REUBEN COMMANDING THE SPIRITS OF THE EARTH TO RISE
High winds & heavy rain. The windows are rattling with it. That comforting sense of the log cabin walls around you as the weather drives hard. Strange days: although it’s July, it’s more like November with leaves.
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Back in my teens I read an enormous amount of science fiction. Initially, I was undiscriminating: the limpest of sub-Flash Gordon space operas or the most turgid of epics, concrete-heavy with allegory (Has anyone ever got beyond the first 3 pages of Olaf Stapledon’s Last & First Men?), I consumed them all voraciously.
During the course of this prolonged period of intensive grazing, inevitably I came across the literate sci-fi writers then emerging. After a couple of Asimovs, a Kurt Vonnegut & a trio of Brian Aldisses I was converted. The guys at the controls of the space hardware could actually be real people. The situations that they encountered could have the qualities & dimensions of those that we confronted here on Earth – political crises, moral dilemmas, issues of loyalty & betrayal, questions of spiritual belief, the vicissitudes of human relationships. As J.G. Ballard, the single most influential of these authors on my nascent conversion to class sci-fi, observed – the territory subject to the most intensive exploration now was no longer outer space but inner space.
The most important lesson for me in this quantum shift from space flotsam & jetsam to the stellar stuff was that quality is not genre-specific. There is lambent poetry, hard-core science, transcendent philosophy, authentic spiritual enquiry, trenchant political satire & startlingly acute philosophical debate to be found in crime novels, Westerns, spy fictions, war stories & science fiction.
I picked up a book in the Cambridge Borders the other day. Some sniffy undergraduate part-timer had put it amongst the plane journey pot boilers. It’s called The Sixth Lamentation & it’s by William Brodrick. Essentially it’s a John le Carre-style thriller, but the link will explain the plot. My point is that writing of exceedingly high quality is to be found within literature that both publishers & booksellers alike conspire to present as schlock. And maybe this combination of niche-marketing & on-the-spot snobbery is not altogether a bad thing. I came across the high octane stuff simply as part of the process of hoovering my way across the parameters of sci-fi. Thus others will experience the same chance encounters & barriers will fall accordingly.
Here’s an extract from The Sixth Lamentation. Lucy is looking after her grandmother Agnes, who is entering the final stages of motor neurone disease.
Lucy put out her arm and Agnes took it with both hands as if it were a railing. With a nod she dismissed further help, making her way towards the bathroom to get ready for bed. She walked deliberately, touching now to the right and then to the left, finding objects placed in position for the purpose. Lucy remained in the kitchen, hearing the click of a switch and the faint run of water, simple noises that begin and end the day; and, presumably, a life.
Lucy looked up. Agnes stood motionless, like an apparition, framed by the doorway in a long dressing gown and red furry slippers, a hand o each jamb. Evening light, all but gone, traced out her nose, a parted lip; and to Lucy it was as though Agnes had died and this was a final, wilful resurgence of flesh, a last insistent request to see Lucy just one more time before she fluttered into memory.
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11.16. Reuben in full active dreaming mode. A long night ahead…
11:18:18 PM 
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