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Arthur Koestler wrote a book called The Roots of Coincidence about Paul Kammerer’s search for meaning in random events. Two persons saying the same words together, two friends having the same birthday. In Das Gesetz der Serie (The Law of Seriality), Kammerer lists a hundred strange coincidences. A concert goer has seat number nine and cloakroom ticket number nine. The next night he attends another concert, sits in seat number twenty one and has cloakroom ticket number twenty one. Two soldiers were admitted to a hospital in Silesia. Both were nineteen years old and both were called Franz Richter. Kammerer saw these sorts of things as being under the control of some sort of mysterious law. Koestler too looked for meaning in these improbabilities. Jung coined the word “synchronicity” to describe them; which is a lovely bit of jargon to confuse your friends with. I’ve never seen a satisfactory definition of the word. Jung has a long essay in the front of my copy of the “I Ching” which he devotes to a discussion of synchronicity, but it appears to be written with a pen dipped in muddy water; it makes no sense whatsoever.
You’ve experienced it, and so have I. The strange, silly coincidences that you would never put in a story because no one would believe it. Life may be like that, but art is not. In Friday by Robert Heinlein, the heroine is desperately in need of money. Guess what happens? She wins a lottery! I hated that in the book, but I’d accept it in life. Isn’t that silly?
When I decided to come to New Zealand to live, I went to see one of my friends and told her what I was going to do. “Oh good,” she said. “I’ll give you the address of my daughter. She lives in Wellington. I’ll give you the address of her ex-husband as well. They got divorced a while ago. He’s called Jack Briggs.”
She gave me the names and addresses and I noted them down and in the fullness of time I arrived in New Zealand. I was met at the airport.
“Hello, I’m your new boss. My name’s Jack Briggs.”
My flabber was (as they say) ghasted.
This year I returned to England and attended the World SF convention in Brighton. Rosemary and I were taking the air on the sea front when we bumped into an old school friend of Rosemary’s whom we hadn’t seen for years. We didn’t even know she was in England; and she certainly didn’t know we were—we’d lost touch with her ages ago. But there she was on the Brighton seafront.
This sort of thing seems to happen to New Zealanders much more often than it happens to anybody else. Many of my friends have reported it—there is nothing odd in these oddities. A quantum mechanically inclined friend of mine to whom it has happened far too often for comfort summed it up quite neatly. “Kiwis”, he said, “warp probability waves”.
As an explanation, that is probably far too science fictional to be true, but it is nonetheless very elegant.
(Having brought up the subject of quantum mechanics, let me just spend a sentence or two telling you my favourite quantum mechanical jokes. If you don’t like quantum mechanical jokes, just skip the next two paragraphs. I’ll join you there in a minute.
The tunnel effect was once described to me as: If you walk up and down outside Buckingham Palace for long enough, eventually you’ll find yourself inside.
My other favourite is: If photons had mass, we’d all be stoned to death.)
The literary term for this is “deus ex machina” which is Latin for: I’ve written myself into a corner; what the hell do I do now? It describes the arbitrary and the unprepared for, coincidences and downright unbelievability.
SF (particularly when written by the beginner or the amateur) can often be a prescription for the deus ex machina. There is a terrible temptation to whip out a miraculous machine to defeat the ravening alien hordes. One of the reasons that I dislike E. E. “Doc” Smith’s stories so much (apart from the appalling writing style) is his over-fondness for pulling “high-tech” stunts out of his hat like a stage magician with a rabbit. (“Now suppose we weld another busbar on here and connect it in parallel with the atomic defibrillator here…”.) Harry Harrison parodied this attitude beautifully in Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers.
In the days when John Campbell was God, it was generally assumed that it was impossible to write a science fictional detective story since there seemed to be nothing to stop the hero from whipping out his device (!) and, after examining it closely, arresting the villain. If you allow such things, the argument went, the resulting story would be no fun to read; and besides it wasn’t fair on the reader.
You can’t argue with the conclusion, but you can argue with the premise. Why allow such a thing in the first place?
Isaac Asimov is on record as saying that one of the reasons he wrote The Caves of Steel was in order to prove Campbell wrong; to show that it was possible to write a classical detective story within a science fictional framework without falling into the deus ex machina trap. (Which may of course have been Campbell’s plan all along. As an editor he was a genius, and he did this sort of thing all the time.) Asimov wanted to play fair, present all the clues, give the reader a chance. He wanted to play the same game that Agatha Christie played (despite the fact that the old dear cheated outrageously); and once he’d proved it was possible, the floodgates opened.
Randall Garrett wrote a whole series of stories about Lord Darcy, Chief Investigator for the Duke of Normandy. The stories are set in an alternate world where Richard the Lion Heart did not die in 1199, but lived to found a mighty empire. Magic and the laws of extra sensory perception have been codified, but the laws of physics remain unsuspected.
You might think that this is even worse. If the super scientist can ruin the story and trap the criminal simply by turning on his big bright green pleasure machine, how much more leeway does a magician have with access to demons and all manner of supernatural agencies?
I wouldn’t bother mentioning it at all except that Garret is perfectly well aware of these dangers, but despite it all he succeeds in telling a rigorous, classically crafted detective story within his chosen framework. Just how well he succeeds is demonstrated by the fact that a friend of mine in England who was a detective story freak in much the same way that you and I are science fiction freaks, liked Garrett’s stories very much indeed, and went out of his way to read them. Normally he went out of his way to avoid SF and similar mind-rotting junk. Unclean, unclean!
Just as an aside isn’t it strange that Fredric Brown and Jack Vance, both of whom have won awards and prestige in the detective story world have never (as far as I am aware) mixed that side of their writing lives in with their SF with which they have also won awards and prestige? I have no idea why. Can anyone solve this little conundrum?
The man who is always falling into the hole and dragging his deus ex machina after him is, of course, A. E. van Vogt. He is my very favourite bad writer. I’ve just counted, and I have forty van Vogt books on my shelves which is at least thirty-nine too many by any sane reckoning.
Damon Knight, in an essay called Cosmic Jerrybuilder (available in In Search of Wonder, Advent, 1968) comprehensively takes van Vogt apart, and all the king’s horses and all the king’s men will never be able to take the man seriously again.
The essay was first published in 1945. It marked Damon Knight’s debut as a major critic of the field and also the start of van Vogt’s decline as a major writer.
To choose just one example, Knight proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that the short story A Can of Paint is actually a giant deus ex machina from beginning to end and has no justification for existing at all! Now that has class.
The hero of the story has a problem; he must discover how to get the perfect paint off his body before it covers him completely and kills him. The problem is solved when the hero discovers that the “Liquid Light” in the paint is “absorbed” by a bank of “photoconverter cells” which he just happens to have on hand. Put any jargon phrases you like in between the inverted commas, and you won’t change the story one jot or tittle.
In his summing up, Knight says of van Vogt’s stories that:
…every hero packs a .32 calibre improbability in his hip pocket.
and I really cannot argue with that conclusion. However I still continue to read van Vogt, despite the fact that his books make no sense whatsoever, because I admire the sheer unmitigated gall of the man. No one else would even begin to attempt anything like it. He is a genuinely inspired madman. Who else would dare have a character cry “Hey, I’ve figured out the true nature of the Universe!”? Van Vogt did it in Rogue Ship and went on to demonstrate the truth of the statement. In a fair contest, no genuine universe has a chance against van Vogt.
It is interesting to consider exactly why outrageous coincidence and the like should be barred from fiction. Just why does it irritate? After all, fiction is supposed to hold up a mirror to life, and we are supposed to see ourselves reflected in the glass, however darkly. Since such things are an unavoidable part of life (particularly in New Zealand!) why can we not admit them to the realm of fiction?
I suspect the reason has a lot to do with the way the thing is presented. How often have you seen or heard something which knocked you out? It might have been a drama or a hilarious joke, a picture or a poem that moved you deeply. You explain it to your friends in the pub, you describe the picture, you tell them the joke, and you get (at best) only a polite smile. No guffaws of laughter, no tears where you were expecting them. Your explanation tails off and you start to feel very silly. You end up by saying lamely, “I suppose you had to be there to appreciate it”. Maybe you blush a little and offer to buy another round to take people’s mind off your faux pas.
That has happened to every one of us. It is very hard to share a second hand experience. No one can really appreciate it, and the more outrageous it is the less appreciation there can be. You really do have to be there. And fiction, no matter how well written, is a second hand experience, and must ipso facto follow the rules in the same way that you must when trying to tell a joke to your friends. It is in the same position you are, and is likely to produce the same effect if it isn’t careful.
So that, in the end, is why the deus ex machina doesn’t work. I suggest that every time you spot one you write to the author and ask him to buy you a drink. After all, you had to do it in the pub, didn’t you?
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