None of us set out to do anything more than be technically ingenious. We succeeded and London nearly died. Surely that’s more than enough to make us redirect our activities. The next time it may be the whole world.

Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971)

Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis were a writing duo active in the 1960s and ’70s. They wrote for the BBC’s Doctor Who in the ’60s, giving the world the Cybermen in 1966.

When I was a solitary, bespectacled and distinctly oikotropic child growing up in Dundee in the 1960s, I never found the Cybermen that frightening, to be honest. I was much more worried about their etymologically linked contemporaries, the Cybernauts—trilby-wearing, karate-chopping killer robots from ITV’s television series, The Avengers.

Anyway, Pedler and Davis went on to invent a fabulously successful television series for the BBC, in the techno-thriller genre—Doomwatch (1970). They tapped into the burgeoning environmental paranoia of the times, and each episode saw the appearance of some new threat to the world (generally produced by careless, malevolent or just plain dumb scientists), which had to be sorted out by a quasi-governmental organization with a formal name that seemed to vary from episode to episode, but which was code-named Doomwatch.
The name pretty quickly entered the lexicon, as a word for any kind of observation intended to avert technological danger—the Oxford English Dictionary records its first usage, other than as a direct reference to the TV series, in 1973.

The formula worked so well for them, they cooperated to produce three novels in the same style—Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971), Brainrack (1974) and The Dynostar Menace (1975), all involving some near-future technological threat that endangers civilization. *

The strengths of the novels are in their meticulous technical descriptions, and in their ability to conjure up striking scenarios that remain in the memory. The weakness is … well, the writing. Pedler and Davis can’t really do conversation very well, and either they or their publisher seem to be in the grip of some sort of punctuation famine—there are a lot of missing question marks, a lot of commas where full stops or semicolons might do the job better, and a lot of places in which the insertion of a humble comma would have made the reading a great deal easier.

I recently decided to re-read them, to see if the striking images were still striking, and how well their “advanced technology” stood the test of time.

First up is Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters, in which a bacterium engineered to digest plastic escapes into central London. The plot is recycled and expanded from the first episode of Doomwatch. There’s much discussion of bacterial cultures and electron microscopy (Pedler’s day-job was in electron microscopy), and lots of scientists having ill-tempered disputes over molecular design. The peril comes from the way the bacterium strips the insulation off electric wiring and ruptures the plastic seals on gas pipes as it spreads through the sewers and tunnels under London. The striking visuals come from the way kitchen work-surfaces, airliner cabins and trendy “wet-look” PVC clothing melt and puddle as the bacteria do their work. The memorable scenarios are the deserted appearance of an evacuated central London, the slow disintegration and failure of a passenger aircraft in flight over the Atlantic, and the long trek through the tunnels of the London Underground that some of the novel’s characters have to make to reach safety after disaster strikes. The Pan paperback has, I think, a near perfect cover photograph by Julian Cottrell—a fancy briefcase with a combination lock (implying privilege and secrecy), is open to reveal a melted model of a Boeing 727 passenger aircraft (echoing two major themes of the novel, melting plastic and aircraft crashes).

The successor volume, Brainrack, has two plot threads—one that kicks off the story, and then peters out; and one that ramps up as the story progresses, to provide the novel’s climax. The early part of the novel raises concerns that computers are becoming so complicated that they can make decisions in ways humans can’t understand. In these days of trained neural networks, that’s now a real worry—for Pedler and Davis to have pointed it out in 1974, in the days when  computers still occupied entire rooms and were programmed with tape and punched cards, was remarkably prescient. The other strand of the story involves the detection of decreasing intelligence (as well as more focal neurological disabilities) in some subgroups of the world’s population. The combination of “too clever by half” computers with dumb operators produces a Perfect Storm during the commissioning of a new nuclear reactor in Orkney, resulting in a core meltdown and a “China Accident” ^†, with a massive release of radiation.

The description of the meltdown, and the story of the protagonist’s escape from the ruined power station, is the high point of the book. On either side of that, things move a little slowly. But the story ends with a dilemma that is familiar to us today, in a different guise—how much present-day technological convenience are we willing to give up, to avoid future disaster?

Finally, The Dynostar Menace. The eponymous Dynostar is an experimental fusion reactor, built aboard an orbiting space habitat. Just before its commissioning run, evidence comes to light that its magnetic field will destroy the Earth’s ozone layer. This is disappointing hocum, of course—merely a McGuffin to set up a powerful dilemma for the characters. In another layer of McGuffin, the Dynostar is already set to be triggered automatically in a computer-controlled sequence that is difficult to stop safely. (This abdication of responsibility to an automatic computer sequence is rendered even less credible by the revelation, early in the novel, that this story is set after the events described in Brainrack.)

Anyway, the reactor trigger sequence must now be shut down by the crew of the space habitat. Who unfortunately start to be murdered by someone among their number who is determined that the automated Dynostar test go ahead as planned, despite the risk to all life on Earth. Cue the search for the cunning, inventive and psychopathic crew-member.

So we have claustrophobia, mounting paranoia, murders and sabotage, and a race against time. There are tense sequences both within the habitat and in space, and the technical depiction of life aboard a space station was fresh and novel back in 1975, drawing as it did on experience from the then-recent 1973 Skylab missions.

But gad, I hate these extremely cunning and inventive psychopathic scientists. They get to do anything they like for as long as it serves the plot, and then can be relied upon for a homicidal melt-down in the closing sequence. And Pedler and Davis struggle to differentiate their various characters well enough for me to keep them straight in my head, let alone to shift my suspicions from one to another as the story progresses. So this is by far the weakest of the three novels.

All the novels are dated by their science and their social milieu. Hulking mainframe computers, wet-look plastic clothes, gay stereotypes—they’re all in there, as well as the obligatory hysterical woman who just needs a good slap to make her pull herself together. Mutant 59 has lasted best, with an unusual plot which is well-explored. Brainrack gets itself muddled between two plot strands, though the central sequence of the reactor melt-down still works. But Dynostar‘s space setting is nowadays too familiar to sustain interest in an otherwise weary and patchy plot.

So if you want a little glimpse of classic 1970s environmental paranoia, take a look at Mutant 59. You can safely leave the other two in the remaindered bin of history.

* They also cooperated on a slim volume entitled Doomwatch: The World In Danger, containing three short stories based on three Doomwatch episodes. Be warned that this was one of a series of early reading texts from Longman’s, known as “Structural Readers”, and so is written in a style not too distant from “Look, John, look. See Spot run. Run, Spot, run.” This renders it pretty much unreadable, paradoxically enough.

^† What Pedler and Davis call a “China Accident” is now more commonly known by the name China Syndrome, a term that was popularized by a 1979 film of the same name. The molten reactor core burns through the base of the containment vessel and burrows into the ground beneath—fancifully, it keeps going until it passes right through the Earth and reaches China. (Which tells us that the term was coined in America.)

This I tell you all. Some disaster happened in the past, in the long past. So complete was it that no one can explain to you what it was or how it came about. We know only that it brought darkness and cold.
You try to live the best you can. Good, good, live well, love one another, be kind. But don’t pretend that the disaster has nothing to do with you. It may have happened long ago, yet it infects every day of our lives.

Brian Aldiss is a British science fiction author and anthologist who produced his first novel, Non-Stop, in 1956, and who has been writing pretty much continuously ever since. I first encountered his work in the late ’60s and early ’70s, when he was a prominent exponent of the British “New Wave” style of science fiction then being championed by Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard in the magazine New Worlds. I had little patience for the New Wave and its non-stories full of image and metaphor, and so pretty much ignored Aldiss after a few disappointing encounters.

Then, in 1982, he produced Helliconia Spring, the first instalment of what looked very much like a good old-fashioned hard science fiction trilogy—what was promised was a long, detailed exploration of an exotic planet, spanning several centuries. Helliconia Summer followed in 1983, and Helliconia Winter in 1985. (Winter brought with it our first sight of Aldiss’s detailed map of Helliconian towns and geographical features, something that would have been useful when reading the sprawling narrative of Summer. The newer omnibus editions of the trilogy put the map where it should be, right at the start of the work.)

The novels are set on the planet Helliconia, which orbits the star Batalix, a thousand light-years from Earth. Batalix is a little dimmer than our sun, and Helliconia orbits a little farther from it than Earth orbits the sun. It would therefore be a constantly chilly place, if Batalix did not in turn follow a wide, slow, elliptical orbit around a fiercely hot supergiant star, Freyr. Every 2600 years, Batalix dips close to Freyr, and Helliconia undergoes a baking millennial summer; half an orbit later, Batalix is three times farther from Freyr, and Helliconia is locked in a planet-wide winter.

Life on the planet must adapt to this long seasonal sequence of what Aldiss calls the “Great Year”, and during the course of the three novels he gives us glimpses of these adaptations—the plants that put down deep roots to tap geothermal sources in order to survive the winter chill; the mammals that pass the centuries of winter underground, in a glass-like state of extreme hibernation; and the Wutra’s worms, which go through four separate metamorphoses as the long seasons pass.

Humans, too, have their own seasonal cycle, triggered by a virus. In spring, a pandemic called Bone Fever converts the chubby endomorphs who survived the winter into slim ectomorphs, ready for the rigours of summer; in autumn, the same virus induces the Fat Death, and those humans who survive the plague emerge fat and metabolically adapted to cold conditions. The planet also hosts another intelligent race, the minotaur-like phagors, who are cold-adapted to a degree humans cannot match. Phagors dominate Helliconia in winter, enslaving those humans who do not flee to the narrow band of relative warmth at the equator; humans dominate in the summer, enslaving those phagors who do not escape to the high, cold mountains.

Aldiss put a lot of work into the detail of his world, enlisting the help of astronomers, geologists, climatologists, biologists, anthropologists and even philologists in his native Oxford*. And he built himself a detailed map of the planet and its star system, which you can inspect on his website, here. Some reviewers have remarked (often in a negative way) that this means the planet itself is the central character in the novels; the Wikipedia page about the trilogy blithely repeats the same statement. But this is (not to put too fine a point on it) complete bollocks. Aldiss is simply too good a writer to let that happen—in each novel he provides us with a rich and varied cast of well-developed, believable characters. I chose the quote at the head of this page (taken from Spring) specifically to illustrate the relationship between Aldiss’s characters and their world. In his own words, he created

… characters to which an ordinary reader might lend sympathy: people not given over to heroics, though sometimes to heroism; not faultless people, set apart by virtue; but people, men and women, caught in the toils of life, often unclear about where they were going, and involved in their feelings for one another; in short, courageous people without a great deal of insight. And these people would be shown in contrast to the gigantic background of their planet at periods when both the climate and history were undergoing change.

In Spring, he tells the story of the founding of a village by humans still adapting to the thaw, tormented by Bone Fever and conflict with the phagors, and undergoing a dawning realization that much knowledge of the world has been lost during the long winter. In Summer, a king puts aside his beloved queen so that he can marry a child bride, a princess from another kingdom, in order to cement an expedient political alliance—little good comes of it. And in Winter, a victorious army returns home, bringing with it the Fat Death plague, with complex consequences for both the soldiers and their homeland, as the phagors again rise towards dominance in the cooling world.

In the midst of such complex human stories, the planet Helliconia occupies no more than a supporting role—a spectacular backdrop, a lurking threat, and at key moments a deus ex machina, as some new natural phenomenon shifts the balance of power or reverses a character’s fortunes.

Running through it all is Aldiss’s wry (and occasionally bleak) humour. Here’s a sample from Summer, in which he describes how the wild tribesmen of the Kaci return to their homelands at the end of a war:

To the Kaci, peace was relative; they were long accustomed to internecine struggles. They simply hung their crossbows on the back of the hut door and resumed their traditional occupations. These included hunting, blood feuds, potting—they made excellent pottery which they traded with the Madi for rugs—stealing, mining precious stones, and goading their scrawny womenfolk into working harder.

Aldiss also has a great enthusiasm for unusual words^†, which of course goes down well, chez Oikofuge. Certainly the most important word he introduces is enantiodromia—the process by which things turn into their opposites. It’s a key concept in these novels, recurring over and over again—things constantly cycles through opposing values, just as Helliconia swings from summer to winter and back again. Phagors and humans alternate as rulers of the planet; the same virus causes anorexia in the spring and bulimia in the autumn; characters rise to dominance and are laid low; friends become enemies, and enemies friends; new knowledge is a joy, and then a danger; religion is a comfort, and then a betrayal. Once you’re sensitized to it, enantiodromia pops up everywhere, from the theatre that stages “tragedies dealing with broken teacups, comedies dealing with wholesale slaughter”, to the insects “which, if predatory, disguise themselves as something innocuous whereby to deceive their prey, or, if innocuous, as a poisonous species to deceive their predators.”

Another central theme is Aldiss’s sense that we’re out of harmony with the natural world, and suffering because of it. While his Helliconian characters struggle and adapt to what their world throws at them, they are observed by Earth humans in an orbiting artificial satellite, who collect reams of data about Helliconia’s natural world and its inhabitants. The observers are unable to descend to the planet, because they will die from exposure to the Fat Death / Bone Fever virus, and are unable to return to Earth, because of the distance involved. Instead, they sit as passive observers in their technological cocoon, which Aldiss teasingly names Avernus—a reference to one of the gateways to Hell in Roman mythology. The fate of the Avernus inhabitants, trapped in their unnatural world, is another of the many narrative strands woven through the books.

In the third novel, harmony with the natural world takes on a positively mystical aspect, which I feel is the weakest part of Aldiss’s conception:

[They] had failed to understand the nature of mankind: that it, like the elephant and the common daisy, is no more and no less than a part and function of a living entity. Separated from that entity, humans, being more complex than elephants and daisies, have little chance of flourishing.

Indeed, Aldiss offers us something very close to New Age Gaianism—a spiritual interpretation of James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis. Gaia is presented as a spiritual Mother Earth, rather than just a planetary homeostatic mechanism mediated by biology. This Gaia is able to communicate with the “Original Beholder”, which is Helliconia’s own governing nature spirit. And the Original Beholder is the explanation for another strange aspect of the trilogy, which is the ability of Helliconians to enter a trance in which they communicate with the dead—the spirits of departed Helliconians are gradually merging with the spirit of the Original Beholder, and therefore remain accessible for (often rather opaque) conversations with their living relatives.

I confess to finding this late development in the Helliconia story a little annoying—I recall shouting “Oh, come on!” to an empty room when I first read it, and I find I’m still unhappy with it on rereading. But I suspect it’s typical of Aldiss that he was never going to let himself be confined to the straitjacket of “hard” science fiction when he felt he had a point to make.

So for me, a flawed classic—but an undoubted, inventive and truly epic classic, nevertheless.

* For all this fact-gathering, Aldiss sometimes loses the astronomical place; the movement of the two suns in Helliconia’s sky goes awry on more than one occasion.
^† Among the delightfully rarities Aldiss uses are leggiadrous (“graceful”), deuteroscopist (“seer”), retromingent (“urinating backwards”), ancipital (“double-edged”) and aularian (“pertaining to halls”). But fear not—as with the various words he coins to designate peculiarly Helliconian concepts and objects, Aldiss ensures that you don’t need to understand the word to follow the text; he either makes the meaning clear from context, or leaves it as a sparkly little decoration that isn’t necessary for the story.

We’ve got good tech, we’ve got a nice planet, but we’re fucking it up by way of stupid laws.

I’ve written about Kim Stanley Robinson before, when I reviewed his Green Earth. I mentioned his environmentalist and anti-capitalist concerns, his lyrical descriptions of landscape, his long passages where nothing much happens except characters talking to each other about stuff they find important, and his tendency to veer into occasional implausibility so as to get his characters into a situation he wants them to experience and reflect on.

So, there’s more of all that in New York 2140, which is already garnering Robinson’s usual U-shaped profile of reader reviews—five-star raves from those who share his concerns and love his slow and discursive style; one-star denunciations from those who loathe his politics and/or hate his narrative pace.

This one is to some extent a successor to Green Earth; another example of what’s nowadays a recognized subgenre of science fiction, cli-fi—climate-change fiction. It deals with a future New York, flooded by fifty feet of sea-level rise and battered by even more extreme summers and winters than it currently enjoys. And to some extent it’s a revisiting of the flooded Manhattan we glimpsed in his state-of-the-solar-system novel, 2312*—but Robinson has previously said that he tends to “self-plagiarize”, rather than attempt to link his novels together, so it’s probably a mistake to imagine that New York 2140 is in any sense a prequel to 2312.

And in this one, Robinson brings his issues with capitalism in general, and the global finance industry in particular, front and centre. In his New York, the banks and financial traders have simply shrugged off the devastation of climate change, which they see as having merely changed the sort of loans it’s worth risking, and the sort of commodities it’s worth trading.

His New York is richly textured—the buildings of lower Manhattan are now flooded in their lower storeys, but equipped with boat docks from which New Yorkers venture forth into their flooded streets and squares as if travelling through the canals and bacinos of Venice. Overhead, sky bridges link the towers, and airships are tethered to the old mooring masts. Upper Manhattan is still above water, and is home to even more towering skyscrapers. And between the two is the intertidal zone, legally problematic and structurally failing. Everywhere, there are vertical farms and roof gardens.

He tells his story by shifting among a varied cast of point-of-view characters, all of whom live in the old Met Life Tower on flooded Madison Square. There’s the building supervisor, the building manager, a financial trader, an airheaded “cloud star” (read “internet personality”), a couple of coders disillusioned with their jobs programming the financial markets, a couple of vagrant kids, and a policewoman. Their lives weave together in increasingly complicated ways as the novel progresses. The characters are interesting, their interactions are interesting, and they also have a narrative purpose to serve—Robinson needs to pass on a lot of information to us, and having his various experts explain things to his various innocents does the job.

But Robinson isn’t shy about just coming out and delivering a bit of a lecture from time to time (and gad, that drives some of his reviewers crazy). In this novel, there are chapters that are narrated, first person, by “a citizen”—who is of course just Robinson, leaning into the story to tell us a bit more about history, geology, economics, rewilding … whatever he feels we might find interesting or need to help us understand the narrative. Robinson even pokes self-referential fun at himself via the words of “a citizen”:

… certain awesome writers fond of lists would have already inflicted this amazing list of coastal cities on the reader …

The “citizen” is impatient and polemical and downright rude as only a stereotypical New Yorker can be, which makes him entertaining as well as informative. And Robinson has made his feelings clear about readers who complain about his “expository lumps” or “info dumps”:

I feel they are bad readers who aren’t getting it, who are in effect being narcissistic, as if nothing could be interesting but dramatized scenes about people interacting. In fact, those scenes are often the most clichéd and boring parts of a novel, and many a novel is boring from start to finish because of that. The world is often more interesting than what people do to each other. That said, novels are about people, so that has to be kept in mind. What I do is give up on the idea of balance, also these various workshop categories like world-building or characters, which in effect pretend to know how fiction works, when they really don’t know how fiction works. Fiction is highly mysterious. So I let myself go crazy and see what happens.

In effect, if you don’t like it, then Robinson would prefer it if you went away and stopped moaning about it; and probably you should stop reading those writers’ manuals, too. It’s an interesting stance, and maybe one only a mature, successful writer with a couple of degrees in English and Literature could adopt.

So Robinson builds another interesting and multilayered world, in his own leisurely, eccentric way. In Green Earth I reported how I found a few of his characters irritating, but this lot seem an amiable enough bunch, and each one interesting in a different way. On top of that there’s a hunt for buried treasure, a building collapse, a kidnapping, a boy trapped in a broken diving bell, an encounter with a ghost, an edgy showdown between police and corporate security, polar bears loose in an airship, a hurricane and storm surge, and a plot to deliberately crash the financial markets and nationalize the banks.

So, as ever, if you like Robinson, you’ll like this. For me, it’s up there with 2312 and the Mars trilogy, in terms of it’s variety and descriptive verve. And if you don’t like Robinson—Why do you keep reading his stuff and making yourself ill with stress like that?

There are some errors, as there always are when you write a book this big and complicated. Robinson repeatedly refers to “neap” tides in contexts that suggest he really means spring tides, which are the tides with the largest variation in water height. And the wrong name is given for the coiner of the word monocausotaxophilia, “a love of finding single causes to explain everything”. That was neuroscientist Ernst Pöppel, but a typo turns him into “Pöpper”. Harmless enough, except that, since Robinson’s novel was published, I see the interesting word has already had a few mentions on social media, but misattributed to philosopher Karl Popper. Sigh.

And there’s one mysterious omission. It seems to be OK for Robinson to write about housing cooperatives and communal dining, to quote Karl Marx, to depict a renters’ revolt, the redistribution of the property and capital of the wealthy, the fall of capitalism and the nationalization of the banks … but amid all his wordy pyrotechnics I never noticed him mention the “s” word. I can’t help wondering if Orbit, his publisher, felt that all this edgy stuff was fine, just so long as he never actually used that word abhorrent to a large fraction of an American readership … socialism.

* Robinson describes how the 2312 version of Manhattan was part of the genesis of this novel in an interview with the Sierra Club.