Tissue, Tissue

First published in Phlogiston Seven, November 1985.

Last time we were discussing measures of literary excellence. The only really hard and fast rule was that there were no rules—which is why we have critics, and why they never agree with each other. Now however, after much research, I can report that I have finally discovered a sure fire method of measuring scientifically the merit (or lack of it) of any particular book. As of now, critics are out of a job and subjective criticism is dead.

It all began in the pub—as these things often do. A friend of mine confessed that books often made her cry. Close questioning elicited the fact that she sometimes cried a lot, and sometimes a little, and sometimes not at all depending on the book and how it affected her. It immediately occurred to me that here we might have a quantitative measure of the merit of any given piece of writing. Simply supply her with a book and a box of tissues, count the number of tissues used (and measure the degree of saturation of each one) and there you are! The book is rated unequivocally. No more will the unsuspecting reader be misled by the blurb on the back cover. All we need is a law requiring that the tissue factor for any given book be printed in large figures on the cover and we can make our choice of books to buy logically and scientifically.

I am currently in the process of putting together a petition to Parliament to enact such a law, and to have my lady friend declared a National Resource. (She is precious, and must be guarded carefully—we must all Think Big here.)

If she will collaborate with me, I will report the tissue factor of any books I review in future. (I’m allowed to collaborate—my wife says so.)

Talking of collaborations; have you noticed how many there are in the SF world? (Pohl and Kornbluth, Pohl and Williamson, Pohl and Del Rey…) It does seem to be a purely SF phenomenon—examples from outside the field are very few and far between. In the thriller genre there is Ellery Queen of course, and I’m about 80% sure that the rather obscure writer Manning Coles was a collaboration. John Sladek and Thomas Disch collaborated on a thriller called Black Alice—but they are SF writers, so perhaps that doesn’t count. (And then there are the husband/wife collaborations in SF—Kuttner and Moore, Van Vogt and E. Mayne Hull, Moorcock and Bailey…)

In the mainstream of literature, collaborations are conspicuous by their absence. Dickens worked with Wilkie Collins on a few short stories, Ezra Pound worked closely with T. S. Elliot on the final draft of The Waste Land—and rack my brains and my reference books as I will, those are the only two examples I can come up with.

(Meanwhile back in the SF world, Harlan Ellison collaborated with everybody in sight and published Partners in Wonder—a whole book of collaborations.)

I’m not referring to posthumous “collaborations” here. A writer (or one of them anyway) has no control over this process. So we can forget all the attempts to finish The Mystery of Edwin Drood or The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (but that’s getting too close to SF again—and besides, it wasn’t unfinished anyway, no matter what Jules Verne may have thought). We can also forget those seemingly never ending Conan stories and the Lovecraft pastiches. They don’t really count. (But there is still L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Avram Davidson and Ward Moore, Judith Merril and Cyril Kornbluth…)

Why is the phenomenon so common in SF and so rare everywhere else? I think it all comes down to the fact that the SF field is a world wide fraternity. The readers and the writers know each other in a way that just doesn’t happen in other fields. People meet at conventions—they talk together and get drunk together. So many SF writers are just plain friends with other writers because of such meetings. And among friends, what is more natural than to do things together, to explore mutual interests? So we get collaborations. (Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, Piers Anthony and Robert Margroff, James Blish and Norman L. Knight…)

Put it down to fandom if you like. Not only were many of the writers grubby little fans themselves at one time, they have never really lost touch with their roots. It isn’t only to placate the great god of marketing that they turn up at so many conventions, you know. Of course that is a part of it. Putting in a presence, pressing the flesh, certainly doesn’t do any harm to their sales; and a lot of useful deals can be made at conventions if you catch your agent at the right convivial moment (which reminds me—wouldn’t CONviviality be a good convention name?). But deep down, a major reason for writers attending conventions is the same one that motivates you and me—a desire to renew old acquaintances, and make new ones. So the writers get together, and ideas are born. Collaborations happen simply because everyone knows everyone else. (Philip K. Dick and Ray Nelson, Philip K. Dick and Roger Zelazny, Roger Zelazny and Fred Saberhagen…)

What this is all leading up to, of course, is Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle and their new novel Footfall. (For the moment we’ll forget about Larry Niven and David Gerrold, and Larry Niven and Stephen Barnes.)

I must confess to a fair degree of ambivalence about the Niven/Pournelle books. I have a mild interest in Larry Niven’s solo works; they generally entertain me. However I have a marked dislike of Jerry Pournelle’s writing. It seems to me that too many of the things he accepts as axiomatic are debatable, to say the least, and so we have little common ground. By these lights, therefore, it would seem that I ought to be at best lukewarm (and at worst downright freezing) towards the Niven/Pournelle collaborations. Interestingly, this is not the case. Together they seem to reinforce each other’s strengths and perhaps the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—and I don’t care if that violates the law of conservation of energy.

The Mote in God’s Eye was interesting, though I found it badly flawed in the first sections where the authors insisted on describing the organisation of the “space navy” in terms that best applied to the nineteenth century sea-going navy. The book seemed to be little more than Hornblower in space, and I kept expecting them to issue cutlasses prior to sending out a boarding party. However once they reached the mote and discovered the aliens, it picked up a lot. Niven and Pournelle seem to be good at aliens (I’ll be returning to this point later with reference to Footfall). On balance, I guess we can give this one a tissue factor of 65%. A good first effort.

Inferno, on the other hand, is such a weird book that if I didn’t know better I’d swear they were both ripped to the tits on something illegal when they wrote it. Essentially it is a rewrite of Dante’s Inferno, but in science fictional terms. Goodness only knows why they chose to do it—it is so unlike anything that either of them have done before (together or apart) that it stands out there alone on its limb shouting “Read me. Read me” at the top of its voice. I liked it a lot, and I have returned to it several times. It is a very, very strange book and I’d give it a tissue factor of at least 90%.

Lucifer’s Hammer was a disaster movie pretending to be a book. It concerned a comet striking the earth, and the disruptive effects thereof. The marketing men aimed it at the general market rather than the SF genre market, and that seemed to be a good ploy because it shot into the bestseller lists. For you and me, old and jaded as we are, it contained no surprises—but I guess the lumpenproletariat found it exciting enough because they bought it in huge numbers. There is really nothing in the book that you can point to and say “this was badly done”—so I have no right to sneer. It’s just that I have read so many disaster movie books (Earth Abides, Day of the Triffids, Greybeard, The Drowned World, On the Beach—the list is endless). This one was a good example of its kind, but because it had nothing new to say, I can only give it a tissue factor of 70%.

Next was Oath of Fealty set in a huge (and I mean huge) tower block in Los Angeles. The block was virtually self contained and self supporting (they called it an “arcology”; a clever word. I’m not sure if it was original with them or not). The story concerned the conflict between the arcology and the city of Los Angeles proper. Again, I found this book seriously flawed—the story of the conflict was told in thud and blunder terms. In effect the book was a cliched American cops and robbers story. It could have been (and should have been) a lot more than that. The presence of the arcology rescued the plot a little simply by its presence, but the overly dramatic (not to say melodramatic) thriller plot dragged it back down again. Tissue factor 50%.

And now we have Footfall. At first sight of the blurb I was disappointed. An alien spaceship is spotted in the solar system. At first everyone is sure they will be friendly. But it turns out that they are not…

My immediate reaction was oh god, not another aliens invade the earth story—take me to your leader. Then I started thinking as opposed to merely reacting. Just how many aliens invade the earth stories have you read? Despite the fact that it is a supposedly old and hackneyed SF cliche, I was very hard pressed to find any examples of it. The classic War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, a very old and very obscure Brian Aldiss novel Bow Down to Nul (sometimes called The Interpreter), L. Ron Hubbard’s new book Battlefield Earth. That’s about it, except for the occasional short story. It occurs to me that the theme is only thought to be a common one (perhaps because it is such an obvious plot). And since everyone thinks it has been done so many times, nobody does it. Therefore it is actually a very rare plot. Score one for Niven and Pournelle for recognising this.

What of the book itself? Structurally the novel has much in common with Lucifer’s Hammer. An enormous cast of characters work out their individual destinies. There are a lot of stories in this novel; and they are not all human ones. I said earlier that Niven and Pournelle were good at aliens. Here they are magnificent. Their aliens are people too, but they aren’t human people. They do the things that they do for their own reasons, and they aren’t human reasons. Far too often the aliens in SF are simply eccentric people with green skins and the occasional tentacle. It is my contention that alien implies difference—we can see this to a huge extent even here on earth. How much do you have in common with the people of the Ayatollah’s Iran for example? Not a lot, I would venture to guess. Your motivations and theirs do not interact and each would find the other difficult to understand (although to themselves each is behaving perfectly normally. But what is normal? It depends on your cultural imperatives). How much more so then does this apply to a truly alien being? I’d have thought that was an obvious point to make, but so many writers fail to make the connection so often, that perhaps it isn’t really as obvious as I thought. Niven and Pournelle, however, have recognised this fact and have really come to grips with it. Both in The Mote in God’s Eye and in Footfall they have dealt with the aliens in the aliens’ own terms.

The book swings along. It is a vast novel both in terms of physical size and in terms of the subjects it deals with. I found the ending a little rushed (partly, I suspect because the book had grown so large, and the authors were so far behind on their deadlines that it really was rushed) and I do not really believe in the scenario that leads to the eventual resolution of the problem of the invasion. (I am being purposefully vague here because I don’t want to give a vital plot point away.) Let’s just say that I think the timescale is wrong, and the improvisations unlikely.

Also I dislike the way that the government calls in a team of SF writers as special advisers on the alien menace and defers to them all the time. Neither do I like the way that the SF writers in the advisory team are so right so often on so little evidence. That was just plain silly. Neither governments nor SF writers are like that.

But such trivialities aside (and they really are trivial in terms of the book as a whole), I thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing. As with Lucifer’s Hammer, I suspect that the marketing men will point it at the general market. I also suspect that again it will be a blockbuster best seller. I’m all in favour of it. The book is true “sensawonder” SF and giving it the widest possible exposure can only be good for the field as a whole. It is a magnificent piece of work, and it completely eclipses anything that either Niven or Pournelle have done before, separately or together. Sod the laws of thermodynamics. This one is about 120% of the sum of both of the writers. I don’t know how they did it, but I give them a tissue factor of 95%, and I hope they do it again soon.

(Meanwhile there is Michael Bishop and Ian Watson, James Gunn and Jack Williamson, James Blish and R. A. W. Lowndes…)