Nightmare of Eden (1)

 

People who don’t like science fiction sometimes claim that science fiction is difficult to understand.

Which is fair enough. Genre fiction targets particular demographics. The writer of horse-racing stories doesn’t go back to first principles and explain how betting odds work. A novelist whose hero is a premiership soccer star can assume an audience which knows the rules of English football. So the writer of a tale about space-ships and robots may take it for granted that his readership is au fait with basic scientific ideas. People who failed their general science A level might well find it all a bit bewildering. 

Is this what the people who “can’t understand science fiction” are complaining about? “One of the characters started talking about xenoforming and tachyons, and I have no idea what those words meant.” Maybe: but I think that in many cases, the people who “can’t understand” sci-fi have simply never learned to read it. 

I think that many of them have acquired the habit of  “zoning out” during exposition. In mainstream and literary fiction, that is often a  good strategy. Mainstream writers often feel the need to describe in some detail what the spy had for dinner; or to regale you with cheerful facts about the state of sanitation in early nineteenth century Paris. This information is rarely pertinent to the denouement. But if you skip the equivalent passages in the first chapter of a science fiction tale, then by chapter ten you won’t have the slightest idea where the hero is, or what he is being chased by, and why you ought to care.

I think the same thing happens when science fiction readers claim not to understand mainstream fiction. Space cadets and scientists do sometimes talk about their feelings and their relationships: nowadays they sometimes even have sex with each other. But those passages are often eminently skippable roughage; where in proper grown up novels they may be the whole point. If the sci-fi averse reader never learned to read science fiction, the hard-core fan may never have learned to read anything else.

A decade ago, a group of conspiracy theorists started to argue that emotions and feelings had been illegitimately insinuated into science fiction by a cabal of militant feminists as part of a plot to destroy western civilisation. That is an admittedly extreme position. But I think most of us have heard people saying things like “I get that there is a dude and a girl in a posh house who are interested in each other but keep pretending that they are not — but when is the story going to start?” 

The conspiracy theorists are  now running America. 

Terrance Dicks said that the purpose of Doctor Who was to ensure that the BBC did not have to transmit 20 minutes of dead air on a Saturday night. He was making a joke: but it was a joke with a serious point behind it. We now live in a media environment where every episode of Doctor Who takes on a massive, disproportionate significance: there can be an eighteen month build up to a single 45 minute episode, with speculations and post-mortems in the quality newspapers as well as the fan sheets. But it was not always thus. Nightmare of Eden came and went in an era when Doctor Who was pretty much explicitly the amuse bouche before the evening’s main bill of fair: Basil Brush, Doctor Who, Larry Grayson, Shirley Bassey, Secret Army and most importantly, Dallas. 

About a hundred thousand people bought Doctor Who Monthly. About a thousand paid an annual subscription to the Doctor Who Appreciation Society. But seven million people watched Nightmare of Eden. 

The question is not “Does Nightmare of Eden contain some fascinating and original science fiction ideas?” 

The question is not “Does Nightmare of Eden, watched in one go as an eighty minute movie, hang together as a narrative?” 

The question is not “Does the denouement contain ideas and images that you haven’t seen before?” 

The question is not even “Can you get past the sillier than usual monsters and the hammier than usual acting and appreciate what Bob Baker was driving at?” 

The question is: “What would the 99% of viewers who were not Doctor Who fans have made of it?” 

And the answer is “They would have been completely and utterly bewildered.” 

As, indeed, was I.