Slaves of the Death Spiders and Other Essays on Fantastic Literature Read online

  We have, of course, heard this promise before. L. Ron Hubbard promised it when he invented Dianetics and Scientology. John W. Campbell Jr. promised it during the psi boom of the 1950s, in his lurid editorializing as well as the fiction which he bought for Astounding/Analog, and also—it has recently transpired—in the voluminous letters which he wrote to his authors and friends. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that we now find in Wilson’s work a strategy of popularization very similar to one which has also been employed, in his exploits as writer and messiah, by Hubbard and, in his capacity as editor and agent provocateur, by Campbell.

  What has happened to mankind in Spider World is a kind of well-deserved fall from grace. We failed to reach our true potential while we had the chance, wasting ourselves in war and luxury, and we paid the price when the miraculous comet gave spiders their chance. Spiders, the plot alleges, already make subconscious use of the psychokinetic power of their tiny wills in directing flies into their webs. Blown up to giant size, their will power is marvellously increased and they easily subdue humans, who have concentrated all their efforts on the cleverness of their hands. Because of this sin, we deserve to be enslaved by the spiders, who are morally entitled to use us as food (it is, after all, merely their nature—although one of the many things the info-dump does not explain is why Wilson’s spiders do not need to liquefy their food in the same fashion asthe ones with which we are familiar. The spiders are not all bad—and the bombardier beetles turn out to be scrupulously fair-minded, after their fashion—because the essential patient passivity of their fundamental nature means that they do not generally go in for wars and suchlike.

  It is clear even from volume one of this saga that men will release themselves from the yoke of slavery only by cultivating will-power to go with their technological handiness. In so doing they will become whole beings, unlike their old selves or the spiders. The only thing which remains in serious doubt even at this stage is what will happen to the spiders. The pulpish scenario suggests that gung-ho genocide is the outcome to aim at, but we have already seen enough good words put in for them to harbor the suspicion that man and spider might be able to strike a better balance, achieving a symbiosis which transcends the present parasitism.

  The way in which Niall’s brother Veig initially makes things much easier for the family by domesticating wild insects seems to be preparing the ground for an eventual pluralistic solution by which men, insects and arachnids can combine their different modes of consciousness for the mutual good. The Spider Lord’s current resemblance to Ming the Merciless and the Mekon may only be a blind. I must confess that I hope that things will go that way—in these liberal times the reckless speciesism of pulp SF is surely as outdated as its casual sexism—but I remain worried (for one thing, Wilson’s sexism is as cavalier as anything one might have found in Startling Stories).

  * * * *

  A cynical observer might suggest that there is a certain irony in what Colin Wilson is trying to do in Spider World. In earlier works he joined the ranks of those apologists who could not be content with the condescending judgment that SF consists of “fairy stories for adults who have failed to outgrow fairy stories.” When he first began to write SF stories, therefore, he was careful to pack them with lots of heavy stuff suggestive of more respectable literary relationships and existentialist chutzpah. He ran the risk, however, of lending credit to the sceptical argument that all his existentialist woffle and studied support for parapsychology was just part and parcel of the SF bag—i.e., “fairy stories for adults who have failed to outgrow fairy stories.”

  The will-power of Spider World is difficult to see as anything other than the magic power of wishing, and one might easily be prompted to ask whether, if Colin Wilson wants us to take this even half-seriously, we need to take seriously anything else he has ever said. L. Ron Hubbard has surely done much the same thing; while he was invisible to his followers they might just about have been prepared to believe he was a kind of superman, but who in the world could possibly believe that of the hand that penned Battlefield Earth?

  I have credited these observations to a hypothetical cynical observer because I do not entirely agree with the position. I do not believe that SF consists of fairy stories for people who have not outgrown fairy stories. For that matter, I would not want to be condescending about fairy stories either. I cannot believe, however, that the real merits of science fiction include the ability to tempt us into the development of some mysterious Factor X which will make us all supermen and save us from the possibility of becoming slaves of the death spiders. For this reason, I have mixed feelings about Spider World. If I am invited to take it seriously, I simply cannot; it really is too silly. If I am asked not to take it seriously, but only as a mere entertainment, then I will admit that it has a certain rough-hewn charm, like “Mad Planet” or Star Wars, but I will persist in regretting that it has very few of the authentic merits which can be found in good SF. It is low on originality, has a sprawling and ungainly plot, and it has not yet extended the horizons of the imagination at all. I still have hopes of the Spider Lord, though, and there may yet prove to be more things in this heaven and earth than I have dreamt of. I have a feeling that we have yet to meet the bees.

  * * * *

  Note (1995): The bibliography of Spider World became rather complicated. The Tower was split into three books for US publication as a series of “young adult” novels, and was there followed—as it was in the UK—by The Delta (1987). According to Wilson’s comments in the Third Edition of the St. James Press Twentieth-Century Science-Fiction Writers, however, all of this material constituted the first “volume” of the trilogy. A second “volume,” entitled The Magician, was due to be published in two actual volumes, but only the first of these—consisting of “The Assassins” and “The Living Dead”—seems to have made it into print. It appeared in 1992, under the intended title, from a different publisher. A projected third “volume” called The New Earth—intended to consist of three actual volumes—was planned but may not ever see the light of day.

  I was never sent review copies of any of the subsequent volumes in the series and I never bothered to buy any of them, so I have no idea how my predictions are working out so far.

  11Wilson, Colin. Science Fiction as Existentialism. Hayes, England: Bran’s Head Books, 1978, p. 2.

  2Ibid., p. 4.

  3Wilson, Colin. The Occult. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1971, p. 10.

  4Ibid., p. 579.

  IS THERE NO BALM IN GILEAD?: The Woeful Prophecies of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

  “Behold, listen!” says the prophet Jeremiah (Jer. 8:20-22). “The cry of the daughter of my people from a distant land.” Having reproduced her cry, he adds: “For the brokenness of the daughter of my people I am broken; I mourn, dismay has taken hold of me. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has not the health of the daughter of my people been restored?”

  Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale is set in the land of Gilead, in the northeastern part of what was formerly the USA, in the not-very-distant future. It has been described as a dystopian novel, but might be better understood as a Jeremiad: a Book of Lamentations.

  Alone among the prophets of the Old Testament, Jeremiah mourned—rather extravagantly—his own fate. He complained bitterly of his mistreatment at the hands of those who did not care to hear his message of cursed times to come. Although it is a tale of the future, The Handmaid’s Tale is not a prophecy in the vulgar sense of being a set of predictions, but it has much of the prophet Jeremiah’s urgent and woeful crying. It is fiction and its narrative voice is imagined to emanate from the hypothetical future, thus distancing the text from the real author, so the parallel with Jeremiah is by no means exact, but the lamentations which the story contains are so much the heart of the book that the connection must surely be made—and that story is
certainly, from Margaret Atwood’s feminist viewpoint, “the cry of the daughter of my people from a distant land.”

  The reader eventually learns from the text that Gilead is a society which has evolved after a coup by right-wing Fundamentalists. This coup succeeded, in part, because of a state of crisis brought about by a drastic decline in the birthrate. The decline had no single cause, but was the result of a combination of factors, feminist demands for control of their own fertility being supplemented by the catastrophic effects of environmental pollution. The theocratic state has assumed total control of reproduction in the cause of preserving society, using infertile women as expendable slave labor (or, covertly, as prostitutes) while redistributing those who are potentially fertile as “handmaids” who will stand in for barren wives, following a Biblical precedent established in Gen. 30:1-3. Bizarre symbolism requires that the handmaids lie while copulating between the legs of the wives for whom they are intended to serve as surrogates.

  All this, however, becomes clear to the reader only by degrees, and some aspects of the Gileadan social order are not explained until an epilogue, which takes the form of a paper written by a historian who wonders about the authenticity of the heroine’s taped testimony. In the early pages of the novel we eavesdrop on the protagonist’s “re-educated” consciousness, washed almost clean of the pollutions of memory and resistance. Only by degrees is this straitened and bruised mind slowly restored to a state where it can give true vent to its anguish, guiding the heroine into progressive violation of the mores of her new world, until she must escape or be condemned to death. For the reader, this progression is one of gradual enlightenment, both in a factual sense, as we learn more about this crazy society and how it came about, and in a moral sense, as the heroine becomes better able to analyse the horrific texture of its oppressions.

  There is an obvious fashion in which The Handmaid’s Tale can be likened to the classics of dystopian fiction, particularly to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nineteen Eighty-Four is similarly preoccupied with the policing of thought, the rewriting of sacred texts, and the apparent futility of rebellion against such intimate oppression. There are some direct echoes of Orwell’s world in Gilead—for instance, the way in which the handmaids are provided with a cathartic opportunity to vent their spite in the mutilation and execution of supposed rapists is reminiscent of the ritualized hate sessions of the earlier novel. Above all, however, it is the ironically bitter pessimism of the two texts which links them together.

  Orwell offers us a world with no hope left, suggesting that if we want to imagine its future we might think of a boot stamping on the human face eternally. Margaret Atwood is not so brutally direct, but she carefully refuses to tell us whether the black van which comes at the end to take the heroine away is taking her to freedom or to her death. In her historical epilogue, although she allows her historian to make jokes about the excesses and eccentricities of Gileadan society, she deliberately tells us nothing about the politics of his world, save for such oblique satirical hints as are conveyed by the speech which introduces the paper. As the last line of the text signifies, answers to the questions raised therein belong to another province.

  Atwood and Orwell are doing much the same thing in declaring that there are trends evident in the contemporary world which, if extrapolated, might lead to tragedy and the magnification of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman). Where Atwood differs from Orwell, though, is in her manner of attributing blame. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book about power and control, but Margaret Atwood’s narrator wonders at one point whether her story might be about something subtly but crucially different:

  Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn’t really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn’t about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it’s about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing.5

  There is nothing forgiving about Nineteen Eighty-Four, but for a feminist work, The Handmaid’s Tale is surprisingly easy on its male characters. Even the Commander—who, we are told in the epilogue, might well be one of the chief architects of Gilead’s social order—is displayed in the narrative as a pathetic rather than as an evil character. When he uses his power to command the heroine into violation of the law it is not (as others assume) for the purposes of perverted lust, but out of a quieter kind of loneliness. The masculine chauffeur, who seems also to be a potentially threatening character when first introduced, in the end treats the heroine as well as he can—within the limits of possibility—and she learns to make use of him even though she cannot love him. In fact, we hardly see men behaving badly at all, and what we do see is counterbalanced by images of women behaving badly in all sorts of ways: the Aunts with their cattle prods whose task it is to re-educate the handmaids; the moral treason of the apparently-heroic Moira in accepting a new role as a whore; the sad deficiencies of the pusillanimous Janine.

  Janine is especially interesting, as her sin is to accept the blame for offences that are not really hers. In the latter pages of the tale we find the heroine lapsing continually into a similarly self-effacing, if not actually self-abusing, capitulation with her oppressors. The narrator (unlike the author) is occasionally in dire danger of losing her moral indignation, of forgiving. Her view is eventually reinforced by the way the historians in the epilogue see the injustices of Gilead—as eccentricities of the historical record, quaintly fascinating, pregnant with opportunities for witty wordplay. For them, Gilead is dead and gone, to be understood rather than to be censured—are we not assured, after all, by another source that to understand all is to forgive all.

  The reader is expected to withhold endorsement from this view (we have been warned by a prefatory quotation from Jonathan Swift’s Modest Proposal not to take the text’s rhetoric entirely at face value) but the fact remains that a key question in the novel—which we do not find in many dystopian texts—is: how much must we forgive?

  It is when we bring this question back from the hypothetical land of Gilead to our own world that we appreciate what an awkward anguish it is that Margaret Atwood’s heroine has been made to experience. Her lamentations are inevitably soured by her very generosity; unlike Winston Smith she does not make concessions to her oppressors because she has been taken to Room 101 and shown the most frightful thing in the world. She does so simply because her oppressors are obviously not the most frightful thing in the world, and can be pitied, thanked and respected as well as despised, hated and opposed. There is, clearly, a world of difference between the attitude which a good socialist like Orwell could adopt toward totalitarian manipulators, and the attitude which a good feminist like Margaret Atwood can adopt toward men. One does not have to wonder how much one must forgive a man like O’Brien, but a mere man, unlike a Party member is all too obviously ripe for forgiveness.

  In the window-seat of the room in which the handmaid lives during the period covered by her tale there is a cushion embroidered with the word FAITH. It was, presumably, one of a set, but HOPE and CHARITY have gone. That is the way of things in Gilead: faith has indeed been left to hold the field of battle alone; hope and charity are extinct, and in Gilead there is therefore no balm. There remains in this prophetic vision, however, a deeply ironic lament—a bitter-tasting anxiety that the charity of women stands in unfortunate opposition to their hopes. The heroine, in seeking to live in this appalling world, is left without hope very largely because she cannot deny charity to her controllers. Is this, we are tacitly asked, the predicament of the modern feminist? If it is, then it is surely a hard lot, and the feminist prophet can take little enough pleasure from the alarmist warnings which she offers, or from her fragile hope that tragedy might, after all, be averted by moral renewal. For this reason, we find in The Handmaid’s Tale a tone of voice that is not characteristic of most dystopian writings, and for which we must hunt for
other analogues.

  “He has besieged me and encompassed me with bitterness and hardship,” wailed Jeremiah (Lam. 3: 5-8), “In dark places He has made me dwell, Like those who have long been dead. He has walled me in so that I cannot go out; He has made my chain heavy. Even when I cry out and call for help, He shuts out my prayer.” By “He,” of course, Jeremiah meant the Lord rather than the male of the species, but in Gilead it comes to the same thing. It always has, and perhaps it always will. The Handmaid’s Tale, at least, cannot assure us that it will not.

  To which one can only add, Amen.

  * * * *

  The following letter of comment on the above essay appeared in Foundation #41. It was (inaccurately) advertised on the contents page as “Gwyneth Jones: Weeping for Stableford.”

  Dear Foundation,

  “I weep for you, the walrus said. I deeply sympathise.”

  The inauguration of the Arthur C. Clarke Award is a great event, and rightly celebrated in No. 39: it is good to know that the whole panel agreed on the literary excellence and power of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. However, the “appreciation” of the prize-winning novel provided by Brian Stableford seemed somewhat ambivalent in tone: perhaps not surprisingly so, as feminism in SF is still regarded by some as a controversial topic. Nevertheless, after a detailed description of the conditions maintained by the oppressors and suffered by the oppressed in the fictional world of Gilead—a world which Stableford himself calls “appalling”—it is bemusing to be told that in this book “we hardly see men behaving badly at all.” It is as if Atwood is accused of (or commended for) whitewashing the entire Third Reich, on the grounds that she shows a few flashes of humanity in one or two of the guards at the extermination camps. Stableford goes on to express concern at the negative features of Atwood’s female characters, apparently feeling that she has fataly weakened her case by showing that slaves are corrupted by slavery, no less than slave-owners. In conclusion, Stableford seems to say that he approves of the book because it demonstrates that women can never get the better of male oppression.