it out. She is also startled to learn that the lichenin can be administered at different strengths or factors. Her father’s giving her Times Three but Diana has extracted up to Time Five i.e. expected lifespan 350 years. That’s what she’s dosing herself.

The plot proceeds along the five or so plotlines which Wyndham has now established – Paul and his scheming wife Jane; Zephanie and her boyfriend Richard; Saxover and his plans; Diana and her clinic; the newspaper hacks snooping around her operation.

The latter two come together when one of Diana’s employees (a Miss Brandon) says she’s been asked out by a guy who turns out to be a newspaperman and is asking lots of questions. With humorous cynicism, Diana plays the journalists, briefing the employee to go along to a nightclub with them and tell the journos she doesn’t know much about the magic treatment, but thinks it comes from seaweed found in Galway Bay. Which prompts an infestation of hacks in Galway and soaring prices for seaweed. As in The Kraken Wakes Wyndham is quick to see the humorous side of how our wretched corrupt society reacts to big news or changes.

To please his daughter, Saxover starts treating her boyfriend, Richard. The young couple plan for all the wonderful time they’re going to have together.

Francis Saxover meets Diana for dinner. There is a lot of unresolved emotional tension. Diana always hero-worshipped him and Francis, for his part, has long been a widower, and… Well, they suppress these feelings like good solid English chaps and focus on the crisis in hand. Diana has a lot of amusing scams ready to spin the Press to keep them off the track for years, but Francis bursts her bubble by revealing that Jane not only bulldozed her way into Darr and insisted on having a tab of lichenin sewn into her arm (the method for administering it), she then promptly went somewhere and passed it on – presumably for the promise of future benefits and the prize of big cash in hand.

Francis tells Diana that Paul found this out, the couple had a blazing row, he slept on the sofa, next day she had packed her bags and left. Nice wife you’ve got there, Paul. So – Francis tells Diana – the lid is about to be blown off the whole thing before they’re completely ready. Diana is sanguine. We’d never have been ready she says. She will start to mobilise her 1,000 rich women, Let battle commence!

Part three

The storyline about the hacks who’ve descended on Galway Bay, the dodgy beauty companies already flogging Galways glamour products – there’s a huge dollop of Ealing Comedy in all this, as there is in the sassy dialogue between the Nefertiti employee (Miss Brendon) who Diana now collaborates with to decoy the press further (not to mention Diana’s relationship with her answer-back secretary, Miss Tallwyn:

‘Sarah, dear, how long have you been in this enterprising trade?’ Diana inquired.
‘I am not in it,’ said Miss Tallwyn. ‘I am your secretary.’

– Joyce Grenfell should have had a part somewhere in the movie).

Now, as things get moving, Diana makes smart Miss Brendon an offer to come in as a partner and right-hand woman. Shortly afterwards she’s paid a visit by Lady Tewley, who she first met ten years earlier, when she needed help rising to the challenge of dressing and behaving like a member of the aristocracy. Previously she had been a medical student and a few years ago she twigged to the anti-ageing treatment. Now she’s come to tell Diana the press are working on her, too, her beastly husband has fixed her up with a lover who everso gently but persistently keeps asking her about her beauty treatment.

Their conversation is interrupted by a panicky call from Zephanie. Someone broke into Darr to try and steal the secret, then set a fire to cover their tracks. Francis was lucky to escape, but did so over the rooftops to the main body of the building which was unaffected. Diana is shaken by the news. We know how much she loves him.

Right! Diana realises it’s time to mobilise her army of rich women and tells her secretary to post the big bundle of letters which has been waiting in the safe all these years, to invite them all to a special emergency meeting.

In a separate development, Richard and Zephanie’s car is pulled over by the police. Except it isn’t the police. It’s crooks. They are bundled out at gunpoint and taken to the den of some crook who sits behind a bright light and interrogates Zephanie. Every false answer Richard is beaten. Quite quickly she breaks down and tells them all she knows which isn’t, in fact all that much, she knows it’s a lichen but has no idea which species.

The sequel is described to Francis in a phone call to Diana, namely Zephanie woke up next to the car she’s been kidnapped from, Richard unconscious beside her with a few teeth missing. A passing labourer helped get him into a car and hospital.

Meanwhile Diana holds her big meeting-cum-press conference and is bitterly disappointed when none of the press report what she considers the biggest story since Adam. This prompts some broad satire on the reality of the newspaper business delivered by Miss Tallwyn. The extended focus on the press, including direct quotes from the coverage of her meeting from the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Mail, Express, Mirror, Herald and Sketch, are exactly cognate with the similar passages in Kraken Wakes where the narrator quotes at length from the newspaper coverage of various key events.

Also, bear in mind that Wyndham had been writing for nearly 40 years by now. Her has developed a kind of late style which allows him to zoom in on some areas, dismiss others (like Diana’s entire Cambridge career) with a few lines. Turns out not to be the press which cause a fuss but the markets. A few life insurance companies suspend dividends while they recalibrate their sums, if a life extension drug has been discovered. Wyndham laconically gives us the comments of stockbrokers reading about this.

‘I reckon we might sell those General Eventualities before the going gets rough.’
It was not an isolated decision.
The going got rough.

Laconic, eh? Major shifts in the Stock Exchange force the papers to take serious notice of Diana’s claims and she gives a second press conference which is, this time, widely reported. Next day, reviewing the results in the Sundays, Miss Tallwyn rings up and tells her to listen to the BBC Home Service, there is a vicar giving an impassioned sermon against interfering with the nature and the works of God.

Diana drives to see Francis and it is an opportunity for more of the philosophising about The Great Change forms such a large part of all Wyndham’s novels. In this case she wants to give people longer lives not just to party and enjoy themselves, but so that they evolve into an entirely new form of human,

It will become worthwhile. There will be time – time to do really great things at last…

‘You’re wrong if you think I want power, Francis. All I want to do is see that Homo diuturnus gets born somehow. I don’t care how inconvenient he is, how different; he must have his chance. If it takes a caesarian to give him a start, it doesn’t matter. If the surgeons won’t help, then I’ll be head midwife, and do it myself. The only advance in millions of years, Francis! It shan’t be crushed – it shall not, whatever it costs!’

Behind their speculations about what will happen, and Diana’s conviction that every power in the land will try to suppress the new drug, lies the unresolved emotional tension between them. Diana complains that she was never so unhappy as when she worked at Darr because of her unrequited love for him. Francis begins to stutter a reply, but she bursts into tears and storms out.

Cut to a new scene, Diana reviewing the papers. Once again there are direct quotes from the Mail, the Trumpeter, Telegraph, the Gazette and Mirror. The text collapses into a series of snippets expressed entirely in dialogue:

Diana tells Miss Brendon to gather some of the girls and go out to pubs and clubs and laundrettes and coffee shops and sound out the word on the street
an executive meeting of an advertising agency says whoever’s handling Nefertiti’s PR is making a right horlicks of it
telegram to the Home Secretary from the General Council of The Brotherhood of British Morticians asking for compensation for loss in trade
a middle-aged woman pestering her doctor to give her an estimate of her age
three brokers in a coffee bar, one of them advising the future is in ladies fashions and lingerie
telegram to the Prime Minister from the Secretary of the Sabbath Preservation Society protesting that the God-given lifespan is three-score years and ten
old Sir John asks his manservant Spiller his opinion about the whole fuss then orders him to make him, Sir John, an appointment at this clinic
two civil servants preparing for a question about antigerone which has been tabled for the minister, one admitting his wife is a regular at Nefertiti’s
two senior coppers speculating about what they can arrest Diana for
The Evening Flag suggests the first candidate for the anti-ageing treatment should be the Queen
a very working class Cockney telling his mate down the boozer how his missus didn’t arf go on about it, ‘ow it’s not fair and so on
a lower middle class woman asking her husband to turn the radio on so they can listen to an interview with that anti-ageing woman, and we then have the transcript of a long interview in which Diana easily bests her mealy-mouthed BBC interviewer
a couple in bed, the woman asking if 300 years of married life are going to be bearable
a snippet from Radio Moscow claiming the well educated people of the Soviet Union of course know that the first antigerone was developed by a Hero of the Soviet Union Russian biochemist
dialogue between a police constable and a drunk middle-class man who claims to be a statistician and to have worked out that if everyone lives to be 200 the human race will starve

Lady Tewly visits and tells Diana their Women’s Movement is well and truly advanced but the cause of the drug faces many enemies. The entire trades union movement is against it and is calling a general strike and rallies in Trafalgar Square. They see it simply as a way for employers to tie employees to their workbenches and factory floors for three times as long. Prolonging the exploitation. The Tories and Labour are at odds over it and the Prime Minister is conflicted because, on the one hand it sounds like a boon to humanity, on the other hand so many, particularly on the Left, are calling for it to be banned.

But Lady Tewly alarms Diana when she announces news has got out about the lichen’s true location. Diana and Francis had discussed this long ago, but the only site she could find when she went on her ’round-the-world’ trip (which was really a cover for her tracking down its natural growth areas) was in a remote part of China. Point being a) when the Chinese realise this, they will close the area and keep it for themselves. But b) the area is very close to the Russian border and so there is every chance the Russians might invade China.

Alarmed, Diana tells her secretary to contact the media and arrange for a no-holds-barred interview. This time she will share everything she knows about lichenin.

That night she’s woken by a phone call. It’s Zephie saying a gang of men attacked Darr House and this time completely burned it to the ground. Francis managed to jump from a window and sprained a wrist, is in shock, several of the staff, one old man, the groundsman, was killed by a single blow from a cosh. Things are getting serious. The Anti-G forces are growing violent.

Diana’s death and cause

Thus it is with a spirit of determination that Diana and her entourage brave the crowds surrounding her luxury block of flats (Darlington House) the next morning, as the commissionaire makes a path through the shouting protesting rowdy throng towards the Rolls Royce waiting to take her to the radio interview. Suddenly three shots ring out, Diana clutches her side and falls across the steps. A young man pushes forward, tells the commissionaire he is a doctor, already one of her assistants is calling an ambulance. Cut to a radio announcement cancelling the talk and announcing that Diana was shot on the steps of her building and died in the ambulance.

The result is she becomes a martyr to her movement, to the League for the New Life. We are shown a big demonstration in Trafalgar Square called by representatives of the workers, presumably Labour and Trades Unions leaders, who whip up the crowd into an anti antigerone fervour. It’s worth quoting at length because this was still the kind of political rhetoric which dominated my boyhood in the 1970s. The speaker is speaking from a platform to a packed rally in Trafalgar Square:

‘The Antigerone,’ he said, ‘the dirtiest weapon of all the dirty weapons that the Tories have aimed at the workers. The bomb with the selective fall-out – that falls on the workers. The men who live lives of comfort and luxury are happy with the Anti-G – of course they are. For them it means more years – many more years – of that comfort and luxury. But what does it mean to us, the workers, who produce the wealth that buys that comfort and luxury? I’ll tell you what it means to us. It means working for three lifetimes instead of one. And if you are going to keep on working for three lifetimes, where are your sons going to find work? Yes, and your sons’ sons, too. It means two generations, two whole generations of unemployment, two generations on the dole, two generations born to rot in unemployment that will bring down your wages. I tell you that never in the history of the whole working-class struggle –’

What happens next is amazingly modern because this speech against scientific advances by a man is interrupted by a counter-speech in favour by educated middle-class women. A loudspeaker from a van very loudly retorts to the workers leader that he and his ilk are ‘Murderers! Cowards! Woman-killers!’

‘We’re not going to let you shorten all our lives. We’ve met you before. You are the dolts, the dimwits, the Luddites. And now you carry Luddism to its logical conclusion – don’t stop at smashing the machines, smash the inventors, too, and they won’t invent any more!’

The police – enforcers of the status quo – rush over to the van, burst open the door and drive it away. At which point another van elsewhere in the square continues with the pro-antigerone, anti-Luddite message, until the police likewise remove it. In all four vans are dealt with but not before they’ve got their message across that the speaker represents Luddism, philistinism, and murdering cowards who killed a saintly woman who was trying to give us all longer, better lives.

From the vantage point of 2020 this looks entirely contemporary, with university-educated feminist women berating working class men for their ignorance and toxic masculinity. Plus ça change, plus it’s exactly the same chose.

There’s a brief reprise of Diana’s funeral which, you remember, is the scene the novel opened with, attended overwhelmingly by posh grateful women whose lives she was extending, and ‘young women’ bearing banners and handing out badges supporting the LNL, the League for New Life.

Cut to a 2-page scene between the Prime Minister and a mature woman of influence, his wife? his mistress? Lydia Washington. Anyway, the conversation serves the purpose of explaining how and why the Prime Minister is in a pickle how to respond to the antigerone furore, how the political parties are split.

The most significant piece of new information in this conversation is that the Chinese have learned somehow that the main locations for the rare lichens are on their territory. Francis has discovered and communicated to the Prime Minister that the Chinese have announced they are digging over the entire area and making it into one of their huge communal farms. There was never very much of the lichen to begin with; now it looks as if it will be lost for good.

The PM and Lydia’s conversation ends with the thought that he needs to distract the populace with something new, a new toy and distraction. Cut to the Prime Minister’s speech to the nation in which he invokes British patriotism to mask the fact that supplies are minuscule but the government will be setting up an enquiry / task force / commission etc etc:

‘He had little doubt, indeed our record of scientific progress assured him that he need have no doubt, that British brains, British purpose, and British know-how would succeed – and succeed in the very near future – in producing a supply of the Antigerone for every man and woman in the country who wishes to use it….’

Sounds like Boris Johnson. Sounds like the windy rhetoric surrounding Brexit. As at other moments in the story, you find yourself realising how some things have change, but other things have remained exactly the same.

A surprise happy ending

The last scene is tranquil and funny and moving. Francis Saxover parks his car by the gate of an isolated farmhouse on the edge of the fells, so presumably somewhere in the Lake District. He calls for the owner and his suspicions are confirmed when Diana comes to the door. She’s so surprised to see him she faints.

Yes, because Diana is not dead. She faked her own death with the aid of an actor who played the assassin, an actor who played the doctor tending her into the ambulance and a fake death certificate. She had been preparing this remote bolthole for years. She shows Francis round. It even has a laboratory attached and she has been trying to grow some of the famous lichen.

In the final ‘philosophical’ or sociological conversation of the novel they both foresee trouble ahead. The Americans and Russians are devoting resources to isolating the antigerone, sooner or later it will be mass produced and then there will be revolutionary social change. But she’s done her part, as she explains:

‘The real trouble will come later on. We may get through that without bloodshed too, but it won’t be easy. If we wake up to the famine problem now, if we work flat out on ways to increase food supplies, if something can be done to discourage the suicidal birthrate, we might just manage it with no more trouble than discomforts and short rations for a time. We shall see. All I care about is that we’ve got homo diuturnus, or homo vivax, or whatever they’ll call him, on stage, and waiting in the wings.’

As dusk falls the pair repair to the living room and a roaring fire to discuss the future. Between them they have enough supplies to continue dosing themselves and their nearest and dearest. Their long-suppressed love story comes to a happy ending as it is agreed they will get married. What was once an insuperable aged difference between them is no longer an obstacle, it will melt away before the new extended lifespans they expect.

The final bombshell of the story is understated but massive. On the last page it is implied that both Diana and Francis misled their relatives and the world about the longevity affects of lichenin. They used two or three times normal lifespan as illustrations of its effects, but the implication on the last page is that the true, full effect of the substance could be much, much longer lifespans. Nobody says this but the implication is it could make life… endless… Immortality!

Satire

Arguably the entire novel is a satire: on the beauty industry, on newspapers, and politics, on Labour and the Trade Unions and crusty old aristocrats, on spivs in advertising, on the Cold War with its ludicrously boastful Russians and loudmouth braggart Yanks, a satire on men and women, gender relations, and social stereotyping and constraining of women. It is a far-reaching satire on the whole contemporary world as Wyndham understood it.

Plausibility

It certainly has more validity as social satire than as serious sociological speculation. The passages involving criminals, left wing politicians, and the rich, work as quick satirical stereotypes of likely reactions of these stereotyped sectors or types to news of an elixir of life has been discovered. However, these days we all know a lot more about old age, not least from the spotlight which has been shone on the care home sector during the COVID-19 pandemic, we know that the leading cause of death in the UK is Alzheimer’s Disease and that people are living longer than ever before BUT spend a good deal of those extra years suffering from chronic conditions which require extensive medication or surgery to maintain.

This is the one real-world implication of a pill for longer life which Wyndham doesn’t address at all – the notion that people might well be made to live for 350 years but spend the final 150 of it ill, incapacitated, on heavy medication, requiring surgery or dialysis etc – and it’s interesting to speculate that this is because, in the late 1950s, nobody knew this about extended lifespans.

Feminism

Wyndham makes Diana’s great-aunt Anne a leading suffragette (‘Hammer for the shop-windows, petrol for the letter-boxes, scenes in the House!’, p.123) and Diana herself a thorough-going feminist and independent woman. The book is drenched in comments about the conventions and norms expected of women, with Diana leading numerous conversations about the plight of women, the role of women, the women’s struggle, women’s struggle for freedom / equality / independence, and so on.

These occur early on in Diana’s frequent conversations with her Mummy Darling – embodiment of the Pressure to Conform – a bit later with Zephanie, representative of the Young Generation who she warns not to get suckered in by social pressure or advertising, and then with the employees of her beauty salon, Nefertiti, and with her adored mentor, Francis Saxover.

On having a family

‘I’m not at all sure that I do want to raise a family,’ Diana told her. ‘There are so many families already.’
Mrs Brackley looked shocked.
‘But every woman wants a family, at heart,’ she said. ‘It’s only natural.’
‘Habitual,’ corrected Diana. ‘God knows what would happen to civilization if we did things just because they were natural.’
Mrs Brackley frowned.
‘I don’t understand you, Diana. Don’t you want a house of your own, and a family?’
‘Not furiously, Mummy, or I expect I’d have done something about it long before this. Perhaps I’ll try it, though, later on. I might like it. I’ve plenty of time yet.’
‘Not so long as you think. A woman is always up against time, and it doesn’t do to forget it.’
‘I’m sure you’re right, darling. But being too conscious of it can produce some pretty ghastly results as well, don’t you think? Don’t you worry about me, Mummy. I know what I’m doing.’

On the pressure of advertising 1

‘Perhaps it’s not entirely me. Now, you don’t think as much as you did before you went to that school. If you just go on taking what they tell you without thinking about it, you’ll turn into advertisers’ meat, and end up as a housewife.’
‘But most people do – become housewives, I mean,’ Zephanie said.
‘I know they do – housewife, hausfrau, house-woman, house-keeper, house-minder. Is that what you want? It’s a diddle word, darling. Tell a woman: “woman’s place is in the home”, or “get thee to thy kitchen” and she doesn’t like it; but call it “being a good housewife”, which means exactly the same thing, and she’ll drudge along, glowing with pride. My great-aunt fought, and went to prison several times, for women’s rights; and what did she achieve? A change of technique from coercion to diddle, and a generation of granddaughters who don’t even know they’re being diddled – and probably wouldn’t care more if they did. Our deadliest susceptibility is conformity, and our deadliest virtue is putting up with things as they are. So watch for the diddles, darling. You can’t be too careful about them in a world where the symbol of the joy of living can be a baked bean.’ (p.45)

On the pressure of advertising 2

‘I told myself: “This is the twentieth century, for what it’s worth. It’s not the age of reason, or even the nineteenth century, it’s the era of flummery, and the day of the devious approach. Reason’s gone into the backrooms where it works to devise means by which people can be induced to emote in the desired direction. And when I say people I mean women. To hell with reason.”‘ (Diana Brackley, p.91)

Women are their own worst enemy

‘Aren’t you going to get married, Diana?’
‘Oh, I daresay I shall – one day,’ Diana conceded.
‘But if you don’t, what’ll you do? Will you be like your great-aunt, and fight for women’s rights?’
‘You’ve got it a bit muddled, darling. My great-aunt, and other people’s great-aunts, won all the rights that women need ages ago. All that’s been lacking since then is the social courage to use them. My great-aunt and the rest thought that by technically defeating male privilege they’d scored a great victory. What they didn’t realize is that the greatest enemies of women aren’t men at all, they are women: silly women, lazy women, and smug women. Smug women are the worst; their profession is being women, and they just hate any women who make any other kind of profession a success. It sets up an inferiority-superiority thing in them.’
Zephanie regarded her thoughtfully.
‘I don’t think you like women very much, Diana,’ she decided.
‘Too sweeping, darling. What I don’t like about us is our readiness to be conditioned – the easy way we can be made to be willing to be nothing better than squaws and second-class citizens, and taught to go through life as appendages instead of as people in our own right.’ (p.46)

The beauty industry

‘Well, if you’d spent twelve years working for it, embroiled in a pink-shaded, flower-scented, soft-carpeted, silk-bowed, Cellophane-protected dreamland populated by purring, scheming, hardeyed, grasping, cynical, retractible-clawed bitches who support themselves by assisting other women to employ their secondary sexual characteristics to the best advantage, you’d welcome pretty nearly any kind of change, too.’ (p.124)

Diana’s casual insights into sexism:

‘You can, if necessary, brush off an article slanted at women more easily than one that purported to give reliable news to men.’ (p.153)

‘I don’t want to lead all these women. I’m just making use of them – deceiving them, if you care to say so. The idea of a longer life has an immense superficial appeal to them. Most of them have no notion of what it is really going to mean to them. They don’t see yet that it will make them grow up – that they simply won’t be able to go on for two hundred years leading the nugatory piffling sort of lives that most women do lead; nobody could stand it….

‘They think I’m just offering them more of the same life. I’m not. I’m cheating them.’

‘All my life I’ve been watching potentially brilliant women let their brains, and their talents, rot away. I could weep for the waste of it; for what they might have been, and might have done… But give them two hundred, three hundred years, and they’ll either have to employ those talents to keep themselves sane – or commit suicide out of boredom.’

Of course a modern feminist might well object how patronising it was for a man to write any book like this, claiming to speak for women, and would not be slow to point out the numerous places where 1950s gender stereotypes still occur, even in the thinking of Diana herself, a hundred and one slips of phrase which betray its fundamentally reactionary mindset. It wouldn’t be difficult to dismiss the book as the patronising mansplaining of a stale, pale and male author, yet another dead white man, modern feminism being so prolific in new insults and abuse.

Still, it’s a really noteworthy achievement for an author who is mostly remembered for his sci fi horror shockers to have devoted so much time and energy to a book entirely setting out to vindicate women, champion women, comment on how women are patronised and marginalised and pressurised by society and manipulated by advertising, a book-length study of an extremely strong, independent woman, a scientist to boot, who makes a great discovery and then isn’t pushed aside by men, but conceives and carries out a series of clever schemes to change the world, who sets the pace and leads the narrative right up to the last scene and the final sentences. Surely this is a remarkable achievement for 1960.

Credit

Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham was published by Michael Joseph in 1960. All references are to the 1974 Penguin paperback edition (recommended retail price 30p).

John Wyndham reviews

Sleepers of Mars (1973) 5 short stories from the 1930s
The Day of the Triffids (1951)
The Kraken Wakes (1953)
Jizzle (1954) 15 short stories
The Chrysalids (1955)
The Seeds of Time (1956) 11 short stories
The Midwich Cuckoos (1957)
The Outward Urge (1959)
Trouble with Lichen (1960)
Consider Her Ways and Others (1961) 6 short stories
Chocky (1968)
Hidden Wyndham: Life, Love, Letters by Amy Binns (2019)

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 latter’s invention, an anti-gravity material they call ‘Cavorite’, to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites, leading up to its chasteningly moralistic conclusion
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 and they rebel
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, an 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 unimaginable strangeness

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 vastest 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, where mysteries and adventures unfold

1940s

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent Satan tempting the planet’s new young inhabitants to a new Fall as he did on earth
1945 That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis – Ransom assembles a motley crew of heroes ancient and modern 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 vanished 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
1951 The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham – the whole world turns out to watch the flashing lights in the sky caused by a passing comet and next morning wakes up blind, except for a handful of survivors who have to rebuild human society while fighting off the rapidly growing population of the mobile, intelligent, poison sting-wielding monster plants of the title
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psycho-historian 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 Foundation Trilogy, which describes 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 – until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a fast-moving novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke one of my favourite sci-fi novels, a thrilling narrative describing the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1953 The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham – some form of alien life invades earth in the shape of ‘fireballs’ from outer space which fall into the deepest parts of the earth’s oceans, followed by the sinking of ships passing over the ocean deeps, gruesome attacks of ‘sea tanks’ on ports and shoreline settlements around the world and then, in the final phase, the melting of the earth’s icecaps and global flooding
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 who is tasked with solving a murder mystery
1954 Jizzle by John Wyndham – 15 short stories, from the malevolent monkey of the title story to a bizarre yarn about a tube train which goes to hell, a paychiatrist who projects the same idyllic dream into the minds of hundreds of women around London, to a chapter-length dry run for The Chrysalids
1955 The Chrysalids by John Wyndham – hundreds of years after a nuclear war devastated North America, David Strorm grows up in a rural community run by God-fearing zealots obsessed with detecting mutant plants, livestock and – worst of all – human ‘blasphemies’ – caused by the lingering radiation. But as he grows up, David realises he possesses a special mutation the Guardians of Purity have never dreamed of – the power of telepathy – and he’s not the only one, but when he and his mind-melding friends are discovered, they are forced to flee to the Badlands in a race to survive
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 fast-paced 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 revenge
1956 The Death of Grass by John Christopher – amid the backdrop of a worldwide famine caused by the Chung-Li virus which kills all species of grass (wheat, barley, oats etc) decent civil engineer John Custance finds himself leading his wife, two children and a small gang of followers out of London and across an England collapsing into chaos and barbarism in order to reach the remote valley which his brother had told him he was going to plant with potatoes and other root vegetables and which he knows is an easily defendable enclave
1956 The Seeds of Time by John Wyndham – 11 science fiction short stories, mostly humorous, satirical, even farcical, but two or three (Survival, Dumb Martian and Time To Rest) which really cut through and linger.
1957 The Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham – one night a nondescript English village is closed off by a force field, all the inhabitants within the zone losing consciousness. A day later the field disappears and the villagers all regain consciousness but two months later, all the fertile women in the place realise they are pregnant, and nine months later give birth to identical babies with platinum blonde hair and penetrating golden eyes, which soon begin exerting telepathic control over their parents and then the other villagers. Are they aliens, implanted in human wombs, and destined to supersede Homo sapiens as top species on the planet?
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury
1959 The Outward Urge by John Wyndham – a relatively conventional space exploration novel in five parts which follow successive members of the Troon family over a 200-year period (1994 to 2194) as they help build the first British space station, command the British moon base, lead expeditions to Mars, to Venus, and ends with an eerie ‘ghost’ story

1960s

1960 Trouble With Lichen by John Wyndham – ardent feminist and biochemist Diana Brackley discovers a substance which slows down the ageing process, with potentially revolutionary implications for human civilisation, in a novel which combines serious insights into how women are shaped and controlled by society and sociological speculation with a sentimental love story and passages of broad social satire (about the beauty industry and the newspaper trade)
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
1961 Consider Her Ways and Others by John Wyndham – Six short stories dominated by the title track which depicts England a few centuries hence, after a plague has wiped out all men and the surviving women have been genetically engineered into four distinct types, the brainy Doctors, the brawny Amazons, the short Servitors, and the vast whale-like mothers into whose body a twentieth century woman doctor is unwittingly transported
1962 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
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
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, 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
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds and the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
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
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
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
1968 Chocky by John Wyndham – Matthew is the adopted son of an ordinary, middle-class couple who starts talking to a voice in his head who it takes the entire novel to persuade his parents is real and a telepathic explorer from a far distant planet
1969 The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton – describes in retrospect, in the style of a scientific inquiry, the crisis which unfolds after a fatal virus is brought back to earth by a space probe and starts spreading uncontrollably
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 undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

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 ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same pattern, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
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 his 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, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
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, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
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
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1973 The Best of John Wyndham 1932 to 1949 – Six rather silly short stories dating, as the title indicates, from 1932 to 1949, with far too much interplanetary travel
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
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
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 The Alteration by Kingsley Amis – a counterfactual narrative in which the Reformation never happened and so there was no Enlightenment, no Romantic revolution, no Industrial Revolution spearheaded by Protestant England, no political revolutions, no Victorian era when democracy and liberalism triumphed over Christian repression, with the result that England in 1976 is a peaceful medieval country ruled by officials of the all-powerful Roman Catholic Church
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced he is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions, including the news that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prisoner at the gaol where Starbuck ends up serving a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians in the so-called ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
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
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself ‘President Manson’, revived an old nuclear power station to light up Las Vegas and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
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 Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard – his breakthrough book, ostensibly an autobiography focusing on this 1930s boyhood in Shanghai and then incarceration in a Japanese internment camp, observing the psychological breakdown of the adults around him: made into an Oscar-winning movie by Steven Spielberg: only later did it emerge that the book was intended as a novel and is factually misleading
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which 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’: Turner is a tough expert at kidnapping scientists from one mega-tech corporation for another, until his abduction of Christopher Mitchell from Maas Biolabs goes badly wrong and he finds himself on the run, his storyline dovetailing with those of sexy young Marly Krushkhova, ‘disgraced former owner of a tiny Paris gallery’ who is commissioned by the richest man in the world to track down the source of a mysterious modern artwork, and Bobby Newmark, self-styled ‘Count Zero’ and computer hacker
1987 The Day of Creation by J.G. Ballard – strange and, in my view, profoundly unsuccessful novel in which WHO doctor John Mallory embarks on an obsessive quest to find the source of an African river accompanied by a teenage African girl and a half-blind documentary maker who films the chaotic sequence of events
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 Memories of the Space Age Eight short stories spanning the 20 most productive years of Ballard’s career, presented in chronological order and linked by the Ballardian themes of space travel, astronauts and psychosis
1988 Running Wild by J.G. Ballard – the pampered children of a gated community of affluent professionals, near Reading, run wild and murder their parents and security guards
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 Angie is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero; while the daughter of a Japanese gangster, who’s been sent to London for safekeeping, is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s

1990 War Fever by J.G. Ballard – 14 late short stories, some traditional science fiction, some interesting formal experiments like Answers To a Questionnaire from which you have to deduce the questions and the context
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative version of history, Victorian inventor Charles Babbage’s design for an early computer, instead of remaining 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 suppressed
1991 The Kindness of Women by J.G. Ballard – a sequel of sorts to Empire of the Sun which reprises the Shanghai and Japanese internment camp scenes from that book, but goes on to describe the author’s post-war experiences as a medical student at Cambridge, as a pilot in Canada, his marriage, children, writing and involvement in the avant-garde art scene of the 1960s and 70s: though based on his own experiences the book is overtly a novel focusing on a small number of recurring characters who symbolise different aspects of the post-war world
1993 Virtual Light by William Gibson – first of Gibson’s Bridge Trilogy, in which cop-with-a-heart-of-gold Berry Rydell foils an attempt by crooked property developers to rebuild post-earthquake San Francisco
1994 Rushing to Paradise by J.G. Ballard – a sort of rewrite of Lord of the Flies in which a number of unbalanced environmental activists set up a utopian community on a Pacific island, ostensibly to save the local rare breed of albatross from French nuclear tests, but end up going mad and murdering each other
1996 Cocaine Nights by J. G. Ballard – sensible, middle-class Charles Prentice flies out to a luxury resort for British ex-pats on the Spanish Riviera to find out why his brother, Frank, is in a Spanish prison charged with murder, and discovers the resort has become a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour – i.e. sex, drugs and organised violence – which has come to bind the community together
1996 Idoru by William Gibson – second novel in the ‘Bridge’ trilogy: Colin Laney has a gift for spotting nodal points in the oceans of data in cyberspace, and so is hired by the scary head of security for a pop music duo, Lo/Rez, to find out why his boss, the half-Irish singer Rez, has announced he is going to marry a virtual reality woman, an idoru; meanwhile schoolgirl Chia MacKenzie flies out to Tokyo and unwittingly gets caught up in smuggling new nanotechnology device which is the core of the plot
1999 All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson – third of the Bridge Trilogy in which main characters from the two previous books are reunited on the ruined Golden Gate bridge, including tough ex-cop Rydell, sexy bike courier Chevette, digital babe Rei Toei, Fontaine the old black dude who keeps an antiques shop, as a smooth, rich corporate baddie seeks to unleash a terminal shift in the world’s dataflows and Rydell is hunted by a Taoist assassin

2000s

2000 Super-Cannes by J.G. Ballard – Paul Sinclair packs in his London job to accompany his wife, who’s landed a plum job as a paediatrician at Eden-Olympia, an elite business park just outside Cannes in the South of France; both are unnerved to discover that her predecessor, David Greenwood, one day went to work with an assault rifle, shot dead several senior executives before shooting himself; when Paul sets out to investigate, he discovers the business park is a hotbed of ‘transgressive’ behaviour i.e. designer drugs, BDSM sex, and organised vigilante violence against immigrants down in Cannes, and finds himself and his wife being sucked into its disturbing mind-set
2003 Pattern Recognition by William Gibson – first of the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set very much in the present, around the London-based advertising agency Blue Ant, founded by advertising guru Hubertus Bigend who hires Cayce Pollard, supernaturally gifted logo approver and fashion trend detector, to hunt down the maker of mysterious ‘footage’ which has started appearing on the internet, a quest that takes them from New York and London, to Tokyo, Moscow and Paris
2007 Spook Country by William Gibson – second in the ‘Blue Ant’ trilogy, set in London and featuring many of the characters from its immediate predecessor, namely Milgrim the drug addict and ex-rock singer Hollis Henry
2008 Miracles of Life by J.G. Ballard – right at the end of his life, Ballard wrote a straightforward autobiography in which he makes startling revelations about his time in the Japanese internment camp (he really enjoyed it!), insightful comments about science fiction, but the real theme is his moving expressions of love for his three children

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974)

‘Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn’t even in the galaxy proper, but rather is part of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant. Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Manoeuvring into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.’
(The Forever War page 174)

This may be the only novel I’ve read by a soldier who won the Purple Heart, the medal awarded in the name of the United States President to those wounded or killed while serving in the US armed forces.

Haldeman was a Physics major when he was drafted into the US Army and went to fight in Vietnam, where he was badly wounded, before receiving his honour.

The Forever War intertwines the reality of contemporary conflict, 1970s-style, with social prophecy and a detailed and believable grasp of advanced physics, to make a plausible and powerful narrative which is also an Orwellian fable.

The plot

It is the 1990s and Earth science has discovered collapsars, a type of black hole, which allow space ships instantaneous travel to other collapsars, thus giving humans the ability to travel astronomical distances in short periods.

Barely have we Terrans (earthlings – in practice, Americans) begun to settle the new solar systems and planets reachable via this miraculous device, than we are attacked, ships blown up, colonies wiped out by violent alien forces. Since the first attack happens in a star system near Taurus, the enemy are named Taurians.

The novel consists of four sections following the first-person account of William Mandella, one of the first elite conscripts called up to be trained in the new star-jumping, alien-fighting technology.

Crucial to the narrative is the idea that, although the astronauts jumping through collapsars experience the passage of just weeks or months, because they are travelling at near light speed and so time (for them) has slowed right down — for everyone else, including their loved ones left back on Earth, time continues at the speed we’re familiar with. So that when they return after a mission lasting what is for them only a few months, decades have passed back on Earth.

Private Mandella We are given a detailed account of his training, of the complex space suits required, how him and his team build the first habitations on the planetoid named Stargate, before being subjected to artificial enemy ‘attacks’.

Amusing details of future Army life, including that the official group response to officers is, ‘Fuck you, Sir!’ and promiscuous sex is encouraged between men and women who are treated completely equally as regards training and combat.

When they finally emerge from collapsar travel and hit the surface of a planetoid known to harbour a Taurian base, the enemy turn out to be skinny monsters enveloped in bubble of their own atmosphere who ride a kind of broomstick. The one and only attack made on their compound is surprisingly easy to beat off, with the Taurians virtually lining up to be killed, although an enormous flower-shaped machine burps bubbles of acid which float at head height and you have to duck (in between avoiding laser weapon fire) if you don’t want to be decapitated.

Sergeant Mandella 2007-2024 Mandella sets off on another tour of duty in a more advanced space ship but, realistically enough, this one is attacked before it even gets near the destination planet, coming out of the collapsar to be immediately hit, so that Mandella comes out of cryogenic suspension to find blood everywhere and half the crew dead, and the woman he’s become closest to in the previous episodes, Marygay, with half her guts hanging out (due to futuristic medicine, she survives). The ship limps back to the nearest collapsar, on to Stargate, and Mandella prepares to go ‘home’, back to Earth.

But, of course, in the meantime decades have passed. His mother has aged 40 years, his father is dead. This is the fullest description in the book of how earth has changed while he was away i.e. Haldeman’s own predictions for what will happen in the 40 or so years from the mid-1990s.

He predicts a huge population explosion, with the number of people on earth ballooning to over 9 billion, which leads to food shortages and the so-called ‘Ration Wars’. When Mandella returns it is to find that his mother living in a huge high-rise; that everyone needs a bodyguard; that you have to bribe agents to get even a basic job; that food is strictly rationed; and that his mother has taken a lesbian lover.

Mandella seeks escape from the violent city by going to visit the family of his lover, Marygay, who live on a farm/commune. He discovers that the farms are subject to raids and attacks and has barely settled in before, having taken Marygay to a dance, they return to discover a full-scale raid taking place at her parents’ farm. Rather inevitably, the parents are killed and he and Marygay, disillusioned with this violent Earth, decide to re-enlist.

Lieutenant Mandella 2024-2389 Mandella arrives back in space to discover the technology has moved on hugely since his first tour: the Starbase he helped build in pat one is now a small city with 10,000 inhabitants – the number of collapsars discovered is now into the hundreds.

The camp new officers inform him that homosexuality is now the predominant gender on Earth where heterosexuality is frowned on. Don’t worry, though, most people think heterosexuality can be cured, so he should be just fine!

Mandella’s squad have only barely reached the target planet and deployed before the vehicle he’s in is blown up, falling on his leg and crushing it. But the space suits are now very advanced, with built-in guillotines which amputate damaged limbs, hermetically seal the suit and inject the patient with morphine. You sleep till rescued or till you die in your sleep. Mandella is rescued and undergoes new treatment for regrowing limbs, which is explained in some detail.

Major Mandella 2458 – 3143 By this time William is one of the few people who have lived through the entire war. He learns that Earth’s population has now stabilised at a billion homosexuals, bred in test tubes, pushed out of artificial vaginas, raised in clinics. None of that parenting nonsense. Like Brave New World (1932). He is now in command of 120 of these brave new humanoids in a mission to the furthest collapsar yet discovered. Their mission is to erect a base on a planetoid in the system and await the inevitable attack. He knows they’re probably all doomed.

This final section gives a persuasive and powerful sense of the burden of command over an essentially alien race, a detailed description of the new fighting technology, including a stasis bubble, in which no electrical pulses can travel. When the predicted Taurian attack comes, Haldeman powerfully describes its successive phases: first the rival ships out in space fighting each other at nearly the speed of light; then the computer-operated lasers located around the periphery zapping everything which moves, including all the alien drones; then ‘tachyon’ bombs raising the temperature so high that the lasers can no longer operate; and then wave after wave of invader ships disgorging ranks of Taurians who relentlessly attack, until the last survivors are forced back into the stasis bubble, where…

Well, you’ll have to read the exciting climax yourself.

Fighting

I assume that Haldeman’s descriptions of the army, training, military discipline and hierarchy, are closely based on his own experiences in the U.S. Army and in Vietnam, a factor which anchors the often ludicrous plotline in powerful and persuasive descriptions of combat.

The events may be fantastic, but the cynical soldier’s reactions to them seem lived-in and real. As in other military memoirs I’ve read, the most important factor of Army life appears to be the infinitesimally small amount of time spent actually fighting, with 99% of the time being spent in boring training, building camps, keeping fit, carrying out fatigues and so on, or rotating back to the world for R&R.

Social commentary

Population explosion Halderman is writing in a period when the greatest threat facing humanity was meant to be the ‘population explosion’ (see the classic 1973 movie, Soylent Green). In the novel, the advent of a population of 9 billion begins a process of calamitous change, starting with wars over food.

When he wrote, the world population was about 3.5 billion, today it is double that, 7.5 billion. Maybe surprisingly, this hasn’t led to global social collapse and certainly not in the highest-populated countries – China, India, the USA, which have both absorbed the tremendous growth and managed to significantly raise the standard of living for hundreds of millions.

Space travel I feel I have lived through the Space Age. The fact that both J.G. Ballard and Gerard DeGroot thought it was over by 1972 (the last moon landing) confirms my feeling that the Space Shuttle era (1981-2011) was a long, expensive anti-climax. Obviously, new satellites are launched all the time and the International Space Station continues to be occupied and carry out its experiments. But we’ll never go back to the moon, and the notion of manned flights to Mars is crackers. During my lifetime humanity discovered that space travel is too expensive and too risky and brings little or no return.

All space-based science fiction therefore has a wistful, nostalgic feel. It is a technologically optimistic past’s vision of a future which is not, now, going to happen.

The unconscious American basis of science fiction A few centuries in the future Haldeman sees the entire population being hatched out of test tubes and engineered to be homosexual or neuter. This, like all notions of space travel and lots of other classic sci-fi predictions, relies on the premise that the whole world can be brought up to American levels of affluence and technological prowess. I.e. it doesn’t understand the uniqueness of the American achievement.

Old-school Marxists say this is because America spent the 20th century erecting a vast military-industrial apparatus designed to exploit the rest of the world’s commodities and raw materials. With around 5% of the world population, it consumes about 25% of the world’s resources (Scientific American, 14 September 2012)

By contrast, free marketeers say that America’s ongoing economic and technological success is based on its high level of education, its competitive capitalist culture, and its flexible working practices.

Whatever the reason, it is clear that all science fiction which premises its narratives on the notion of the continuous economic and technological improvement of all humanity, enabling us all to reach the same luxury lifestyle – and then expand that lifestyle out into space – is profoundly flawed.

Fewer than one in ten of the world population enjoy anything like the lifestyle, the affluence and the technological gewgaws everyone reading this blog takes for granted. And the entire trend of our time is towards the attributes of middle-class life contracting, all across the industrialised world, as wealth is redistributed away from the squeezed middle upwards to the super-rich. (Middle-Class Squeeze Wikipedia article)

‘Hard’ science fiction is the name given to sci-fi based on a realistic understanding of science – here, the laws of physics and relativity, among other technically plausible details.

But I find it almost unreadable because it requires such a tremendous suspension of disbelief in the realities of the world we live in.

In the world we live in there will be no space travel. There will be no planetary government. There will be no attainment of luxurious lifestyles for the entire global population.

These ideas are as faded and dated as Victorian theology. The technological and economic optimism which gave birth to them died in the 1970s and was replaced by our current ideology of gross inequality and cultural pessimism.

The forever war The one prediction which does ring true is the idea that the attacks of an ill-defined but real enemy will create an atmosphere of paranoia and lead to the placing of society on a permanent war footing.

Left-wing writers call it the Shock Doctrine or Disaster Capitalism, but anyone who reads the newspapers can follow how the world has developed since 9/11 – how the highfalutin’ notion that a united government of earth will come together to fund idealistic expeditions to found new settlements on inhabitable planets across the universe seem like childish dreams compared to the permanent instability we have created here on earth, and the eternal and much-publicised ‘terrorist threat’ which justifies enhanced levels of spying, monitoring and control over all the populations of the economically advanced countries for the foreseeable future.

In this, the most cynical and satirical prediction of this powerful novel, Haldeman was bitingly accurate.

Number one

In 1999 Millennium Publishing began republishing the best science fiction novels of all time, eventually producing a list of 50 all-time classics (each one numbered). The Forever War was number one in the series and, when the top ten were reprinted in hardcover editions, The Forever War was also included. The experts consider it that important.

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

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, there to discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka 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
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
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 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
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 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
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 a catastrophe on the moon

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?

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
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

Books & Boots

All posts tagged population explosion

Congo: the epic history of a people by David Van Reybrouck (2010)

Kimbanguism

1. Van Reybrouck is not British

2. Van Reybrouck is not a historian

3. Van Reybrouck is interested in byways

4. Van Reybrouck has carried our many interviews

a) People van Reybrouck spoke to

b) Written texts recording African testimony and voices

Chapters

Between the wars

Incorporation into global capitalist economy

Industrialisation and proletarianisation

Population explosion

Repression

What is an évolué?

A succession of raw materials

Conclusion

Credit

Africa-related reviews

History

Fictions set wholly or partly in Africa

Exhibitions about Africa

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Trouble with Lichen by John Wyndham (1960)

Wyndham’s wish to write literature

Part one

Part two

Part three

Diana’s death and cause

A surprise happy ending

Satire

Plausibility

Feminism

On having a family

On the pressure of advertising 1

On the pressure of advertising 2

Women are their own worst enemy

The beauty industry

Credit

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John Wyndham reviews

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Late Victorian

1900s

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

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The Forever War by Joe Haldeman (1974)

The plot

Fighting

Social commentary

Number one

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