BACH 

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Eight, February 1991.

Those unenlightened mundane souls who don’t read science fiction think that BACH was a composer. We illuminated ones know better, of course.

BACH stands for Bradbury, Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke—the four writers who essentially defined modern science fiction. They took it kicking and screaming out of the pulp gutter it had languished in since 1926 and gave it some respectability. For a long time, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, they stood head and shoulders above the competition. They were SF and to a great extent they still are.

It is particularly timely to talk about them now. Bradbury has been silent for many years and is largely forgotten by today’s audience. However his books are being republished by Bantam in very handsome editions. With any luck a whole new generation will discover his very special magic. Both Asimov and Clarke have published major new novels (Nemesis by Asimov and The Ghost from the Grand Banks by Clarke) and the unexpurgated edition of Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land is now available for the first time ever. How do the four Golden Age masters measure up today? Were we right to sing their praises as loudly as we did? Are they still important or has time passed them by?

These questions first raised themselves in my mind when I was browsing around the Science Fiction area of one of the New Zealand computer bulletin boards. There was a message on there complaining about the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s. The writer said that it was unreadable, full of old fashioned and discredited scientific ideas and far too pulpy. He only read modern writers—the old ones were boring and out of date. They had nothing to say any more.

It is easy to understand his feelings (I have been heard to say much the same thing about writers of the generation prior to BACH) and it is impossible just to say “Humph!” and dismiss what he said out of hand. So let’s look a little bit more closely… 

During the period we are discussing, the doyen of hard SF magazines was, of course, Astounding Science Fiction under the editorship of John W. Campbell. I have been unable to find any reference to Bradbury ever having appeared in this magazine (if he did, it must have been for very minor work). The reason is not hard to find—there is no science in Ray Bradbury’s SF. He simply isn’t interested in putting it there. His most famous work, The Martian Chronicles (published in English editions as The Silver Locusts) deals with repeated attempts by humans to colonise Mars. So far so science fictional. But the Mars of Ray Bradbury owes nothing at all to the Mars that the world of science was exploring at the time; neither does it owe anything to that earlier Mars, the Barsoom of Edgar Rice Burroughs with its beautiful princesses, evil monsters and deeds of derring do. It was a new Mars built largely from the fancies of Ray Bradbury and modelled loosely (if it was modelled on anything at all) on small town America. In a series of brilliantly contrived and closely interwoven stories linked by recurrent themes and images Bradbury showed how humanity brought all the old prejudices with them from Earth. Repeated meetings with the somewhat ambiguous shape-changing Martians merely reinforced all those prejudices and humanity was unable to cope with this different world view. The mood of the stories is lonely and nostalgic; there is a constant feeling of dying and decay and falling apart. Many of the stories are slight (even trite) but they are told in a language the like of which there never was before on land or sea nor ever will be again. Bradbury had a power with words to touch the heartstrings. To read his stories was to be moved and changed. That was his secret and that was the whole of his power.

In story after story he painted images in the minds of a generation that all the years in between have been unable to dim.

The space ship hit by a meteor spilling its crew out into space like wriggling silverfish. The shadow of a child burned onto the wall of a house after the nuclear holocaust. The tattoos of the illustrated man. Fahrenheit 451—the temperature at which book paper burns.

Those were the images that haunted our dreams and we kept coming back for more. Bradbury was, if anything, an antitechnologist. He distrusted science. He used the images and trappings of SF but his heart wasn’t in them. He was a fantasist and a fabulist, not a technician.

He shot through and out of the SF ghetto at the speed of light. The Martian Chronicles was only his second book but it came to the notice of the literati (God knows how) and no less a person than Christopher Isherwood praised him. After that he could do no wrong and his stories appeared in the slick magazines, in Esquire and Saturday Evening Post and McCalls and Colliers and he made pots of money. He wasn’t writing SF any more but we still read the stories because his wonderful way with words still weaved its unforgettable magic spell. His was probably the most spectacularly successful non-sf writing career of any of the SF heroes until Kurt Vonnegut followed in his footsteps a generation later. But unlike Vonnegut, Bradbury never denied his origins—like the rest of us he started life as a grubby little fan publishing his grubby little fanzine (called Futuria Fantasia if you are interested. If you find a copy, hang on to it—it’s as good as money in the bank), and he was proud of his fannish beginnings.

The stories have not dated in any way because they were timeless stories (Bradbury once edited an anthology called Timeless Stories for Today and Tomorrow—I think he knew exactly what he was doing). The thrills, the spills and the magic are just as powerful as ever they were and to read Bradbury today is just as wonderful an experience as ever it was. He still deserves his reputation as a great writer and the fact that he was less prolific and more “artistic” than his three colleagues does not detract from his reputation at all.

But be warned—unlike the other three members of BACH, he didn’t write technological science fiction.

Just in passing here’s a fascinating bit of Ray Bradbury trivia. One of his very early stories, called Lorelei of the Red Mist (written in collaboration with Leigh Brackett) has a character called Conan who has absolutely no relationship whatsoever with Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian. Reading the story is terribly disorienting and nerve wracking because of it. I can never decide whether or not he did it on purpose.

Let’s skip past Asimov and Clarke for the moment (we’ll come back to them, I promise) and talk about Heinlein. In many ways his career is just as interesting as Bradbury’s and parallels it in many ways as well. Like Bradbury he took SF into places it had never been seen before. Like Bradbury he sprawled all over the slick magazines but unlike Bradbury he never really left the SF field at all. I don’t think he ever published a novel that wasn’t science fiction, nor did he ever show any inclination to do so.

Heinlein had two reputations. At the height of the golden age when BACH could do no wrong, he was generally regarded as the best writer of the four. He led, others followed. In the 1960s, when his reputation both inside and outside the field was such that anything with his name on it guaranteed a certain minimum number of sales, he grew sloppy and careless and earned another reputation as a once good writer who was no longer capable of producing the good stuff.

I think both reputations were exaggerations of the truth.

The last time Alex (the guy who bullies me into writing these things) visited me, we played a little game. We went through my shelf of Heinlein novels and picked out all the ones we thought were worthy of respect; all the ones we had enjoyed reading. We were not allowed to use our disagreement with the philosophical position espoused by the novel as an indication that the book lacked merit. For example, we both hate Starship Troopers for what it stands for but we’ve both read it many times in the past and will probably do so again in the future. It went on the list as a good book.

Interestingly, there was a surprising degree of agreement in our choices. The only book we disagreed on was The Puppet Masters which I enjoyed but Alex didn’t. The end result of the experiment astonished me—thirty-one out of the forty books on my shelves were judged worthy. That’s a success rate of 77.5%. I think any author in the world would be proud to think that he satisfied his readers 77.5% of the time. There was nowhere near as much trash as I remembered nor as much as the critics seem to think.

I was so intrigued by the result of this experiment that after Alex had gone, I went and tried it on the writer whose name immediately pops into my mind when people ask me who my favourite SF writer is—Philip K. Dick. Again, the results were very surprising. Out of the fifty-four Philip K. Dick books on my shelves I found only thirteen that I could honestly point to and say these are exceptional books. That’s a success rate of 24%. The selection rule I used this time (since I had nobody to discuss things with) was to choose only those Philip K. Dick books that I had read more than once.

I didn’t believe it and so I checked again, but it’s true. Despite the fact that I invariably cite Philip K. Dick as my favourite writer only 24% of his books have inspired me sufficiently to make me want to read them on second or subsequent occasions. But Heinlein, a writer I generally sneer at, managed “successful” books more than three times as often.

How do Heinlein’s books stand up today? Has the science been invalidated as my friend on the bulletin board claimed?

Heinlein was rarely on the cutting edge of science. By temperament and training he was an engineer and he brought an engineer’s perspective to the science he used. He was interested more in practical applications than in neat theories. Consequently his extrapolations tended towards the conservative and I think that has stood him in good stead. His space stations and rocket ships and moon colonies are well engineered environments which break no fundamental laws of physics or mathematics. Indeed Heinlein often interrupts his story for a brief lecture on how things work (one of the very few authors who managed to get away with this successfully—again a measure of his great writing skill), and you won’t find any mistakes in those lectures. They are just as accurate now as they were the day they were written. I once thought I’d discovered an error in Space Cadet. One of the cadets is set a problem in celestial mechanics which, as it happened, was a subject I was studying at the time. I thought the answer he gave looked funny and so I set out to solve the problem myself. It turned out to be considerably harder than I first thought it would be, but I got there in the end. Heinlein wasn’t wrong—I was. There’s a lot of homework in some of Heinlein’s novels and he did it conscientiously.

But generally this was just window dressing. Like all great novelists, what Heinlein was writing about was people (and sometimes pussy cats) and their reactions to the situations they were involved in. I think the only novel in which a “fabulous invention” played a major central role was The Door Into Summer and again the household robots he postulated were just a very logical engineering application. (I don’t really count the super-science of The Day After Tomorrow since that book was written to order and the idea was supplied by Campbell and Heinlein is on record as saying he disagreed with virtually every scientific extrapolation in it—which is why he worked twice as hard to make it sound plausible of course.)

As a general rule I think it is safe to say that Heinlein never really wrote science fiction, he wrote engineering fiction. His wilder speculations were reserved mainly for social, political and economic situations. Stranger in a Strange Land (in my opinion his masterpiece) shocked everybody for more than twenty years, and now that it has been republished in a new, longer edition it will probably do it all over again.

You can’t say the same about Arthur C. Clarke. If anybody ever wrote science fiction, he did (and does).

Someone once described Arthur C. Clarke as a brain on legs. The man’s intellect is as awesome as his sense of humour is wicked (I can never read Earthlight without chuckling out loud, and most of his novels make me grin widely. The man has a very cutting wit). Age shows no signs of diminishing his cleverness and no one can deny that he keeps up to date with things. His new novel (The Ghost from the Grand Banks) is primarily about the Titanic, but has a fascinating subplot connected with the Mandelbrot Set.

Clarke has never been afraid to extrapolate from current scientific theorising and to Think Big. All of his SF novels push back the envelope, though generally in an aside or subplot, seldom on stage as a main theme. As Clarke knows perfectly well, when scientific advances are the main theme of a novel, far too often the novel turns into a lecture or a tract (look at James P. Hogan for a perfectly horrible example of exactly that). Clarke is far too much of an artist to fall into that trap.

Nonetheless, some of his books have dated because scientific advances have caught up with him and passed him by. The Sands of Mars was true to the picture of Mars as the planet was understood at the time the novel was written (Clarke always did his homework) but the space probes of the last dozen years or so have invalidated much of that picture and Clarke’s Mars is now no more real than the Mars of Ray Bradbury. The difference, of course, is that Bradbury did that deliberately and so his stories still work. Clarke did not do it deliberately and so there is at least one sense in which The Sands of Mars no longer works at all.

Does that make it any less of a novel? In some ways it does, because it obviously falls short of its writer’s intentions for it. It is no longer the reportage that it once purported to be. But the problems that it examines, the personal problems of the hero and the larger social and political problems that the fledgling colony faces are still valid because they had no connection (except peripherally) with the now out of date scientific truths. They were human and cultural problems and humanity has not changed in the generation since the book was published. Because Clarke is an artist as well as a scientist, there is still a sense in which the book does work.

But it doesn’t feel completely right, and the complaints on the bulletin board message have a lot of truth in them in this case. (And to be fair, I am sure that Arthur C. Clarke himself would agree as well.)

As time passes I think this is going to happen to more of his books. Fortunately, for the majority of them, neither he nor I will be alive to see it; so we can still keep our illusions.

Asimov, the final member of BACH, is a very peculiar case. On the one hand he is justly famous for the three laws of robotics, for the original three Foundation books, and for novels that teased and puzzled such as The End of Eternity (my favourite of all his books). However, on the other hand, much of his vast output gives the impression of carelessness, as if it was hacked out just to add another book to the list. The later Foundation novels are particularly guilty of this. There is page after numbing page of dialogue as the characters gnaw and tease endlessly at a small idea that ends up thoroughly chewed and as limp as a wet rag. Some of his books are very hard to read.

Like Clarke, Asimov’s science is always impeccable. He knows exactly what he is doing and saying and why he is doing and saying it. Again like Clarke, he is sometimes overtaken by events. His juvenile Lucky Starr novels which all take place in our solar system are perfect examples of this.

Many of his novels, however, take place in a future so remote that it is hard to point the finger and say this, this and this is scientific nonsense. Asimov invariably has the skill to make even the most outrageous things sound plausible. His “science” is likely to be longer lasting than Clarke’s because of it.

But there are other criticisms that can be brought to bear. Of all the members of BACH, Asimov has found it hardest to cast off his pulp origins. His is the least skilful writing style and he is the least in control of his medium. Bradbury, Heinlein and Clarke are eminently skilful language technicians and it is at least possible to claim that all three are artists in their own right. Asimov cannot claim that distinction. He is simply a technician and his reputation has grown largely from the cleverness of his ideas rather than the sophistication of his prose. This separates him from his three colleagues.

The bulletin board criticism of “too pulpy” fits Asimov much more than it fits the others (it doesn’t really fit the others at all) and despite the fact that Asimov is one of my heroes I have to admit the justification of it. The language, the style, and the situations that he describes are pulp, and if you don’t like pulp then you won’t like Asimov.

Bradbury’s reputation has been eclipsed because of twenty years of virtual silence. Asimov’s literary style has failed to grow with the field and his popularity (though not his reputation) has suffered because of it. Heinlein has been unjustly condemned. A few bad books late in his career have cast a shadow retrospectively over his more worthy books. His contribution to the field needs to be reassessed. Clarke just gets better and better.