Alphaville, written by Jean-Luc Godard from the novel by Peter Cheyney, directed by Jean-Luc Godard, 1965, 100 min.

Godard was one of the foremost directors in what is known as French New Wave cinema, and Alphaville was Godard's foray into science fiction. French New Wave is an entirely different beast than what is generally referred to in science fiction circles as New Wave, but there are some vague parallels between the two. Two relatively small groups of talented and creative people, trying to set themselves against what has come before. Of course this description could fit any generation of artist types, so the label seems to be more due to the real or professed radicalness of the break with the past.

Any artistic movement ultimately succeeds or fails on the merit of what it produces (or on the perceived merit, when the hype is operating). Alphaville itself is a strange, perhaps ultimately unworkable hybrid of detective story and science fiction. Such a mix is certainly possible, as has been demonstrated from Isaac Asimov through to Robert J. Sawyer. Godard treats the science fiction elements of the story with enough dignity, but tries and fails to walk a fine line between parody and a straight recycling of film noir. The film noir baggage loads down the movie with some truly disturbing misogyny.

Lemmy Caution is a detective in the future. He is asked to solve a case, and gets involved with a woman. Caution also gets mixed up in the fight against the totalitarian computer which controls the society of the future. Events proceed about as expected, with not even much in the way of stylistic flashiness.

The main character Lemmy Caution is so hard-boiled that his lines often cause laughter. Sometimes it's with a kind of dizzy appreciation of the chopped-down wit of the dialogue (as in most of Chandler's work), but sometimes it's a derisive or apprehensive laughter at the type of character being portrayed. As with most private eyes, Caution is also bitterly misogynistic, and this is hardly balanced out at any point in the film. I began to wonder why the female lead was at all important to Caution, considering his attitude towards women (and the contempt towards her on his part).

Babel-17, Samuel R. Delany, Gregg Press, 1976, 158 pp. (originally published in 1966)

Babel-17 was not Delany's first novel, but it was certainly the first where he hit his stride as a giant of the field. The book would win the Nebula award in its year, followed by another Nebula for Delany's subsequent novel, The Einstein Intersection. The Einstein Intersection is a masterpiece of subtlety and muscular prose and might be a better book than Babel-17. But Babel-17 helps to illustrate a certain join between the old and the new, whereas The Einstein Intersection strikes out entirely on its own. Babel-17 is still rich and interesting.

Babel-17 tells the story of Rydra Wong, a famous poet of the future. Unlike some books, Delany supplies a fictional poet with poetry that is actually good! Rydra Wong is dragooned into working for the government -- the enemy is using a code known as Babel-17 and Wong is supposed to break it. As it turns out, Babel-17 is not a code but a language, and Wong becomes obsessed with the linguistic puzzle that it represents. Wong also falls in love with someone who has no concept of "I", an opportunity for more linguistic tricks on the part of Delany.

As I said, the plot of the book retains some of the clunky apparatus left over from earlier science fiction (apparatus which have certainly not disappeared in the years since!). So there are spaceships and secret military headquarters and death robots, galaxy-spanning civilizations and wars between them. But Delany gives everything a completely different spin due to the main character and her struggles as a linguist. A fascinating mix, and interesting to consider as a precursor to the free-flight imaginings of The Einstein Intersection.

My mind makes a strange link between Delany's fiercely creative and individually-imagined books, and Norman Spinrad's recent fatalistic pronunciations of the death of science fiction. Spinrad's descriptions of the state of science fiction that is being lost closely resembles New Wave and the work of its most powerful writers like Delany (and also Tiptree). Spinrad is probably correct in that the New Wave is long gone; also probably correct in fearing the tide of media tie-ins. But in many ways, the legacy of New Wave is alive and well, still working out its influence in a field that has matured and changed, fragmenting perhaps but always evolving. Maybe science fiction will survive only in niches served by writers who are powerful in their own right but lack the central positioning that Delany received in his own day. That does not make Delany less important or less innovative.

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny, Avon, 1976, 319 pp. (originally published in 1967)

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison, Signet, 1975, 514 pp. (originally published in 1967)

Dangerous Visions was the landmark anthology put together by Harlan Ellison with the express purpose of giving the new writing in science fiction a place of welcome. Ellison committed great amounts of personal sweat and tears to the project, in trust that the material in the collection deserved as much attention as possible.

Looking back on Dangerous Visions, I am struck again and again by how many of the stories prove Ellison correct. Publishers have never really been in the business of taking chances, and Ellison was just tenacious enough to bring this remarkable collection into being. Ellison gave the genre a challenge, and the genre answered with more than an affirmation -- more like a shout of joy at the opportunity, a declaration of principle about the possibilities opening before everyone. As I've already mentioned, the awards flowed like water for this ostensibly controversial New Wave material. Let me take a minute to detail how honoured these stories from Dangerous Visions became. The 1967 Nebulas included nominations for Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" and Sturgeon's "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?", and wins for Leiber's "Gonna the Roll the Bones" (Best Novelette) and Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah" (Best Short Story). The 1968 Hugos gave nominations to Dick's "Faith of Our Fathers", Delany's "Aye, and Gomorrah", and Niven's "The Jigsaw Man", with wins for Farmer’s "Riders of the Purple Wage" (Best Novella) and Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" (Best Novelette). That year at the Hugos must have felt like massive vindication for Ellison himself, because he also won two Hugos personally, Best Short Story for "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream" and Best Dramatic Presentation for his famous Star Trek script, "City on the Edge of Forever."

What might it mean that the establishment of the genre embraced these stories so whole-heartedly when it came to award time? And are Ellison's picks really that good?

"Gonna Roll the Bones" is a flashy story about a gambler named Joe Slattermill. Leiber's prose sparkles with wit and intelligence, and the story remains long in the mind for its feel. But "Gonna Roll the Bones" also holds up well to multiple readings because the glitter goes deeper than the surface. I confess that I had completely misremembered the ending from my first reading of the story about ten years ago -- I remembered the identity of the Big Gambler that Joe ends up betting his soul against, but Leiber pulls a subtle trick with the conclusion that crept up on my blind side. "Aye, and Gomorrah" is another dazzling piece, shorter than "Gonna Roll the Bones" but just as effective. Delany populates a future with people and details and customs so vividly imagined that the headlong rush of the story is something more than a shock. Ellison points out in his introduction to "Aye, and Gomorrah" that this was Delany's first short story, and it shows the same mastery as demonstrated with Delany's novels.

Farmer's "Riders of the Purple Wage" looks forward to the quartet of warnings that Brunner was already writing (the first, Stand on Zanzibar, would win the Hugo in 1969). Like Brunner's novels, Farmer's story is marked by linguistic playfulness linked tightly with a deadly serious intent. The reader pieces together fragments and shattered stereotypes, and the result is quite magnificent.

Ellison expends a great deal of verbiage on how controversial these stories are, and the grandness of his efforts at putting the anthology together. Controversy is a relative thing, and the shock value of most of the material has long since worn away. However, these last thirty years of science fiction owe a vast debt to Ellison and the contributors in Dangerous Visions, as the book was indeed part of a sea change in the genre. It matters not in the least that the consternation over the shocking content has faded; Ellison made some strong editorial decisions, and the stories have (mostly) stood the test of time. The awards were certainly part of the deep shifts in the genre, but also acknowledgement that paradigms were being shattered by people who knew what they were doing.

Perhaps the only flaw in the book is the paucity of female writers -- only three of the thirty-two contributors are women. I don't mean to downplay the achievements of Miriam Allen de Ford, Carol Emshwiller, and Sonya Dorman. In fact, this trio provides some of my favourite stories in the collection, especially Emshwiller's "Sex And/Or Mr. Morrison," a disturbing and hallucinatory journey without peer. By the time of Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions a few years later, the situation was improved, but not by much -- that collection had stories by Ursula K. Le Guin, Kate Wilhelm, Joanna Russ, Joan Bernott, Evelyn Lief, and Josephine Saxton (as well as the memorable "Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree Jr., but of course Tiptree was still a man at that point; more on that in the next review). Again, I don't mean to condescend to the achievements of these women, but it would be another decade or more before numerical equality between the genders would come about.

To close, I would like to point out that Ellison acknowledges his debt to other anthologizers of the time, as well as the inanity of any one label like New Wave. In his introduction, Ellison relates how Norman Spinrad gave him the original idea: "[Spinrad] said he thought I should implement some of the rabble-rousing ideas I had been spreading about 'the new thing' in speculative fiction, with an anthology of same. I hasten to point out my 'new thing' is neither Judith Merril's 'new thing' nor Michael Moorcock's 'new thing.' Ask for us by our brand names" (xxiii-xxiv). British SF, New Wave or otherwise, is an entirely different matter than what I've been discussing here. And the life and works of Merril will be the topic of my next column, as her influence is too important to do justice here.

Warm Worlds and Otherwise, James Tiptree, Jr., Del Rey, 1975, 222 pp.

Of the three collections of Tiptree's early stories -- this one, Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, and Star Songs of an Old Primate -- I chose Warm Worlds and Otherwise for this column for two reasons. I remember Tiptree's "Milk of Paradise" as one of the best stories in Ellison's Again, Dangerous Visions. The second reason is the spectacular introduction by Robert Silverberg. Why spectacular? Silverberg tries to defend a certain position that is worth quoting at length:

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree's writing. I don't think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male. (xii)

The Introduction is followed by "Postscript - Three Years Later," where Silverberg talks about finding out that "Tiptree" was the pseudonym for a woman named Alice Sheldon.

Hindsight is the safest position from which to heckle, so I won't say anything more about Silverberg's misstep than to point out how neatly it illustrates the debate over Tiptree. The short stories written under the pen name of James Tiptree Jr. are some of the best in the genre, bar none, and trailblazing in their attention to gender and social construction of sex roles. How could a man write such stories, with regard to the latter? And if Tiptree, shrouded in secrecy, were actually a woman, how could a woman write such excellent stories? Tiptree seemed to prove that it was possible for men to gain a perspective outside their gender, and it's interesting that Silverberg would feel the need to defend Tiptree's purview as typically male. I don't mean to contend that the state of science fiction today is perfect, but I breathe a huge sigh of relief that this particular debate is (largely) over. Female authors are not hugely outnumbered (if not numerically equal), and their works certainly span the genre, from space opera to hard sf to literary sf to feminist sf. Sheldon's revelation in 1976 about her use of the Tiptree pseudonym put one final nail in a long overdue coffin.

"Milk of Paradise" turned my attention to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, but there are three other topnotch stories here, quality of the level that any writer would be lucky to produce in an entire career. Two of the stories I am referring to won awards: "Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" won the Nebula for best short story in 1973; "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" won the Hugo for best novella in 1974. The fourth story that I consider to be of surpassing quality is "The Women Men Don't See."

"Milk of Paradise" is a well-sustained little shocker, perhaps a bit lacking in substance, but it lodged in my mind many years ago with a tenacity demonstrated by none but a handful of short stories. Tiptree deconstructs human desire, both the kind known as lust and the kind known as greed. Plus the story boasts an opening paragraph the like of which few stories can match: "She was flowing hot and naked and she straddled his belly in the cuddle-cube and fed him her hard little tits. And he convulsed up under her and then was headlong on the waster, vomiting" (25).

"Love is the Plan, The Plan is Death" is Tiptree's contribution to the attempts in science fiction to imagine the truly alien. Moggadeet is that alien and "she" struggles to survive and to improve the quality of life, and all in concepts and in writing that are bizarre and often violent. The story is written in first person, and the strength of it lies in Moggadeet's self-involved narrative. We the human readers of the story have no clear idea of what is going on -- for example: "My secret hands begin to knead and roll the stuff that is dripping from my jaws" (176) -- but why would Moggadeet explain the things that are obvious to her? And the ending chills us as we understand at least the broad outlines what the title might mean.

"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" is an extended meditation on the nature of the body and its relation to the media. It is a future where advertising has been banned. GTX is a company that raises perfect and beautiful clone bodies, gives the clone bodies remote-control operators who will follow orders, and sends the clones out into the jetset society of the world (which is heavily covered in tabloid-style media), all in the hopes of influencing the buying habits of the common folk. P. Burke is an ugly woman who tries to commit suicide; GTX rescues her and gives her control of a clone body named Delphi. Complications ensue, and the beauty of the story is in the writing. Early in the story, Delphi (i.e., P. Burke) is first realizing her newfound power over the masses: "She's in gigabuck mainstream now, at the funnel maw of the unceasing hose that's pumping the sight and sound and flesh and blood and sobs and laughs and dreams of reality into the world's happy head" (100). A keener description of the way things operate could hardly be found.

To close the review, I'll say a few words about "The Women Men Don't See." Written in first person from the perspective of a very macho and self-impressed man, the story has a curious doubleness to it due to Tiptree's real identity. This story is one that Silverberg cites as evidence of Tiptree's ineluctable maleness, and a closer examination (again with the hindsight knowledge of Tiptree's identity) shows how much of a sham the narrator is as a person. A female character says at one point, in a line that has become rightly famous: "'What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine'" (154). The narrator offers lame repartee by reflex and not much more.

It is difficult to separate the Tiptree/Sheldon issue from any discussion of the Tiptree stories. But the power of the writing is such that the stories persist in their greatness, both before Sheldon's identity was known and now that the secret has been out for approximately twenty-five years. And that's perhaps the best way to describe New Wave material in general: no matter the hype or the backlash, the writing itself remains the sole criteria for excellence, and the reputation of this category of science fiction is much-deserved on this basis.

James Schellenberg lives in Ontario, Canada. He was not even born in the 60s, so this column was not written from any haze of nostalgia -- he recognizes good writing when he sees it.

Last modified: July 20, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by James Schellenberg (james@jschellenberg.com)