A challenging novel of mysticism, power, and alien contact

Starships and faster-than-light travel are load-bearing elements of science fiction, convenient narrative devices to put characters in close contact with the alien other. Ian Watson’s fourth novel Alien Embassy, originally published in 1977, explores an altogether different means of communing with the galaxy. Set in a post-disaster future in which western technology has been largely abandoned, this is a story rooted instead in eastern mysticism. Free of its “mad urge to conquer space with machines”, humankind can instead use the power of the mind to bridge the gap between the stars.

Continuing Watson’s run of challenging, idea-packed novels, Alien Embassy also develops his fascination with communication, our limited grasp of reality, and the fraught quest for transcendence. Like The Embedding (1973) and The Jonah Kit (1975) before it, this is bracing and ambitious SF, arguably best suited to readers with a strong grounding in the genre. Short on physical action but long on sweeping conceptual breakthroughs and deep philosophical speculation, Alien Embassy is a powerful example of Watson’s under-recognised contribution to British SF in the 1970s.

“Ecstasy, not hydrazine”

The year is 2170 and the world has undergone vast change over the course of two centuries. It is an unenlightened time, and few people are aware of how the new order came about - following a catastrophic population crash in the 1990s. Only a few advanced technologies are used: computer-controlled ocean vessels, solar panels for electricity generation, and implanted “contracapsules” to keep the population in check. Aircraft are very rare, and even the notion of long-distance travel is frowned upon.

Lila Makindi is a young woman living on the coast of Tanzania. After undergoing rigorous testing, she is recruited to join “Bardo” - the Space Communications Administration operated by the world government. Her selection and training takes her first to semi-abandoned Miami, and later to Lhasa, high in the mountains of Tibet. Lila is to become a “pilot”, exploiting her natural talent to undergo a form of astral travel to worlds orbiting distant stars. 

Lila and her colleagues are inducted into the strange world of Bardo, and into its rigid sexual, reproductive, and spiritual strictures. They are to be the vanguard of humanity’s newfound destiny in space. As Lila puts it, “ecstasy, not hydrazine, would be our rocket fuel to the stars.” In time, though, Lila and her fellow pilots begin to suspect that they are being misled by the state. Peeling away layer after layer of deception, Lila becomes increasingly troubled by what Bardo has in store.

Conceptual breakthrough as power structure

In at least one key way, Alien Embassy marks a break with Watson’s earlier work. “My first three novels all had triple story lines”, he recalled in 2008, “then with [..] Alien Embassy, I shifted to [a] first person narrative in the mouth of a black African woman (which I suppose was innovative at the time, and maybe still is).” Lila is something of an everywoman, told she is special by a government agency she is increasingly suspicious of but has little power to oppose.

Like Brian Aldiss’ novel Non-Stop (1958), Alien Embassy is a formidable showcase of the conceptual breakthrough. As the story progresses, Lila experiences a chain of breakthroughs in her understanding of Bardo, their methods and goals, and even the nature of the universe. In Aldiss’ novel, passage from one conceptual frame to another is a question of position. This is also true in Watson’s story, as Lila’s arrival in new locations exposes her to further revelations. However, the breakthrough is also a function of power: in Alien Embassy, the higher Lila’s status, the more complete and disturbing her view of reality becomes.

Sex and spirituality

Also disturbing to some is Watson’s emphasis on sex, which is a key part of the novel’s first half in particular. In order to achieve astral spaceflight - the projection of mind beyond Earth’s embrace - Lila and her fellow recruits are paired with strangers for spiritually charged sexual unions. It is the fusion of male and female psychic energies, the pilots are told, which allows their thoughts and perceptions to travel over interstellar distances. As this is a science fiction novel, this is a less than strictly accurate explanation.

Alien Embassy is not just steeped in eastern mysticism but also in the opening up of discussions about sexuality in the decade of The Joy of Sex. Watson’s work has provoked revulsion over its sexual content, but this is arguably explained in part by the general “dis-ease” with sex as an SF subject observed by Peter Nicholls in the SFE.

“I can know the ways of heaven”

One of the most striking aspects of Alien Embassy is its depiction of a society based around the rejection of real experience, and on a kind of manipulative sophistry about psychic “action at a distance”. In the novel, ideas from Tibetan thought are transformed by Bardo into a repressive dogma, restricting knowledge to a chosen few. Travel, and experience of the real world, is highly restricted. “What did flying ever bring people”, Lila is asked, “but a few handfuls of dust from the next-door world?” It is easy to make a ready comparison with the inward-looking retreat into vapid fakeness that is such a visible strain of 21st century culture.

A Times reviewer was quite right to say that Alien Embassy “hums with notions as a hive of bees”. Lila’s experiences see her not only join an interstellar sex cult, but also meet birdlike aliens in an identity-scrambling symbiotic relationship with trees, and crystalline creatures that communicate using natural lasers. This is an intellectually intense novel written in a fine literary style, and a worthwhile part of Watson’s legacy.

An influential classic of power and revenge on Venus

Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore were one of the preeminent power couples in science fiction. Coming to prominence as writers individually in the 1930s, they met through the circle of figures around H. P. Lovecraft and married in 1940. They formed a highly prolific and unusually close collaboration, working together so intricately that their contributions were often inseparable. Their stories became a fixture of Astounding magazine during World War II, under the editorship of John W. Campbell Jr. Much of their work was credited to the pseudonyms Lewis Padgett and Lawrence O’Donnell.

Fury is one of the duo’s most famous collaborations, although also one of their most unequal - Moore estimated that she wrote only around one eighth of the text. The novel was serialised in the May, June, and July 1947 issues of Astounding and credited to O’Donnell. It built on an earlier story, “Clash by Night” (1943). When it was first published in book form in 1950, it was credited to Kuttner alone and most subsequent editions have preserved this misleading impression.

An enduring classic of the so-called golden age of science fiction, Fury is interesting for its entertainingly old-fashioned depiction of Venus, its ruthless antihero, and its influence on later works.

Venus envy

From today’s perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Fury is its depiction of Venus, which is fairly typical for SF in the first half of the 20th century. At that time, knowledge about conditions on Venus was limited, and the planet was often felt to be a likely candidate for extraterrestrial life and habitability. These hopes were dashed in the 1960s, especially by the Soviet probe Venera 4, which indicated that the planet’s atmosphere is toxic and extremely hot.

In Fury, Venus has a hostile but lush jungle environment. Its air and soil are rife with aggressive microorganisms, its seas teem with ravenous creatures, and ferocious land predators lurk within its prolific vegetation. Kuttner and Moore confine their imagined human population to the ocean depths - the immense engineering challenges these cities would present is waved away by the invention of the miracle metal impervium.

The depiction of Venus’ surface seems to have been a clear inspiration for Harry Harrison’s excellent novel Deathworld (1960). That title has since been used to describe similarly hostile planets in various SF contexts, including Warhammer 40,000. The irony, of course, is that the real Venus is more deadly than any science fictional “deathworld”; but its brutal heat, pressure, and toxicity which forbid any form of life are hardly storyable.

Bad before Bester

The setting of Fury is not its only influential element. The character of Sam Harker, vengeful antihero, has also left his mark on later science fiction. In particular, he is a clear precursor for Gully Foyle from Alfred Bester’s better known novel The Stars My Destination (1956). While Bester’s novel takes inspiration from The Count of Monte Cristo (1856), it was also very likely influenced by the work of Kuttner and Moore. Both antiheroes are mutilated, betrayed, and abandoned; both act out of selfishness and a desire for vengeance, but inadvertently trigger wider changes that affect all of humankind.

Between stagnation and the stars

Fury depicts the Keeps as a stagnant society, frozen in meaningless pleasure and directionless labour. Kuttner and Moore imagine a civilisation in which the power of the few is so entrenched, so beyond challenge, that the human spirit itself is threatened. The Keeps are a void, without hope of change; conversely, Sam Harker is an agent of change, a catalyst for upheaval. This kind of conflict is one which writers of SF - a genre acutely concerned with change - have relitigated many times over the decades; but Fury does so engagingly even after all the years that have passed since its publication.

An entertainingly wild aquatic adventure on two worlds

Originally published in 1977, Medusa’s Children is a mid-period novel by Northern Irish SF writer Bob Shaw. Out of print since 1988, it is an aquatic adventure which exploits one of Shaw’s most outlandish concepts to bring together two narrative threads set in radically diverse environments. 

By 1977, Shaw was a well-established writer in fan and professional circles. He had recently published Orbitsville (1975), which won the BSFA Award for Best Novel, and then A Wreath of Stars (1976), which the writers of the Science Fiction Encyclopedia have described as “perhaps his finest” individual novel. 

While not quite at the level of Shaw’s formidable best, Medusa’s Children is beguilingly strange and inventive, weaving together biological speculation, matter transmission, and even ancient aliens.

Squid goals

For around half of the novel, Shaw alternates between two very different perspectives. Later, these merge as the story approaches its climax. 

The novel opens in a bizarre underwater environment. Myrah is part of a small community of humans living submerged in a giant ball of water, essentially a liquid planet. To survive, they must constantly scavenge for bubbles of air which they trap within special helmets. Their society is primitive, with no technology to speak of. Their lives are nasty, brutish, and short due to rampant disease and the predations of an aggressive squid-like species.

Meanwhile, Tarrant is a not-terribly-competent aquafarmer operating in the Pacific Ocean. A former pilot and deserter, his aims are to keep a low profile and to romance Beth, a young woman who lives nearby. His efforts are frustrated by Beth’s controlling, conservative parents. Worse, his farm is threatened by an aggressive squid-like species…

Meeting the siphonophore

Although Shaw’s two watery worlds are obviously connected from early on in the novel, part of the charm of Medusa’s Children is the outlandish idea which links them. 

Both Myrah and Tarrant grapple, quite separately, with the same monstrous creatures - which Myrah’s people know as Horra. It is also apparent that Myrah’s bleak, submerged home cannot be on Earth, due to its lack of dry land and its very low gravity. The puzzle of where Myrah’s people are, and how they got there generations ago, is the main driver of the book’s first half. 

The explanation is easily one of Shaw’s wilder ideas, and when it comes, Medusa’s Children steps up a few gears. It transpires that Tarrant and Myrah each live close to one end of an extraordinary piece of ancient alien technology. Millions of years previously, long-departed aliens set up a matter transmission system as a means of regulating and stabilising Earth’s sea levels. 

Excess seawater was transported across the solar system and into space, kept liquid to form a glob of ocean held loosely together by a weak gravitational force. It is implied that Myrah’s community are the inbred descendants of unfortunate travelers, inadvertently caught in the device’s transmission field in a kind of Bermuda Triangle scenario generations earlier. 

Shaw also introduces a vast, sentient sea creature which evolved from Earth animals also caught by the alien device. Known as Ka by Myrah’s people and worshipped by some of them as a god, this immense entity is a hyper-evolved form of a siphonophore, some of the strangest species in Earth’s oceans. Through this element, Shaw explores interesting concepts about evolution, distributed intelligence, and unusual methods of survival.

A liquid world

Of the two halves of Medusa’s Children, the second is easily the strongest. In the first half, Tarrant’s down-to-Earth story is not particularly compelling, and his efforts to form a relationship with Beth go nowhere, existing largely to pad out the page count. While the sexual politics of the novel are dubious, they are interesting and Shaw even briefly flirts with body horror as Ka demonstrates his ability to extend his influence.

It is when Shaw begins to unfurl his mysteries that the novel improves, and while it never reaches the level of a novel like A Wreath of Stars or The Palace of Eternity, it is definitely entertaining. It may not be the best entry point into Shaw’s body of work, but established fans would do well to pick it up, should a copy cross their path.

On the run in the networked society

Nickie Haflinger is a product of the system. Extensively trained in a covert U.S. government facility, he has been moulded to operate in a highly computerised future “tightly webbed in a net of inter-locking data-channels”. Having witnessed other government experiments which disturb him, Haflinger goes rogue. Picking up and discarding identities in quick succession, he sets out on a chase from Ohio to California, with his former overseers on his trail.

Published in 1975, The Shockwave Rider is the fourth and final in John Brunner’s famous sequence of “tract novels” which reflect the author’s thinking about the challenges to come in the 21st century. While Brunner’s previous efforts had confronted overpopulation, environmental degradation, and urban violence, The Shockwave Rider explores computerisation and the prospect of a networked world. 

By turns prophetic and arguably naive, Brunner’s novel is an intriguing look at a digital future, written when ARPANET was the most sophisticated extant computer network. Brunner correctly foresaw the privacy and security threats implicit in a networked society, as well as our desire to assume different personas online. However, his hope that people could choose to disentangle themselves from overbearing systems clashes with the rigid, heavily surveilled landscape of today’s Internet.

The “tract novels”

John Brunner’s writing became increasingly mature and sophisticated in the mid-1960s. He gradually moved away from pulp story formats, and mined science publications and grey literature to imagine the world of the relatively near future. This culminated with his landmark novel Stand on Zanzibar (1968). Written in a panoramic style strongly influenced by the USA trilogy (1930 - 1936) by John Dos Passos, this work made Brunner the first British winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel. 

Although Stand on Zanzibar was not particularly successful in commercial terms - likely in part due to its huge length for a novel at that time - Brunner wrote three further books in a relatively similar style. The Jagged Orbit (1969), The Sheep Look Up (1972), and The Shockwave Rider each posit a different 21st century scenario, based on Brunner’s extrapolation of trends he observed in the world around him. Unfortunately for us, Brunner’s predictive methods were sometimes quite sound.

Super phreak

Much of the book covers Haflinger’s period as a fugitive, hunted by his government handlers. When the heat is on, he uses his computer skills to assume new, invented identities and to erase all traces of his previous guises. To describe this, Brunner coined the term “computer worm”, later adopted by computer scientists.

During his time on the run, Haflinger lives as a fringe preacher in Toledo, Ohio and then as a wealthy computer consultant in Kansas City, Missouri. There, he meets Kate, a bright young perpetual student who sees through his false identity. Together they move on to find a home in Precipice, one of several new communities that have sprung up to house refugees from an earthquake that destroyed San Francisco. 

Inspired by his new friends in California, Haflinger transforms from fugitive to would-be hacker revolutionary, bent on tearing down the veils of government secrecy and exposing the corruption of a decadent elite.

Information overload

Classic science fiction should not be judged on its predictive accuracy; but if it were, The Shockwave Rider would rate quite highly. Brunner’s depiction of a computer-reliant, highly networked society is quite striking and reflects his awareness of recent technological progress. In Stand on Zanzibar, the monolithic supercomputer Shalmaneser guides corporate decision-making. The Shockwave Rider depicts a much more distributed and interconnected model of computing, influenced by the development of ARPANET. 

Crucially, Brunner imagines a future in which distributed computer networks, processing vast reams of data, are accessible to all. Citizens access the continental net through their landline phones, and Haflinger’s manipulation of this system resembles phreaking, the analogue precursor to computer hacking. Brunner anticipates a version of today’s prediction markets, termed “Delphi pools”, after Pythia, the famous Oracle of Delphi. Conducted over the continental net, these exploit the predictive potential of the “wisdom of the crowd”.

Typically for Brunner’s work, The Shockwave Rider does not linger on technology but focuses instead on its social effects. Many people practice the “plug-in lifestyle”, a kind of highly mobile existence made possible by a combination of computerisation, cheaper transport, and consumer fads. This terminology recalls James Tiptree Jr.’s story “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), an influence on William Gibson and cyberpunk. In some ways, these plugged-in people resemble an early form of today’s digital nomads. As a child, Haflinger was transferred from family to family, essentially as a kind of lifestyle accessory. He credits this experience with preparing him for a world of constant change.

Brunner was strongly influenced by Alvin Toffler’s book Future Shock (1970), which posited that people could suffer trauma from “too much change in too short a period of time”. In The Shockwave Rider, some people - notably Haflinger - are afflicted by “overload”, a kind of trauma inflicted by over-exposure not so much to change, but to information. Even in this Brunner was only a few steps removed from the kind of derangement people experience today, affected by online misinformation, deepfakes, propaganda, and the bizarre counterfactuals spat out by LLMs.

The cyber novel

As with The Jagged Orbit, The Shockwave Rider is written in a more grounded style than Stand on Zanzibar. Brunner’s deployment of futuristic neologisms is kept to a relative minimum, and there are fewer settings. Brunner prided himself on his ostensibly authentic use of American locations and dialogue, and these are quite effective. In keeping with the other “tract novels”, The Shockwave Rider is quite talky, and the characters express themselves far more through dialogue than through physical action. This is a thought-provoking, rather than exciting, piece of work. 

The novel has often been described, not unreasonably, as a precursor to cyberpunk. It can certainly be thought of a “cyber” novel, deeply immersed in the social implications of then-advanced computer technology but lacking the gritty cynicism and violence found in the later, true cyberpunk of Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Brunner, with his clipped English accent and love of folk music, was nobody’s idea of a punk - but certainly The Shockwave Rider influenced cyberpunk writers. One of these was Pat Cadigan, who met Brunner at the University of Kansas in 1975.

Digital democracy

The crux of The Shockwave Rider is in its comparison between its imagined mainstream future society - and especially the cruel government labs - and the almost utopian lifestyle of Precipice. In the refugee town, Haflinger and Kate find genuine community and solidarity of a type which Brunner suggests is fatally undermined by the computerised society. Set on his revolutionary course, Haflinger defines absolute evil: “it consists in treating another human being as a thing.” Based in Precipice, Haflinger uses the ultimate worm to turn the continental net against its overseers, and give the people the chance to define their own idea of the good society.

Part of the message of the novel seems to be that the risk of a networked world is that it better enables the powerful to treat human beings as things. As computer technologies are increasingly used by repressive states as tools of misinformation, cruelty, and violence, The Shockwave Rider remains relevant despite the rather pat simplicity of its prescriptions.

Can hope exist in a scientific city of total suspicion?

Long before George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), another novel depicted repressive totalitarian states locked in struggle, saturated in total surveillance and immersed in a corrosive atmosphere of mutual suspicion. The strong similarities must be coincidental, however, because the earlier book was published in Swedish and not translated into English until 1966. 

Kallocain (1940) was written by the Swedish poet and novelist Karin Boye (1900 - 1941). Her only work of science fiction, it is a gloomy dystopia influenced by her visits to both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Hailed by one contemporary critic as “a significant and lasting work of art”, it would be Boye’s last, as she died a year after its publication in the spring of 1941.

Like Murray Constantine’s Swastika Night (1937) before it, Kallocain is a landmark in the history of dystopian fiction by women. It follows Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We (1920) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) in the great chain of 20th century dystopian novels. Profoundly shaped by its specific political and historical context, it is a statement by a troubled writer on the necessity of life and hope in the face of pervasive terror.

Better oppression through chemistry

At some point in the future, the so-called World State has control over a large portion of the Earth. While almost all culture and history have been obliterated, there are hints that the old world was ruined by a devastating war and the extensive use of chemical weapons. The World State is governed by a bleak, oppressive regime. People are not considered individuals, merely cells in the great organism of the State. This is a militarised society, in which each person refers to others as “Fellow Soldier”, and everyone must participate in military drills. There is almost no freedom of movement, of association, or of communication. Even in the home, domestic helpers double as spies, monitoring the actions of every family unit. Surveillance cameras and microphones are everywhere. 

Leo Kall is a chemist working in Chemistry City No. 4, a World State settlement dedicated to his field. Devoted to the World State, he is excited to make a major breakthrough - a powerful truth serum he calls Kallocain. His elation is dented when Rissen, a superior whom Leo suspects of having an affair with his wife Linda, is assigned to evaluate the research project. Later, both men become embroiled with the World State’s immensely powerful police ministry, which sees Kallocain’s potential to destroy the last possible site of resistance against the State - the free thought of the individual.

Personal and political 

Born in Gothenburg in 1900, Boye initially came to prominence as a poet, publishing her first collection in 1922. Six years later, she visited the Soviet Union for a three week study tour, which according to translator David McDuff “seems to have consisted mainly in a drab pilgrimage between various state institutions, factories and collective farms.” Her first novel appeared in 1931. At around the same time, she began to undergo psychoanalysis, in part to come to terms with her homosexuality. This took her to Berlin, where in 1932 and 1933 she witnessed the rise of Nazism firsthand.

By the time Boye began work on Kallocain in the autumn of 1939, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were in a non-aggression pact in the early stages of World War II. In that conflict, Sweden was neutral. Boye and other Swedish writers had to tread carefully, as censors were watchful for any material that could trigger a German invasion. McDuff writes that Kallocain’s “mechanised, dehumanised landscape is a composite, bearing the traits of both Nazi and Soviet society.”

Boye ended her own life in the spring of 1941, just a few months before Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union. These two repressive states, combined into the inspiration for Boye’s World State, became engaged in total war which ended with the destruction of Hitler’s Germany in 1945.

As Vowles go on to note, however, there are distinctive elements to Kallocain. One is the particular nature of the repression it depicts, which in some ways seems even more pervasive and total than in Orwell’s Airstrip One. While rooted in the Nazi and Soviet systems, the culture of mutual suspicion, informing, and denunciations anticipates the grimly paranoid atmosphere that was fomented by the Stasi in East Germany.

The depiction of the state as the agent of oppression is, as Vowles notes, typical of this era of dystopian fiction. Today, it is increasingly private corporations which appear to want to know everything about our lives.

…the individual is nothing

Early on in Nineteen Eighty-Four, it is stated that “nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters inside your skull.” Leo Kall’s development of his truth serum - the most clearly science fictional element in the novel - becomes a weapon which the World State can use to threaten even this small bastion of freedom. Again, this makes the atmosphere in Kallocain even more sinister, even as the novel lacks any overt scenes of violence. Kall’s initial delight at what his drug is capable of demonstrates his seemingly unshakeable support for the regime.

Early in the novel, Kall - whose name means “cold” in Swedish - makes a speech at a public event which causes him to be reprimanded by the authorities. He is forced to apologise on the radio: “I committed a serious error [...] affected with a false compassion, of a kind that results from sympathy with the individual, and a false heroism…” Again, it is striking that some of today’s antisocial billionaires have inverted the logic of the World State, pushing a “war on empathy”, an atmosphere of absolute individual selfishness, an abolition of any notion of solidarity or community.

A lost dystopia?

Kallocain makes for an interesting comparison with Swastika Night (1937), an earlier dystopia written by Katharine Burdekin using the pseudonym Murray Constantine. Burdekin’s novel is much more explicit, violent, despairing, and bleak than Kallocain - and in some ways arguably more effective. Swastika Night is explicitly about Nazism, a fierce statement of anti-fascism that was possible in pre-war Britain, and not so in neutral Sweden in 1940.

Kallocain is little-known in the English speaking world, in part due to its relatively late translation from Swedish. Another reason may be that, as Vowles put it, “ideology and police violence, while they exist, fall outside the perimeter of [Boye’s] fiction.” Steeped in ideology and violence, and arriving in the anxious post-war period, Orwell’s novel was well placed to make an indelible impact. While its plot and characterisation leave something to be desired, Kallocain is nevertheless a fascinating entry in the dystopian canon.

The faithful preserve the past, and the future, after a nuclear war

On 15 February 1944, the United States military bombed the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, southeast of Rome. Mistakenly believing that the abbey was being occupied by German troops, the Americans dropped over a thousand tons of explosives on the structure, which had been built in 529 AD. The abbey was obliterated. The Cardinal Secretary of State described the act as “a colossal blunder … a piece of gross stupidity”.

One life permanently changed by the bombing was that of Walter M. Miller Jr. (1923 - 1996). He was a tail gunner whose aircraft was one of those which destroyed the abbey at Monte Cassino, and he was profoundly affected by it. Joe Haldeman, author of The Forever War (1975), wrote that Miller “had post-traumatic stress disorder for 30 years before it had a name”. 

After the war, Miller studied engineering and converted to Catholicism in 1947. Between 1951 and 1957, he published over three dozen science fiction stories, which were often influenced by his faith. Of these, three were gathered and adapted into the only novel published in his lifetime: A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959). 

Long one of the most celebrated SF novels of the 1950s, the book deals with the efforts of monks in what was once New Mexico to preserve knowledge in the millennia after a devastating nuclear war. Told in three parts each separated by six centuries, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a powerful meditation on knowledge, faith, progress, and the hope and risks that come with science and technology.

After the Simplification

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic novel focusing on the long, slow recovery of civilisation after a nuclear exchange at some point in the 20th century. At the centre of the book is the Albertian Order of Leibowitz, based at an abbey in the deserted wasteland of post-nuclear New Mexico. The monks there venerate I. E. Leibowitz, an electrical engineer who survived the “Flame Deluge”, and sought to preserve knowledge during the mass book burnings and purges of intellectuals that followed. In an irony lost on the faithful, Leibowitz was a weapons engineer whose work may have helped make the nuclear war possible.

This is a “fixup novel”, made up of three parts - a common form in the 1950s. Each part is an expansion of a story published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (or F&SF) between 1955 and 1957. Perhaps surprisingly, it did not dawn on Miller that he was writing a serialised novel until he was writing the third part. 

In “Fiat Homo”, a 26th century novice stumbles on a fallout shelter which contains a blueprint which Leibowitz had worked on. Brother Francis Gerard makes it his life's work to copy and try to understand this relic, a mission which causes great trouble for him inside and outside the abbey - but which also presents new hope for the future. In “Fiat Lux”, it is 3174 and the abbey is surrounded by petty fiefdoms. Thon Taddeo, a secular scientist from the city of Texarkana, visits the abbey while regional tensions are on the rise. Finally, “Fiat Voluntas Tua” is set in 3781, and new states have far surpassed the technical achievements of the distant 20th century. In the time of Abbot Zerchi, the abbey must confront the possibility of a second nuclear conflict.

Rites and rituals

Writing in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia, Brian Stableford and David Langford stated that “familiar definitions of SF imply that there is nothing more alien to its concerns than religion”. However, they go on to identify a “spectacular boom” in stories “which cut straight to the heart of theological matters” in the period following World War II. They describe A Canticle for Leibowitz as the “single most impressive work” of this period.

The monks in the novel practice a sort of corrupted form of Catholicism, shaped by the nuclear disaster of the Flame Deluge. Their community is steeped in Latin scripture, but has its own saints, rites, and rituals. In the surprisingly funny “Fiat Homo”, Miller exploits this for some dark humour, in one instance articulating the logic of nuclear deterrence in the language of the Bible:

To play the Phoenix

Early on in “Fiat Lux”, the scientist Thon Taddeo asks Abbot Dom Paulo, “How can a great and wise civilisation have destroyed itself so completely?” This is one of the key questions which animates A Canticle for Leibowitz. Across the arc of its three parts, the novel suggests that the human race is trapped in a tragic cycle of invention and destruction, capable of incredible feats but doomed to undo them in atomic hellfire, senselessly wasting billions of lives, time and again. As Abbot Zerchi muses in the novel’s final part, 
“Have we no choice but to play the Phoenix in an unending sequence of rise and fall?”

One monk’s initial answer to the scholar’s question is to suggest that the people of the 20th century were “materially great and materially wise, and nothing else.” This implies a spiritual lack, a spiritual failing in humankind. Over the centuries, the monks become the guardians of technical knowledge they cannot understand. The novel invites the question: if those at the abbey understood the great promise and the dire threat of the “treasured fragments of a dead civilisation”, would they keep them or cast them into the fire?

It is striking that the loss of worldly knowledge begun by the Flame Deluge, the nuclear war, is completed by mobs deliberately seeking out and destroying written information, and hunting down first intellectuals, and then anyone who could read. In this aspect, Miller’s novel connects with Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), also about a mania for illiterate “simplification”. In Bradbury’s work, book burning does not follow a nuclear war, but rather precedes it.

The long shadow of Saint Leibowitz

A Canticle for Leibowitz is one chain in a cycle of many other SF novels dealing with the tension between faith and progress, including Pavane (1968) by Keith Roberts and The Cloud Walker (1978) by Edmund Cooper.

Following the publication of A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller Jr. ceased to publish. He experienced depression and eventually became a recluse, allowing no-one to see him - not even his agent, Don Congdon. Some months after the death of his wife, Miller ended his own life on 9 January, 1996. 

At Miller’s request, the writer Terry Bisson (1942 - 2024) completed Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), Miller’s relatively little-known sequel to his classic novel. In the SFE, John Clute reflects that the original novel “remained a singleton for decades, and retains that autonomy for most readers.” Certainly A Canticle for Leibowitz retains and deserves its classic status, in part as a humane and troubling examination of humankind’s linked capacity to create and to destroy.

Should the Culture intervene in the struggle for a shellworld?

Sursamen is no ordinary planet. Entirely artificial, it is a vast construct of concentric spheres, each layer a world unto itself. Its days and nights are determined by synthetic stars which run on rails along its colossal ceilings. Built for an inscrutable purpose by a long-extinct species, it is home to various intelligent races, from the humanoid Sarl to the monthian megawhales. A new discovery threatens the balance between even more formidable factions from outside - including the Culture.

Matter (2008) is the seventh novel in the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. On publication, it had been eight years since the previous Culture novel Look to Windward (2000). This novel opens the final phase of Banks’ beloved series, a trio of lengthy works long on epic spectacle. The biggest Culture novel so far, Matter is a bold tale which fuses flavours from its precursors: the grand conflicts of Consider Phlebas (1987), the subterfuge of Use of Weapons (1990), and the fantasy adjacent trappings of Inversions (1998).

Matter is a grand-scale SF adventure, and a continuation of Banks’ use of the Culture series to explore questions of agency and intervention.

A family affair

Matter is a novel which operates literally and figuratively on a number of levels. It opens on the eighth level of Sursamen, during the closing stages of a war between the Sarl and the Deldeyn, two humanoid species with technology roughly equivalent to that of renaissance Europe. Under their leader King Hausk, the Sarl win a victory over the Deldeyn, who had dominated the ninth level. In the aftermath, the wounded king is murdered by his long-time adjutant, Mertis tyl Loesp. This killing is witnessed by Ferbin, one of the king’s sons, who is believed dead.

This war story expands into something of a family saga. Mertis tyl Loesp appoints himself regent, because Hausk’s other son Oramen - now apparently the king’s heir - is too young to succeed his father. Oramen, appointed to duties at a spectacular ruined city in the ninth level to keep him away from the Sarl capital, begins to suspect foul play. 

King Hausk’s daughter also learns of her father’s death. Djan Seriy Anaplian left Sursamen fifteen years earlier, and has become a novice Special Circumstances agent for the Culture. In their own way, all three siblings - Ferbin, Oramen, and Djan Seriy - have eye-opening encounters with powerful alien species which each have a mysterious interest in the fate of the shellworld.

Matter has something of an epic quality, and Banks packs it with characters, locations, and incidents. There is a former Culture agent stirring up wars for entertainment, murderous court intrigue, sentient cloud creatures, and bloodthirsty drone that disguises itself as a sex toy. 

Culture shock

Relations and transitions between societies with different cultures and varying levels of technology is a common feature of Banks’ novels, and Matter explores this thoroughly. The feudal monarchy of the Sarl strongly recalls the civilisations in Inversions, albeit with more advanced technology like firearms, explosives, and trains. Crucially, the Sarl are well aware of the sophisticated elder species which control their galactic vicinity. They have friendly if confusing diplomatic relations with the crablike Oct and to a lesser extent with the Culture. 

The relative sophistication of the Sarl does not preclude them from worshipping a vast creature that occupies the core of Sursamen, which they revere as their “WorldGod”. This species, the Xinthian tensile aeronothaurs, are described as “utterly ancient” and “once near-invincably powerful” but now enjoying a kind of retirement. Banks also poaches on fantasy turf with multiple species of domesticated flying creatures, which are flown by elite Sarl scouts.

Djan Seriy is a key character in that, as a native of Sursamen who has joined the Culture, she has distinct views on both. In some ways she resembles Cheradenine Zakalwe from Use of Weapons, although she is an enthusiastic novice rather than a jaded veteran. In a memorable scene, she meets a critic of Special Circumstances and defends the agency’s “well-meaning, sometimes risky, and just occasionally catastrophic interference in the affairs of other civilisations”. While even Djan has reservations about her work - is in fact trained to have them - she enjoys the Culture’s lack of sexism and misogyny.

With great power

It is not only Djan Seriy who is confronted with questions about power and intervention. Mertis tyl Loesp, essentially the novel’s villain albeit a fairly small player in the grand scheme of things, is driven to acquire power largely for its own sake. Ferbin meets a cynical former Culture operative who provokes wars in a kind of godgame for the amusement of far more powerful civilisations. Similarly, advanced species like the Oct and the Aultridia - who evolved from a species of parasite - manipulate the fates of factions on Sursamen, but are also manipulated in turn.

The sympathetic characters in Matter are those who are initially reluctant to wield power over others (like Ferbin) or are troubled by their need to do so (like Djan Seriy). For his part, Oramen is rightly suspicious of an artificially intelligent machine discovered on the ninth level, which like today’s large language models tells its audience what they want to hear. His desire to wield power responsibly, and to earnestly seek the truth, sets him apart within the court intrigues of the Sarl.

Under the influence

Matter is interesting also because it seems to react interestingly to other SF works. For example, the mentor and mentee relationships between species recalls the works of David Brin. It also feels as though Banks had been reading Alastair Reynolds since the previous Culture novel - especially because the combat suits accessible to Djan Seriy and her allies strongly resemble those in the Revelation Space series.

With that being so, Matter is still unmistakably the unique voice of Iain M. Banks. While it deals with huge questions and spectacular events, the novel is still littered with moments of humour. What this novel lacks in tight focus compared to some of its predecessors in this loose and wonderful series, it makes up for in huge scope, and richness of wild imagination.

Confronting a time mystery as a new ice age looms

At some point in the 21st century, global temperatures begin to plummet. A new period of rapid glaciation begins, and ice sheets advance ominously from the poles. While societies confront the likely arrival of a new ice age, a small group of investigators at an isolated, frozen base puzzle over a different mystery. Objects and mangled corpses are falling from the sky, seemingly from thousands of years in the past.

Originally published in 1974 and out of print since 1984, Ice and Iron is one of the more obscure novels by the American writer Wilson Tucker (1914 - 2006). Revisiting some themes from his earlier books like The City in the Sea (1951) and The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970), this novel is in part an interesting 1970s example of climate fiction. Specifically, it is inspired by theories of global cooling, a significant minority view at that time but now discredited.

Understandably little-known compared to Tucker's more prominent novels, Ice and Iron is still an intriguing science fictional mystery.

The zombie awakens: about Wilson Tucker

Wilson Tucker was a science fiction fan, writer, and critic. He was brought up in Illinois and became active in science fiction fan circles in 1929. He edited the fanzine Le Zombie which ran intermittently (published “every time a zombie awakens”) from 1938 to 2001. In his obituary for Tucker, John Clute wrote that Le Zombie was “perhaps the most brilliant” of fanzines. It was in these pages that Tucker coined the term “space opera”.

Tucker worked as a film projectionist from 1931 to 1971, when he retired. Much of his fan, critic, and writing activity was done alongside this career. He was not prolific as a writer of fiction, producing relatively few short stories - some of them fan-related - and 13 SF novels between 1951 and 1981. Of these, the best known are the post-apocalyptic The Long Loud Silence (1952) and the time travel story The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970). Ice and Iron is a fairly obscure novel, but not as obscure as his scarce final work Resurrection Days (1981), which has been out of print since its first publication.

Out of the past?

Ice and Iron has a somewhat unusual structure. It has two narrative threads, one with every chapter named “Ice”, and the other with all chapters named “Iron”. These threads are braided together complexly, as Tucker crafts a science fictional mystery about the past and future of humankind.

The “Ice” thread is set at some point in the 21st century. The United States and Canada have merged into one state, the United States of North America. In practice, what was once Canada is a desolate wasteland, overrun by a new ice sheet which pushes south at a rate of 61 metres per year. Somewhere near Regina, in southern Saskatchewan, Fisher Yann Highsmith is based at a government research outpost. He is a “reconstructionist”, tasked with making sense of various objects and 16 corpses which have fallen from the sky in the area.

These arrivals appear primitive, so Highsmith assumes that they have somehow arrived from thousands of years in the past. When a living man arrives in the same way, Highsmith may have a way to solve the mystery - but time is short, as a fearsome storm is closing in and the entire base may have to be abandoned.

The “Iron” thread is not a single narrative, but rather a set of sometimes intersecting stories focusing on different characters, all primitive people who will end up in Highsmith’s era. Each character has encounters, often violent, with a group of women armed with futuristic technology who are apparently invading the region. These clashes are closely linked with the seemingly inexplicable arrivals in Highsmith’s time.

Mercury falling

Today’s climate fiction deals with the implications of rising temperatures. In the 1970s, some scientists believed that global cooling was on its way. Ice and Iron works with this scenario. In the novel, Canada was essentially destroyed by encroaching ice before Highsmith was even born, and the situation in Siberia is said to be even more dire. Anna Kavan’s novel Ice (1967) employed a similar premise before the 1970s vogue for global cooling, but used it to surreal effect. By contrast, Tucker’s depiction of glaciation is quite meticulously researched.

The strange objects and bodies arriving in Highsmith’s time are interestingly and explicitly described as Fortean phenomena. In the same way that many SF novels are efforts to resolve the Fermi paradox, Ice and Iron is a fictional explanation for classic events researched by Charles Fort, like various documented cases of “rain of animals”. 

Battle of the sexes

The “Iron” component of the novel has a very different atmosphere compared with Highsmith’s deliberations. The violent, nameless characters - the “primitives” - in these episodes are products of an illiterate culture, locked into a constant struggle for survival. The contrast with the frozen but sophisticated world of the 21st century researchers is stark. Tucker makes it clear that what these people lack in technology is made up for by their great attunement to the natural world, their survival skills, and their physical prowess. 

The “Iron” chapters depict a brutal conflict between the overwhelmingly male “primitives” and an exclusively female fighting force which appears to have traveled back in time from even further into the future than Highsmith’s era. In this way, Ice and Iron fits into a 1970s vogue for “battle of the sexes” stories, and also fits in with Tucker’s longstanding interest in matriarchal societies, which would continue in that almost lost final novel, Resurrection Days. 

A somewhat later novel which also contrasts the modern and early human societies and attitudes is Pat Murphy’s excellent The Shadow Hunter (1982). 

Deep time

Ice and Iron should not be viewed as a great, lost science fiction classic of the 1970s - but it is an interesting novel. Through his gradually unraveling mystery, Tucker puts across some intriguing points about human progress, what constitutes civilisation, and dramatic environmental change.

Another comic inferno from another stupid timeline

John Sladek’s first science fiction novel, The Reproductive System (1968), is a comic inferno of self-replicating machines running amok. For his second trick, the UK-based American writer doubled down. The Müller-Fokker Effect (1970) is a radical intensification of Sladek’s approach, a manic satire bursting at the seams with more, more, more of everything: crazed characters, strange technologies, witty wordplay, and bizarre happenings - all in more settings, viewed from more warped perspectives.

In Sladek’s madcap near-future plot, several individuals and factions scramble to acquire and use a set of four tapes containing the fractured personality of corporate drone Bob Shairp. These tapes are put to various uses, from animating a robot duplicate of a fanatical evangelical preacher to powering a dangerously dysfunctional U.S. Army logistics system. While Shairp, reduced to pure mind, attempts to pull himself together, Washington D.C. comes under assault from an army of idiotic white supremacists.

Even more so than Sladek’s first novel, The Müller-Fokker Effect captures something of the spirit of today’s deeply stupid timeline, depicting an America collapsing under the weight of ignorance, racism, and rogue technologies.

Disintegration nation

Bob Shairp works for the National Arsenamid corporation as a technical writer (a job Sladek did for a number of years). One day he is replaced in his role by a mildly uplifted dog, and then made into the test subject for an experimental mind uploading device. The procedure is successful, in that Shairp’s mind is copied onto a set of four “Müller-Fokker tapes”, named for their elusive inventor who is thought to have defected to the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, Shairp’s body is immediately destroyed in a raid by deluded local racists. In this way, poor Bob completes a transition from corporate man to non-corporeal man.

Worse, the four tapes are soon sold off as surplus and scattered to various eccentric new owners. The novel is only minimally concerned with disembodied Bob. Instead, it is a kaleidoscopic look at an increasingly crazed United States. The narrative pinballs between numerous bizarre characters, several of them satirical analogues for real figures. Glen Dale is a frustratedly virginal equivalent for Hugh Hefner, ailing preacher Billy Koch is a version of Billy Graham, and Shairp’s wife Marge is recruited as the template for a character resembling Betty Crocker.

Shairp’s son is sent off to a comically regimented military school, the only two members of a dying anti-communist group lurch towards a superannuated love affair, and semi-literate fascist Wes Davis may just get a shot at the presidency. All the while, the Müller-Fokker tapes, which Shairp needs to be whole again, continue changing hands…

Make it make sense

Clearly, The Müller-Fokker Effect will frustrate any reader who insists on a clear and direct style of narrative drive. Even more so than The Reproductive System, this is a manic story, frequently digressive and at times almost cryptic. Episodes focusing on Bob Shairp’s bodiless musings exemplify quite well the experimentalism of the SF “New Wave”, and for better or worse they have little bearing on the outcome.

This is a playful novel, stuffed with references, jokes, wordplay, and the occasional dose of typographical trickery. At one point, Shairp’s homeless consciousness is rendered in the form of a flow chart, as if he is clutching to the ordered familiarity of his former day job. Those familiar with SF of this era will catch some well-worn techniques, such as what Shlock Value has called the “Party Where Everybody is Trying to Be More Weird Than Everybody Else”. There are three of these in The Müller-Fokker Effect.

It is happening here

Being primarily a raucous satire, The Müller-Fokker Effect is a novel steeped in the political and cultural scene of the late 1960s. However, as James Davis Nicoll has stated, it could be rewritten as “a modern day satirical take on current fads and public figures without having to alter the events of the plot significantly”. This may be the most interesting use case for the novel: as a historical document which sets our own times in a new light.

Sladek was responding to his own times, but in a way which anticipates today’s realities, a demonstration of the sometimes troubling repetitions in American history. The political violence in the novel can be seen as a response to the widespread protests of 1968, but also resembles the chaos of January 6, 2021. Sladek deploys humour even in the racist insurrection of the novel’s climax, in which fascist groups disintegrate into countless micro-factions, locked in farcical, mutual recrimination. 

Although The Müller-Fokker Effect is a more anarchic and intense satire than The Reproductive System, there is an unavoidable sense of diminishing returns. Unfortunately, Sladek’s second SF novel “gained little response” (SFE) and he would not release another novel for a decade. In the intervening time, he continued to publish short stories, including in F&SF and New Worlds magazines. Some of these are collected in The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers (1973) and the curiously titled Keep the Giraffe Burning (1977). Sladek would eventually return to long-form SF with his most ambitious, and most troubled, novel: the robot saga Roderick (1980 - 1983).

Corporate warfare becomes deadly as the state crumbles

Science fiction has frequently depicted corporate power in the ascendancy, a theme particularly associated with the cyberpunk that came of age in the 1980s, alongside the ruinous logic of Reaganomics and Thatcherism. SF writers like William Gibson imagined vast corporate concerns displacing the power of the state, imposing their will on the population against a backdrop of rapidly advancing technology. Immense corporate power is one aspect of cyberpunk which resonates troublingly with today’s reality.

Originally published in 1977, Robert Asprin’s debut novel The Cold Cash War was written before the emergence of cyberpunk but shares its emphasis on corporate dominance. Set in a future 1990s, the novel imagines a world bent to the will of a few sprawling monopolies with sweeping control over whole segments of the economy. These private combines begin to wage covert simulated wars to more efficiently adjudicate conflicts over resources and markets. When one battle spills out onto American streets and into the public eye, it triggers a deadly conflict between corporate power and government authority.

The Cold Cash War is a product of a particular moment, after the humiliating U.S. defeat in the Vietnam War and before the rise of the corporate culture of the 1980s. While dated and flawed in a number of ways, Asprin’s novel is an interesting precursor both to cyberpunk and today’s landscape of new corporate monopolies.

Waging fake wars

While no date is given for the events of The Cold Cash War, a 1990s setting can be inferred from a reference to the 1970 suicide of Japanese ultranationalist Yukio Mishima having taken place “over twenty years ago”. In this imagined future, capitalism is triumphant and the communist bloc has withdrawn from world affairs following a war between China and the Soviet Union. In the West, corporate consolidation is so far advanced that whole economic sectors are controlled by single, hugely powerful combines.

Fearful that conflict over resources and markets will damage their bottom line, the corporate monopolies agree to use simulated wars to settle their differences. They clandestinely hire territory from amenable governments, and employ highly trained mercenaries to act as their battlefield representatives. These corporate troops wear sophisticated “killsuits”, which - when registering shots from special non-lethal weapons - render the user immobile until the engagement is concluded.

Army buddies Tidwell and Clancy serve on opposite sides of a staged war fought in the Brazilian jungle by the Communications and Oil combines. Following inexplicable combat failures, both mercenaries defect to a third party - a Japanese zaibatsu looking to train up its own troops. Tidwell and Clancy find themselves well positioned when the secret wars are exposed to government scrutiny, and the corporations seize the chance to defeat and displace the incompetent, ill-trained forces of the old governments.

From the barracks to the boardroom

Robert Asprin (1946 - 2008) was born in Michigan and was a graduate of the University of Michigan. As a writer, he is probably best remembered today for his comic fantasy novels in the MythAdventures series, which lasted from 1978 until the final posthumous instalment was published in 2010. He also wrote the humorous Phule’s Company series of military SF novels, mostly in collaboration with Peter J. Heck. 

According to John Clute, “Asprin's reputation lies mainly in the ingenuity of his braiding activities as editor”, particularly his work on the Thieves’ World series which attracted numerous high-profile writers to set fantasy stories in the city of Sanctuary. The Cold Cash War, then, is an outlier in his career. One of his few serious SF novels, it was inspired by his time in the U.S. Army in 1965-66 and his period working for a multinational corporation after that.

Broadly functional

The Cold Cash War is written in a broadly functional, but very readable style which is a good fit for its grounded, near-future setting. Asprin’s premise is rather implausible, projecting huge social, technological, and especially economic changes over just two decades. However, some stylistic flourishes - such as brief news snippets - help to make the novel work and in some limited respects it feels quite prescient. A frame narrative involves an information broker whose methods anticipate today’s analysts of so-called open source intelligence (OSINT).

To a degree, the novel resembles the techno-thriller genre which was emerging at the time; it was published just weeks after Craig Thomas’ Firefox which is often credited with pioneering the genre.

Hostile takeovers

One of the most interesting aspects of The Cold Cash War is its speculations about the future of warfare. In part, the novel likely reflects criticisms of the readiness of the U.S military in the late 1970s, shortly after the bruising defeat in Vietnam. When a shooting war breaks out between government troops and corporate mercenaries, the private armies are shown to be hugely more formidable. This reflects the familiar right-wing claim that businesses are inherently more efficient than states, but hardly seems credible, even in the context of the novel.

The non-lethal wars staged in secret by the corporations have some clear real-world parallels. At the time of publication, the U.S. military was beginning to experiment with laser-based, non-lethal combat simulations for training purposes. By the mid-1980s, this concept had been adapted for civilian recreational purposes as laser tag. 

The novel correctly identifies the critical and growing importance of signals intelligence in warfare. Some of the key victories won by Tidwell and Clancy are made possible by tampering with government communications. Some of Asprin’s other speculations are more fanciful, like the deployable jump pad that Tidwell uses to leap over a high security fence during a simulated stealth mission in Brazil.

“Horrifyingly plausible”?

The novel’s politics are also of interest. Asprin’s sympathies seem to lie with the corporations and their mercenaries, as he depicts them as not only more effective than their government enemies, but also more moral. The novel has similarities with the work of Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, especially Oath of Fealty (1981), which also predicts a conflict between the private and public sectors in which the former wins out.

By the end of the novel, a corporate takeover is far advanced and it is said that “the only reason the governments still exist today is because they do a lot of the scut work the corporations don’t want to dirty their hands with”. The novel implies a certain ambivalence on Asprin’s part about this scenario. Text inside the jacket of the UK first edition describes the novel as “horrifyingly plausible”.

Tidwell and Clancy’s deployment to Japan, to train and command zaibatsu troops there, is a rather sketchy and orientalist depiction of the country. It is also a relatively early example of SF which focuses on the rise of Japan as an economic power, which would be a recurring feature of cyberpunk in the 1980s.

While a flawed novel, The Cold Cash War is an interesting document of a particular time. At its best, it anticipates trends that would emerge more fully in the 1980s, from the cyberpunk of Neuromancer (1984) to the murderous corporate conflicts of RoboCop (1987). While Asprin left this hard-edged science fiction approach behind in favour of his comic fantasies, he also left a mark.