What The Hades?

Passage to Pluto

By Hugh Walters


5...

I recently attempted to do an on-line CBT/mindfulness stress-reduction course.

Apparently, it is possible to relieve stress by imagining that your anxieties are an orange and letting the orange gently float away into a relaxing sunset. You have to imagine the texture of the orange and the colour of the fruit-bowl and what kind of relaxing beach the sun is setting over.

I assume that this works for some people or the therapists wouldn’t keep selling it.

The main thing I discovered from the course was that I didn’t have a visual imagination.

Come to think of it, I must have known that already. So the main thing I discovered from the course is that some people do have one.

I definitely know what oranges look like. If I appeared in a court and was asked to describe one orange in particular, I could state some solid facts about it. “There was a blue spot near the stalk, your honour. I thought that was odd at the time.”

But forming a mental picture of the orange and holding it before my mind’s eye: and then adding the tree, the sunset, the yellow bird and the tallyman tallying his bananas entirely eluded me? The best I could achieve was brief mental orange shaped snapshots amid the encroaching darkness.

Is this normal? Is this common? Is there a three letter abbreviation that I can apply for?

For the record, I found that breathing in through my nose to the count of six and then slowly blowing the seeds off an imaginary dandelion made me as calm as I am ever likely to be.

I suppose that this disability—or perhaps it is a superpower—affects the way I read and the kinds of books I enjoy. It might explain why I find “difficult” books like the Silmarillion relatively approachable, and approachable books like Conan the Freebooter relatively difficult.

It would also explain why I like fiction where someone has taken the trouble to actually draw the pictures he wants me to see, instead of leaving me to do all the hard work for myself, or “comics” as we used to call them.

I have talked before about book-memes on Facebook: I have even insinuated that the "Reading is Brilliant" threads are often implicitly anti-literate. You tell me that books are magical devices that carry me away to places I have never been where I will meet people who are more real to me than my friends and family. I am apt to reply “Are they bollocks!” I tell you that Tolkien’s archaic prose and Salman Rushdie’s oblique metaphors are the exact things which make them both in their different ways great writers. I fully understand why you want to reply that I have taken all the fun out of reading. Across such a chasm, no bridge can be constructed. If you enjoy being physically present in Victor Frankenstein’s laboratory, experiencing all the smells and textures and sounds of dissected corpses and arcane machinery, you don’t want to hear Mr Pedant telling you to pay attention to the actual words Mrs Shelley used to describe it. Or, indeed, pointing out that she didn’t.

I blame school teachers. For everything. Many people of my shape and demeanour are unable to quite shake the belief that football is primarily an excuse for big kids to kick little kids in the shins and a pretext for repressed adults to look at teenagers in states of undress.We don’t quite literally believe it, but we feel in our guts that it must be true. And some people enjoyed Eng. Lit. almost as much as I enjoyed PE. It must as strange to them that I would pay money to watch actors performing Shakespeare as it is to me that they would pay money to watch other people doing a kick about on a field.

It's a prejudice. But not everyone realises it's a prejudice. Some people think that “I had to sing boring hymns at infant school” is a theological position.

Miles Kington said that the trouble with O Level French was that O Level French is not the language that French people actually speak. I think that school PE did sometimes involve the playing of a game that was in some respects quite similar to the one that football fans enjoy. But school English was largely detached from anything the normal theatre-goer or the normal novel-reader would engage in voluntarily. I don’t know what the normal poetry reader does. Is there even such a beast? Or is poetry written by the sorts of people who write poetry for the benefit of the sorts of people who publish and review poetry books? You can fill a medium sized coffee shop with people who want to hear actual vernacular performance poems, but that wouldn’t be caught dead between the covers of a school anthology.

Now, obviously, speaking for myself, I like thinking about books. I like writing about books. I like reading books about books (“criticism”). I even like reading books about books about books (“critical theory”). Whether we are talking Demons of the Punjab or a Passage to India, I have no truck at all with people who say “You ought not to think about this: you ought to just allow it to wash over you.” ("It's just a TV show! Just a piece of entertainment! The whale is just a whale and he said her hair was red because red is the colour her hair actually was!") But I think it is a really bad idea to think about a book before you have read it, or instead of reading it. I think it is an error to suppose that Dickens wrote David Copperfield mainly to give students raw material for their essays. (A surprising number of people believe that the main reason God wrote the Bible was to give Vicars something to preach sermons about.) I think that your first, second and third reaction to Waiting For Godot ought to be “What a strange, puzzling, fascinating, peculiar play.” I think that it is okay to whistle a catchy tune without wanting to find out what makes a tune catchy. He who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.

But perhaps we are simply talking about people with, and people without, visual imaginations? If the majority of people genuinely can think of an orange when they are told to think of an orange, then presumably, when someone speaks of horses they really do think that they see them, pounding their hoofs in the receiving earth. And if you are in that majority, then the person who tells you to count up how many I-ams Shakespeare put into each of his pentameters and find out what "puissance" means is missing the whole point of the play. You aren’t being taught to play football better: you are being told that you oughtn't to have been "playing" it at all. 

I am not a formalist. I am not claiming that the only things you can definitely say about oranges is that they have three syllables and don’t rhyme with anything. I have just read the latest Knausgaard, The School of Night, which would, incidentally, be an excellent jumping on point for anyone who hasn’t read any Knausgaard and would like to find out what all the fuss is about. It is nominally the fourth volume in his excruciating Morning Star metaverse. I think if I use the search function in my Kindle it may turn out that the main character, Kristin Hadeland, is the John Doe who the agnostic Church of Norway clergywoman buried in volume one. But it stands very independently as a novel; about a student at a prestigious photography school whose art is not appreciated by his contemporaries, who makes a possibly unwise agreement with a mysterious figure, while, incidentally, helping out with a fringe production of Doctor Faustus. He becomes extremely famous and successful but finds that some extremely reckless things done as a young man come back to haunt him in middle age.

It’s a story.

And certainly, I wasn’t “just reading the words”. If you were “just reading the words” of Knausgaard you would go insane. It isn’t true (pace Private Eye) that he ruthlessly chronicles every character’s bowel movements: it is true that if someone is going to have a cup of coffee, there is a serious danger that we will learn about how the granules gradually dissolve in the cup and the milk swirls around in a swirly milky pattern. Which is why the publishers were rather spot on to use the epithet “addictive” to describe the book.

Besides, a hand-held vacuum cleaner was a very useful thing when we left crumbs in places where a big vacuum cleaner was impractical, on the kitchen worktop for instance, or we might make just a small mess somewhere, perhaps we’d spill thirty or forty grains of rice onto the floor when we tipped the bag, and who would go to the cupboard to get the big vacuum cleaner then, which had to be lifted and carried, plugged in and switched on? No, it was much easier to turn to the small one that sat so snugly in the hand and was always at the ready. I lived in the age of hand-held vacuum cleaners, but it didn’t mean I had to bow down to them, just as Giordano Bruno in his day had felt unobliged to bow down to the Catholic Church.

It took only about ten pages to go from “Who is this awful man and why do I care about his awful life?" to peeping out from behind a metaphorical sofa thinking “oh god please don’t you aren’t really going to steal a dead cat from the vet oh…” or indeed screaming “stop agonising go to the police and admit that you failed to report an accident you bloody fool”. In the final section it becomes very clear that a very bad thing indeed is about to happen, and the blow by blow description of the trivial minutiae which are occurring while it is pointedly failing to do so become almost physically painful. I certainly wouldn't want to attempt a GCSE "compare-and-contrast-two-minor-characters" essay about it. I cared far too much about the actual story and wanted far too badly to know what happened next. Did I feel that I was temporarily in Norway? That Kristen was someone I had actually met? Did I feel that my mind was full or oranges, oranger and more orangey than anything I had ever oranged before?

Did I bollocks.

4...

There is, you may be surprised to learn, a point to this.

As you know, we have been engaged for several years in a critical re-reading of the works of Hugh Walters, who was my favourite science fiction writer when I was at primary school. The latest volume is called Passage to Pluto. It is exactly the same as all the others. 

While re-reading the book, I am fairly sure that I had a visual flashback to the pictures I made in my head when I first read the story, I think in the summer of 1972. At the end of the book, three astronauts are saved at the last possible moment from Certain Death by their erstwhile comrade Chris Godfrey. During the rescue, young common northern engineer Tony Hale does something very reckless and dangerous in the engine room. As I read this passage, I distinctly saw the two characters in my head: Tony crawling around the engine room, Chris at the helm of the rescue ship. I could distinctly see their faces. And I observed (can you observe yourself having a memory of a mental construct?) that I was picturing Tony as Stephen (Peter Vaughan) from the Tomorrow People, and that, by a process of elimination, Chris was being played by Nicholas Young, (John), from the same series. 

We have established that I was reading Walters’ books and watching the first run of the TV show, at exactly the same time. I don’t know if some after-the-fact firing of synapses hyperlinked the two aesthetic experiences in retrospect, or if Kid-Andrew was consciously “casting” the characters during his primal reading. Roger Price’s teenaged mutant heroes were at least two-dimensional, where Hugh Walters’ cast are basically cardboard cutouts, so it would make sense to have used the TV show to add a bit of reality to the books. 

Was I remembering stuff I had seen on the telly as a substitute for what the writer failed to describe? Did the spaceships look as if they were made by the BBC visual effects department, tin foil and wires an all? I think they might have done. Did my lack of a mind’s eye force me to lean on stuff I had seen on TV as a ready made source of imagery? Or was mental-picture building something I unlearned through watching too much TV, not a neurological faculty which I happen to have been born without?

I think these are excellent questions. What happens when we read a book. Just how do our brains transmute words into emotions? Do some people really experience reading as hallucination, or is this just a rhetorical exaggeration? Was I exaggerating when I talked about the orange? 

It’s all very interesting. Which is just as well, because Passage to Pluto really isn’t.

3...

Hugh Walters’ books are ostensibly rip-roaring adventures about Man’s first tentative steps into Space. But that’s a cover story. From the first volume, what he has really been engaged in has been a theological debate. Can you continue to believe that there is a friend for little children above the bright blue sky when you’ve been as far as Mars and found no sign of Him? Can one person be a man of action, a man of science and also a man of faith? Does the presence or absence of a deity make a difference to the way a human faces Certain Death?

In the previous volume (First Contact?) Walters’ offered an elegant solution to the problem. God literally exists: but He is simply the most highly evolved being in the Universe. Angels are extraterrestrials who occasionally look in on Planet Earth to see that we are evolving correctly. This information is so mind-boggling that in the final chapters of the book, our protagonists’ memories have to be erased.

A lessor theologian might have rested his case at this point. But Walters continues the dialectical process. Passage to Pluto is a riposte to First Contact. The new proposition is “God exists: but the being who exists is not God.”

It is clear that the author's attention is focussed on this question. I don’t think that even the youngest reader could have missed the fact that Passage to Pluto is Hugh Walters by numbers, a reversion to the formula established in Blast Off At Woomera. It’s the kind of plot he could have written in his sleep, and possibly did. Our heroes prepare for launch (page 1-42); they are blasted into space (page 43) there is a Terrible Disaster (page 72) a daring rescue is attempted (page 90); and at the last possible second they are saved (page 120).

Everything comes into focus on page 53. Our hero, Chris Godfrey (now a grounded deputy-director of the space programme) learns that his friends have no way of getting back from Pluto. There is no hope and this time they are quite definitely going to die. 

“Oh God, what shall I do?” Chris prayed, desperately.

And then the idea came.

"And then the idea came." The subject isn’t broached again until the very last page of the novel. The long shot has paid off and the day has beens saved and everyone is safely back on earth. Funny Whiskers, the retired RAF pilot, asks if they are going to “have a wonderful celebration”.

The four young men who had returned safely from the most incredible adventure the world had ever known looked at each other uncomfortably. Chris spoke for all of them. “That can come after” he said “but first we are going to give thanks to God for our safe return".

How does Walters want us to read this? My first thought was that Chris’s mind was not, after all, wiped at the end of the last book: that he (the viewpoint character since the first volume) is aware that the stories now take place in a theistic universe. He has acquired the capacity to invoke the deity at moments of crisis. He is become Neo in the Matrix, a kind of Space Buddha: or at any rate a very Anglican Lensman.  It is astonishingly easy to accidentally add a T to his name while typing this kind of article.

But in fact, I think that Walters intends to refute the message of the last book. Granted the existence of extraterrestrials, one race must by definition be more evolved than all the others; and since we are all agreed that evolution means improvement and that improvement implies moral advancement, the most evolved being in the universe must be morally superior to all the others. So we might as well give the most-evolved and most-moral being in the universe the name “God”. But The Most Highly Evolved Being would hardly be the sort of thing you could pray to, and certainly not the kind of being who would care if you went to Mass at the beginning of your mission, or sung hymns of praise in the camp chapel after you came on. The God of religion has nothing to do with the “God” our heroes encountered on Uranus. Proof denies faith and without faith I am nothing. The Most Evolved Being could not have saved the lives of Chris's friends. The Church of England God has apparently done so. Which may be why Whiskers, who originally proposed the M.E.B theory, wants to have a party rather than a church service.

The third possibility is that I am reading slightly too much into this; that Walters has completely forgotten what he wrote in the previous volume; and chucked a couple of Sunday School references in because that’s the kind of thing you expect to find in vaguely improving children’s fiction. But it's much more fun to pretend that isn't the case. 

2...

So: our heroes are blasted to Pluto, partly because it is the only planet they have never visited and partly because the boffins have discovered a mysterious new Planet X out beyond its orbit. The boffins have also invented a new, atomic powered, near light-speed space-ship which can get our heroes to Pluto and back in weeks rather than years. They still have to be put into cryogenic sleep to prevent their being squished by the acceleration. (I am not entirely sure that would work.) The ship is called Pluto One, but there is a back-up ship called Pluto Two. No-one has ever seen a Disney movie.

Chris, the hero of the first thirteen volumes, has stepped back from his role as an astronaut in order to become second in command of the space programme. His friend Morrey has been promoted to boss-astronaut. making him responsible for all the agonising and soul-searching when Certain Death is on the horizon. Chris is, of course, very sad that he is not going into space with his friends. (Did I mention there was a back-up spaceship?) He is also very sad during the training, the launch, and while his friends are on their two week journey. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?) And of course, when disaster strikes, he is very sad indeed that is not there either to help out or to perish alongside his friends. (Did I mention that there was a back-up spaceship?)

When the Famous Three arrive on Pluto, they discover there has been a Very Bad Accident and they have lost all their fuel. We never find out what the Very Bad Accident was: probably, I don’t know, some sort of meteor strike. (The chances of this are “unimaginably remote...yet it had happened”.) I suppose by this point we know the formula as well as the author and are happy to fast-forward to the Certain Death part of the story. Although the ship is powered by nukes, it uses chemical fuel to turn around and navigate an earthward course. And they can’t escape from the gravitational pull of Planet X (which is a massively dense asteroid, or just possibly a massively dense alien construct). So the crew are faced with an agonising choice between eating three worms or running three times round the playground in the nude, sorry, dying slowly from asphyxiation or quickly by crashing the ship into Pluto.

Did I mention that there was a back up space ship and that Chris was very sad that he couldn’t go into space with his three comrades?

And so, in the final pages, readers are subjected to this kind of thing:

Chris let out an involuntary groan as his body took the full force of the chemical motor’s thrust. ….But it didn’t matter. No matter what his suffering, Chris was determined to do his utmost. He was prepared to go beyond the limit of human endurance in his desperate bid.

And this:

Caution must be thrown to the winds. He would risk ALL in the effort to save his friends.

And this:

Twenty-four thousand miles an hour. Gosh! that would take some slowing down.

And in case we haven’t got the point, this:

It was all or bust! He was going to catch up with Pluto One or die in the attempt.

Meanwhile, back on the the main ship, emotions run understandably high

A flood of admiration and gratitude flowed over the three astronauts. Chris was attempting the impossible in order to save them. Who but Chris could do such a thing?

And, indeed, on earth, where they don’t quite know what is going on:

Sir Billy and the others were staggered at the fate that must have befallen the four young men. ….. Feelings of utter despair spread among the scores of tired men and women in the control room…

It’s all quite exhausting.

1...

The book shows every sign of being unplanned and unrevised. While Chris is risking all to save his friends, we are told, out of the blue, that in between meeting God on Uranus and being blasted to Pluto, our heroes developed an interest in motor racing, and became more than decent amateur drivers: and that the nerve and reflexes needed when going round tight bends in a fact car is quite a lot like the nerve and reflexes needed when accelerating a space ship to save your friends from Certain Death.

It seemed that the amateur racing driver had pulled off another incredible feat by flinging his ship along at breakneck speed, and then applying the brakes at the last split second.

Very probably. But surely this should have come at the beginning of the story, not at the very end? Walters should surely have started the book with Chris dramatically winning the Isle of Mann TT race, leaving the readers asking “I wonder what this has to do with the rest of the story?” Then, in the last pages, when we’ve mostly forgotten the opening, he could have revealed that amateur racing stands you in good stead when you need to push a space ship beyond its operational limits, and we would all have said “Aha!” 

But he doesn’t do that.

Again; after the Daring Rescue, Tony (the naughty, northern, chocolate stealing one) crawls into the engine room to do a certain thing, and is berated by the others for his recklessness. What he has in fact done is set the abandoned ship to crash into Planet X, which results in the destruction of the asteroid. Chris is quite cross and says that they will discuss it in his office when they get back to school. But it turns out a few pages later that, er, Planet X was not only going to mess up the orbit of Pluto (did I mention it had super-strong gravity?) but also of Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter and eventually Earth, so the young scallywag's mischievousness has in fact saved civilisation as we know it. Fair enough. But why didn’t the boffins mention that Civilisation was imperilled? Because it only occurred to the writer at the last minute, that’s why.

In the opening chapters, the crew are very worried about the fact that, what with Einstein and relativity and everything, after four weeks of zooming through space at an appreciable percentage of light-speed, they will be twelve hours out of sync with the people they left behind on earth. There is some speculation about what effect this will have on them. They were, if you remember, quite worried about missing birthdays when they were first put in cryogenic sleep.

The eventual resolution to this philosophical dilemma is, er, nothing.

“What’s happened to the time-slip?” asked Morrey. “I don’t feel any different.” It was true, they had forgotten about this mysterious effect of space travel. “Our time should be twelve hours different from yours,” Tony exclaimed, “but it’s the same.”

Possibly this is a set up for something that will become important in the next volume. Or, possibly, it isn't.

Finally, he have to go through the obligatory Death Row Drama on the Definitely Doomed Ship. This time around the astronauts and the ground crew engage in a more than usually morbid game of suicidal astro chicken. The crew of Pluto One don’t want Chris to sacrifice himself in a futile rescue attempt: so they consider scuppering the ship to make such a gesture pointless. But Chris guesses that that is what they are going to do because it is what he would do if the positions were reversed, so he says he’ll embark on the suicide mission even if they commit suicide first.

“By the way, you fellows,” Whiskers said, “Chris tells me that he’s coming to join you even if it’s only to pick up the pieces.”

And Walters’ writing becomes borderline hysterical:

The argument between the astronauts went on for some time. An outsider would never have guessed from the calm, detached way in which they were discussing the problem that these three young men were trying to decide the manner and timing of their own deaths….

But this position was different. What they had to face was not a sudden catastrophe that would destroy them before they even knew it, but the knowledge that their lives would end in fifteen or sixteen days’ time! With a little help from their computer, they should be able to calculate the precise moment. As leader of the doomed trio, Morrey was determined to set an example. If anyone did crack up—and who could blame him?—he must not be the one.

They play long-distance chess with Whiskers to take their minds off the inevitable, because of course they do. 

0....

With the exploration of Pluto, there are no new worlds to conquer. Despite having established last time around that interstellar travel is possible via a network of divine gravity beams, Walters isn’t prepared to send our heroes outside the solar system. So you might imagine that we have just tackled the final volume.

But in fact, the series is going to go off in a slightly new direction. And the next volume will offer yet another perspective on the God question.

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My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

The Bringer of Dreams

First Contact?

by Hugh Walters

The latest instalment of my occasional series looking back on a series of science fiction novels you almost definitely read if you were at school in the 1970s. 

This volume raises some weightier than usual questions, and I respectfully suggested the long-than-usual essay may be of interest to people who don't remember the Chris Godfrey series.

I: Current Puns

II: The Road Less Travelled

III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

IV: Life, the Universe, and Everything

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

VII: The Chief End of Man

If you find this kind of thing interesting, please consider supporting my Patreon

My reviews of previous books in the series may be found here.

VII: The Chief End of Man

Previous Section 

What on Earth or Uranus does Hugh Walters think he is doing?

I don’t think the God-talk can be written off as window dressing or plot machinery. You could write a perfectly good story about benevolent aliens without recourse to theology. First Contact? might work better if the Alien was an ambassador from a secular Galactic Federation, as opposed to the emissary of God Almighty. But Walters takes quite a lot of trouble to go through the religious arguments at a pace nine-year-olds will be able to keep up with. I think that the Supreme Being interests him in a way that fast than light tachyon gravity networks really don’t.

Could he be pushing back against Star Trek? The BBC's first run of the original series had come to an end in 1971. Gene Roddenbury’s humanist message was that you should always reject any being with theological pretensions. It is a far, far better thing to die in an atomic war or a plague than to acknowledge that Apollo has some claim over you. Perhaps this is why Chris Godfrey’s American friend makes the reckless decision to nuke the site from orbit? It’s exactly what James T Kirk would have done.

You can see why an Anglican writer of boys’ space-adventures might want to tell the kids that science and religion are not in conflict. But is Walters seeking to inject some spirituality into science — to say that the feelings we feel when we think of Jesus and the Angels could equally well be directed towards Aliens and flying saucers? Or is he trying to drag religion down to science’s level — by saying that all those Bible stories and Norse sagas have perfectly rational explanations?

The great attraction of Von Daniken is that he gives us permission to believe that the Bible is literally true. Ezekiel really did see a wheel in a wheel, way up in the middle of the air. A sweet chariot really did come for to carry Elijah home. But it does this at the cost of removing their specifically religious significance. The chariots of fire are really only very advanced aircraft. Angels' halos are really only space helmets. When Von Daniken asks “Was God an astronaut?” he means “Was God merely an astronaut?”

And that is the problem that Hugh Walters thinks he has solved. Advanced extraterrestrials are by definition closer to God than humans. God is the most advancedist extraterrestrial of all. If the Uranus Alien is literally an emissary of the Supreme Being, then he is as near to being an actual Angel as makes no difference. Moses and Gabriel were under-cover agents of the Supreme Being. So, presumably, was Gautama. It wouldn’t be difficult to fit J.C into the picture: maybe he’s literally the Supreme Being’s son. Or the Supreme Being travelling incognito.

Joyful all ye nations rise, God and Science reconciled.

Rev Beckwith’s God (in the Doctor Who book) is a deist demiurge whose job is to explain the complexity of the universe. Walters sees, correctly, that science has made an explanatory God redundant. In principle, you can understand how the universe works without recourse to a supernatural creator. But he also sees that a purely scientific world-view throws out the teleological star-baby with the explanatory bath-water. His Supreme Being doesn’t tell us how the Universe works, but what it is for: its purpose and objective. Rev Beckwith’s God is a moral force: he’s there to reassure us that the goodies will always beat the baddies in Episode Six. Walters’ Supreme Being is only indirectly moral. He certainly wants humans to be wise and sensible because if they blow themselves up they will stop evolving. But the Supreme Being doesn't specially want us to be good. The objective of evolution is to evolve. Walters' religion is the worship of progress per se. Walters stated several times that he wrote science fiction “to inspire the young people of today to be the scientists and technicians of tomorrow.” And it seems that this is the meaning of life: the whole purpose for which the universe was invented.

If Chris had not met the Alien, might he have decided that space-exploration was pointless and the human race might as well stagnate? After his memory was wiped, did he feel the urge to drop out of UNEXA and go and live in an arts-and-crafts commune? Walters’ has created a truly Anglican Supreme Being. He is the God Who Makes No Difference; the God who enjoins you to carry on doing exactly what you would have been doing in any case.

VI: The Most Tremendous Tale of All

Previous Section

Chariots of the Gods (published in 1968) set out to debunk religion. Primitive Man saw spaceships and aliens and mistook them for angels and deities. Christianity and Judaism are on precisely the same level as a Pacific Island cargo cult.

But not everyone who read or heard about the book took it that way. Von Daniken intended to say that what we thought were divine beings were really only extraterrestrials. But his effect on the popular imagination was to give extra-terrestrial visitors the aura of the divine. UFOs could sit alongside leylines and astrology as part of the smorgasbord spirituality of the Age of Aquarius.

Arthur C Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. The corollary is that any fanciful story about magic might turn out to be a perfectly true story about advanced science. And for some people, this is a comforting thought. There might, after all, be a Santa Claus: it’s just that we slightly misunderstood his nature. If God was an Astronaut, then Astronauts may be a kind of god.

2001: A Space Odyssey (published in the same year as Von Daniken) leans heavily into the space-god mythos. Arthur C Clark would, I assume, have regarded “intelligent design” as pure pseudo-science. But the movie uses the idea of paleocontact to salvage some human exceptionalism from the Darwinian wreckage. Humans aren’t just clever monkeys that happened to have evolved in a particular way. They were deliberately taught tool-making by an enigmatic alien visitor. And the visitor had a purpose in mind: it wants humans to find their way to Jupiter so it can force them to evolve again. Natural selection isn't the whole story: there has to be Something Else. The movie, at any rate, gives no hints as to the nature of that Other Thing it just shows us an enigmatic blank slab, onto which we are free to project God or Science or Magic or Whatever The Heck We Like.

You might think that the idea that Aliens gave rise to the idea of Angels — that Moses came up with the idea of YHWH because he didn't know what a spaceship was —would be roundly condemned by theists as blasphemy of the highest order. But it seems that some Christians and even some clergymen just stroked their dog-collars and said “Maybe so.”

“If we ask ‘what has religion got to do with science fiction’, the answer is ‘everything’ 

So wrote one Rev John D Beckwith in a 1972 paperback called The Making of Doctor Who. We have talked about this momentous little publication before: it was the first Whovian reference book ever published; the only source of information on the early years most of us had before Jeremy Bentham started cranking out xeroxes. 

Why on earth was a C of E vicar asked to contribute an essay to a book which was mainly about special effects, Bill Hartnell’s CV and how they filmed the Sea Devils? I think that there is a pretty clear answer to that question. 

The Making of Doctor Who also contained an earnest little essay, presumably by Terrence Dicks, about the “science” in “science fiction”. It explains the TARDIS’s dimensions in terms of flat-landers, cubes and tesseracts; and points out that strange things happen to time when you approach the speed of light. It tells us, wrongly, that people in olden times believed that if you sailed far enough you would fall off the edge of the world: but it makes the much better point that although we know the world is round, we largely feel that it is flat. It blows our mind by telling us about non-Euclidian geometry: if you travel a hundred miles East, a hundred miles South, a hundred miles West and a hundred miles North, you don’t end up back where you started, because the surface of the earth is curved! And if you cut an orange into eight  segments, you end up with “a triangle with a square corner”. (Rather delightfully, my copy of the book has half-century old orange juice stains on the pages!)

I am afraid Dicks wanted us to draw rather anti-scientific conclusions from all this. We shouldn’t laugh at the sailors who thought the world was flat because some of our ideas might be wrong too. If we can be surprised by four-dimensional cubes and the geometry of curved surfaces, then might there not be all sorts of perspectives from which even more surprising things could be true? So, Daleks and sonic-screwdrivers — why not? It is a hand-wave which has turned up often enough in Doctor Who scripts. Bumblebees would be unable to fly if they were fixed winged aircraft, therefore aerodynamics is false, therefore you can believe anything you want to believe about anything.

The essay also introduces young readers to Femi’s paradox. Space is big, right? So “lets be gloomy” and assume that only one star in a hundred has a planet going round it and only one planet in a hundred as life on it and only one life-form in a hundred is intelligent and only one intelligent life form in a hundred has space ships….then (what with space being so big) that’s still a thousand space-going civilisations in Our-Galaxy-Alone.

So where the hell are they?

Dicks has two theories.

1: Those thousand space faring civilisations have got a hundred thousand million stars to check up on (in Our-Galaxy-Alone). And it takes an awfully long time to travel between them. (Did I mention that space was big?) So doubtless they’ll get around to visiting Earth in the next thousand years.

2: Maybe they have visited us in the past, but we didn’t spot them, because we weren’t “scientific enough”.

As evidence, Dicks points, not to the Pyramids or the Nascar lines, but to a book he calls The Holy Bible (in italics). He quotes the passage about the Four Living Creatures of Ezekiel. Aliens, obviously. He could also have pointed to the “wheel in the wheel” which “went up on their four sides and turned not when they went.” No less a person than Eugene H Peterson thinks that sounds a lot like a gyroscope.

And surely this is why they found a Vicar to say some nice things about Doctor Who on the final pages of the book? We have just, pretty blasphemously, claimed that one of the people who wrote the actual Bible — one of the people who, according to Christians, foretold the coming of Jesus — was an ignorant savage who couldn’t tell a four-headed ET from a Seraphim.

So here is the Reverend Beckwith to provide some balance.

Human beings have always looked up at the sky and made up stories, right? So Greek and Roman myths about the sun and the moon are in a very real sense a kind of olden days science fiction. And scientists and science fiction writers wonder what the universe is like, don’t they? Which is in a very real sense the same thing as the people of the Old Testament “looking for god in the heavens”. And get this — Christians think that Time and Space was made by God! So exploring Time and Space is in a very real sense the same as learning about God, isn’t it? And you know who else talked about Time and Space? Jesus! He told his followers that “God can be found and seen in everything around them” and also that “it is no good looking for God way out in space if we don’t recognise him in our familiar surroundings.” (Er…Citation needed.) Space exploration is a Good Thing, because it helps us understand that the Universe “can only have been planned by something greater than Man himself.” If we discover non-human sentient beings in Space, then God made them as well. The Bible totally says there are angels, who are certainly non-human and certainly sentient. So you could say that they are in a very real sense, “the first spacemen”. “Some people” even think the idea of angels came from alien visitations. And Doctor Who fights bad guys, which “proves that there is one basic Truth in God’s creations, and this is that the most valuable and worthwhile thing is goodness”. That is, in a very real sense, the point of Christianity, that good things are good and bad things are bad and good will win out in the end. We will now sing hymn number 425, All Things Bright and Beautiful…

Dicks’ essay was entitled “Could It All Be True?” But perhaps “It” doesn’t just refer to Zarbi and Silurians and boxes that are bigger on the inside than the outside, but the burning bush and the manna from heaven and the star of Bethlehem as well? The transition from Dicks talking about Ezekiel on page 108 and the Rev. saying that science fiction and Christianity were basically the same thing on page 109 doesn’t amount to a coherent argument: but it planted the idea in my head. The answer to both questions might very well be “Yes”. It evoked a mental mood in which watching Doctor Who on Saturday and going to Sunday School on Sunday were not incompatible and that reading Chris Godfrey stories and reading Every Boys Book of Bible Stories were not contradictory. I think that for the next decade (from the age of about nine to the age of about nineteen) I pretty much took it for granted that Kubrick’s "Dawn of Man" was more or less the literal truth; and that that literal truth was more or less what the book of Genesis “really meant”.

As has been said before: it was not a very healthy state of mind to be in. I was one of the Brainy People who the Man in the Street looked down on; but I was also one of the enlightened modern scientists, free from the arrogance of the pharisaical Victorians. I could listen to the preacher preaching and say “Aha; he doesn’t know he is really talking about aliens”, but I could read a science fiction writer talking about aliens and say “Aha, but the writer doesn’t know he is really talking about God.”

In 1963, the Rev JAT Robinson famously conceded that science had proven that God did not exist, but that it was okay to carry on worshipping a non-existent being because “God” really meant “whatever is most true and most important.” When you say that “God is love” you really mean that love is the most really, really, real thing that there is and you are definitely in favour of it" Robinson’s book was entitled Honest to God. Rev Beckwith’s essay was rather pointedly entitled “Honest to Doctor Who”.

Next Section.

V: Who Mourns for Adonis?

Previous Section 

If this were an adult science fiction novel — and I fully grok that it is not — I think we would expect it to develop in one of the following directions.

A: The Aliens are monstrous, with horrifying personal habits and weird Lovecraftian names. The astronauts assume they are evil: but it turns out that Whiskers is right and they are super-evolved space Christs.

B: The Aliens are beautiful and perfectly good: so much so that they regard humans as a blight on the Universe and intend to wipe us out.

C: The Aliens appear to be beautiful and perfectly good, But in fact they are so advanced that they regard humans as moderately interesting bacteria, and their long term plan involves turning us into perfume and baking the remains into pies.

D: The Aliens really are good and beautiful. But they have no concept of ethics, no moral code, and positively deny the existence of God, leaving everything theologically confused.

But this is a kids' book: and within a few pages of their encounter, the Alien confirms that all Whiskers speculations are true. Life really exists on millions of planets. There really is a quality called “development” and older worlds have more of it and younger worlds don’t have so much. And development really does have an end-point and a destination. 

“At the apex of all this, somewhere, is what we can call the Supreme Intelligence, directing and guiding your World, my World, and countless others too.”

“That—that’s God!” gasped Colin.

“Then there is a Deity?” Chris burst out.

But the Supreme Intelligence is not a Creator or a Designer, although it is indirectly influencing and guiding evolution. The Ultimate Question which he can answer is not "how?" but "why?"

“All are evolving towards the Ultimate: towards the Supreme Intelligence. Otherwise, why should Life evolve at all?”

Why should life evolve at all?

Back on their human's spaceship, Walters introduces us to what might be called Chris’s Wager: "God exists because I would like God to exist." Or, less cynically “It is desirable that there should be a God; therefore I might as will proceed as if there is one.” (Socrates, in fairness, said very much the same thing.) 

“The scheme of things as outlined by the Alien was so attractive and exciting, made life so worthwhile and logical, that if it wasn’t true Chris didn’t want to know. If life was just a chance development amid universal chaos, it seemed a waste. If it had no purpose or objective then all the highest incentives to progress were just self-deception. How flat everything would now seem if all that [the Alien] had said were untrue.“

But wasn’t Chris already a pious church-goer before he encountered the Alien? What new element does rebranding God as the Supreme Intelligence add to his life?

The Alien has one more tbombshell to drop. This is not the first time his race has visited our solar system:

“We have sent our emissaries to live among you. They have been as you are and have lived as you do. Of course your people did not realise that we were from another world. Usually they thought we were the prophets and teachers of your own world.”

Tony immediately connects this with UFO reports, and theorises that “the ancients” might have mistaken aliens for divine beings. He goes so far as to say that there are passages in the Bible which might refer to spaceships.

When asked to explain human religious beliefs to the Alien, Chris admits that among “civilised” people, theism is in decline. He does not say that the better we have understood the Universe, the less we have relied on God for explanations. He doesn’t say that we stopped believing in Adam and Eve once we understood natural selection; or that once we knew about microbes and viruses, we stopped attributing sickness to the devil. He looks at it in terms of a cosmic hierarchy of Greatness. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, humans rejected God because they believed that humans now knew everything and would soon be all-powerful. We're invited to look at Victorian scepticism about God in the same light as the Man in the Street's scepticism about extraterrestrial life: a hubristic belief that Man Is Tops.

“As we thought we were wresting Nature’s secrets away from her, so belief in God began to crumble. Given time, man could know everything and would be all-powerful.”

But it is again the Brainy Chaps who have seen the fallacy of this:

“For every new discovery that was made, complete understanding seemed to have become further away. Gradually, I think we are losing the arrogance that made us see Man as the be-all and end-all of creation.”

Atheism is the arrogant believe that the human mind is supreme; theism, the humble acknowledgement that it is not. Chris's story is a variation of the one in the Bible. Pride is the root of every sin. Man tastes the fruit of the tree of knowledge and believes that he can become as gods, knowing good from evil.

Next Section

IV: Life, the Universe and Everything

Previous Section

On page 89 of the book old “Whiskers”, the comic relief ex-Battle of Britain duffer tells Lord Benson, out of the blue “I think there must be a God.”

Benson does not reply “Well, of course you do, you’re British, dammit.”

Neither does he reply “Since we have attended Holy Communion together, I rather took that for granted.”

On the contrary, Benson is rather embarrassed. He thinks that religion is “something which one didn’t talk about” — despite having literally knelt down and prayed out loud with the teenage Chris in the first volume. One wonders who all those silent prayers that he keeps uttering have been directed at?

Whiskers explains his thinking. 

“...the universe is older and more complicated than the human mind can conceive. It’s older than we can imagine even if we accept the big bang theory of its creation….” 

and so on at some length. In summary, his argument goes like this:

1: The Universe is big.
2: The Universe is old.
3: The Universe is complex.
4: The Universe is ordered.
5: Humans do not understand the Universe.
6: Therefore Humans are not the greatest thing in the Universe
7: Therefore something greater than Humans must exist.

I am not sure he actually needed to bother with stages 1-6. If there is extraterrestrial life, then it must by definition be either a: greater than humans b: less great than humans or c: about equal to humans. And if there are a huge number of extraterrestrial life forms, then it is highly probable that at least one of them must be our superior. The proposition is actually “If we are not the only thing in the universe, then we are almost certainly not the greatest thing in it.”

But is there any extraterrestrial life at all? Walters explains that someone called “the man in the street”, relying on something called “common sense” is entirely skeptical about it.

“If these brainy chaps wanted to believe that, then let them. Mr Ordinary Man knew better. He felt in his bones that he was ‘the tops’. How could there be a higher form of life, he asked himself proudly as he looked around at his pubs and bingo halls, his motor cars and tinned foods, his palaces and slums.”

The Man in the Street does not point to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or King Lear as proof of man’s superiority: this is the voice of grammar school educated British Interplanetary Society member sneering at the plebs who only made it to Secondary Modern. But It’s a decent enough device for getting readers on side. Obviously, we all want to be on the side of the Brainy Chaps.

We aren’t told what the man-in-the-street thinks about religion: but we get a brief insight into what Brainy Chaps think. Benson, it turns out, is strictly agnostic. He thinks that the universe has three qualities

1: Complexity
2: Beauty
3: Infinite wonder.

It isn’t clear if he thinks that complexity is intrinsically beautiful, or if there could have been a universe was beautiful and simple, or one which was complicated but ugly. It also isn’t clear if “wonder”, “complexity” and “beauty” are intrinsic properties that the universe has, or merely descriptions of human beings reaction to it. But he does think that they might imply that there is a “thing” that “lies behind” the universe.

He does not think that this Thing, if it exists, would have explanatory power. He does not say that the universe is so complicated, beautiful and wonderful that some Thing even more complicated, beautiful and wonderful must have had a hand in the design of it. But if such a Thing exists, we can reasonably ask what the Universe is for. The existence of the Thing implies that the universe has a “meaning” and that there is a “direction in which it is moving.”

It is trivially true that if Man is not the greatest thing in the universe, then something greater than Man must exist. And if there are many things in the Universe and many degrees of greatness, one Thing must necessarily be the greatest of all. But it is by no means the case that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" is also the "greatest thing which could possibly exist". But we seem to have agreed that "the greatest thing which happens to exist" can reasonably be given the name "God". 

Whiskers reasoning goes beyond Benson’s

1: A race with more complicated machines and greater scientific understanding can be said to be more advanced than one without those things.
2: An older race must have been developing longer than a younger race.
3: An older race must have been evolving for longer than a younger race — indeed, it must be "more evolved".
4: Advancement, development and evolution all imply an increase in greatness.
5: The thing with the most greatness is called God.
6: Therefore older races must be closer to God than younger ones.
7: God is by definition good.
8: Therefore older races must necessarily be more good than younger ones, and our heroes have nothing to fear from the aliens.

Whiskers is, in fact, conflating “greatness” with “goodness”: he is assuming that “more advanced” is synonymous with “better”. We could label this Taylor’s Fallacy: “Somewhere in the universe there has to be something better than man”.

Sir Billy, who has replaced Sir George as head of UNEXA, points out that evolution is not a matter of linear improvement: “many other things” apart from the human mind has evolved. But Whiskers refutes this — there have been “set backs and side tracks” but the “trend” has always been towards greater intelligence. The arc of evolution is long, but it bends towards Prof Albert Einstein. 

This is indeed the view of evolution promulgated in 1970s school text books which tended to show chimpanzees turning into stockbrokers and codfish turning into triceratops as automatically as kittens turn into pussy cats and tadpoles turn into frogs. A scientific theory about change and adaptation has morphed into a narrative about inevitable improvement. This provided Creationists with a convenient stick with which to beat Charles Darwin: since the "inevitable improvement" theory was obviously silly, the whole idea of evolution was obviously fake news.

“What you are saying,” Lord Benson interposed “is that because [the Alien] must come from an older race, it must necessarily be from a more advanced and intelligent race. That evolution is always towards a higher plane, is always an advance.”

“Something like that.” Whiskers agreed…”Evolution has a definite direction and objective” he declared firmly. “I believe it is towards God himself.”

And later

“So what you are saying is that because this Alien comes from a far more technically advanced civilisation than ours, from a race that must have been evolving far longer than ours, they must be nearer and more like God than we are?” Lord Benson enquired.

So: we have a hypothesis. Because the Alien is technologically superior to humans, it must necessarily be morally superior to humans as well. 

And back on the surface of Planetty McPlanettface, we see the hypothesis being tested.

 

Next Section

III: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Previous Section 

The boffins have detected peculiar signals coming from...Planetty MacPlanetFace. No-one can listen to the signals for very long without getting a blinding migraine. Since it is unlikely that something so mindbogglingly annoying could have evolved purely by chance, the boffins conclude that Someone must be trying very hard to get our attention. So not one but two space ships are sent to investigate.

The previous volume, Nearly Neptune, ended on a small cliffhanger: Chris Godfrey was offered the job of deputy director of UNEXA on condition he gave up being an astronaut. We have already been told that astronauts retire at the age of forty, and it is very hard to see how he can be less than thirty-seven at this point. First Contact? begins in media res with the mission already well under way. It turns out that Chris is in command for one last trip. The American One, the Russian One, and the Working Class One from the previous volumes are all present and correct, and the empty spaces are filled by The Welsh One, the Scots One, the Bald One and the Not-Bald One. They really aren’t characterised beyond this. Mervyn Williams (really) has a poetic soul. During a space walk he intones “Beautiful it is, like a great black mantle with diamonds sewn all over it”. This is very much the kind of book in which people "intone" things. They also "splutter" them, "gasp" them and "murmur" them. But they hardly ever just "say" them.

A charming sense of amateurism pervades the proceedings. No-one seems to have given a moment’s consideration to what Chris will actually do if he encounters Aliens. You might think some diplomats, heads of state, anthropologists and even philosophers would be on hand to advise him, but everyone is fine with the chaps on the rocket-ship just winging it.

The unstated assumption seems to be that astronauts are a special class of human being, and that only someone who is good at “being an astronaut” can possibly be sent into space. It’s a little like the idea that there is a quality called “the right stuff” — quite distinct from aptitude — and it is that which makes someone a great test-pilot. Certainly our heroes have technical know-how — we are told that the ship has banks of hard to understand controls — but plot points always turn on things which the boffins on Earth and Tony (the Working Class one) on the space ship have cobbled together. When the strange sounds being emitted by Planetty McPlanetface render communication between the two ships impossible, Tony improvises a morse code machine from bits and pieces on the ships. The Boffs on earth borrow one from a museum. Sir George Benson (the outgoing director) works out how the signals work by playing them to himself in his back garden, moving his wheel chair to various distances to calculate the range of the migraine effect. He has to go down the road to the electrical shop to buy an extension cable!

These kinds of details make it easy for us to put ourselves in the heroes' place, and imagine that we ourselves are out there enjoying all the diamonds and black velvet. During the communication crisis, Tony decides that the best thing to do is make a space-walk to the other ship and explain the problem to them face-to-face; and Walters takes us slowly through him putting on the space suit, stepping out of the air-lock, navigating his way through empty space... It’s not the only way of writing for kids, but it works. It’s very much the technique which makes Enid Blyton and JK Rowling so compelling for anyone under the age of eleven and so unbearable for anyone older. 

So: the boys land on Planetty McPlanetface. There really is an Alien space craft there — all knobbly and un-aerodynamic and without a proper door. Communications are established and the Alien invites a delegation aboard for a face-to-face meeting.

The ship turns out to come from another solar system, where there is no death, no gravity, and a different shaped gear-stick on the Mini Metro. It doesn’t need doors because Aliens have mastered the art of walking through walls. It travels faster than the speed of light along concentrated gravity beams that criss-cross the galaxy. The Alien itself is aloof, but friendly and humanoid and good looking. The Not-Bald-One thinks he looks like an archangel, although the Bald-One points out the Lucifer was a fallen angel.

Chris takes the Alien at its word. But Morey (the American one) thinks Chris has trusted the angelic extraterrestrial far too easily and probably been mind-controlled. When Chris and the others do not return from their second sojourn on the vessel, he decides that the most sensible course of action would be to blow up the Alien Spaceship and return home. He plans to take control of one of the Earth ships and go kamikaze. Nothing we know about Morey has given us any reason to think that he would be this reckless. I was kind of waiting for the revelation that he was the one who had been hypnotised.

The Alien of course, knows what is happening immediately. He takes control of the suicide ship and it bounces harmlessly off his force-field. But far from sending Morey to stand outside the headmaster’s office, the Alien pats him on the head and tells him that he has been a very brave boy. After all, he truthfully thought the Alien was evil, and was courageously prepared to lay down his life to protect the human race. But clearly, humans are not yet ready to join the wider galactic community, so everyone is sent back to earth with a jolly good mind-wipe. The amnesiac astronauts tell the boffins that although they believe they saw an Alien spaceship, by the time they landed, it had disappeared; so they turned around and came straight home.

The story ends on another dot-dot-dot moment: George Benson realises that they were actually on the planet for several days and something is being concealed.

Next Section

II: The Road Less Travelled

Previous Section

Science fiction is about opening doors and looking at things from new angles. I remember the first line of 2001: A Space Odyssey — “behind every human being there stands three ghosts; that is the ratio in which the dead outnumber the living” — far better than I remember the nonsense about monoliths and mad computers. Many young minds were blown by Phillip K Dick or the Matrix long before they knew that grown-up philosophers worried about the mind/body problem. Even a silly schoolboy writer like Edgar Rice Burroughs could be life-changing; not because his science is good — his science is non-existent — but because he gives you permission to imagine what the world would look like from a completely different perspective.

Sometimes you return to a place, or person or a book you knew a long time ago and say: “Oh: that’s where I learned that particular idea. I thought that it was just what I always believed.”

Or, of course “That’s the moment at which I took the wrong turning.”

First Contact?  is the twelfth book in the children’s science fiction saga which began with Blast Off At Woomera. The books contain a little bit of engineering, a little bit of popular astronomy, a lot of narrow escapes and a light seasoning of muscular Christianity. But they have thus far been largely devoid of anything that could be called “ideas”.

But First Contact? contains the biggest possible idea. The book literally reveals the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. And it isn’t a joke or a punch-line. I am pretty sure that Hugh Walters believed it, and wanted his readers to believe it. And for a decade, at least, from the age of eight to the age of eighteen, I did believe it. I had completely forgotten the source: but I took it for granted.

It’s Holy Blood and Holy Grail for infants. 

It’s Olaf Stapleton for Year 4. 

It’s complete codswallop.

Next Section

I: Current Puns

Strange noises are coming from Uranus. The boffins decide they want a very close look at Uranus. Because no-one has ever seen Uranus before. But it turns out that Uranus is being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's, yet as mortal as our own. 

I don’t think I got the joke when I first read First Contact? There was zero sex-education at primary school: I don’t think I even knew words like “anus” or “penis”. There were the words that were used at home and the words that were used in the playground. And if anyone had laughed I would have priggishly pretended not to understand, because science fiction was very serious and important and grown up.

It’s a very silly joke, because the correct pronunciation isn’t Your Anus; it’s Urine Us.

Continues. 

The Mystic

Nearly Neptune

by Hugh Walters

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

I suppose Orinoco must still be picking up the litter in some park somewhere and I don't know about it and that makes me feel sad.  The Clangers have had a hundred and four new adventures, of which I have only shared five or six. That makes me slightly sad as well. I haven't thought about Doctor Doolittle or Hal and Roger for decades. Maybe I should see if they are on social media.

Strange, the loyalty you feel to people who don't exist.

Some of our childhood friends grew up with us. Some people think it is terribly smart to say "Doctor Who is just a children's programme" or "Star Wars is just a 1970s B movie" but if they really thought that was true there would be no point in saying it. No-one has ever pointed out that actually Bagpuss is a children's programme.

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

Even at the age of ten, I could see that Hugh Walters had run out of steam. The formula of the series has become narrower and narrower and finally disappeared up Uranus.

It's not hard to see why. Space travel, simply as such, is not very interesting. Four guys in a small box, floating in literal nothingness a long way away from anything else. Space travel stories are mostly not about the getting there, but about what happens when you arrive. And if you don't know very much about planetary physics and have ruled out aliens, one destination is a lot like another.

Is space itself interesting? Hugh Walters occasionally pauses to tell us that it is very big, very black, and has lots of stars in it:

“Though he’d seen it many times before, the vision of space never failed to make Morey catch his breath. Innumerable points of brilliant light shone unwinkingly from every direction. He knew that the void itself, not having the power to reflect light, would be like black velvet, but there were so many stars that he scarcely saw a black patch at all."

There is some implication that the astronauts find just being up there among the sparkly velvet a spiritual experience, or (though Walters doesn't put it like that) an addiction. But I can't help feeling that it would have been safer and cheaper to go and swoon over some Lake District daffodils. Or possibly find a waterfall and have sublime feelings about it. 

When I Was Very Young, I wanted more than anything to be an Astronaut. I think I harmed my Academic Career by insisting on doing science subjects, even though my bent was clearly towards the humanities. "O" Level Biology kept alive the dream of someday being a Space Man. Now I Am Six I read about the nasty rich guy's fantasy of space colonisation and I think "Even if I had a trillion pounds, I wouldn't spend it on being shot into near orbit and floating for a few seconds in a vacuum."

I couldn't have articulated any of this when I was ten, of course. But I vividly remember sitting on the bed in my Granny's spare room reading Nearly Neptune and thinking "They are going to sacrifice their lives for each other. Again. That's all that ever happens in these stories now." Expressions like "jump the shark" weren't in vogue. But you don't have to have an 'A' Level in English literature to spot that the ghost is always the fairground owner in a mask, and Dennis always ends up across his Dad's knee.

Did I stop reading the books? Of course I didn't stop reading the books. Do you imagine that I would allow my friend Chris to go on a space mission without me? But the Tripods increasingly became my drug of choice.

*

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

My four friends are shot in the direction of Neptune in a rocket. There is a technical fault. All seems lost. The ground crew give them up for dead. But with some technical acumen and a last minute intervention by God, they survive, and come back to earth, and start planning for their next trip. Which is to say, the plot of Nearly Neptune is exactly the same as the plot of the previous ten books: but there are no telepathic twins, floating martian ghosts, alien fungi, subterranean eggs or unexplained domes to add spice. There isn't even a Russian saboteur or a nasty boffin who turns out to have a heart of gold.

"Neptune!" Morey exclaimed "Why Neptune?"

Why indeed? One imagines Hugh Walters sitting at his typewriter coming up with titles -- Yacht to Uranus? Unicycle to Uranus? Yodelling On Uranus? -- and then giving up.

"Neptune is more favourably placed" explains Sir George Boffin "it will be several years before we could have another shot at it.

Walters is shamelessly good at dramatic opening lines. Of course I didn't actually believe that Chris or any of his three companions were dead, exclamation mark. True, Stan Lee had taught me that good guys did sometimes get killed off; but I knew perfectly well that entire casts never get wiped out on page one. Still, it was a good hook. And it could have been a good structural twist. Why not skip over the boring set up (briefing, training, launch) and skip straight to the part where there has been a Terrible Disaster and our heroes are facing Certain Death?

But Walters cannot resist the power of The Formula. Admittedly, we spend Chapter One in ground control. Sir George Benson, the chief boffin is "overwhelmed with grief" and Whiskers, the funny boffin is "smitten with deep grief". But Gillanders, the Australian Boffin says that "They accepted the risks openly and cheerfully" and everyone pulls themselves together.

By Chapter Two, we have gone into a flashback sequence. It's rather tiresomely written in the past perfect ("It had been six months before that Sir George Benson sent for his favourite crew") but otherwise it's business as usual. "Rides on the giant centrifuge had been childsplay....They had also to spend periods in hot and cold chambers to test out the insulation of their suits". By chapter three we're seeing the story from Chris's point of view. I suppose there are homeopathic qualities of dramatic irony because we know something is going to go horribly wrong. But something always goes horribly wrong.

*

"Chris Godfrey and his three companions were dead!"

Was Walters a plotter or a pantser? He typed for an hour each morning before going off to the furniture warehouse; and churned out two books each year. Did he write that first sentence knowing why our heroes were (apparently) dead? Or was he one of those writers who just put paper in the typewriter and started to type?

It's rather common in old-fashioned 2-cents a word pulp stories for Heroes to wake up in white rooms suffering from memory loss. They stagger through mysterious doorways into blank white landscapes. They keep drinking coffee or whiskey or in some cases smoking joints. We see the story forming in the authors head and on the page. Douglas Adams posthumous Dirk Gentley novel had the hero just walking randomly around London looking for a case to solve.

Miss Griffiths often told us to write a story on a set subject, say, A Picnic By The Sea or What Would Happen If Jesus Came To Tea. We wrote directly into our exercise books; in long hand with fountain pens, and were expected to finish inside an hour.

Did this first exposure to the idea of "writing" privilege pantsing over plotting? Did the emphasis on neat cursive writing tacitly teach us that revision was cheating? Crossings out were a mortal sin. What kind of writer does that tend to produce? A blocked writer, reluctant to put pen to paper until the perfect sentence has formed in their head? A dull writer, forced safely to write cliche and unadorned prose, with lots of adjectives? It was a beautiful sunny day when there was a knock at my shiny green door. Who should it be but sweet little baby Jesus himself. Would you like a nice cup of hot tea in a red mug I said brightly oh yes please he replied happily? I have always thought that the popularity of J.K Rowling owes something to the fact that her prose is the sort of prose that junior school English teachers would think was good prose.

But maybe the school teachers were unconsciously breeding poets in the mould of Ted Hughes and Alan Ginsburg where first thoughts are the best thoughts, the mind is tethered directly to the writing hand and once the thought fox has left his footprint in the white room it is really too late to change anything?

I think Walters wrote the first sentence at the top of his page, and trusted that the momentum would carry him through the set-up and the first few chapters, and that he would find out what the terrible disaster was at the same time the boffins and the readers did. I think he got to the Midpoint and realised he still had no idea what was going to happen; and said "Oh, soddit. Mechanical failure due to human error."

He drops a little hint that the ship is going to be pierced by a meteor. Holes made by tiny ones are automatically patched, but large ones could portentously puncture the oxygen tanks and the fuel pods. "But this was so unlikely that the possibility could be forgotten". And Walters does, indeed, forget it. The disaster just kind of happens.

"For some unaccountable reason there was a loose connection among the hundreds of wires that were housed within the hypo control casing."

You're the effing writer, Hugh: account for it.

*

The boys wake up from suspended animation. They find that the loose wire has caused a fire, wasting a lot of oxygen and fuel and filling the ship up with smoke. Chris "his chest feeling as if it was ready to burst" goes to the store room and "exerting every ounce of his ebbing strength" he manages to open the locker doors and find some space helmets. He "feels the perspiration running down his face" but "feels a great flood of relief" when he is able to use the space helmets to revive the other astronauts. They temporarily abandon ship. The sight of "the star-spangled heavens" fills Chris "with wonder at its indescribable beauty" but he also shivers when he sees the "vast emptiness surrounding the four astronauts". Everyone agrees that they are "tiny specks of life in a vast hostile universe".

Fortunately, the tiny specks of life manage to get the radio working and tell Mission Control that Chris Godfrey and his three companions are still alive. Unfortunately, the retro rockets are bust, so there is no way of turning the ship round. Fortunately, it would be possible for someone to go out into space, physically push the ship, and allow Newtonian mechanics to do the rest. Unfortunately, the person doing so would shoot himself off into space and never be heard from again. Fortunately, while Chris is nobly sacrificing himself, Tony, the only competent person on board, works out a way of using oxygen to fix the jet packs ("compressed air guns") and the ship is turned around without anyone being deaded. Unfortunately, the journey home will take eight months. Fortunately, Tony is able to fix the cryogenic system. Unfortunately, there are only two functioning chambers. And very unfortunately there isn't enough food for even two crewmen to survive that long. So while two of the crew are in with a good chance of getting home, the other two are quite definitely and irrevocably going to die. Which is very unfortunate indeed.

Walters has backed himself into a corner which raises genuine moral questions about life and death -- questions about the ethics of suicide and euthanasia. Questions about faith and mortality. Chris has been said to be an active church-goer. You might imagine he would at some point say something about heaven. Or ask one of the boffins to read them the Last Rites. I suppose Serge is a godless commie. I know it's a kids' book, but it's a kid's book which is all about dying. And it's rather peculiar about the subject of death. 

George Boffin, on earth, wonders whether to leave the radio connected or not.

"Would it be kind to let he astronauts end their days in privacy? Or should they keep in contact right to the end? Benson didn't think he could stand that."

When he realises that he may have to decide which two get the cryogenic couches, he again seems to focus on his own discomfort:

"Now two only must be selected to live....It was going to be a ghastly job making the decision."

Chris naturally assumes that, as captain, he will sacrifice himself for his crew: and Serge and Morey both beg to be allowed to be one of the ones who cops it. Chris is a little disappointed that Tony is the only one not to volunteer. But of course, once he has completed the repairs, Tony goes off by himself, slips into a space suit, and jumps out of the airlock. Why he bothers with the spacesuit is not entirely clear. But while he "floats in space and lets oblivion come creeping over him" "a feeling of guilt floods over" all the others. They were all planning to leap out of the airlock as well, and are ashamed that Tony got there first. So they all go outside, drag him back inside, and try to have a civilised discussion about the situation:

"I’m sure we’d all be prepared to take a one-way walk into space but we must decide rationally who’s to do it.”

“Have you thought, Chris, how the two survivors will feel?” Serge asked quietly. “I don’t want to be one of them.”

“Nor me,” Morey burst out. “I couldn’t face life with that on my mind.”

Everyone wants to die on behalf of his friends because it would be too painful to know that one of his friends had died on behalf of him. Which makes you think that if they were really heroic, they guys would be offering to stay alive to spare their friends the emotional trauma. I am reminded of the old joke about the sadist and the masochist.) (*) Walters would have been a young child at the end of World War 1 and a young adult at the end of World War II: one wonders if some traumatic survivor guilt is working its way out in these stories? 

When the team learned that they were going to Neptune, they were as "excited as schoolboys". When they thought about the dangers, they were "as gay as schoolboys". Early in the mission, Whiskers told Tony that he would "give him a good hiding" when he gets home if he was not more "respectful to his elders". By my sums, Chris is 37 and Tony is 29. But Walters is still writing them as if they were the adolescent heroes of Blast Off At Woomera and the Domes of Pico. Like the First World War poets, he sees a certain poignant beauty in the idea of young men expiring together before old age and women can spoil them. They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man, the lads that will die in their glory and never be old. 

"We've always been together" Tony insisted "And we must be together to the end. Let's step out with arms linked and keep it that way."

In the end, they agree to, er, take it in turns, with two guys spending some time in cold sleep while the others try to survive on as little food and oxygen as possible, and then swapping places. Exactly how this helps, I don't know. I would have thought it introduces a ghoulishly random element, so that the two who are in deep freeze when the others drop dead from starvation get to go home. I suppose it means that no-one has to make the terrible choice. The discussion become even more ghoulish. What's to stop the two chaps who are awake killing themselves as soon as the other two chaps are asleep? They'd promise not too. But wouldn't giving your life for your best friend make it okay to break a promise, even if you'd crossed your heart and pinky promised?

“No, I don’t. If we give our word to each other, that’s more binding than anything,” Chris said.

“But we can easily counter that. We’d all give an undertaking that if any pair of us woke up to find the other two had broken their solemn pledge, then the survivors, too, would step out into space.”

The Russians used experimental dogs to test the early space craft. One wonders whether UNEXA ever used trained lemmings.

And in the end, there is a deus ex machina. Something in the original malfunction has affected the ship's heating system; so the two crewmen who were awake when it finally blows (Chris and Morey, as it happens) are accidentally put into cold sleep. When he introduced the concept, Walters had thought through how cryogenics might work: he talked about little implants to keep the heart functioning an special injections of space anti-freeze to stop the blood from freezing. But it seems that to get our heroes out of a hole, it works just as well to go to sleep in a chilly space capsule.

*

This is the twelfth novel and Chris's eleventh space expedition. Internal chronology suggests that twenty years have passed since his first adventure, and astronauts have to retire at the age of 40. Sir George, who must be close to 65, announces his retirement at the end of this book. Australian Boffin Billy Gilanders takes over as head of UNEXA, and asks Chris to be his deputy. Chris isn't too sure:

"He should have been proud, of course But was he? Was it worthwhile being recommended for this marvellous appointment if it meant the end of his journeys in space? He must take a long, long time before he made up his mind."

This question is considerably more interesting than anything which happens in this morbidly lacklustre volume.

(*) "Please, please, will you beat me?" "No."

Andrew has been re-reading a few of these books every autumn for the last few years. Read the other essays right here....

I only get time to write these things because people like you take the trouble to support me; so if you think this stuff is fine, please, consider joining my Patreon....

...And None Of Them Were Wearing Eyepatches!

The Mohole Mystery
Hugh Walters

Sooner or later, it had to be faced. Chris Godfrey spent four whole books exploring the Moon; but he whizzed through Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Mercury and Saturn in only five volumes. (He's apparently sharing Mars with some other astronauts; but their expeditions are distinctly Off Stage.) Is the series going to come to a preemptive close after Neptune, Pluto and The One With the Rude Name? Or are there other places where our heroes can confront Certain Death? Walters speculated about interstellar travel when introducing us to the idea of cryogenics; but in the end he shies away from it. He probably wouldn't have done alien civilisations; and crashing into a barren moon on Alpha Centuri wouldn't have been much more fun than crashing into one on Pluto.

So: this time around our heroes take a detour. A journey to the Centre of the Earth. Well; maybe not the centre, but forty miles down. Pretty darn deep, at any rate. It appears that between the earth's crust and the earth's mantel is something called the Mohorovicic Discontinuity, which it is impossible to drill through. So, naturally, the Boffins are trying really hard to drill through it, and they've found a weak spot in, er, Dudley; just near the Castle Zoo, as a matter of fact. (Tony comes from Birmingham, but no-one thinks it polite to say so.) Initial probes have discovered an absolutely ginormous cave, along with traces of nasty alien microbes. So the only option is to send some explorers down and find out what is going on. Sir George also claims that if they don't explore the cave, everyone will have to stop mining coal and drilling for oil and civilisation as we now know it will come to an end: but no-one seems particularly bothered by this.

So: we have an exciting variation on the archetypal Astronaut Goes Up / Astronaut Comes Down plot-line. Astronaut goes down. Astronaut's descent capsule lands awkwardly. Astronaut has no way of getting home and comes to terms with Certain Death. Astronaut's friends mount rescue attempt. Astronauts come up. 

It feels a little slight: the suspicion arises that Walters is engaged in what can only be described as padding. But overall it works better than it should. The comic relief and side plots manage to be a reasonable amount of fun; and the focus on the three heroes left on the surface lends a certain desperation to the plight of the one trapped all alone in the underworld. 

Once or twice, Walters seems to be attempting what I can only describe as humour. The capsule in which our heroes are going to make their descent is manufactured by Rubery Owen, a company who normally make aircraft and racing cars. Our author permits himself to be wryly amused by the formality and self-importance of British Industry.

A magnificent commissionaire, who was obviously also an archduke at the very least, emerged through swing glass doors to bid them welcome...The noble person who condescended to act as a commissionaire, personally conducted the director and his party to the Chairman's private office.

I think that it is probably a mistake to do this sort of thing in a children's book: I am pretty sure the irony was lost on me. If a grown up tells you that some West Midlands car firms are staffed by exiled Russian nobility, at ten years old you are inclined to assume that this is a true and obvious fact.

Wing Commander Gatreux -- "old Whiskers" -- who hasn't been heard from since the Mars adventure, makes a reappearance. His whole purpose in life is to provide comic relief, and he knows it. As soon as he arrives, our heroes start to act like naughty school children, putting an "apple pie bed" in his quarters and laughing at the colour of his PJs. 

He also has a very unreliable car:

It was one of the former officer's main occupations in life to wage a constant battle to keep the Red Peril in running order. Nevertheless it had made the journey from Buckinghamshire to the Midlands without any really vital parts dropping off.

Not, I concede, the funniest joke ever made: but it bespeaks a lighter tone than the previous volumes have had. Silly Whiskers and Stuffy Sir George Benson are a passable double act which adds some much needed light and shade to the roster of faceless boffins. 

And, slightly more surprisingly, the Chairman of RO comes across as, if not quite a character, then at least as an endearing caricature. He starts out as only one degree removed from Reginald Perrin's C.J. He  humourlessly insists that if the capsule is scheduled to be completed by 0320 then it can be tested at 0321. He boasts to the astronauts that he sometimes travels as much as half a million miles in a single year. But when our heroes are facing (SPOILER ALERT) Certain Death, he puts on some overalls and gets his own hands dirty on the factory floor. He even refuses to go to hospital until the rescue project is completed, despite having been involved in a serious industrial accident.

"But you must have an X-ray" the doctor declared firmly. "You may have a broken shoulder and crushed ribs."

"I don't care if I've been decapitated" the industrialist spluttered "I'm stopping on this job. Don't you realise there's a life at stake?"

The shaft that has been drilled from Dudley Zoo to the mysterious cave is very narrow; and there is no time to make it wider; so a single astronaut ("subterrainaut") is going to have to squeeze into a very small capsule and be dropped forty miles into the cavern below. This is one reason why the mission is going to be undertaken by astronauts and not, say pot-holers: they have experience with free-fall. There is quite a lot of not entirely implausible technical detail about how the capsule works:when the altimeter tells the pilot that the capsule is close to the cave bottom, he can activate rockets (using his knees) to slow his descent; and the boffins on the surface will shine an infrared beam down the hole which will guide him home. But only a small astronaut can squeeze into the tiny capsule; and an inordinate amount of time is spent watching our heroes desperately hoping that they will be chosen for this mission. Morrey, being an American, has "broad shouldered" printed on his character sheet and is ruled out from the beginning: Tony and Chris are both a little on the large side. Like Doc Smiths Lensemen, they seem to subsist entirely on a diet of bacon and eggs, steak, and apple pie. But Serge, being Russian, is small enough to squeeze into the tin can. 

This leads to a sub-plot which almost amounts to a shaggy dog story. The aforementioned Whiskers, being ex-RAF is wheeled in to train Serge for the mission. The others join the gym sessions in solidarity and to show they are still a team. Whiskers makes a big deal out of being too old for this sort of thing; and affects to be surprised that there are only four sets of gym equipment, forcing him to sit and watch while the young men do their keep fit sessions. Naturally, Chris sees right through this ruse and finds spare exercise bikes and rowing machines which Whiskers has hidden, shaming the old man to do PE lessons with the lads. But of course, this precisely what Whiskers intended: he knows that working together to catch out the old man will have wonderful effect on the boys' morale. 

Serge is shot down the shaft; and instantly meets with one of those Certain Death Scenarios. The absent-minded boffins didn't realise that all the the debris from their drilling will be piled up on the cave floor. When the capsule lands on the mountain of rubble it topples onto its side, making a return to the surface impossible. (And forty miles of solid rock means he can't radio for help. A shame they didn't have any telepathic twins on hand.) Serge immediately flips into the standard heroic suicidal ideation. 

He would have to compose himself and await his end as calmly as possible.

He would explore the underworld until his oxygen gave out. Then he would die with his courage intact.

He would only have to cut off his oxygen supply and he's soon fade out for ever. Or he would remove his helmet and allow his lungs to be scorched by the searing heat. Valiant Serge shrugged off those unworthy thoughts. It was his duty, instilled in him by years of training, to remain alive to the bitter end...

If he had to die, at least he'd die cleanly...

Serge expects to die of starvation, or for his oxygen to run out; but weirdly and rather arbitrarily, Walters introduces an additional Peril. The Cave is inhabited by a strange life-form which may be a faceless limbless animal but which may also be an unusually mobile mushroom. A swarm of hollow eggs which are capable of rolling up the hill; and which, for no clear reason, are converging on our hero...and which periodically burst and shower him with potentially deadly alien dust. There is something uncanny -- at times very slightly Lovecraftian -- about this idea. But at the same time it feels exactly like the sort of thing you'd get in 1960s BBC TV show. You can just picture the black and white astronaut on the studio floor while BBC special effect eggs on strings move slowly towards him, just before the cliffhanger music kicks in.

No-one seems to have the slightest curiosity about this new life-form: Serge's immediate reaction is to throw stones at it. 

In the end, it is engineering and PE which saves the day. The heroic mechanics at RO jerry-rig a capsule with two compartments; and, crucially, legs, so that it can land safely on the uneven cave floor. And Chris realises that because he joined in Whiskers' gym sessions he has lost nearly a stone and will now fit in the tiny capsule. (I told you there would be a punch line.) So he makes another descent, and drags Serge back to the surface, in the nick of time. The borehole is sealed. No-one tells Chris that he isn't allowed to glance backwards, and everyone seems to have forgotten about the imminent threat to Civilisation. 

Overall, the book is surprisingly effective, even though it is obvious that Walters is sometimes scraping the barrel to find space-filling strategies. ("At Hendon, Serge joined the motorway and was bowling along nicely until he came to the Aylesbury road fork...") But there is something genuinely nightmarish about Serge's predicament; dropped forty miles down into a dark cave he has to chance of getting out of; isloated from your friends; trying to face The End bravely as weird alien animals creep inexorably towards you.

NOTE: Whiskers' got married in Blast Off at Woomera (1957); his children were away at school in Expedition Venus and are now at university, which is consistent with this book being set in 1976 or 77. Spaceship To Saturn, with its 18 month round trip and 6 months of preparation and a longer than usual internal timeline. Earth mainly gave up burning coal for fuel in "the late 60s and early 70s" and the Cold War -- weapons in general -- are now part of "the bad old days". However, the boys bet "half a crown" on a game of snooker and Tony manages to win "eleven shillings" off Whiskers. 

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