My Early Life

First published in Warp 36, September 1983.

I remember it very well. I was about ten years old, and I’d been flirting mildly with SF for some time, but I still wasn’t hooked. Captain W. E. Johns’ stories about the asteroids, Angus Macvicar’s stories about Hesikos, the lost planet, the Kemlo books (does anyone remember Kemlo?). I found them vaguely entertaining, nothing more. What I was really interested in was aeroplanes, particularly their early history. Cody, the Wright brothers, Louis Bleriot.

Then my mother went and spoiled it all. “Alan,” she said, “I’ve just read this marvellous book. I think you’ll enjoy it. It’s called The Day of the Triffids”. So I read it, and the world was never the same again. Magic had come into it. For the first time, my sense of wonder had been turned on, and the only thing I wanted in the world was to repeat the sensation. I was hooked, and I have never lost the addiction.

About the same time, I persuaded the librarian to let me into the adult section. (I’d long ago exhausted the children’s section, and I was on my second time through.) I knew what I wanted, I wanted SF. I found H. G. Wells, and scared myself with War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man. Wells was an SF writer, so I took Love and Mr Lewisham out, and discovered that Wells also wrote things that weren’t SF. They were boring. I read omnivorously. I fought the green tharks on the dead sea bottoms of Mars with Captain John Carter, I voyaged around the world in 80 days with Phileas Fogg. I read a book whose title and author my subconscious has (mercifully) suppressed. I vividly remember one episode from it. The hero was a giant chicken mining radioactive dust. I loved it. I had to have more.

There was SF all around in those days. Once a week on television, the entire British nation huddled around their television sets and grooved on Quatermass and the Pit. Pub landlords complained about how slack business was when the programme was on. I wasn’t allowed to watch it in case it gave me nightmares. Tony Hancock did a satire of it. Since that was a light hearted comedy program, I was allowed to watch it. It gave me nightmares. The Goons did a satire of it, but I didn’t find that until 20 years later. My father didn’t approve of the Goons, so we never listened. But there was always Journey Into Space. Andrew Faulds played Captain Jet Morgan, and Alfie Bass was Lemmy. Later Faulds went into politics and became an MP. Alfie Bass became Bootsie of The Army Game and “Bootsie and Snudge”. I wonder which was the better decision?

By now I’d discovered that Gollancz had a whole series of books with plain yellow covers that were all SF. I devoured them avidly. Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein. It took me ages to discover Brian Aldiss and James Blish. They were published by Faber, and the books didn’t have yellow covers. Proper SF had yellow covers. Again, my mother came to the rescue. She found Hothouse by Aldiss. Whole new worlds opened up. Yellow covers, I realised, were not the only criterion of excellence.

On the television, more SF appeared. Four Feather Falls and Supercar. There was a series about the Moon, Mars and Venus. I recall nothing at all about it except that in the very last episode, an actor called George Colouris stayed behind on Venus when his friends blasted off for home. He liked it there. For years afterwards, whenever I saw him in anything, I was always puzzled. How the heck had he got home? Then there was Doctor Who, with William Hartnell glaring fiercely at the camera as he tried to remember what his next line was. Sometimes he succeeded.

By now I was into my early teens, and for a while SF took a back seat. I never wholly lost the taste, but more and more I was turning to other things. Kafka held me for a while. I enjoyed the feelings of surrealistic paranoia his books evoked (a very SF sensation, I realise now). I read Sartre and Camus (the former sent me to sleep, the latter woke me up again. Maybe he had a better translator). I discovered Somerset Maugham, and devoured everything he had written, which took considerable time, because he was very prolific. I turned to the American Novel, and plowed my way through Faulkner, Steinbeck, Mailer, Jones and Dos Passos. I made the first of many unsuccessful attempts to read the great Russian novelists. I got bored. I read the Foundation trilogy. SF grabbed me by the scruff of the neck again. From that time on, it has never let me go.

Why? What is there that grabs me so? From time to time I have attempted to answer these unanswerable questions. For my own peace of mind, if for no other reason. I like to know what makes me tick. I think the closest I have ever come to an answer was when I began to think of SF as applied surrealism. It often gives me the same feelings that I get when I look at a painting by Dali or Magritte. Dali’s soft watches, Magritte’s shattered landscapes in a broken window, Moorcock’s moody decadent fantasy worlds, Pohl and Kornbluth’s Wolfbane and the ring of fire that grew, Blish’s Triumph of Time (also published under the title Clash of Cymbals)—they all give me that funny shiver in the pit of my stomach that we all recognize as a signal of the “real thing”. And that is the closest I can come.