The Rotting of the Mind

First published in Phlogiston Sixteen, February 1988.

The film Creepshow opens with a child reading a horror comic and his father getting very annoyed with him for wasting time with such unutterable trash. After a bit of yelling and screaming, Dad confiscates the comic and throws it away.

Most of us can probably point to similar scenes in our own lives when parents or teachers have told us off for reading comic books or listening to pop music or any of a million things that (in their opinion) keep us from doing the sensible things that we should be doing—whatever they may be. It seems to be the generally accepted wisdom that crap is bad for children; it pollutes their bodily fluids; it prevents them from maturing into sober, sensible people. It is harmful to the intellect and the psyche. Exactly how it is so harmful is usually left very vague.

Furthermore, the object of derision itself tends to change from generation to generation. My parents were castigated for reading the pulp magazines. I used to get told off for reading Superman comics and listening to Rock and Roll on Radio Luxemburg. Tommy Steele, Marty Wilde, Billy Fury, Adam Faith, Don Lang and his Frantic Five, Lord Rockingham’s Eleven with Cherry Wainer (and her poodle) on piano—now there are names to conjure with. The first record I ever bought for myself was I’m Not A Juvenile Delinquent by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. It was a 78. Now go and work out how old I am. Today similar scorn seems to be reserved for television instead. I never got that. I was part of the first generation of television children. I was only three years old when we got our first ever TV, and my parents were even more fascinated by it than I was. Rubbish on TV was obviously a different class of rubbish, somehow. Not to be compared with ridiculous, mind-rotting, time-wasting things like Superman comics. I wonder what the b’te noire of the next generation will be?

Interestingly, many years later, my mother admitted that after I’d gone to bed, she and her father often used to read my Superman comics themselves. How’s that for a double standard!

The judgement of what does and does not fall into the category of rubbish is so arbitrary that it is impossible to deduce any rules at all. I used to subscribe to three comics as a child (with full parental approval, I may add). They were Adventure, Rover and Wizard. The reason my parents approved of them was because they did not have any comic strips in them at all. They were solid prose from cover to cover. They had proper stories in them. I suppose comic was a bad name—they were really fiction magazines. They don’t exist any more—at least not in that format.

I still remember many of the stories. Some of them were even SF. There was one I recall which concerned an explorer in a remote part of Africa. There he came across a native tribe who mined uranium ore and made crude atomic bombs by chucking lumps of it into tubes so that it reached critical mass and exploded. Today I could fly several very large ICBMs through the holes in that idea—but at the time it was wonderful. It was my very first exposure to the idea of critical mass. So perhaps it was worth while. The story contained some good harrowing descriptions of radiation seared landscapes. Generations of genetic mutation allowed the natives to withstand the radiation. All very heavy stuff for a child.

Sometimes the comics were singularly gruesome. The hero of one particular story had at various times in his life broken every bone in his body. Therefore he was so used to it that it didn’t bother him very much any more. In one particular episode the baddies caught him and broke both his legs by tying them to a fallen tree and belting them with crowbars. I remember vivid descriptions of cracking bones—I’m surprised it didn’t give me nightmares. Having performed the dastardly deed, they bugger off and leave him there to die. However our hero is made of sterner stuff than that. He splints his legs by dunking them in a hot mud pool and letting the mud dry and then totters off in search of revenge. Presumably he succeeded—I don’t remember.

There was an interminable series called I Shot Hitler concerning an English Assassin (pun intended on my part but not theirs since Moorcock hadn’t been invented yet) in wartime Germany attempting to shoot Hitler. He was parachuted into Germany shortly after war was declared in 1939 and spent the next six years failing to do the job on Adolf. Every episode ended with him just escaping from the clutches of the Gestapo as they closed in and foiled his latest attempt. Since I don’t think they ever caught him, I guess they must have been about as inept as he was. In the last episode, as the Russian tanks rumbled into Berlin and when it was far too late to make any difference at all, our hero sneaked into the bunker and shot Hitler just seconds before he committed suicide. Of course the rest of the world thought that the suicide attempt succeeded, but us readers of the comic knew differently. What an odd moral attitude to induce in a small child—the thought that assassination could be as honourable as the story made it seem to be (the hero, by the way, never questioned his mission).

There were far too many football stories. I seldom read them (Roy of the Rovers is one I recall). They were all the same and all ended up with a kick by kick description of a seemingly endless game where the eponymous hero invariably scored the winning goal. They were so formulaic that they could have been (and probably were) written with a rubber stamp.

As must be perfectly obvious to you by now, these comics were the English children’s equivalent of the American pulp magazines. The stories were crude and hastily written. They were the prose version (if you like) of the comic strip. Nonetheless, because they were prose rather than comic, they received parental approval. My parents seemed to have some vague, never properly articulated idea that reading prose would sharpen and improve my reading skills whereas reading comics would blunt and destroy those same skills.

However, there was prose and there was prose. At the age of about twelve I discovered, rather to my surprise, that not all prose was equally acceptable on all occasions.

In an English exam at school, I was asked to describe the best book I had ever read. I chose a science fiction novel I had recently devoured which had impressed the pants off me—The Man Who Owned the World by Charles Eric Maine. (Don’t bother searching it out. Only a twelve year old could thrill to it.) I waxed eloquent for several pages about this book and went home and proudly told my parents what I had done. They were horrified, and I was in deep shit. I had to promise them that if I was ever asked such a question again I would not choose such rubbish. What on earth would the teacher think?

Actually, looking back, I strongly suspect that the teacher was so pleased to find someone who had read something outside the prescribed course texts that any old rubbish would have done. English teachers are a lot smarter than my parents gave them credit for. I’d be willing to bet that virtually every other kid in the class chose one of the books we’d read in class as the “best book ever read” and lied through their teeth as they eulogised it. After twenty or so of those stultifying essays, to come across an essay by a child who had read something of his own free will and actually enjoyed what he had read would have been like a breath of fresh air.

My English teacher was a great guy. He spent his evenings playing clarinet with a jazz band and I would not be in the least surprised to find that he also read science fiction. He used to run a sixth form General Studies course on the history of science, which is a very odd subject for an English teacher to teach. Maybe his interest in it was stimulated by SF? I never thought to ask him—I wish I had. Incidentally, he is also the only person in the known world to have sent in a contribution to the Life’s Like That column of the Reader’s Digest and had it published. Inspired by his success, I’ve sent a few, but they just seem to fall off the edge of the universe and are never seen again.

The incident of the exam question was the first time I had consciously realised that there was a difference between the writings I was devouring so avidly at home and the writings I was being forced fed at school. Perhaps it was the triggering mechanism for what Hemingway used to call the “shit detector”. Certainly it was not very long after that I cancelled my subscriptions to the comics. On a conscious level I rationalised it by saying that I was growing out of the sorts of things I was reading in the comics. They were just for kids. In retrospect, however, I think that may have not been the real reason. I did have to move on to other things. I had learned all that the comics had to teach me. Perhaps it was just kids stuff on one level, but on another level entirely I think there was a lot more going on than I ever realised at the time.

Let me explain by digressing again, for a moment.

A common denominator in the early lives of many well respected SF writers of today is that they were all constantly exposed to the mind-rotting junk of the pulp magazines. In the introductions to their books, in interviews, in autobiographical texts of one sort or another, writers such as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Brian Aldiss, Bob Shaw and countless others wax nostalgic about beautiful Martian princesses and deadly multicoloured rays, tentacled aliens abducting Earth’s fairest daughters, and space combats galore.

Considering that people such as these are now some of the most respected writers in the field (and in some cases out of it—Asimov has written very widely in other fields) it seems to give the lie to the accepted wisdom that we have been discussing so far. Indeed I would suggest that exposure to such things, far from being harmful is actually necessary for the true development of science fictional imagination and creativity. The images (“ideas” if you like) generated by them seem to unlock a door in the mind which leads into an area that would remain unexplored otherwise. The people we refer to as “mundane” have never unlocked this particular door and remain ignorant of the territory behind it.

Eventually, in the course of exploring the territory, we find another door at the other end of the land. This one isn’t locked. We can open it whenever we want to, provided that we reach it. It leads into less junky areas and the doorkeeper hands us our portable shit detector as we pass through.

We have to go through this second door to reach what you might call literary (or artistic) maturity. My parents were right to think that much of the stuff I wanted to read was junk. What they failed to appreciate was that it was only a step along the way.

I’m not just saying that the junkyard is the only route to that second door. I haven’t seen the map, there may be many ways of getting there. Indeed, since Marshall McLuhan has assured us that the map is not the territory, we can legitimately assume the corollary that the territory is not the map which implies that there must be many other trails leading to the same place. If there weren’t, we wouldn’t have art and poetry, we’d only have pictures and verse. But I can only tell you about the journey that I made and that so many of the writers that I respect also seem to have made. It is a well trodden path in the SF world. I cancelled my comic subscriptions when I went through that second door. They had served their purpose and they were no longer necessary.

Because of this, I find it hard to condemn an interest in today’s equivalent of the mind-rotting rubbish of my youth. Star Trek and Star Wars, the puppets of Gerry Anderson, Transformers™ and Masters of the Universe™, MarvelŪ Comics and fantasy role playing. It seems to me that these sorts of things are very much a part of the territory behind the first door and therefore a liking for them is simply a valid exploration of that territory.

The only thing that worries me is that too many people seem to consider that the territory is closed; a dead end, complete unto itself. They never go exploring; they never find the second door. In extreme cases they deny that it even exists.

I would never do what my parents did and forbid these pulp equivalents. That is censorship. But I would like to see the people who are locked into this sort of thing take their blinkers off and look around a bit.

In the poem pity this busy monster, manunkind e. e. cummings said;

listen: there’s a hell of a good universe next door;
let’s go