The View from the Cheap Seats Read online

  1:30 Driving back into town through empty Wimbledon we get pulled over by a police car—they’ve noticed the antique laserdisc player in the boot, and have leapt to the not unreasonable conclusion that My Publisher is in fact a burglar. Nervously, he hides Miami Spice under the seat, gets out of the car, hands the cop his mobile phone and tells him to phone people to prove his identity; the cop stares at it wistfully. “They won’t even give us one of those,” he sighs. He asks My Publisher about his (Barrow-in-Furness) accent and announces that he comes from Bridlington himself. Waves us on our way. My plans of an exciting night crusading against police brutality—or better yet, journalistically, spent in the cells—founder and crash.

  1:45 Victoria Station. Something must be happening at Victoria . . . nope. A sterile expanse, full of fluorescent ads for things you can’t buy at this time of night. (Prawn Waldorf sandwiches?) My Publisher explains that London pigeons have lost their toes through decades of inbreeding and pollution. Tell him this sounds unlikely.

  2:10 Pass the Hard Rock Café. Nobody’s queuing.

  2:45 Soho. We walk past a street of empty wine bars and bookshops, and My Publisher tells me it used to be brothels once, a long time ago; then, Miami Spice and a functioning laserdisc player ahead of him, he tears off into the night.

  I decide that I’m just going to wander aimlessly, resolve not to disappear into any seedy drinking clubs, even if I can find any (like Little Magic Shops, they have a tendency to vanish the next time you want them, replaced by brick walls or closed doors).

  Under the tacky neon glare of Brewer Street a young woman holds a polystyrene head with a red wig on it. The Vintage Magazine Shop has the OZ “schoolkids” issue in the window.

  3:31 At an all-night food place—Mr. Pumpernincks—on the corner of Piccadilly, I run into Ella. She’s blond, with smudged pink lipstick and red pumps, Day-Glo acidhouse wristbands. Looks fifteen, assures me she’s really nearly nineteen and tells me not to eat the popcorn because it “tastes like earwax.”

  Turns out she’s a nightclub hostess. I assume this is my first encounter tonight with the seamy side of London nightlife. She shakes her head. Her job, she explains, is to sell as much champagne as possible on commission, pour her glass on the floor when the customer “goes to the loo,” spill as much as she can. It’s all a con, she sighs: £12 for a salmon sandwich, £12 for a packet of forty cigarettes, no one spends less than £100 a night, and last week she was offered £5,000 by five Swedish men to sleep with them.

  She said no. She doesn’t think she’s hard enough for the business. Ella comes down to Mr. Pumpernincks to drink the rotten coffee and sober up every night. She came up from Bath to the big city a month or so back; her ambition in life is to steal a Porsche 911 Turbo, and possibly even to get a driving license.

  4:30 I’m in Brewer Street again. Six pigeons on the road in front of me; one of them doesn’t have any toes. My Publisher was right.

  In Wardour Street a small heap of Goths huddle together, walking warily. I can’t figure out why: there’s no one around to menace them, but maybe they don’t know that.

  It’s sort of boring; there’s simply no one about. I start fantasizing a mugging to break up the monotony of empty chill streets; I could probably claim it back on expenses.

  Ella’s gone the next time I pass Piccadilly.

  In one of the back streets behind Shaftesbury Avenue, I walk past some accordion doors with something written on them. Walking toward them it reads OPRIG. Parallel it says NO PARKING. Looking back over my shoulder it reads N AKN. I wonder briefly if somebody is trying to tell me something, then conclude I’m getting tired, or transcendently bored.

  On the Charing Cross Road a little old Chinese lady teeter-totters on the pavement, gesturing at taxis that ignore her. She looks lost. Leicester Square is utterly deserted.

  It’s nearly five a.m. I stop a couple of cops I’ve seen across the roads all evening. Ask them about the West End—is there anything happening late at night? They say no, say the area’s still cruising on a reputation it hasn’t deserved for over a decade. They sigh, wistfully. “You may get the odd rent boy hanging round Piccadilly, but that’s all they do: hang around.”

  They’d seen three people in their last sweep through every dangerous dead-end alley and mysterious Soho street. They’re almost as bored as I am; I’m probably the most interesting thing that’s happened to them all night. If I had a mobile phone I’d let them play with it. Five thirty, they tell me, things hot up; the cleaners begin to come round.

  5:20 I pass a McDonald’s. Already the McPeople who work there are in, McScrubbing the McCounters and unloading McMillions of McBuns from the McTruck.

  5:40 Ponder the touching concern in My Editor’s voice when I told her I’d wander the streets, her obvious worry that terrible things were going to happen to me. I should have been so lucky.

  6:02 I’m in the taxi going home. I tell the driver about my abortive evening. “Fing is,” he explains, “everybody relates to Wardour Street, Brewer Street, Greek Street as where the action is. They fink people hang round the ’Dilly still, addicts waiting for their scrips. Fuck me man, you’re going back twenty years. Notting Hill, that’s where it’s all at these days. The action’s always there. It just moves. And the West End’s been cleaned up so hard it’s dead.”

  Conclusion (statistical breakdown):

  murders seen 0

  car chases involved in 0

  adventures had 0

  foreign spies encountered 0

  ladies of the night ditto ½ (Ella)

  rock stars encountered (in Café München) 1

  encounters with police 2

  * * *

  Originally published in Time Out, 1988.

  * * *

  III

  INTRODUCTIONS AND MUSINGS: SCIENCE FICTION

  “There are three phrases that make possible the world of writing about the world of not-yet . . . and they are simple phrases.

  “What if . . . ?

  “If only . . .

  “If this goes on . . .”

  Fritz Leiber: The Short Stories

  I met Fritz Leiber (it’s pronounced Lie-ber, and not, as I had mispronounced it all my life until I met him, Lee-ber) shortly before his death. This was twenty years ago. We were sitting next to each other at a banquet at the World Fantasy Convention. He seemed so old: a tall, serious distinguished man with white hair, who reminded me of a thinner, better-looking Boris Karloff. He said nothing, during the dinner, not that I can remember. Our mutual friend Harlan Ellison had sent him a copy of Sandman #18, A Dream of a Thousand Cats, which was my own small tribute to Leiber’s cat stories, and I told him he had been an inspiration, and he said something more or less inaudible in return, and I was happy. We rarely get to thank those who shaped us.

  My first Leiber short story: I was nine. The story, “The Winter Flies,” was in Judith Merril’s huge anthology SF12. It was the most important book I read when I was nine, with the possible exception of Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer, for it was the place I discovered a host of authors who would become important to me, and dozens of stories I would read so often that I could have recited them: Chip Delany’s “The Star Pit,” R. A. Lafferty’s “Primary Education of the Camiroi” and “Narrow Valley” and William Burroughs’s “They Do Not Always Remember,” J. G. Ballard’s “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D,” not to mention Tuli Kupferberg’s poems, Carol Emshwiller and Sonya Dorman and Kit Reed and the rest. It did not matter that I was much too young for the stories: I knew that they were beyond me, and was not even slightly troubled by this. The stories made sense to me, a sense that was beyond what they literally meant. It was in SF12 I encountered concepts and people that did not exist in the children’s books I was familiar with, and it delighted me.

  What did I make of the “The Winter Flies” then? The last time I read it I saw it as semiautobiographical fiction, about a man who philanders and drinks when he is on the road, whose marriage is b
reaking down and who interrupts a masturbatory reverie to talk a child having a panic attack back to reality, something that, for a moment, brings a family, fragmenting in alcohol and lack of communication, together. When I read it as a nine-year-old it was about a man beset by demons, talking his son, lost among the stars, home again.

  I knew I liked Fritz Leiber from that story on. He was someone I read. When I was eleven I bought Conjure Wife, and learned that all women were witches, and found out what a hand of glory was (and yes, there is sexism and misogyny in the book and in the concept, but there is, if you are a twelve-year-old boy trying to make sense of something that might as well be an alien species, also the kind of paranoid “what if it’s true?” that makes reading books such a dangerous occupation at any age). I read a 1972 issue of Wonder Woman written by Samuel R. Delany, featuring Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, and was disappointed that it felt nothing like a Chip Delany story, but had now encountered our two adventurers, and, from the magic of comics, knew what they looked like. I read Sword of Sorcery, which was the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser comic that DC comics brought out in 1973, and finally found a copy of The Swords of Lankhmar at the age of thirteen, in the cupboard at the back of Mr. Wright’s English class, its cover (I would later discover) a bad English copy of the Jeff Jones painting on the cover of the US edition; and I read it, and I was content.

  I couldn’t enjoy Conan after that. Not really. I missed the wit.

  Shortly after I found a copy of The Big Time, Leiber’s novel of the Change War, being fought by two incomprehensible groups of antagonists using human beings as pawns, and read it, convinced it was a stage play cunningly disguised as a novella, and when I reread it twenty years on I enjoyed it almost as much (aspects of how Leiber treated the narrator bothered me) and was still just as convinced it was a stage play.

  Leiber wrote some great books, and he wrote some stinkers: the majority of his SF novels in particular feel dated and throwaway. He wrote some great short stories in SF and fantasy and horror and there’s scarcely a stinker among them.

  He was one of the giants of genre literature and it is hard to imagine the world today being the same without him. And he was a giant partly because he vaulted over genre restrictions, sidled around them, took them in his stride. He created—in the sense that it barely existed before he wrote it—witty and intelligent sword and sorcery; he was the person who put down the foundations of what would become urban horror.

  The best of Leiber has themes that recur, like an artist returning to his favorite subjects—Shakespeare and watches and cats, marriage and women and ghosts, the power of cities and booze and the stage, dealing with the devil, Germany, mortality, never actually repeating, usually both smarter and deeper than it needed to be to sell, written with elegance and poetry and wit.

  Good malt whisky tastes of one thing; a great malt whisky tastes of many things. It plays a chromatic scale of flavor in your mouth, leaving you with an odd sequence of aftertastes, and after the liquid has gone from your tongue you find yourself reminded of first honey, then woodsmoke, bitter chocolate and of the barren salt pastures at the edge of the sea. Fritz Leiber’s short stories do the thing a fine whisky does. They leave aftertastes in memory, they leave an emotional residue and resonance that remains long after the final page has been turned. Like the stage manager in “Four Ghosts in Hamlet,” we feel that Leiber spent a lifetime observing, and he was adept at turning the straw of memory into the bricks of imagination and of story. He demanded a great deal of his readers—you need to pay attention, you need to care—and he gave a great deal in return, for those of us that did.

  Twentieth-century genre SF produced some recognized giants—Ray Bradbury being the obvious example—but it also produced a handful of people who never gained the recognition that should have been their due. They were caviar (but then, so was Bradbury, and he was rapidly taken out of SF and seen as a national treasure). They might have been giants, but nobody noticed them; they were too odd, too misshapen, too smart. Avram Davidson was one. R. A. Lafferty another. Fritz Leiber was never quite one of the overlooked ones, not in that way: he won many awards; he was widely and rightly seen as one of our great writers. But he never crossed over into the popular consciousness: he was too baroque, perhaps; too intelligent. He is not on the roadmap that we draw that takes us from Stephen King and Ramsey Campbell back to H. P. Lovecraft in one direction, from every game of Dungeons and Dragons with a thief in it back to Robert E. Howard, in another.

  He should be.

  I hope this book reminds his admirers of why they love his work; but more than that, I trust it will find him new readers, and that the new readers will, in turn, find an author they can trust (as much as ever you can trust an author) and to love.

  * * *

  This was my Introduction to Selected Stories by Fritz Leiber, 2010.

  * * *

  Hothouse

  Annihilating all that’s made

  To a green thought in a green shade

  “The Garden,” Andrew Marvell

  Brian Aldiss is now the preeminent English science fiction writer of his generation. He has now been writing for over fifty years with a restless energy and intellect that have taken him from the heart of genre science fiction to mainstream fiction and back again, with explorations of biography, fabulism, and absurdism on the way. As an editor and as an anthologist he has done much to influence the kind of science fiction that people were reading through the sixties and seventies, and was responsible for shaping tastes of readers of science fiction in the UK. He has been a critic, and his examinations of the SF field, Billion Year Spree and its reinvention, Trillion Year Spree, were remarkable descriptions of the genre that Aldiss argued began with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and defined as “Hubris clobbered by Nemesis.” His career has been enormous: it has recapitulated British SF, always with a ferocious intelligence, always with poetry and oddness, always with passion; while his work outside the boundaries of science fiction, as a writer of mainstream fiction, gained respect and attention from the wider world.

  Brian Aldiss is, as I write this, a living author, still working and still writing, and a living author who has restlessly crossed from genre to genre and broken genre lines whenever it suited him; as such he is difficult to put into context, problematic to pigeonhole.

  As a young man in the army Brian Aldiss found himself serving in Burma and in Sumatra, encountering a jungle world unimaginable in gray England, and it is not too presumptuous to suggest that the inspiration for the world of Hothouse began with that exposure to the alien, in a novel that celebrates the joy of strange and savage vegetable growth.

  He was demobbed in 1948, returned to England and worked in a bookshop while writing science fiction short stories. His first book was The Brightfount Diaries, a series of sketches about bookselling, and shortly thereafter he sold his first set of science fiction stories in book form—Space, Time and Nathaniel—began editing, became a critic and describer of SF as a medium.

  Aldiss was part of the second generation of English science fiction writers; he had grown up reading American science fiction magazines, and he understood and spoke the language of “Golden Age” science fiction, combining it with a very English literary point of view. He owed as much to early Robert Heinlein as to H. G. Wells. Still, he was a writer, and not, say, an engineer. The story was always more important to Aldiss than the science. (American writer and critic James Blish famously criticized Hothouse for its scientific implausibility; but Hothouse delights in its implausibilities, and its impossibilities—the oneiric image of the web-connected moon is a prime example—are its strengths, not weaknesses.)

  Hothouse, Aldiss’s next major work, like many novels of its time, was written and published serially, in magazine form, in America. It was written as a linked sequence of five novelettes, which were collectively given the Hugo Award (the science fiction field’s Oscar) in 1962, for Best Short Fiction. (Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land
took the Hugo for Best Novel.)

  There had been prominent English science fiction writers before Aldiss, writing for the American market—Arthur C. Clarke, for example, or Eric Frank Russell—but Aldiss came on the scene after the so-called Golden Age was over, began to write at a point where science fiction was beginning to introspect. Authors like Aldiss and his contemporaries, such as J. G. Ballard and John Brunner, were part of the sea change that would produce, in the second half of the sixties, coagulating around the Michael Moorcock–edited New Worlds, what would become known as the “New Wave”: science fiction that relied on the softer sciences, on style, on experimentation. And although Hothouse predates the New Wave, it can also be seen as one of the seminal works that created it, or that showed that the change had come.

  Aldiss continued to experiment in form and content, experimenting with prose comedic, psychedelic and literary. His Horatio Stubbs Saga, published between 1971 and 1978, a sequence of three books which dealt with the youth, education and war experiences in Burma of a young man whose experiences parallel Aldiss’s, were bestsellers, a first for Aldiss. In the early 1980s he returned to classical science fiction with the magisterial Helliconia sequence, which imagined a planet with immensely long seasons orbiting two suns, and examined the life-forms and biological cycles of the planet, and the effect on the planet’s human observers, in an astonishing exercise in world-building.

  Restlessly creative, relentlessly fecund, Brian Aldiss has created continually, and just as his hothouse Earth brings forth life of all shapes and kinds, unpredictable, delightful and dangerous, so has Aldiss. His characters and his worlds, whether in his mainstream fiction, his science fiction, or in the books that are harder to classify, such as the experimental, surreal Report on Probability A, are always engaged in, to use graphic novelist Eddie Campbell’s phrase, the dance of Lifey Death.