Arthur Montagu Brookfield, "Simiocracy" (1884)

 

Arthur Montagu Brookfield (1853–1940) was educated at Rugby and Jesus, Cambridge, afterwards serving as a lieutenant in the 13th Hussars in India and later commanding a battalion of the Imperial Yeomanry in the Boer War. He was a Conservative MP from 1885 to 1903, and a JP for Sussex. In 1903 he stepped away from Parliament to become British Consul at Montevideo, and (in 1904) Consul to Danzig (then in Prussia, now in Poland). All in all, a successful late Victorian Tory career.

Brookfield had a sideline in writing novels, of which I have read two. The first is The Apparition (1884), a sort of Scooby-Doo-avant-la-lettre story in which a young scapegrace, Paul French, cashiered out of the army for fighting a duel with his commanding officer (he called him a cheat whilst playing, and losing, a game of cards) runs away to an English country house, dies, is buried in the ground and afterward appears as a ghost to various people. It turns out a different person, not French, was interred, that French is still alive, and the titular ‘apparition’ was people seeing him out and about (‘“But I buried him! That’s all I can say,” replied the Rector. “But did you ever see his face; or the face of the dead man, rather?” persisted the Colonel. “No,” answered the Rector after some pause. “And what’s more I must acknowledge that I ought to have insisted on doing so. Oho!” [233-4]’). It's not much cop, this novel. 

Then I read Simiocracy: A Fragment of a Future History (1884). This is a more interesting, although still not a very good, piece of fiction. It is, in a sense, science fiction, hence my blogging about it here—although it's a narrow, satirical and frankly racist piece of work.

What happens. Well, at the end of the 19th-century the wicked Liberal Party abolishes the monarchy and establishes ‘a new British Commonwealth’. In an attempt to bolster their electoral support they change the laws so as to enable apes to vote, afterwards importing large numbers of orang utan to tip the electoral balance in their favour. This move is described as ‘in perfect harmony with the progressive spirit of the age’:

The people had been gradually induced to perceive that the opinions so stoutly maintained by some of the most thoughtful men of the day as to the original connection between the human and the Simian races, were not to be disposed of by mere contradiction or intolerant ridicule. The people had not yet forgotten the teachings of Darwin ... Had not other alien races been once despised—nay, even slaughtered? And now, were not some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar these same abhorred “blackamoors”? And did not millions of English as well as Dutch men, women, and children bear allegiance to a dynasty of negroes whom we had once contemptuously handed over into slavery? [Simiocracy, 38]

South Africa as a majority-rule republic in this Victorian imagined future is a striking thing. But there is, obviously, no ignoring the racism here. The ‘some of the brightest ornaments of the English Bar are “blackamoors”’ line intrigued me, so I checked. From the Society of Black Lawyers website I learned the following:

In 1854 John Thorpe, a Sierra Leonean, became the first barrister of African descent to be called to the Bar and Monmohon Ghosh in 1864, the first person of Indian descent to be called to the Bar, with John Mensah Sarbah the first Ghanaian called to the Bar in 1887.

Interesting! But what strikes me as a wonderful thing clearly struck Brookfield as deplorable. At any rate, Simiocracy elaborates its premise: apes flood into the UK. Their leader is Orang Api:

Many writers have described the gratification as well as the astonishment which they felt, on finding, instead of a savage creature running to and fro on the ground with his hands and feet, a calm, and indeed dignified being, dressed in a loose suit of blue serge, and seated in an arm-chair, from which he welcomed his visitors with an unembarrassed smile and a courteous wave of the hand. When Orong Api stood up, he measured just five feet six inches in height; but his frame was now somewhat bent ... His form displayed great strength, and a certain rugged symmetry. His body was for the most part covered with hair of a dusky brown; but his face and ears, his feet and the palms of his hands, were smooth. [44]

There are various other idiotic reforms: children petition to have schools abolished, which happens (‘the obnoxious Education Act was formally repealed, and the arbitrary and feudal calling of the pedagogue banished to the limbo of obsolete privileges’); hunting, shooting and fishing are outlawed and so on. But the main change is the influx of apes.

This immigrants have, surprisingly enough, a fair deal of support among the people, the ‘Simiophile’ faction. But these new arrivals also evoke hostility: Orong Api is assassinated, and other apes are attacked and beaten in the streets. Some Oran Otani retaliate: ‘in one instance a fruiterer was set upon, savagely beaten, and robbed of all his wares. In another case a representative of the press was forced to drink the contents of a small portable ink-bottle which he carried ; and finally thrust through a glass shopfront, and compelled to seek safety in flight, horribly cut and bruised’ [129]. But these ape-acts, the narrator tells us, with an irony heavy enough to bend metal bars, are the exception, not the rule:

Surely the friends of Progress may even now feel a thrill of honest pride when they reflect, that but for the wantonness of a few hot-headed young Simians, the conduct of two and a half million successful invaders, flushed with the victory they had already accomplished, and glowing with zeal for struggles still to be undertaken, was such as to elicit the warmest praise from some of the highest officials in the English Parliament. For ourselves, we must here express our deliberate opinion that the general behaviour of the Oran Otani, at the time when they first landed on British soil, was of a kind for which the previous history of European invasions supplies no parallel: and, but for one calamitous incident which we shall now describe, we believe that the entire English people would have eventually acquiesced in this view, by rising like one man to welcome, and not to repel, the pioneers of Simiocratic civilisation and freedom. [130]

This thrill of honest pride style of heavyset sarcasm increasingly manifests as the story goes on. The ‘calamitous incident’ is a fire by the London Docks that destroys a building housing thousands of Oran Otani. Suspecting arson, the apes rise up and despoil London:

What wonder that the Simian war-cry arose ... What wonder that a peaceful and indeed benevolent army of occupation became forthwith transformed into a furious and unreasoning army of vengeance ; that bands of wrathful warriors spread abroad in every direction — to the houses and churches, to the wine-vaults, the shops, the warehouses, the wharves, and the shipping — carrying fire and sword with them, leaving slaughter, rapine, and desolation in their wake!

An Anglo-Simian conference is organised. The increasing influx of apes into Britain means that there is now a large simian army, although the leader of the apes, Madame Jocki, relies not only on force: ‘her first act was to transfer the huge treasure-chest, which had been brought from Borneo, into the keeping of the English Premier, to be applied to the relief of the homeless poor who had suffered from the recent disasters.’ Either way, Simian domination of England is inevitable:

A few of the wealthier classes endeavoured to rally an armed force, in the neighbourhood of Dunrobin Castle, in Sutherlandshire; but the national spirit had become so effectually tamed, that the attempt had to be abandoned. Most of those who could afford the large sums which were now demanded for a passage to the European continent or elsewhere, made haste to leave the country; and the steamship companies, the owners of private vessels, and the German and French proprietors of the four submarine tunnels, speedily reaped a golden harvest. The British coast was crowded with poorer fugitives; some of whom succeeded in chartering fishing-smacks, and coal-barges, while others put to sea on timber-rafts — and even ruder contrivances — of their own manufacture. [179]

Those tunnels are a nice SF-futurist touch. Anyway, the (human) Prime Minister is deposed by Madame Jocki, who is then herself overthrown by an aggressive young ape called Pongat Wou. He issues a proclamation, on the basis of which Britain is now to be ruled (the ‘Tupa’ mentioned is a kind of legendary Orang, supposed to dwell in Borneo, the ultimate ape power): 

‘Talking’, in point 6, refers to human speech: the Oran speech is obviously still permitted. The novel gives us a few samples of that: ‘The Premier remarked that the heat in Borneo, during the mild season, could not be much more oppressive than that of a crowded London salon — or “salong” as he called it — in the month of July. Jocki immediately showed her white teeth, and seemed to articulate something like: “Uck-chi; uck-chi. Mi ni nik.” Which, according to the interpreter, meant: “Good; good. I agree with you.”’ But our narrator declares himself delighted to have been released from the prudery of wearing clothes, and commends his history to his apish overlords. But, wait: has he written it in (forbidden) English? Or are we to assume it has been written in ook-ook eek-eek and then somehow translated into English for our benefit? I don't know.

All in all it's not a very sophisticated or notable novel. There was, in fact, a vigorous nineteenth-century subculture of apes-as-humans satire and fiction, the ancestor of today's Planet of the Apes franchises. John Clute points out why it was, specifically, the 19th-century in which this sub-genre arose:

The necessary circumstance was of course Time, or Progress. Moderns instinctively think of beasts and monsters as being prior. For there to have been an eighteenth-century Primitivist vision of the Noble Savage there must have been a sense that we had advanced – or retreated – from some earlier state. So it is no surprise that the first apes-as-human texts of direct interest to an sf reader are probably two works by a Primitivist philosopher, James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), whose Of the Origin and Progress of Language (1773-1792) and Ancient Metaphysics (1779-1799) contrast humanity's corrupt nature with that of the pacific orang-utan, a vegetarian flautist who may not have learned to speak but who was otherwise capable of human attainments. Monboddo's orang-utan was a potent and poignant figure, and soon entered fiction in Melincourt, or Sir Oran Haut-ton (1817) by Thomas Love Peacock, where Oran Haut-ton saves a young maiden from rape, enters Parliament, and gazes wisely upon the human spectacle. Charles Pougens's slightly later tale, Jocko: anecdote détachée des Lettres inédites sur l'instinct des animaux ["Jocko: Anecdote Extracted from Unpublished Letters on Animal Instinct"] (1824), more directly connects the innocence of the orang-utan Jocko to the doctrine of the Noble Savage espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778); this tale, along with other French-language stories of interest, like Émile Dodillon's Hemo (1886) ... But Jocko is not a Satire; and Peacock's instinct to pay less attention to the intrinsic nature of his ape, and to follow his incursion into human society in order to reflect satirically upon civilization, proved more immediately useful. ... The intelligent race of monkeys discovered in Léon Gozlan's Les Emotions de Polydore Marasquin (1857) also serve to hold up the mirror. The use of apes or Yahoos or houyhnhnms as exemplary inhabitants of a Utopia or Dystopia represents a very different – and ultimately more significant – tradition than the use of apes as illustrative examples embedded into our own human world, early examples of which are in any case hard to find: until well past 1850, therefore, an ape-as-human will typically either be discovered in a distant enclave or ideal society, or the ape-as-human will be making a visit to civilization. Only later will the enclave become a Zoo. After the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), the apes-as-human topos became, of course, far more loaded, a lightning rod for the expression of and discharge of deep anxieties about the nature and destiny of the human race. Indeed, it would not be until Darwin that the apes-as-human topic became sufficiently ambiguous or threatening to warrant widespread imaginative use.

In this larger context, Simiocracy seems thin indeed. It can't decide whether it is making a racist point about immigrants, or a local-political point about how stupid and wicked Whigs/Liberals are. Its tonal irony is too clonking, the worldbuilding too scanty. It reminded me a little, as I read, of Will Self's more scatological and wide-ranging but otherwise similarly hamstrung Great Apes (1997). Jerry Fodor's LRB review gets that book right, I think:

There are, in principle, two kinds of chimp jokes: the ones about how chimpanzees are much like us, and the ones about how chimpanzees aren’t much like us. Self’s chimps have a social hierarchy and a ritual of deference according to which one offers one’s respects by presenting one’s posterior. ‘“I am honoured, madam, to make your acquaintance. The entire scientific community is in awe of your ischial pleat ... and I, too, reverence your dangly bits. I would accord it an honour if you would kiss my arse” ... she bestowed the required kiss, then requested an arse lick from Busner in turn.’ Self finds this sort of thing endlessly hilarious; and he is the kind of humorist who thinks that you can’t tell a good joke too often. I guess he tells the kiss-my-arse joke maybe 800 times. Self also can’t get over it that chimps mate publicly and promiscuously, and only when the female is in oesterus. That, he thinks, is more laughs than a barrel of monkeys.

In all other respects, however, Self’s chimps are much like the people that they caricature; in fact, too much like and therein lies the novel’s structural problem. ... The effect is not of animals but of people all dressed up in chimp suits with nowhere much to go. By the end of the book, their fur has more or less ceased to matter to what the characters do and suffer. Maybe that’s Self’s point of course; but just what point does it amount to? Why have your people turn into chimpanzees if you are then going to have your chimpanzees turn into people? Self himself doesn’t seem to know. The novel eventually comes to a halt out of what feels like sheer authorial fatigue.

Something similar vitiates Brookfield's novel. Though it doesn't have any bottoms in it.

Ken MacLeod, ‘Beyond the Hallowed Sky’ (2021)

 

I enjoyed Ken MacLeod's Beyond the Hallowed Sky: a three-ply space opera/political thriller/first contact yarn. It’s the first Wordle-line in a trilogy, so the ending, though decently-enough landed, doesn’t tie the story into a nice little bow, and that fact perhaps dilutes the enjoyment a trifle. And there are some parts of the novel that don’t work so well: it’s overloaded with worldbuilding and tech-info in the first 50-pages, too much in too short a space I think, which makes the story a little hard to get into. And I suppose the problem with the three-ply approach is that readers are liable to enjoy one of the three elements more than the others, thereby unbalancing the whole. In my case I was less engaged by the “handsome young John Grant gadding about near-future utopian-socialist independent Scotland and stumbling into inventing FTL” story-strand. For one thing it turns out that pretty much everywhere else apart from Scotland already invented FTL fifty years previously, and that they’ve just all been keeping that fact secret, which is a little baffling. But perhaps the trilogy's remaining vols will make it clearer how all that’s supposed to go.

A little more engaging was story-strand 2: a starship (a repurposed nuclear submarine, in fact, as these vessels all are) has been shipping settlers from Earth to the extrasolar planet Apis, where we encounter a weird sentient crystalline lifeform. Apis appears to have been seeded with earthlike life many of millions of years before, such that the actual forms of life the settlers encounter have followed a different, achordate evolutionary path. This is all pretty diverting, although MacLeod has to plump it up with some running-around being-chased excitement to keep the storyline bubbling along. My favourite of the three strands was set on a floating settlement high above the surface of Venus, ‘Cloud City’. This story-strand concerns a blandly polite humanoid robot, Marcus Owen, sent to ‘Red Venus’ as a diplomat and spy (a fact he cheerfully concedes to anyone who asks) who also turns a nice line in boinking people, like Gigolo Joe from Spielberg’s A.I. There’s a mysterious ‘something’ down on the hellish surface of the planet, and Owen descends from the clouds to the Venusian ground in a super-armoured space-suit to investigate.

Although the novel takes a while to build its momentum, momentum is eventually achieved, and the final third is full of nicely-styled moments, cool ideas and narrative hooks. I will read vol 2, and indeed anticipate doing so with pleasure. That’s not exactly the ringing-est of blurbs to slap on the front cover, I appreciate. But there you go.

Hmm. That reference to Wordle, in my first paragraph, is going to date this post pretty catastrophically in the coming months, once the fad passes, isn’t it?

I know Ken, and it would be as unseemly for me to trash his novel as it would be compromised to overpraise it: it’s very good, he’s a master of contemporary SF, you should read it. His prose here, as ever, is clear and informative. You may (I tend to) prefer a more wrought, styled idiom but MacLeod’s approach is to lay the characters, material and ideas of his storytelling directly before the reader, which is a perfectly honourable way of proceeding. There’s a flat-stanley quality to many of the characters, but again, in Owen, MacLeod makes a virtue of necessity on that score, and it's both memorable and likeable the way the novel renders the robot’s convincing fakeness of subjectivity.

But this isn’t a review, so much as a notation of one thought I had, whilst reading. It has to do with story structure. So: you might write a novel and keep it focused on one p.o.v. the whole way through, but the danger there is that your reader will find this approach monotonous and tiresome. So you decide instead to dispose your narrative between two, three or perhaps even more storylines running concurrently. But how to combine them? Beyond the Hallowed Sky opts for: just plait them together, A B C A B C, one chapter at a time. It’s a common strategy, which perhaps speaks to its workability, but I find it (not just here, but wherever I encounter it) irksome, distracting, bitty and, as I say above, an invitation to skip the strands you’re less interested in to get to the ones you’re really enjoying.

‘Alright,’ I hear you say. ‘But what are the alternatives? I’m not sure. I think it’s right to say I’ve never written a novel that adopted the braiding strategy, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t. My most recent novel (available from all good bookshops etc) deliberately disposes two quite different p.o.v sections into an overall amphibrach, a three-part shorter-A long-B shorter-A structure, for Dantean reasons. Otherwise I prefer the discrete Rothko-like blocks of text to the intimate braiding. I say ‘prefer’, in the sense that this seems to me a more aesthetically interesting and striking way of doing things, but my taste may well not be yours—and indeed, judging by reactions to my writing, it probably isn’t. So what’s a better way of doing it?

The First Generation Starship

 

Since faster-than-light travel is impossible, and the stars are so very, very far away, any craft making interstellar journeys will take many centuries to get where it is going. Generations will be born aboard these ships, live and die and be in turn superseded by younger generations. This standard trope of SF is predicated upon the unbending realities of physics.

But who was the first to hypothesise a ‘generation starship’? Wikipedia says this:

Rocket pioneer Robert H. Goddard was the first to write about long-duration interstellar journeys in his The Ultimate Migration (1918). In this he described the death of the Sun and the necessity of an ‘interstellar ark’. The crew would travel for centuries in suspended animation and be awakened when they reached another star system. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, considered a father of astronautic theory, first described the need for multiple generations of passengers in his essay, ‘The Future of Earth and Mankind’ (1928), a space colony equipped with engines that travels thousands of years which he called ‘Noah's Ark’.

Clute, Nicholls and Langford go further back:

Tsiolkovsky's ideas ... were anticipated as a passing fancy, though with a more realistic timescale, in John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897): “... with a vessel large enough to contain the necessaries of life, a select party of ladies and gentlemen might start for the Milky Way, and if all went right, their descendants would arrive there in the course of a few million years.”

But 1897 doesn't take us far enough back into the early history of this idea, I think. Here's James E Lake's Bishop Foster's Heresy (1889), imagining a future-fleet voyaging out into the interstellar spaces for ‘millions of years’:

Look out from our flying ship as we sail out upon the universal sea of space. We turn our faces toward the sun, whose bright beams shed such a wonderful sea of material glory over us, that all nature is hid save this effulgence and our own ship ... we begin to look out through the evening twilight upon the vast ocean of trackless ether, upon which we are sailing, and now thousands, yea, millions of ships like our own heave in sight ... Come with me as this fleet of ships sails on its great voyage for a million years, and ask what mighty fleets are these that accompany us over this infinite sea! Hail, thou voyagers over this unsounded sea! Hail Arcturus! Hail Polaris! [154-55]

The scale of the cosmos had been understood for a while by this point, and it is a natural extrapolation from that knowledge to speculate how long it would take for a craft to traverse such distances, and what that would imply for the crew. H F Warren's Recreations in Astronomy (1879) included this intriguing Space 1999-avant la lettre conception:

If our earth were suddenly to dissolve its allegiance to the king of day, and attempt a flight to the North Star (the centre of the Circumpolar Constellation), and should maintain its flight of one thousand miles a minute, it would fly away toward Polaris for thousands of thousands of years, till a million years had passed away before it reached that northern dome of the distant sky and gave its new allegiance to another sun. The sun it had left behind it would gradually diminish till it was small as Arcturus, thus small as could be discerned by the naked eye, until at last it would finally fade out in utter darkness long before the new sun was reached. [72]

There's a lot of late 19th-c speculation about the distances of such voyages, actually.