Friday, June 11, 2010


Speech is silver: silence is golden: print is dynamite.
Clyde H. Nitkin


A week ago a couple of my photography students at Focal Point said to me, “Watch us Alex.” They then bumped their iPhones together. The app is called Bump and when both phones have it, personal information (information you are prepared to share) is exchanged. One of the students told the other, “Cool I now have your email address and I didn’t know you were allergic to peanuts.”


To read is to strike a blow for culture.
Clyde H. Nitkin


The bumping of the phones took me immediately to a book I had read back in 1961, Brian Aldiss’ The Primal Urge.


Only books stand between us and the cave.
Clyde H. Nitkin


From 1957 until around 1965 I read just about every science fiction book I could find to buy. I had discovered reading not only with the Hardy Boys but also with Tom Corbett – Space Cadet. It was natural that I would drift in the direction of science fiction. Without knowing some of the pulp science fiction books I read were a bit more. At the time (even today) science fiction was a tad lower in rank along with mysteries from lofty literature. But because of the space cover I read Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan and Gore Vidal’s Messiah I read too as it was in the science fiction section of Mexico City’s Sanborn’s which were the only places I could find pocket books in English.


Dear God, I would rather be an author than Clyde H. Nitkin.
Clyde H. Nitkin


Brian Aldiss is much alive (86) and he is the recipient of the OBE. This took a while. Even though one of his best friends was Kingsley Amis (I read him, too as Sanborn’s, a chain of American style soup to nuts drugstores categorized him as science fiction) Aldiss never really got much respect. He was a science fiction writer. It would take such writers as J.G. Ballard to jump from the genre to literature or the more recent William Gibson to give science fiction the cachet it had never had.


Only by libraries can man survive.
Clyde H. Nitkin


It was Aldiss’ The Primal Urge that left that seed of comparative recognition when I watched my students bump phones.

In a late 50s or a very “with it” London of 1961 Aldiss’ novel is about the mass installation (by government decree) of penny sized little sensors on every British inhabitant’s forehead. They are called Emotional Registers (E.Rs. for short) that are wired to the brain in such a way as to bypass reason. Our hero, a nerdish Jimmy Solent goes to a cocktail party with his E.R. newly installed and upon being introduced to a beautiful woman he finds that his Norman (another name for the E.R.) begins to glow. The glowing process can be gradual or sudden. I don’t have to explain here what happens when a long married couple wakes up in the morning and Mr. has an urge to only find that the Mrs’ sensor is unlit and will stay unlit until the inevitable divorce becomes a consequence.


Literature is a jealous god: serve it in deeds and words.
Clyde H. Nitkin


The purpose of the E.R. in Aldiss’ novel is to help break the traditional British coldness and lack of emotional involvement:

“…Norman Lights go deeper [author’s italics] than the thought centres. They register purely on the sensational level. They represent, in fact, the spontaneous as against the calculated. Therein lies the whole beauty of them.”

“I absolutely couldn’t agree more,” the heavy glasses said, “The whole notion of submitting ourselves to this process would be intolerable were it not that it gives us back a precious spontaneity, a freedom [author’s italics], lost for generations. It is analogous to the inconvenience of contraception: submit to a minor irk and you inherit a major liberty.”


The tragedy of our 21st century (alas that Bump is part of the problem) is that we all know what everybody is doing all of the time through Twitter and Facebook. My friend in Memphis will no longer talk to me on the phone or wish to talk to me on the phone because he can read what I am doing through my daily blog.

When Rebecca goes to middle school (grade 8) she will be given a cell phone. Her parents want to know where she is at all times and want to be able to contact her at all times.

It would seem that the freedom that our gadgets have bestowed upon us have removed from us all the spontaneity that Aldiss’concept of technology could bring to our lives. To know everything, to be informed reduces our capacity for surprise.

Let’s have a coffee. It will probably be Starbucks. Let’s listen to some jazz. It will probably be Miles Davis. Let’s read a book. It will probably be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Can we ever be surprised? I will know all there is to know about you if we bump.


Melancholy tends to intrude when I write, and thus I can say that I regard, or would regard, the invention and proliferation of androids as a disaster. For a start, I would covet one for myself: less a marriage than a fearful liaison, feeding the ego. Subservient androids might bring you a glass of wine or answer the front door, but they would, above all, serve as status symbols. You could buy them in gold or platinum, like credit cards. This symbolic function of androids is demonstrated in my novel Super-State, where they serve as diamonds have served over the ages, as tokens of wealth and power. My androids are, in fact, a damned nuisance. Since they do not sleep, they would walk about and knock things over; so they are locked up in cupboards at night. There they talk in a flurry of syllogisms.

"What is this 'human condition' they talk about?"

"It's something from which they suffer, like battery failure."

"The human condition can be felt on some of the men."

"It is what we would be like if we lost electric current."

"Their technical term for that is dead."
Brian Aldiss



The Primal Urge I

Brian Aldiss - An Essay