The sky's no limit

As a new exhibition explores how artists - from William Blake to John Cage - have portrayed visions of the universe, science-fiction writer Brian Aldiss speculates on civilisations of the future
Astounding Science Fiction
Across the universe ... Astounding Science Fiction. Photograph: courtesy The Science Fiction Foundation Collection, University of Liverpool Library

By an accident of upbringing, and then by dint of a long sojourn in the tropics, I have become a Steppenwolf. A Steppenwolf enters into civil society, is peaceable, but always sees himself as someone apart. He has no wish to destroy civilisation, but finds it faulty. Such is my disposition. I am therefore well-equipped to write the kind of novel that emphasises those faults and shows how easily disaster might befall a culture: in a word, the science fiction novel.

Thus we see that the science fiction novel is hardly a judicious study of discernable reality, but rather the realities discernable through a capricious temperament. Exactly what may be required in our pluralist world, where caprice and chance are always with us.

As the exhibition The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe, which opens this week at Compton Verney, shows, we have become expert in looking back, in making aspects of the past real to us. We are less expert at making the future more real. This drawback is evident in the case of global warming, the omens for which are discernable enough. Yet our attempts to deal with its root causes - cutting carbon dioxide omissions - are at best faltering. We don't want to go there.

Science fiction can sketch possible scenarios, yet we need institutions that can plan ahead. Democracies are deficient in this regard; the vision of our politicians is necessarily confined, in the main, to the next five years and an oncoming general election, whereas a dictator such as Stalin could plan years ahead, towards the death of the Aral Sea. In this respect, Nasa, so often criticised, is much to be praised. There, men and women learn to work on projects that will come to fruition years ahead, probably after they have retired or died. A good example is the New Horizons probe, launched in 2006, which will reach its target in the close vicinity of Pluto in 2015, and will then travel on into the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud and beyond, long after we and maybe our civilisation will have been lost to the depredations of time and error. This is forward-thinking on a grand scale. Yet the New Horizons probe is still driven by an old-fashioned rocket, one of those big fireworks honed in the second world war, and is not nuclear driven, as one might have hoped.

It has occurred to me in my cheerful old age that my disposition is predominantly melancholic. Those honourable ancestors who have preceded me in trading in fictitious futures have almost all had the melancholy Steppenwolf disposition, from Mary Shelley, through Edward Bulwer-Lytton, HG Wells, Aldous Huxley, and Olaf Stapledon to George Orwell. Melancholy is an ally of creativity, often well disguised, as in the case of Wells. I, a lesser writer, conceal my disposition, too; I like to keep my melancholy to myself.

Of course, I suffer, as do so many, from neglect as a writer, not least because the Higher Snobbery of literature regards science fiction as somehow beyond the pale. Even the Lower Snobbery is at it: the frivolous Stephen Fry, for instance, asked why science fiction writers take themselves seriously (as if there were an alternative).

Melancholy tends to intrude when I write, and thus I can say that I regard, or would regard, the invention and proliferation of androids as a disaster. For a start, I would covet one for myself: less a marriage than a fearful liaison, feeding the ego. Subservient androids might bring you a glass of wine or answer the front door, but they would, above all, serve as status symbols. You could buy them in gold or platinum, like credit cards. This symbolic function of androids is demonstrated in my novel Super-State, where they serve as diamonds have served over the ages, as tokens of wealth and power. My androids are, in fact, a damned nuisance. Since they do not sleep, they would walk about and knock things over; so they are locked up in cupboards at night. There they talk in a flurry of syllogisms.

"What is this 'human condition' they talk about?"

"It's something from which they suffer, like battery failure."

"The human condition can be felt on some of the men."

"It is what we would be like if we lost electric current."

"Their technical term for that is dead."

Robots and androids add to global warming; they consume energy and radiate heat. This was ably illustrated in one of Harry Harrison's stories, where the ruler of a planet has sturdy robots to attend him. They are not electronic but coal-driven; and when one of them is running down, the ruler's lackies open a trap in their bellies and heave in a shovel full of nutty slack. The palace reeks of smoke, as ours will reek of CO2. And syllogisms.

However, the advance of technology cannot be halted. My complaints resemble those of a man in 1901 who condemns the infant motor vehicle industry on the grounds that over the century to come hundreds of people will die on roads yet to be built. Developments in science may bring in unexpected and benevolent side-effects. The computer study of possibilities for android brains may shed new light on human and animal consciousness, with a subsequent improvement in our behaviour patterns.

There is no way in which research could pause, or innovation delay. The machine cannot stop. Capitalism is ever hungry for more. Capitalism allied with evolution has prompted a revolt - as Lewis Mumford pointed out decades ago - against the inhibitions of orthodox Christianity, which now seem gratuitous to many. Greed, one of the seven deadly sins, has now acquired social standing, and its commercials fund television programmes. No, the machine cannot stop. Besides, the neighbours are waiting to move in if it does.

In the years of the Han emperors in China, two centuries before the birth of Christ in the west, the Chinese perfected the crossbow with which to defeat the barbarians. The barbarians did not have the skills necessary to cast the bronze locks the crossbow requires. With the barbarians taken care of, a time of peace prevailed within the newly united states of China.

So from this crossbow developed one of the great aculturing factors by which civilisation itself is judged. I refer to the restaurant - and here I am guessing. But imagine the confidence, the civility required for people first to come to a strange table, possibly in a shady courtyard in Loyang, and to sit down with others whom they do not know, or only remotely know, without fear of being attacked or stabbed. An unknown chef then serves food, which they eat without fear that it may be poisoned. It's a revolution! The restaurant opens a new era in social relationships. In those remarkable circumstances, one not only eats, one converses. And from conversation new ideas are born.

In China and now in the west, cuisine is a fine art, while in other parts of the world millions starve. Is this unfair? Of course. And what is unfair is often beyond remedy, in continents as in families. We have trouble grasping this simple truth, and invent gods and economics and trade practices to try to disguise it.

We might compare with the restaurant another great feature of civilised societies, the orchestra. Grand music is made by people who are otherwise strangers to each other, coming from differing conditions of life to play differing kinds of instruments to make harmonious music. And thus our culture is raised to a higher level. Only to sink again under the impact of rock'n'roll and yelling celebs.

Those who constitute an orchestra may be happy when they play but miserable otherwise. Similarly with composers, artists and writers, not to mention ordinary people, who are less able to exorcise their various despairs. Richard Wagner says in a letter to Hans von Bülow, "I want ... everyone who can take pleasure in my works, ie, my life and what I do [to know] that what gives them pleasure is my suffering, my extreme misfortune!"

Science over the past century in the west has brought many comforts and blessings including longer lifespans. Yet here that ominous phrase, "Research shows ..." beloved of journalists, enters; there are surveys that indicate how frequently men and women suffer as greatly as Wagner without having an ounce of his genius. There is reason to believe that the human brain has developed rather on an ad hoc basis - chance again - and is not without its imperfections. How else could warfare be so endemic? It is generally considered impolite to speak of self-styled homo sapiens in derogatory terms, but the question remains. Why are we not by now living in a utopia?

Archaeologists and palaeontologists provide us with a possible answer to the riddle. It is a cause for amazement that skulls of men are dug from the ground where they have lain intact for centuries, long after the softer materials associated with the skull have disintegrated. How much reckless evolutionary energy nature has expended on bone and the durability of bone. If only more of that energy had gone into building bigger and better-integrated brains.

Luckily, our brains are sufficient for us intermittently to enjoy life, to be inventive, to attend exhibitions, and to wonder why we are here at all, on this small astonishing planet, fighting it out with bacteria and viruses for ultimate possession.

· The Starry Messenger: Visions of the Universe is at Compton Verney Art Gallery, Warwickshire, until September 10 2006. Details: 01926 645500

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