Summary: Near the end of the 21st century, man made his final assault on the barriers of the fourth dimension — time — and they came tumbling down around him . . . In search of the truth are an expert mind-traveler, a phantasmal Dark Woman, an academic with the theory that time runs backward, plus aliens whose perspective includes uncreated time. A godlike vision or an child-like fantasy? Whatever they experienced, the reader must decide for himself in this splendid piece of psychologicial science fiction.
About the Author: Brian Wilson Aldiss was born in East Dareham, Norfolk, in 1925 and has written over 40 novels and over 300 short stories, making him one of the most important voices in science fiction writing today. His first work of science fiction was Non-Stop (1958) and he won the Most Promising New Author award at the SF convention the following year.
In 1962 Hothouse won a Hugo award given by the World Science Fiction Society and in the seventies he explored the experiences of a young soldier in The Horatio Stubbs Saga novels. With Frankenstein Unbound and Moreau’s Other Island he paid tribute to two founders of SF - Mary Shelley and H.G. Wells. By the time of the release of the well-received Hellinconia sequence he had become one of the most prominent British SF writers.
Since 1961 Aldiss has edited anthologies including SF Horizons and has regularly reviewed for the TLS as well as numerous newspapers. Other works include a history of SF, Billion Year Spree, an autobiography Twinkling of an Eye and some poetry. In 1999 he became A Grand Master at the Nebula awards given by the SF and Fantasy Writers Guild for his lifetime achievements in SF writing.
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Analysis: Roland E. Murphy, writing in The Anchor Bible Dictionary, describes the use of "wisdom" in the Hebrew bible, what has been called "wisdom literature," ". . . as a term that can be used to indicate certain books which deal particularly with (biblical) wisdom, or it can refer to a movement in the ancient world associated with 'teachers' or sages, and it can also suggest a particular understanding of reality . . ." I quote this definition because I believe it offers us a literary context in which to understand Aldiss' story. Cryptozoic! is, I would maintain, a narrative about the epiphany of hokma or sophia.
Another context which illuminates Aldiss' story, this time one that is philosophical but not unrelated to wisdom literature, is that of Socratic thought. In particular, the thought of Plato; and here I am thinking about what has come to be known as the allegory of the cave from Book VII of the Politeia (usually, though not precisely, translated as Republic). Aldiss gives us some hint of this in the foreword (inspired by Chapter 5: "On the Decrepit Margins of Time"). In describing the Cryptozoic era, Aldiss writes: "They lay heaped about meaninglessly, and yet with a terrible meaning that hinted of the force which had flung them here. They seemed to be something between the inorganic and the organic. They proliferated on the margins of time, embodying all the amazing forms the world was to carry; the earth was having a nightmare of stone about the progeny that would swarm over it . . . They stretched as far as the eye could see, piled on top of each other, as if they filled the entire Cryptozoic . . . or as if they were the sinister fore-shadowings of what was to come as well as the after-images of what was long past . . ."
What Aldiss is describing here is what Plato refers to as the realm of "Forms" or "Ideas," archetypes. This is the realm
of Universals which makes the objects we experience here, in the material realm, what they are. We may experience, for example, many different individual chairs which vary in every possible way. Yet we recognize all of them as "chairs." For Plato this is because there exists, metaphysically, the Form of "chairness" which is the factor common to all chairs.
This is the reason Aldiss refers to these "forms" in the Cryptozoic as "something between the inorganic and the organic." "Inorganic" because we have crossed over from the physical to the metaphysical in entering the Cryptozoic; "organic" because it is these "pre-existent" Ideas which give the material world and its objects reality. This pre-existence is the reason these archetypes are on the "margins of time." It is also the reason they "embody" "all the amazing forms the world was to carry." This is the "nightmare" about the "progeny" that will "swarm" over the earth; a "fore-shadowing of what was to come . . ." (By the way, the "force" which "flings" these archetypes in the Cryptozoic will be the substance of the novel's concern with revelation. It is the reason these Ideas are also "after-images of what was long past . . .")
Now let us look at Plato's allegory of the cave. It is related to the world of Forms, and to our novel, in that the story is about the revelation of the truth of the world; and, for Plato, it is the Ideas which carry more reality than the world of material objects (indeed we could go farther: for Plato it is the commonality which runs through the Forms, just as a Form is a commonality which runs through similiar objects, which is the most real. This is being itself--Being--which Plato calls the "Good").
Plato begins his account by saying that here is "an image of our nature in its education and want of education. . ." Plato imagines humanity as like a group of men living in a cave. They are tied to chairs, unable to move their heads and only able to look at the wall at the back of the cave. They have been raised in this way from birth. Behind the men, up on a rise, is the opening of the cave. Just outside the opening is a road which others travel upon. And just beyond this road is a fire. Because of this fire, as individuals travel on the road and thus in front of the mouth of the cave, shadows appear on the wall at the back of the cave. Now Plato states: ". . . such men would hold that the truth is nothing other than shadows . . ." In other words, we, and the humanity in Aldiss' story, reside in a world of delusion. That which is most false we take to be the most real.
Now Plato concerns himself with the man who is able to break out of his chair. In other words, that man who is able, through the dialectic, to move towards wisdom. At first he would be in pain; and then confused, unable to clearly see those who pass on the road. He would not immediately believe that the world he has known has been a false one. As he moved toward the fir!
e he would become more disoriented. Eventually, says Plato, this man would become accustomed to the light of the fire--and then those who walk along the road, the sun, and the fact that here, outside the cave, is the reality of the world. Suppose this man were to return to his seat in order to tell the others still in the cave what he has learned. ". . . wouldn't he be the source of laughter, and wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?," asks Plato. Plato already knows the answer to this question as this is what happened to Socrates.
The narrative structure of Plato's cave allegory is recreated with Cryptozoic!'s protagonist, Edward Bush. Even to the point of Bush being physically threatened by the state; and then confined within a mental institution. Aldiss prepares us for Bush's role as one touched by sophia by making us, his readers, believe that an epiphany has already taken place: it is accepted in Bush's time, in a combination of the thought of Kant and Freud, that what we know as "time" is only the result of the workings of consciousness (what Kant called in the Critique of Pure Reason, "a priori sensibility"). In particular, what is called in the novel the "Overmind" (Freud's "Superego"). It is further accepted that the "Undermind" is that area of the mind which is primeval and free from the structures of the overmind: ". . . the undermind is, as it were, our old natural mind. The overmind is a later, Homo sap accretion, a high-powered dynamo whose main function is to structure time and conceal all the sad animal thoughts in the undermind." What better way for us, beings tied to our chairs here in the cave, to be awed by what Bush has to tell us than for us to believe, through revelation, that we are already in possession of the truth?
But what is the wisdom that Bush has to tell us? Through the "sage" Stein, and an descendent/ancestor of Bush's, the "Dark Woman" (symbolically I would maintain is actually Sophia), Bush comes to the realization that what we know as the "forward" direction of time is a delusion. What we envision as "backwards" is, in fact, the actual direction of time: "The sun rises in the west and sets in the east. It acts like the governor of all organic and mortal life that, with their circadian rhythms, come under its sway. Shortly after the beginning of the year, the dead leaves stir, turn gold, rise from the ground in shoals, and coat the beech trees; the beeches then turn them green and by the eighth month suck them back into themselves in the form of buds; all this time, the trees have been pouring out nourishment into the soil; now they stand bare throughout March, February, January, and December, until their next ingestion of leaves gives them strength to grow smaller again. As with the beech, so of course with the other trees. Acorns from giant oak trees grow," we are told.
If Aldiss' novel can be called postmodern, it is here in his deconstruction of the direction of time. For what we know as the "result" of events (cue ball hitting the nine ball into the corner pocket, for example) is actually the first in a series. That is, a "non-casual" series. It is in this undermining (or deconstructing) of cauality that leaves, I suppose, Cryptozoic! open to the charge of not being a science fiction novel (perhaps worse, of being an anti-science fiction novel), as casuality is a bedrock assumption of science. This should perhaps not surprise us as, as I have maintained, I find the novel's context of sources to be religious and philosophical. Of course postmodernism is only a tendency in the novel. For Aldiss there is an actual truth to the world which Bush is attempting to convey to his time.
The revelation that the direction of time is actually, as we understand it, backwards, answers four problems in the novel. If Jesus can be taken as a sage announcing wisdom (or, as Matthew Fox would say, is actually wisdom, sophia, herself), then perhaps we can agree with him that the truth sets one free.
The first, and this is the first problem Bush confronts in the novel, is the problem of creating a new and authentic form of art. Bush already knows, intuitively, that the solution to this problem resides with time: "In any case, he was finished with the purely photic-signal-type groupages that had brought him such success five years ago. Instead of dragging that load of externals inward, he would push the internals outward, related to macro-cosmic time. He would if he knew how to begin." Here time is related to what the artist finds within himself as the source of his inspiration. The point here, I think, is that art must be founded upon truth; and if the way to authentic art goes through time, then one's understanding of time must be correct. Although we never see Bush creating art as a result of his epiphany, we are told that his intuition is correct: "His mind ran lightly over the new prospects; they were not alien to him, and he realized with a tremor that in his own thinking the prospect of time and life flowing backwards had not been without a place."
Second is the question of psychological trauma. In Cryptozoic! Bush feels that he has been denied his mother's love; and that this fact has determined, indeed, polluted, all his future relationships with women. The character of Ann, for example. Now, in our deluded world, this is just the order of events. One suffers from some type of psychological injury which affects the rest of one's life. In other words, the psychic scar is a type of condemnation. But the truth is just the opposite. Since time moves backward the injury is a moment of liberation. For all our lives, in growing from old age to youth, we have lived in such and such a way. But when the moment of injury takes place, like a crescendo, we are free; and our lives now move in a new direction.
Third is the question of mysticism. For example: "Bush's soul had broken away from its little mud hut. It moved now in a mighty crystal palace. He felt the godlike qualities in himself. This merciful interlude in Breedale, away from the real world, had given him the opportunity to find himself. It was his forty days in the wilderness. Much of the days when he discovered this transformation of soul he spent praying; but the prayers changed shape and tone, and came winging back to him. It was the god-quality in himself he needed to reveal . . ." The occurence of being touched by hokma, or the path out of the cave in Plato's allegory, or the insight that time moves backwards are all examples of the mysticial. Mysticial in that, in these instances, the truth about existence cannot be obtained through the use of logical, left-brain type of thinking. What is required is an experience of the Oneness of all being which, by its nature, is of course qualitatively of a different sort than anything resembling an empirical experience. The "God" that Bush refers to above is not a deity; an individual, personal being. This God Bush finds within himself; and perhaps, by extension, throughout all beings. Here we are reminded of Spinoza's God, which he also calls "Nature" or "substance." Perhaps for Bush this God is to be identified with his new insight of time (and here we would be reminded of Heidegger's insight that Being is not be identified with what is opposed to time, but precisely with time, becoming). In the end I take Aldiss' use of mysticism as a way for him to place an aura around Cryptozoic!'s insight about time. It is not just a discovery made by the scientific method. Again, it is more akin to religious discipline or practice. It is just in this way that the ability to time travel is described. And so, again, we have to wonder about the novel's place within science fiction.
Finally, there is the question of politics. At the time of the events in Cryptozoic! a totalitarian government is coming to power in England, where the novel takes place. Here we return to the subject of Cryptozoic! being a postmodern novel; and the possibility, which some have posed, that postmodernism carries within it a tendency towards anarchy. For myself postmodernism is the aphilosophical overthrowing of Being and all that this implies (in short, the overthrowing of all objective concepts of truth, morality, beauty, and knowledge). Now what else is a totalitarian government but a recasting of Being in line with its own values and interests? This being the merging of Being and Power. This is what Orwell describes in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As the character Howes states, though jokingly, about the idea that time moves backwards: "Well, it's certainly a theory to overthrow just about any government you care to name."
If it is true that every great, or at least interesting, work of art is one that moves beyond the boundaries of its genre, in this case science fiction, then for myself this was reason enough to read Cryptozoic!
Henry A. Jimenez
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