Rossgate

Nobody is waiting for my opinion on Rossgate (that link is to  Foz Meadows' roundup of the slapfight; it is worth reading first, and indeed, perhaps -- since I'm about to disagree with her take on it -- instead). I recognise that as a white male writer I have a less worthwhile perspective on the whole brouhaha than many; and I also recognise that too many pixels have been splurged on the topic already. Since I won't link to this post; and since random traffic to this blog is low, I don't feel I'll thereby be thrusting my obnoxious opinions too bullishly on the world. On the other hand, and since my attitude to it all has undergone pretty much a 180-degree about turn, I'll jot down why.

My first awareness of the whole circumstance was Farah Mendlesohn's resignation note. Now Farah is a friend of mine of many years standing, and one of the single most principled and conscience-driven people I know. I applauded her note, both for the stand she was taking and for the scrupulous way she orchestrated her separation from the Loncon committee (with which she found herself in disagreement) so as not to compromise the many worthwhile practical things she has done by way of setting stuff up for the convention. My sense at that time was: SF has been through a particularly intense Sexismfail turmoil over the last several months, and the efforts to make Cons welcoming safe spaces for women is an ongoing, intensely worthwhile activity. I assumed (making an ass of me, I know, I know) that Ross was doing the gig for a fat fee. Since I'm not plugged into comics culture especially closely I was not really aware of his fan credentials, and it seemed to me that Farah had a point. Then, as we all know, Twitter exploded. Ross withdrew. The whole SF community polarised and started shouting.

I've been following the ensuing kerfuffle, off and on; and the longer it has gone on the more I have found myself thinking: Adam you are an ass. Ross offered his services for free. He is, it seems clear now, a genuine geek with a real love for the genre. He would certainly have raised the media profile of the event and so on -- all these questions have been rehearsed many times of course. But the tipping point as far as I was concerned was Kameron Hurley's post on the whole thing. I urge you to read it. She compares the fight to a disagreement she had with a three-year-old. Said three year old went to punch his mother; Kameron Hurley raised her voice; the three year old was outraged since it is rude to shout and such shouting 'hurt his feelings'. Hurley's position is that yelling is justified to prevent a greater evil.

Until she applied her analogy to the situation, I was honestly unsure whether Hurley was troping the three-year-old as Ross or as Fandom. That's the trouble with double-edged allegories. Clearly, nobody was suggesting Jonathan Ross was going to rock up at the Hugos and literally hit the nominated writers. Hurley's point (I take it) is that words can be like blows. But the problem here is that only thing we have in this sorry case is words: the words people imagined Ross would use (based on the precedence of the words he has used in his day-job as a television presenter) and the words people actually used about and to Ross and his family. All hurtful.

For Hurley, Ross is the petulant 3-year-old, and fandom is the 'OK, maybe I could have been a little more cool-headed in the way I reacted, but look: I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings to stop you punching your mother.' Which is to say, since the punching is a metaphor: ' .... but I had to speak in a way that hurt your feelings in order to stop you speaking in a way that would hurt feelings.'

The whole force of Hurley's post hinges on the imbalance of power it assumes: relatively powerless massed fandom, super-powerful white male TV celebrity. 'When did the privileged become victims?' she asks.

OK. So: one unintended consequence of reading her post, for me at least, was to wonder how the actual punching conceit might work.

Imagine a world-famous professional boxer who happened to be a massive genre fan -- an alt-reality Muhammed Ali, say. Let's say he was proposed as host, and people objected 'we can't have him as host! He will literally punch all the nominees in the face! That's what he does!' How would you respond? Let's try: no he won't. Punching people is what he does in his day job; he's here not as a boxer but as a fan whose boxing happens to have made him world famous.

Jonathan Ross's day job is: comedian. His style (like it or loathe it) is comically confrontational rather than mild and agreeable, but that's his day job. He agreed to host the Hugos as a fan, not as a television presenter.

His day job involves him interacting not with privileged people (people like me); but with super-privileged people ... folk of staggering wealth and power, movie stars, rock stars at the like. His modus operandi is: not to give these super-privileged people too easy a ride ('when did the privileged become victims?')  These people do not agree to appear on his show out of the kindness of their hearts; they do so because they intend to parlay the media exposure into even greater reserves of wealth and power. To make their blockbuster an even bigger hit, or sell even more copies of their album. Ross could, as some TV interviewers do, treat these entitled megarich celebrities with fawning deference, and thereby get as little in the way of them selling their shit to us as possible. He doesn't do that. Here's the thing: him 'not doing that' is him doing his job. You can of course object to it; but it seems to me you can't object to it on the grounds that by doing so he is picking on the disempowered or underprivileged.

Here's one scenario: Ross comes to the Hugos, makes fun of all the cowering fat boys and fat girls, laughs in their faces and then drives away in his open-topped sports car with a cigar jammed in the corner of his smug, laughing mouth. Thank heavens we have averted that dire possibility.

Here's another scenario: Ross agrees to host the Hugos for free, because he's a big genre fan. He is immediately attacked by many other fans on the grounds that he is a sexist misogynist, and not wanted, and he can take his working class speech-impedimented masculinity and his fat geek wife and their fat geek daughter and fuck off, basically (I paraphrase). He reacts testily online, and soon enough withdraws. His wife deletes her twitter feed because she finds the tweets she is receiving so upsetting. All the stuff that has actually happened.

This, to revert to Hurley's analogy, is two sides raising their voices. One side, though, is raising their voice as a proxy for raising their fists. Which, though?

I'm not suggesting that the metaphorical playing field is level, where power and influence are concerned. But I am suggesting that the victims of Ross's discourtesy, the people who have been the butt of Ross's public jokes -- the people instanced as the reason why he is The Devil in this context -- are more stratospherically privileged not only than the average SF fan, but than Ross himself. As Frankie Boyle (is he free to host the awards, I wonder?) once put it: you think these megacelebrity filmstars and rockstars are 'like' you, or want to be your friend? You don't realise that they would throw themselves under a bus if they had to live your life for so much as one afternoon? When did the privileged become victims?

So, yes: I've changed my mind on this issue.

'This Is Just To Say' by William Satan Williams

I have eaten
the soul
that was in
your brain

and which
you were probably
hoping Jesus would save
for Heaven

Forgive me
it was delicious
so small
and screamy.

Willy Ley and Wernher von Braun (with illustrations by Chesley Bonestell), The Exploration of Mars (1956)

'So,' my wife said in her "disapproving" voice, as I brought this back from the charity shop: 'you've bought another Nazi book, I see.' I could have pointed out that German rocket scientist Willy Ley fled to the States in 1935 precisely because of the rise of the Nazis; but she would then have countered with 'and von Braun?' and I would have been silenced. Nonetheless, this is a lovely book indeed, with 16 gorgeous full-colour plates (and 5 black and white ones) by the peerless Chesley Bonestell, dozens of line drawings in the body of the text, and a splendid can-do attitude by the authors with respect to what they think will be, within a few years, the actual 'two year and 239-day' mission to Mars and back. (The images below should all embiggen upon clicking, I think):

But mars, man! Mars! Look how excited these tiny spacedudes are on Deimos, gambolling and leaping like giddygoats.

Ditto Phobos:

Now THIS is what a rocket ought to look like! --

On the left, assembling the Martian spaceship in orbit (check out the tiny ur-2001-A-Space-Odyssey wheel space station in the distance). On the right, 'the hardy lichens of earth could probably live under the severe conditions of Mars.' I'm a big fan of the Hardy Lichens, actually. I especially like A Laodlichen and The Moss of Casterbridge. Not forgetting the one about how happy Gustave drove all those people crazy, Fun Gus, the Madding Crowd:

Beauteous double-page spread of the Martian ground station! --

Again, dahling

Interesting seminars on Dahl yesterday; wide-ranging discussion on lots of things. There was a frisson (as much for me as for them) involved in negotiating that debateable land between love for Dahl's writing, which had shaped almost all of them, and disdain for his cranky, bullying, sexist, racist, anti-Semitic, occasionally sadistic, sexually incontinent self. Steering gingerly around the biographical fallacy, they discussed the extent to which his children's books reverted to a misogynistic default (aunts Spiker and Sponge in James and the Giant Peach, the Witches, Miss Trunchbill in Matilda) as opposed to their string of positive fathers and father-figures (Willy Wonka, Fantastic Mr Fox, Danny's Dad in Danny the Champion of the World, the BFG). We talked about how the books' worldview treats things in terms of stereotypes (hence their occasional racism); about Dahl's cruelty and the reason it appeals to children so much -- because it is, we decided, a paradoxically joyful cruelty. Adult dismissal of Dahl, from the early snooty de haut en bas rejection of his 'violence' and 'nastiness' (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was published successfully in the States in 1964; but it took another three years to find a UK publisher willing to issue it, because the publishers over here thought it too nasty for their lists) to the latter-day critiques of his work's misogyny, racism and so on .... such critiques, we agreed, miss an important point. Which is to say, they prove themselves unable to tune-in to the kid's-eye view.

One student cited something Tim Minchin said with respect to adapting Matilda as a musical. I didn't jot down the source and can't trace it now [update: it was Victoria who said it, and on twitter she kindly directs me to the appropriate link], but it was to the effect that adults read Dahl, see adults being sadistically cruel to children and think of Baby P. But (Minchin said) that's not how kids take it; those aren't the associations children carry through to the stories. They find it funny, not ghastly; or perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that they find its ghastliness funny, not depressing. There's something in that.

We also talked about Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and more specifically the things Dahl added to Ian Fleming's rather narrowly conceived original novel. Dahl created Truly Scrumptious for instance; and the whole 'Vulgaria' plotline and -- best of all -- he dreamed up the Child Catcher. A genuinely scary creation, this; the excellently camp incarnation of the principle of Adult Animus Against Children. A one-man embodiment of the Dahl ethos (which is, roughly: that the world is full of wonder and twisted fun for kids, but it is also full of large lumbering malevolent beings who hate children and want to hurt or kill them. These latter are called 'adults' and all but a very few are irremediably malign).

There's a sense in which Dahl is like Kafka. Not in the specifics of their respective fabulations, nor even in tone (although I'm reminded that Deleuze in Coldness and Cruelty insists that the original audiences for Kafka's stories positively fell about laughing at them, so hilarious they were deemed). But in this sense: Kafka's stories look like they describe nightmarishly aberrant worlds, worlds where the principles of kindness, logic, reason and decency do not obtain and individuals are persecuted relentlessly by motiveless bureaucrats or other powers. The mistake, of course, is in thinking that Kafka wrote 'fantasy' at all. The whole of the twentieth-century stands testament to the fact that he wrote the most precise kind of verisimilitude: after all, this was the century in which the North-Korean social logic of his invented worlds covered most of the globe, from Communist and Fascist dictator states to the deracinated blankness of the deserts of late capitalist consumption.

There's something similar at work in Dahl. It seemed to many adults in the 1970s and 1980s that there was a perversely wilful nastiness in the way Dahl saw the world -- not that people thought child abuse never happened, but that they thought it was a marginal, rare and regrettable deviation from the 'normal' course of childhood. Now we look back, through Operation Yewtree tinted glasses, at the sheer stomach-turning scope of the abuse that was going on, from Christian brothers schools and other church-related scandals, through secular schools, abuse in borstals and hostels, hospitals and asylums to the home. In Europe a tenth of all children experience sexual abuse at some time during their growing-up; in Asia the rate rises to a quarter of all children; in Africa the rate is a boggling one third of all children. The crucial thing here is not that it goes on, or has gone on, sickening through the fact of it is; the crucial thing is that nobody really talked about it back then. This is not the same thing as saying that it was a secret, or more precisely it is saying that it was a secret of a very particular kind, a secret hidden in plain view. To look back at footage of the BBC's own Child Catcher, Jimmy Savile, in his heyday is to be struck by the thought: he could hardly have been more obvious about his delinquent weirdness. The great thing about the Child Catcher performance turned in by Sir Robert Helpman (by all accounts a thoroughly nice chap in real life) was the way it so hyperbolically performed its exaggerated sinisterness, the way its spurious child-friendliness was so transparent, the way it was all so evident, right there on the surface.

Dahl's various unpleasantnesses as an adult were all, in their way, symptoms of a deep rooted immaturity; he was the sort of kid who loved playing practical jokes on others, often quite unpleasant ones, and he never lost that attitude as an adult. Which is to say, he seemed not to realise that there is a point in one's life when such things stop being mischievous and endearing and start being the symptoms of mere dickishness. Still, that refusal properly to grow up was the reason he was able to write the sorts of books that children love so forcefully. It drove his prejudices, too. It's not, I think, that Dahl hated females, blacks, Jews and so on; it was that he hated adult women, adult blacks, adult Jews. He hated them because he saw in them hatred; he gave his sadistic personality free rein with them because he saw sadism in them. In the same way that Kafka's prison societies turned out, after all, to be the most accurate emblem of the 20th-century global polis, so it turns out (after all) that the emblematic adult of the postwar period is not Kennedy, or Elvis, or Mandela, or Marilyn Monroe, or Neil Armstrong in his white-knight vacuum suit standing on the moon. The emblematic adult of the times is pictured at the head of this post.

It's worth saying something more, I think. The way Dahl writes his adult characters gets at something important as far as the question goes of why adults abuse children. I daresay we don't wonder too deeply about this, because inside the minds of people who do these things is not a comfortable place to project our thoughts. But I suppose we imagine that an adult sexually molesting a child is doing it because he considers his own sexual gratification more important than the wellbeing of his victim. This isn't right, I think. I think the truth is plainer. Adults abuse children because adults hate children. Pinning this animus to sex is just the sort of thing adults do with those inchoate but potent negative emotions they find swirling around their inner beings. But actually sex isn't the underlay of this hatred. Analysis entails the Coleridgean game of motive hunting for a motiveless malignancy. Dahl gets it: adults hate children because that's what adults are. Because children have the crucial thing (youth, futurity -- life) that adults are losing. And Dahl gets this, too: kids know it. On an instinctive level, they know it.

Dahling

I'll be Dahling this coming Thursday. There he is, at the head of this post, apparently emerging from a large quantity of cotton-wool, or perhaps leaning comfily back against a quantity of coral. And why am I Dahling? Permit me, dahling, to explain the structure of the Children's Literature course I'm teaching this year. So: it runs over 20 weeks and two terms. The syllabus for the first 15 weeks is set by me, and goes from Romanticism (and Rousseau) through 19th and 20th-century key texts up to Harry Potter. For the final five weeks the syllabus is set by the students themselves: we discuss various options, and arrive at a consensus. The deal is: I agree to lecture on the texts they choose, but they must run all the seminars themselves, with me sitting smiling and nodding and pointedly not butting in, in the corner of the room. It's a structure I've tried on other courses, and it's worked pretty well in the past. For instance, on the SF course I taught last year the brief was that I taught the topic to 1999, and the students then chose five examples of 21st-Century SF for the final five classes. This time round it was agreed to broaden the brief in order to include Dahl, who hadn't made it onto the original syllabus (I'd thought about it, obviously, but figured that to include him I'd have to cut out Blyton which would have reduced the already small number of women studied on the course and left a hole between the Hobbit in the late 30s and picture books in the 60s/70s). That's fine: Dahl certainly makes sense. The other four weeks, since you ask, are: YA Fantasy (students especially mentioned: Hunger Games, Series of Unfortunate Events, Pullman's Dark Materials); Blackman's Noughts and Crosses; YA Romance-Fantasy (Twilight and all those other glittery vampire yarns; I might do Hunger Games here actually); Jacqueline Wilson. All good.

So, yes, this Thursday I'll step into the lecture theatre and bloviate about Dahl for an hour. There's a lot to say about him as a children's writer, and his influence (the Lemony Snicket series I mention above couldn't possible have existed without his prior example, for instance). But I don't intend to go into detail about all that in this blogpost. Instead I mean, here, to mark the personal significance he had for me. I know, I know; it's icky all this personal stuff. I've already posted, over on my other blog, one of the most personal (though obliquely so, as befits me) things I've ever published. I should warn you: if you click the link hoping for salacious intimacies and rollicking stories you won't find them: the post in question is a lengthy, rather dry discussion of the fact that, though personally infidel, I have grown up in and been shaped by a culture that is Protestant. The exposure of it (really: it feels exposing, to me) is not a function of its explicitness. It has, rather, to do with my life as a writer, not as a human being; although part of its point is the extent to which I find it increasingly difficult to separate out those two eminently separable elements. That's not a boast. It's the opposite of a boast.

And Dahl? Well, I have cause to be a tad nervy about lecturing on him. More than Carroll, or Tolkien, more than any other book covered on this course (and notwithstanding how profound an effect many of them have had upon me, growing up) it was reading Dahl that decided me to be a writer. Not his kids' books, though. It was his short story about crashing his plane in Libya during the war, 'Piece of Cake'. I'm going to quote myself from another post, about a seemingly unrelated matter: a collection of sting-in-the-tail crime stories originally published in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. That old post reviews the collection, and then indulges in a little bit of speculation on why 'twist in the tail' stories are so perennially popular.

Now it seems to me that this sort of story delivers a very specific sort of pleasure. It is the pleasure of limited surprise, an 'aha!' pleasure ... limited both in intensity and in duration (it doesn't take long for the shine to come off this twist, for instance). Nor is it a pleasure that's especially repeatable. In this respect it has something in common with the punchline of a joke. Yet I don't think describing it as a punchline quite gets it right, either. In a joke the body of the gag exists only to set-up the punchline; where I suppose in a twist-in-the-tale story the reverse is true: the punchline exists rather to cast the world of the story, or the world at large, in a new light. But it's a one-dimensional trick, for all that, and puerile at least in the sense that life is very rarely eucatastrophic, and only slightly less rarely dyscatastrophic. Mostly life runs in predictable grooves, and the things we learn as we go along reinforce, rather than overturn, what we have learned thus far. But here's the thing, and I suppose the appeal of these sorts of stories resides in this: on those occasions when we do experience some sort of perceptual or conceptual about-turn, the experience is weirdly exhilarating. I'm not sure I see why this should be, but I suppose the desire to reproduce that exhilaration, in contained and diluted form, explains the perennial popularity of this sort of story.

That's where I bring in Dahl's own 'Tales of the Unexpected', which I read and re-read as a youngster.

I've a softspot for this sort of tale, which must have something to do with the fact that I so greatly enjoyed Roald Dahl's short fiction when I was a nipper ... specifically: when I graduated from Dahl's children's writing, the reading of which was mandated for all British children in the 1970s by government edict, to his 'adult' shorts. I put adult in inverted commas there because, precious though those stories were, and even are, to me, I have to concede there's something puerile about them; even (or do I mean: especially) his Uncle Oswald sex stories. There's one exception to that, as far as I'm concerned, but it's not exactly relevant here.**

And those two little asterisks direct the reader to the note at the post-bottom, containing the personal bit.

The Dahl story (for adults) that had the greatest impact upon me, and that more than any other written text made me want to be a writer, is not one of his twist ending ones. It is his faintly surreal autobiographical account of flying in wartime, "A Piece of Cake". Something about that story, and more to the point something about the form of that story (not its content, particularly: which is to say, it wasn't that I had a particular interest in WW2 or planes or anything like that) ... something about the way it was written, and structured, or the way it arranged its scenes and images, and the emotional affect it generated, rushed my 13-year-old conscious mind like a sudden tidal bore, and made me want to write things myself. It was, more or less, as simple as that. I didn't want to be a writer before I read that story; I wanted to make animated cartoons. After I read that story, I wanted to be a writer. That I have never written anything like Roald Dahl, and have no desire so to do, flows naturally from this impetus, I think. The force of it upon my mind did not impel a desire to imitate, you see.

I'd read plenty before that moment, most of it SF of course; but it hadn't previously occurred to me that I might want to write it as well. It's still a difficult thing for me to get inside why this particular story had so profound an effect on me.

At any rate, all this 'personal' revelation stuff is making me feel awkward; however bafflingly oblique and unforthcoming it seems to you. I'll stop.

Big bird? Tiny elephant/rhino?

He should look where he's flying. He might bump into something.

Victor Rousseau, The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917)

Following on from my last post, and out of mere curiosity, I read Victor Rousseau's The Messiah of the Cylinder (1917). Our narrator Arnold Tennell works with elderly Sir Spofforth Moore and a geezer called Lazaroff at ‘The Biological Institute’ near London. Also on the scene is Sir Spofforth’s toothsome daughter Esther. Lazaroff ('a Prussian Pole … keen and fanatical, daring, inflexible, the sort of man who would welcome the chance to proclaim a Holy War for Science and die in the front rank') is as full-on an eugenicist as I can recall encountering in any novel of the period:

"Today civilization is being choked to death by the effete, the defective, whom a too benign humanitarianism suffers to live beneath the shelter of a worn-out faith. The fearful menace of a race of defectives has laid hold of the popular imagination. Soon we shall follow the lead of progressive America, and forbid them to propagate their kind. Here any statesman who dared suggest sterilization would be hounded from office. But England is awakening." [11]

Way to go, America! ‘Man will be free. The logical State, finely conceived by Wells, without its rudimentary appendixes and fish-gills, will be the nation of the future.’ [11-12] Boo to fish gills! And what will the main business of this future-utopia be?

"It will be a world of physical and mental perfection, too," [Lazaroff] cried. "Of free men and women, freely mating, separating when the mating impulse is dead — "

"Yes, he is right, Father," Esther interposed eagerly. "Whatever else may come, the hour of woman's liberation is striking."

Mating! Mating FTW! Esther, for one, certainly seems keen. Anyway it so happens that Lazaroff has invented a suspended animation chamber. He also has his eye on Esther, and knows Arnold is a rival; so he tricks our narrator into climbing inside the chamber and sends him away into the far future. Hiss!

Arnold wakes alone in a ruined cellar, and wanders around for a bit. The description of future-London anticipates Fritz Lang’s Metropolis by a decade:

The county of Surrey appeared to be an extensive forest, ending about a waste of dismantled brick, the suburbs of old London, which extended on each side as far as I could see. Then the modern town began: an outer ring of what I took to be enormous factories and storage warehouses; an inner ring, no doubt, of residences; and then the nucleus, the most splendid city that the imagination could have devised … the city presenting the aspect of a succession of gigantic steps, until the summit, the square mile comprising the heart, was reached. This consisted of an array of enormous edifices, with fronts perfectly plain, and evidently constructed of brick-faced steel-work, but all glistening a dazzling white, which, even at that height, made my eyes water, and rising uniformly some forty-five or fifty stories. The flat roofs were occupied by gardens or what I took to be gymnasia, sheltered beneath tarpaulins. I saw innumerable airplanes at rest, suspended high above the streets, while others flitted here and there above the roofs. [45-6]

Interestingly, the future is supplied with two new colours: mull and glow. Not, you understand, new shades of already existing colours—but actually new colours. You’re wondering how that works? Permit me to enlighten you:

"Can it be that in — where you came from they have only the old seven colors in the spectrum?"

"From red to violet."

"We have had nine for at least twenty years," he said. "Mull, below red, and glow, above violet; what our ancestors called ultra-violet and believed to be invisible, though it was staring them in the face everywhere all the time. There used to be a theory that the color sense has developed with civilization."

Sounds persuasive.

I was astonished to discover that no history prior to 1945 was taught, and no geography. The greater part of the curriculum was devoted to scientific and economic subjects. I learned that Oxford and Cambridge had disappeared, with the old public schools, in 1945, after a revolution, the anger of the people having been kindled against them on account of their moral influence and the distinctive stamp of character that they produced.

Quite right! Also, Rousseau anticipates News 24:

On the way home we stopped at one of the open-air moving picture shows, and saw two or three dramatized versions of public affairs. Ingenious mechanism synchronized the movements of the figures upon the screen, which were in stereoscopic relief, with speeches made through the telephone funnels. These, David said, took the place of newspapers when the socialized State destroyed the printed news-sheet by the simple process of killing the advertising.

People still smoke, too. 'Doctor Sanson wants to forbid the use of nicotine as impairing the productive efficiency of the race,’ says one character. ‘But the Council thinks the narcotic has a restraining influence — ‘ So who is this Sanson? ‘He is a man of superhuman powers,’ we’re told, ‘more feared than any man has ever been feared. There is a popular belief that he was born a thousand years ago, and has wandered from land to land, waiting for the new age to dawn. Nothing has ever been learned as to his origin. He appeared like a conqueror, about the year 1980, to lead the hosts of the revolution to victory.’ Ah, 1980!

Well, after a fair amount of Cook’s Touring round this future land, we come to the crunch: Sanson, of course, is Lazaroff. He sealed Esther and himself into suspended-animation tubes too, planning on awaking in the future and taking Esther as his bride. But he foolishly forgot about leap-years when setting the dials for Esther and Arnold, and this somehow resulted in him awaking in 1980, 35 years before them. The tubes being designed as absolutely indestructible and impenetrable he has no option but to grow into an old man whilst the woman he loves remains in stasis as a beautiful 25-year-old. So he seized global power, instituted a eugenicist dys-, or u-, topia (depending on your view) and now plans to make humanity immortal. ‘You shall work with me as you used to do, when I and Esther rule the world together, immortal as gods,’ he tells Arnold; only to be rebuffed ('you can never hold me to obedience, nor Esther either. I love her, and we shall both die before we yield!'). As the novel takes it as axiomatic that immortality would be a great evil, Arnold raises a rebellion to overthrow Lazaroff/Sanson. This involves a big climactic bust-up at the end of the book, with ray-guns and armies and teeth-gnashingly-described aerial battles.

Sansom calls on the Mormon-led dictatorship of America to send its air-force and aid him, but ‘the Mormon airplanes never arrived, because, practically at the same hour, America rose in revolt against her masters. And the Sanson regime has been swept away forever’. Arnie gets the girl; Sansom crashes his airplane into the moon. Hurrah!

Oh, the universal joy at the release of all the inmates of the defectives and moron shops! ... It was as if a dark cloud had rolled away and disclosed the sun.

Thank HEAVENS they closed down the moron shops! Also Christianity is restored, and the narrator notes 'the astonishment and enthusiasm as the people listened to the teachings of Christianity. After three months there are still crowds at all the street corners, hearing the doctrines and the story of Christ from priests and missionaries.' So all's well that ends well.