Conspiracies, Ethics and Whistleblowers

There was an article on the BBC website last week entitled Maths study shows conspiracies prone to unravelling. The idea is that conspiracies involving large groups of people can be modelled as a Poisson process (like radioactive decay), in which there is a small but finite probability that, in any given interval of time, one of the individuals involved will “blow the whistle”. Cumulatively, over several decades and with thousands of people involved, the likelihood of the conspiracy remaining secret will (according to the study’s author) shrink down to almost zero. In principle the same is true of any secret shared by a group of people – for example stage magician’s tricks, movie scripts (while they’re still in production), the design of the next iPhone, soft drink recipes, etc, etc… and you hardly ever get whistleblowers in those situations. The big difference with conspiracies is that the secret is profoundly unethical – which brings me on to the novel pictured above: Invaders from Earth, by Robert Silverberg.

I’ve always been a fan of Silverberg, who strikes me as one of the most knowledgeable and deep-thinking of science fiction writers. Most of the novels I’ve read by him date from the late 60s and early 70s, but Invaders from Earth was first published in 1958, when he was just 23. I decided to get hold of a copy after I came across a review of it a few weeks ago. The British reprint I found on eBay dates from 1979, but I don’t think it differs significantly from the original. It isn’t Silverberg’s best work, but it’s an impressively mature and intelligent novel for a 23-year-old. And it’s all about conspiracies, ethics and whistleblowers.

Taking place in 2044, the story’s main protagonist is named Ted Kennedy (no connection to the politician of that name, who would have been virtually unknown in 1958). Kennedy is a middle-ranking executive in one of New York’s top PR firms. He enjoys his job, which is essentially creative – manipulating the public’s thought processes in favour of whoever happens to be the agency’s current client. At the start of the novel, the agency acquires the most prestigious client of all – the Extraterrestrial Development and Exploration Corporation. Using private capital, the Corporation has gradually risen to “become virtually a supranational state, with lands of its own, police of its own, a spacefleet of its own”. Having found Venus and Mars to be uninhabitable, the Corporation moved on to Ganymede – the largest of Jupiter’s moons – which is much more suitable for exploitation. Unfortunately, Ganymede is already occupied by wise, friendly, peace-loving natives with an ancient culture of poetry and philosophy (but not science or technology). The situation comes across (although Silverberg never says this explicitly) as an interplanetary analogue of the European conquistadors versus the Maya in the 16th century.

The only way the Corporation can get its greedy hands on Ganymede is to wipe out the natives, but it doesn’t have the military resources to do that on its own. It’s going to need the backing of a United Nations resolution – and how can it get that if the public knows the true nature of the Ganymedeans? That’s where the PR firm comes in. In a moment of inspiration, Kennedy himself hits on the line to take. They will create a completely fictitious human colony on Ganymede, complete with women and children (actually there are just a handful of middle-aged male scientists there). Over a period of five months, through a series of press releases and human interest stories, the public’s affection for the colony will gradually be built up. Then in a sudden shock move the natives will “massacre” every non-existent man, woman and child… and the stage will be set for a UN resolution.

Initially Kennedy – the archetypal company man – sees his idea as nothing but a superlative creative achievement. Improbably (but necessary to the progress of the story) his wife is his political opposite – a free-thinking liberal. Equally improbably, he tells her the whole plan, and is shocked when she tells him it’s unethical. To him, “ethics” is just a strange kind of personality disorder.

At this point in the real world, the wife would blow the whistle to the media herself, and Silverberg would be left without a story to write. Instead she simply walks out, leaving him to gradually work his way round to seeing the Ganymedeans as the good guys and the Corporation as the bad guys. By this time (about two-thirds of the way through the novel) Kennedy is on the run, and it finally comes down to the question the reader has been waiting for – will he live long enough to blow the whistle and destroy the Corporation, before the Corporation succeeds in destroying Ganymede? Not surprisingly, the last third of the book is the best bit!

Finnegans Wake

A few days ago I came across a Twitter account called Finnegans Wake and started following it. As far as I can tell, it’s tweeting the entire novel (written by the Irish author James Joyce between 1923 and 1939) a few words at a time. In an earlier post (Literary name-dropping), I mentioned that “I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake”. I can’t believe that was 40 years ago! Sounds like a cue for yet more nostalgic rambling...

Finnegans Wake is a difficult book, and I’m not going to pretend that I read more than a few pages here and there. I probably wouldn’t have managed even that without the assistance and encouragement of other books (some of which are pictured above). Back in 1975 I was 17 years old, and as thoroughly ignorant of history, geography, philosophy, religion, literature and linguistics as it’s possible for a human being to be. After four decades of being a boringly bookish bespectacled bachelor I’m a bit less ignorant, and flicking through the novel just now several things jumped out at me that would have gone over my head as a teenager. But the book is still as difficult to understand as ever!

The most obvious factor that makes Finnegans Wake difficult to read is the sheer number of made-up words it contains. But even if it was written in plain English it wouldn’t be an easy book. Basically it’s supposed to be a dream, which means the author can put anything he wants into it, without needing to be too clear or logical about it. It’s a very erudite dream, too, which flits from one arcane subject to another. There are several recurring themes, including some distinctly Fortean ones – for example Madame Blavatsky and the Theosophical Society, and the metaphysical philosophy of Giordano Bruno (The man who invented aliens). James Joyce seems to have had a soft spot for Bruno, who was born in the Italian city of Nola – thus making him a Nolan, and hence a kind of honorary Irishman!

I had a look through the book for a suitably Fortean passage, and found the following account of a kind of spiritualist séance:

That was Communicator, a former colonel. A disincarnated spirit, called Sebastion, from the Rivera in Januero, (he is not all hear) may fernspreak shortly with messuages from my dead-ported. Let us cheer him up a little and make an appunkment for a future date. Hello, Commudicate! How’s the buttes? Ever-scepistic! He does not believe in our psychous of the Real Absence, neither miracle wheat nor soulsurgery of P. P. Quemby.

P. P. Quimby was an American faith healer and mesmerist in the 19th century – clearly someone to be deeply “scepistical” about, along with miracle-wheat and soul-surgery!

As I mentioned in my post about Literary name-dropping, Finnegans Wake is one of the many literary works referred to in Robert Silverberg’s novel Dying Inside, which I read in Galaxy magazine (pictured above, middle-left) in 1973. But the reference is only understandable with hindsight (“Joycean dream-gabble” and “Earwicker’s borborygmi”), and it was another two years before a number of other things made me decide Finnegans Wake was a book worth looking into.

The first and most important was James Blish’s science fiction novel A Case of Conscience (1958), which I read early in 1975. A subplot running through the first half of the book concerns the protagonist, a Jesuit priest, tackling a literary “case of conscience” which “the church had never cracked”. It comes from pages 572 and 573 of Finnegans Wake (“The procurator Interrogarius Mealterum presends us this proposer...”). Right on the first page of Blish’s novel, Finnegans Wake is described as “diabolically complex (that adverb was official, precisely chosen, and intended to be taken literally)”. Later he describes James Joyce as having a “mighty intellect, easily the greatest ever devoted to fiction in English and perhaps in any language.”

That in itself would probably have been enough to make me check out Joyce’s work, but – by the kind of synchronicity that often happens – I came across several other references to Finnegans Wake in SF stories I read around that time. I can’t remember all of them now, but two that stick in my mind are Philip José Farmer’s novella “Riders of the Purple Wage” (which appeared in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions, included in the picture above), and the Brian Aldiss novel Barefoot in the Head (1969, also pictured above). The latter deals with the aftermath of the Acid Head War, in which the population of Europe is suffering the effects of Psychochemical Aerosol Bombs – making some chapters read like a kind of spaced-out sixties version of Finnegans Wake!

With one exception, all the books pictured above are my own copies bought in the 1970s. The exception is The Divine Invasion by Philip K. Dick, which wasn’t published until 1981. My copy is the first British paperback edition, which I bought as soon as it came out in March 1982 (sadly, in the few days between buying the book and reading it, I heard the news that Dick had died of a stroke at the age of 53).

Finnegans Wake is referred to in the very first chapter of The Divine Invasion. The protagonist, Herb Asher, interprets Joyce’s word “talktape” (in the line “tuck up your sleeves and loosen your talktapes”) to mean “magnetic audio tape” – the invention of which, he believes, postdates the writing of the novel. That isn’t actually true (and from the context it doesn’t sound like Joyce was thinking about a recording device anyway)... but that doesn’t stop Asher launching into some characteristically Dickian speculation:

It’s impossible that James Joyce could have mentioned talktapes in his writing, Asher thought. Some day I’m going to get my article published; I’m going to prove that Finnegans Wake is an information pool based on computer memory systems that didn’t exist until a century after James Joyce’s era; that Joyce was plugged into a cosmic consciousness from which he derived the inspiration for his entire corpus of work.

At another point Dick says “He also has them sitting around a TV set” – and in this case he’s absolutely correct: television plays an important role in Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s portrayal of TV is quite prescient – not in terms of the technology, which already existed when the novel was written, but in terms of its social acceptance. When Dick says “them” he means the customers in a Dublin pub... and pub televisions were still a thing of the future in 1939. So Finnegans Wake was almost certainly the first mainstream novel to portray TV as a commonplace rather than a newfangled novelty.

Joyce made up so many new words in Finnegans Wake you can find almost anything you look for in there. As an example – after a bit of googling (for googling) I found “Feastking of shellies by googling Lovvey” and “One chap googling the holyboy’s thingabib”!

Anthology Nostalgia

Nostalgia is a subjective thing. It’s not just a function of time period (e.g. 60s, 70s or 80s) but also how old you happened to be at the time. This struck me recently when I was looking at some so-called “Eighties nostalgia” blogs on Tumblr, which were all about toys, games and children’s TV. Personally, I associate those with the 1960s rather than the 80s, by which time I was in my twenties. To me, 1980s nostalgia means things like Dallas, Miami Vice, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Traci Lords.

But the height of nostalgia for me is not the 60s or 80s but the 70s – my teenage years. During this period I went through a number of fanatical interests, from amateur radio and Marvel Comics to astronomy and science fiction. In those days, the latter usually meant short stories and novelettes rather than blockbuster novels and movies. At least two-thirds of the SF books I read during the 70s were multi-author anthologies. Wherever possible I bought imported U.S. paperbacks, for the perfectly logical reason that they smelled better than British ones (I mean a lot better – almost as good as comics).

Seven of the books pictured in the photograph above are my original copies from the 70s (Nova 2 and Dangerous Visions 2 are signed by their respective authors, Harry Harrison and Harlan Ellison). The odd one out is the battered-looking one in the bottom right-hand corner – Omega, edited by Roger Elwood. I bought it online last week on a nostalgic impulse. It wasn’t a completely random choice, though – I noticed that several of the stories had a potentially Fortean sound to them:

• “Amfortas” by Laurence M. Janifer. Amfortas is a character in Wagner’s most Fortean opera, Parsifal (the science-fictional aspects of which I’ve discussed elsewhere). The story starts with a quote from the opera, but it only has a tenuous relation to the plot – which is pretty Fortean in its own right, about a transplant recipient who takes on the personality of the donor.
• “Beast in View” by Miriam Allen de Ford isn’t Fortean in itself (it’s about how to deal with a murderer in a futuristic crime-free society), but the author is. She was mentioned by Charles Fort himself in New Lands (“Miriam Allen de Ford has sent me an account of her own observations”) and in Wild Talents (“Clipping sent to me by Miriam Allen de Ford of San Francisco”).
• “Symposium” by R. A. Lafferty consists of philosophical musings by semi-sentient building-blocks in a futuristic child’s toy box. When one of the blocks, labelled with an archaic mediaeval letter, is told “You just don’t fit in!” it replies “You can’t get rid of the awkward. It does not really dispose of a thing to call it Fortean.” Lafferty was one of the most frequently anthologized authors during the period we’re talking about, and his stories often mention Charles Fort (as Daniel Petersen pointed out in a comment to my blog post about Charles Fort in Fiction).
• “Running Around” by Barry N. Malzberg is about a loser who decides to commit suicide by the paradoxical method of travelling back in time to kill his grandfather (and then his father, when that doesn’t work). Like Lafferty, Malzberg was a regular contributor to these anthologies, and another of my favourites at the time (both for his offbeat writing style and his propensity for sex scenes – he’s one of the authors I was trying to parody in Six Dimensional Sex).
• “After King Kong Fell” by Philip José Farmer is the only story in the book that I’d already read in another anthology. It’s basically an eyewitness recollection of King Kong’s rampage in New York by someone who was just a child at the time. On re-reading it, I noticed a few things that would have gone over my head when I read it back in 1976 – such as the cameo appearances by pulp heroes Doc Savage and the Shadow. Also I can see now that the calculation of the length of King Kong’s penis (which fascinated my 18-year-old self) is based on a misapplication of the square-cube law... although I suspect that was intentional on Farmer’s part, for humorous effect.

The Man who Helped to Free the World

I had a nostalgic moment last weekend when I saw Robert Silverberg at the Science Fiction Worldcon, which was held in London this year. In the photograph above, he’s on a panel reminiscing about the two previous London Worldcons in 1957 and 1965. Both were before my time, of course! I first got into Silverberg’s writing in the early seventies, as I mentioned in my piece about Dying Inside a couple of years ago.

I also saw Bob Silverberg at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 2005, but the first occasion was way back in 1976 when he was Guest of Honour at the 27th British Science Fiction Convention in Manchester (the cover from one of the progress reports is reproduced below). It made such an impact on me (I was 18 at the time) that I can still recite verbatim at least a dozen things he said! He was only the third “big name” American author I’d seen, after Isaac Asimov (who I met on his visit to England in 1974, as recounted here) and James Blish, who I saw a few months before he died in 1975 (as mentioned in my blog post about Black Easter).

A couple of months after the convention in Manchester, I saw my fourth big name – Harlan Ellison – when he was signing books in the Andromeda Bookstore in Birmingham. I stood there and gawped the whole time he was in the shop (although most of the time I was gawping an the impressively tight and stiff-nipple-revealing T-shirt of Harlan’s nubile female companion... I remember it as if it was yesterday).

It just happens that Robert Silverberg (and Harlan Ellison, too, for that matter) once played a small but important role in changing the course of history. This isn’t as big a deal as it sounds, because this particular change probably would have occurred even if they hadn’t been involved – they just happened to do the right thing at the right time. The incident isn’t as well known as it ought to be, though, and it relates to the subject of censorship which I was talking about last month, so I thought I’d give a quick rundown of the salient facts.

Robert Silverberg published his first science fiction novel in 1955 at the age of 20, and within a few months he was making a healthy living from writing the genre. Then in the late fifties, disaster struck. The market for SF magazines suddenly collapsed. In the grand scheme of things, this was only a temporary glitch – by the early sixties the old magazine market had been replaced by an equally healthy paperback book market. But in 1958, the only paperbacks were sleazy ones, designed for holding in one hand while the other hand was busy doing something else... and that was the market Bob Silverberg decided to move into.

The publisher Bob wrote for initially was called Bedside Books. But then he had a better idea. He knew that another person on the lookout for new opportunities was a man named William Hamling, who had been the editor of one of the SF magazines that had just folded. Hamling had started a Playboy-style men’s magazine called Rogue, which Harlan Ellison was working on. Using Harlan as an intermediary, Bob suggested to Hamling that he should start up a line of erotic paperback novels to compete with Bedside Books.

Hamling liked the idea, and so in 1959 a brand new imprint called Nightstand Books was born. Its very first title, Love Addict, was written by Robert Silverberg under the pseudonym of Don Elliott.

Silverberg was soon joined by dozens of other authors, who turned Nightstand Books into America’s foremost publisher of sleazy sex-novels. Among them were several other refugees from the world of science fiction, including Marion Zimmer Bradley, Avram Davidson, G. C. Edmondson, John Jakes, Donald E. Westlake... and Harlan Ellison, of course. The resulting books weren’t pornography in the modern sense, because the United States had very strict obscenity laws at the time. They were erotic only in the sense that they hinted at sexual activities without describing them in explicit detail.

The world-changing drama began in 1965, when – despite the softness of the material – the authorities in New York decided to prosecute a news vendor for selling obscene materials. The two books in question were both published by Nightstand – Lust Pool and Shame Agent (these weren’t written by Silverberg or any of the other well-known authors, who had moved back to SF by this time).

From the prosecution’s point of view, the case was a disaster beyond their worst nightmares. William Hamling was wealthy enough to afford the best defence lawyers, and they took the case all the way to the US Supreme Court. The latter merely pointed out what had been obvious to an impartial observer all along, that any form of censorship is unconstitutional – a flagrant violation of the First Amendment. As the presiding judge observed: “Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is a hallmark of an authoritarian regime.” (which is pretty much what I said last month, about David Cameron’s attempts to reintroduce censorship in the UK).

The end result of the Nightstand case, in 1967, was the complete abolition of America’s anti-obscenity laws. Far from banning the softcore fluff they had targeted, the New York authorities succeeded in opening the floodgates to genuine, hardcore pornography. To quote from the main source I’ve used for this article, an excellent book with the dubious title of Young Lusty Sluts: “Every aspect of human sexuality was covered in every combination of gender and colour, with whole families, their pets and assorted farm animals thrown in for good measure.”

And it all started when the 24-year old Robert Silverberg had a money-making idea in 1959.

Literary name-dropping

I’ve always had a special liking for novels that are filled with factual references. I may be in a minority on this -- most people see this sort of thing as shameless padding, which it probably is! But I like it because it’s one of the most painless ways to learn new things. It’s one of the reasons why Philip K. Dick’s VALIS is a favourite novel of mine, and why I like The Da Vinci Code despite its awfulness. The first book of this type that I ever came across was a novel by Robert Silverberg called Dying Inside, which I read 40 years ago when it was first printed in the July-August and September-October 1972 issues of Galaxy magazine. These were among the first grown-up science fiction magazines I ever read -- I was about 14¾ at the time.

Dying Inside is a vaguely Fortean novel, about a telepath who earns a living ghost-writing essays for students who have more money than brains. It isn’t the most thrilling adventure ever written—in fact it’s positively dull—but it’s got a lot of sexual references in it, which are quite interesting when you’re 14¾. It’s also packed full of factual allusions... almost none of which I understood at the time, although I was fascinated by them nonetheless.

There are references to classical music—Schoenberg, Beethoven, Mahler, Berg, Bartok, Bach and Schoenberg, and to high literature from Aeschylus and Sophocles to Balzac, Dostoyevsky and Proust. When I was a student in the late seventies I used to listen to Radio Three a lot, and developed a taste for all the composers mentioned. Great literature, on the other hand, is something I’ve never had much interest in.... although I did go through a phase circa 1975 of trying very hard to read Finnegans Wake, which Silverberg also alludes to (“Earwicker’s borborygmi”). I’ve got more time for poets than I have for heavyweight novelists, and he namedrops some of the best: Tennyson, Browning and T.S. Eliot (whose ashes are buried at East Coker, a few miles from where I live).

For some reason, there aren’t that many painters mentioned in Dying Inside, but the ones who are are among my favourites: Hieronymus Bosch, Peter Bruegel and El Greco. Another artist, M.C. Escher, is referred to as M.G. Escher!

There are very few scientists, too—the only one I found when I just looked through was J.W. Gibbs, whose name will mean a lot to anyone who did physics at university and very little to anyone else. On the whole, though, Silverberg is less interested in the materialistic side of things than the mystical: he mentions Thomas Aquinas and St Augustine, the Tao Te Ching and the Bhagavad-Gita, and a number of quasi-forteans such as J. B Rhine, Arthur Koestler, Wilhelm Reich and Edgar Cayce. He also mentions the I Ching, which features in Philip K. Dick’s novel The Man in the High Castle (which I didn’t read until 1976) and General Semantics, which features in A.E. van Vogt’s masterpiece The World of Null-A (which I didn’t read until 1994!).

Silverberg even namedrops a couple of fellow science fiction authors: Theodore Sturgeon and Isaac Asimov. Seeing Asimov on his visit to Birmingham in 1974 was the high point of the seventies for me... even though I saw Silverberg himself at the Eastercon in Manchester the following year!