Ian Watson, God's World (1979)

Coming back to Watson for a while, hoovering up odd novels and things I didn't get around to before. Why? Well, I'm toying with writing a short-ish critical monograph on Watson and SF generally. This would be called Unelementary: Ian Watson and the Indeducibility of Science Fiction, and would be (since I really can't imagine any actual publisher, academic or otherwise, being interested in putting it out) e-book only. Some of this is drafted, actually; and I may or may not have time over the summer to pull the whole thing together. 'May not' encompasses all the many other things I have to do this summer; but 'may' registers the realisation that if I don't pull it together soon-ish I probably won't ever. Not that this latter state of affairs would be the worst thing in the world. I labour under no illusions about the number of potential readers on tenter-hooks to find out what I think about Watson (or 'lit'-y SF more generally, which would be the real focus). Still, there's small Pointless Imp of Completion in my brain, so I may get to it. Who knows? It might even sell in the single figures.

At any rate, I read this novel over the last few days, after chancing upon it in a charity shop. Viz.:

'His first novel of outer space!' as the first-edition cover blurb boasts; a slightly odd claim given that extrasolar aliens arrive (from outer space!) in The Embedding (1973), and are met by Earth spacemen (in outer space!); plus The Martian Inca (1977) involves a deal of to-ing and fro-ing (through outer space!) between Earth and Mars. Plus the characters in Alien Embassy (1977) travel to other stars (in outer space!) via astral projection. But, look; let's not split hairs.

Now, some of Watson's novels are nothing short of masterpieces. Some, though, don't quite come off, broadly speaking; and I'd class this title with that second group. Mind you, even when Watson's novels don't entirely succeed, they are never less than interesting failures. And God's World may be Watson's most interesting failure of all.

I'd certainly say it's not one of his best-known novels, and so some plot-summary is probably in order. This will include spoilers (so be warned). In fact, to forestall that, why don't you pop over to the SF Gateway? Then you can buy a copy of the book and read it before going any further. Indeed, I'd recommend buying as many Ian Watson books as you can and reading them all. You won't regret it.

So: God's World. The premise is of a scientifically irrefutable revelation of the divine: a miracle apparition, Easter Day Jerusalem 1997. To Christians it appears as 'a tall shimmering creature of golden light ... with wounds in the wrists and ankles and a deep gash in its side.' [31]. Jews see 'a tall, white-bearded, white-robed figure' speaking Hebrew. Moslems see 'a black-bearded man wearing kaftan and turban', calling out in Arabic 'Come to God's World, come to success!' Similarly theologically specific apparitions follow across the globe 'as the wold spun on its course that Easter day' and the message is:

I am the prophet/angel/messenger/message
from Heaven/the heavens/space
where God lives/where God's World is.
There is a star in the River/constellation Eridanus.
The star is unique/an isolated star.
Your best souls will go to Heaven/will ascend/fly there.
If you die, you will live again, undying.
Now there is war in Heaven/conflict/struggle. Gird your arms about you! [33]

The message goes on: a space drive will be provided, and believers or 'pure souls' must be ballasted with unbelievers ('hard souls') 'so you will travel more steadily.' A pyramid-shaped space drive is unearthed in the Gobi desert; a ship constructed (The Pilgrim Crusader) and crewed with seven materialist rational 'rats' and seven spiritual 'psychs'. Travel is through 'High Space', and time to destination is indicated by a green-line 'probability' of arrival. Were the ship crewed only with psychs, it might travel almost instantaneously; but the passage would be unstable and perhaps dangerous.

The book starts, actually, with the narrator 'Amy Dove' fucking her fellow psych Peter Muir, which may well have been nicely startling in 1979. It's still quite a bracing way to start a novel, although its idiom is a little too close to D H Lawrence fucking-as-transcendence for my liking (the fact that the sex happens in the novel's hyper-dimensional, 'High Space' may explain this). The voyage to God's World through the 'grainy mottled sea of trembling, incoherent half-light' of High Space is marked by a lot of metaphysical discussion amongst the crew, and one big event: the ship gets into a battle with another ship, and fires all its missiles (this other ship is actually a time-refracted version of the The Pilgrim Crusader, or something); and then the weapons' master Jacobik is murdered, throttled after what looks like a B/D sex session. The novel, without much urgency, eventually explains his death; but the practicalities are less important than the symbolic force of it: life and death, fucking and dying, bliss and agony, yin and yang.

This crime disheartens the psychs, which holds the ship back; but eventually the Pilgrim Crusader arrive at 82 Eridani. Their destination is a moon orbiting a gas giant itself orbiting the star; but before they can reach it they are attacked by insectile aliens, 'like giant black scorpions, with eight legs and jointed pincers resembling hands ... and jaws. and claws' [79]. Most of the crew escape in a shuttle and make it to 'Getka' as God's World is called, where they find strange humanoid golden-haired aliens, and a paradisical landscape. The Getkans live in cities; and each city has a full-size model replica of itself across the river, seemingly deserted. The book treads water for a hundred pages or so as Amy and her remaining crewmates learn the world of Getka. There's some interesting speculation here, though it leaves the narrative underpowered.

The Getkans (plus a few, though not many, examples of other alien life who have rocked up on their world) live lives balanced between the material cosmos we're all familiar with and a sort of dreamtime spirit dimension. They wear masks to access this; although when one of the humans playfully puts a mask on it nearly kills him and leaves him in a catatonic state -- you have to be trained to do it, and more paired with a life-partner who then dies (or you die; doesn't matter so long as one of you do). Then your bond means that s/he lives on in you in the material world and you live with him/her in the spirit world. The model cities are, when seen through the dreaming spirit eye, teeming with life. The humans start to grow golden hairs on their skin (the hairs are a needful part of the spiritual connection; a sort of parasitical mode of alien life that links matter to the spirit realm) and are finally able to don the masks:

At his (at their) touch, my vision rotates. Below me, outside, is Manfaa. Immediately the empty lanes become thronged thoroughfares, as the island expands hugely. The roofless walls mutate into palaces. The courts of emptiness are crowded amphitheatres. The dry alleys are sapphire canals afloat with junks and ornate house-boats. The city must hold at least half a million natives. [144]

In fact there are many levels, or varieties, of 'heaven' in the dream dimension, including one like hell ('a city of horrors: siege and pillage, rape and fire. The victors set out torture instruments in the streets.') The gas giant, a regular planet in the material cosmos, is revealed to be a huge vortex of spiritual energy in the dream dimension, which is why this moon is so special. And the scorpion-spider aliens? The Getkans call them 'the vile Group-ones'; hive beings -- 'a single entity, with a machine for their lord. This blinds them to the beauty of the dream worlds. They cannot enter them.' [150] But it doesn't matter that the Group-ones stole the human ship, or even that only six of the crew escaped. Six is enough: they must pair off, one from each pairing must die and when that happens each couple will be intimately linked forever; and the three remaining on the world will be connected with the heaven dimension. Then they can go back to earth directly, with no need of the ship, and bring this new spiritual mode of being to the whole of humanity.

You don't need to have seen Star Trek 5: The Final Frontier to have smelt a rat by now. Whilst awake, the humans on Getka are completely caught up on the spiritual richness and joy of their life, not to mention all their intense transcendent fucking they're doing. But sometimes when they sleep, they are drawn back to their ship, by the consciousnesses of the crew they left behind; and here they get a different side to the story via the machine intelligence that orchestrates the scorpion aliens: the 'Harxine Paracomputers'. The energy vortex is not God, but Satan ('You mean to tell me,' Watson has one character say, rather heavy-handedly, 'God's world is really -- Satan's World?' [166]). As in about a hundred episodes of Doctor Who, this 'Veil Being' is

a quasi life-form which balances on the interface ... between reality and the creative force that is beyond reality. It is part of the "energy circuit" between what you term "God" and the created universe -- in our terms, between the descent of Being into the world and its reprocessing back through death, which is the psychic counterpart of the continual fluxing in and out of existence of the entire cosmos. [165]

The problem with the 'Veil Being', according to the Harxine Paracomputers, is not just that it needs to 'feed' on new life, and so plans on hoovering up the whole of earth into its greedy maw. Worse than that, by keeping life in this static deathless dream dimension it is unbalancing the central dynamic of the whole cosmos, which will threaten everything. The Getkans

are granted paranormal powers and quasi-immortality but they are really controlled and hoodwinked by the corporate Veil Being so that they cannot understand how it is against the proper order of things -- against the reprocessing of lives back into Being, through death. It is a blockage, a tumour, in the flux between Being and existence, between what you term "God", and the world. Since reality is the dream of "God" -- since the universe is imagined into existence from beyond - this blockage must bring about a degradation and ultimate collapse of reality. [166]

Oh no! The problem is the humans forget all they learn asleep when they wake; and continue on their hoyful pilgrimage to the sacred site where one half of each of their couples will die, so uniting them immortally and linking the material and dreamtime. And once that happens, the Veil Being will have access to Earth.

If I'm making the novel sound wholly hokey (in, out, in, out, shake it all about) that's not my intention. It doesn't do the wholly hokey, though there's a degree of hokiness here. But there are also stretches of conceptual invention and cadenzas of metaphysics that make the B-movie set-up ('What They Thought Was God Turned Out To Be A Giant Satanic Vortex!!') seem rather more sturdy than, perhaps, it actually is. And there are many brilliant touches. Watson fills chapters with striking and thought-provoking speculation about the topography of a spirit-matter cosmos. But the Star Trek 5 problem hovers over the whole novel, I feel: the reader is promised something that she is then baulked of. This novel will represent the unrepresentable! Except that it won't, and (of course) can't. How can this not be a tad anticlimactic?

Still, Watson is exploring some metaphysically complex and resonant ideas: for example, the question of whether God is 'Other' (the ultimate Objet Grand A), or actually identity. One character insists that we can only perceive 'epiphany' through 'being what we are': 'God needs a subject that reflects Him, just as we need to be the reflecting subject. Here is a transconscious relationship, of which the ego is merely a portion ... I shall tell you a secret, my friends. The Lord may easily be the image of a loved one, correctly understood ... This is convenient for Man. He cannot know his own self directly, but he can know the whole of the Other, as imagined in himself. In this way a dialogue is possible between two beings who are each other.' But Amy has her doubts:

Suppose there was a race of beings somewhere in the universe who weren't distinct from each other, as we all are. Suppose they were all identical, like ants. Only highly evolved into the bargain. Well, they couldn't conceive ... Otherness, could they? The style of their suzerainty would be submission to themselves -- to a group of identical minds, wouldn't it? This would be their only Lord. [180]

There's something potent in this claustrophobic vision of Absolute Transcendence, especially as a critique of religious praxis. But it's dramatically stifling (as, perhaps, it has to be) in a novel; since a novel must take its momentum from the conflict and resolution generated by difference. This is underlined, I think, by Watson's style. God's World is divided between the plain declarative style of ten thousand space exploration stories ('our current course is taking us sunward, inside the gas giant's orbit. If we leave things alone we'll go into an elliptical sun orbit, bringing us to that hypothetic High Space injection point ...' [73]) and a large amount of dialogue, often densely and rather offputtingly rendered theological or pseudo-philosophical speculation. But from time to time Watson injects lyric intensity to his descriptions. This is most successfully accomplished in accounts of the alien landscape of Getka. Here, for instance, they approach a volcanic island by sea:

Smoky dawn: ash on the deck. Water undulates, smooth and oily, crusted with grey scum. No wave breaks or foams. Dead fish float by, their bellies upwards. The sun is hardly visible, a lemon ghost. Someone has lit a bonfire out at sea. A brazier glows and sparks atop a black cone thrust from the glutinous water. [205]

The worst you could say of this writing is that it flirts with purple; but mostly it stays on the right side of the 'evocative and vivid' line.

The port of Pyx: sickles of stone at the corn of sandbars. In the estuary, silver waders dip and uphead again like an army of automatic toys powered by the simple motion of filling up and emptying out. ... Half a dozen large junks ride at anchor at the dockside. Among serried white buildings, the inevitable pyramid marks the water-front. [211]

I liked this sort of thing. I liked it less when Watson turns this technique on his descriptions of sex, where the vividness provokes an 'eew!' reaction of the sort that almost makes me wonder if that was what Watson was going for in the first place:

He slides inside me: slow dance of swelling tissues, hot muscles, nerves aglow, glissade douce. We are dense with this. Our joy winds us together slowly like twin rubber bands of nerve fibre which seem as if they never reach a snapping point. Ours is snail-love: the slow mutual twining of molluscs. [12]

Rubber bands, hot throbbing snail rumpy pumpy: à chacun son gout, I guess.. Though the 'we are dense with this' is less forgiveable. I know it's anachronistic, but it makes me think of that scene in the first Back to the Future movie where Michael J. Fox's young Dad tries to chat up the girl he fancies by telling her 'I am your destiny', but gets tongue-tied with embarrassment and tells her instead 'I am your density'.

There's a serious point in here, somewhere. Watson, here and elsewhere, reveals himself to be a profoundly Romantic writer, in a very specific sense. This is the sense that his project aligns in key ways with an imaginative spiritual transcendence grounded in the actuality of (especially natural) materialism -- what Abrams famously called 'Natural Supernaturalism'. In that very book, Abrams characterises Wordsworth's core project (one taken up by Blake, Coleridge, Shelley, Hoderlin -- and later by Yeats, whom Watson actually quotes in God's World) as: 'the shift to a spiritual and moral revolution which will transform our experience of the old world ... to reconstitute trhe grounds of hope and to announce the certainty, or at least the possibility, of a rebirth in which a renewed mankind will inhabit a renovated earth where he will find himself thoroughly at home.' Watsons fondness for balancing 'psych' and materialist 'rat' characters (here, but also in several other novels) is about this, I think; and the ending of God's World comes close to this spiritual-materialism utopian achievement. This is the final paragraph:

For a moment all my life is present, all at once. And who I am, is answered.
Now that knowledge flows back into ...
energy, the creative energy, answering its question
into light, the light beyond light [ellipsis and absent final full-stop in original; 285]

But this also leaves the novel open to critique. Philosopher Richard Eldridge rather neatly summarises Hegel's objection to Romanticism as a whole with a four word precis: 'too much visionary blathering'. It has something to do with the way the transcendent ambition of the conceputalising is undermined by the Scooby Doo logic of the story (you thought it was a real ghost? Nah it's just a petty crook with a rubber mask on: trust the Dawkinsesque meddling kids to disabuse you of any sense of actual supernatural sublimity). I finished God's World feeling strangely unsatisfied, in a way that puzzled as much as disappointed me. The odour of patchouli and the jargon of tantric sex hung a little too pungently over the whole, I think.