Miracles of Life

those wonderful summers nearly fifty years ago, and I would take the children past the sound stages to the field where unwanted props were left to the elements: figureheads of sailing ships, giant chess-pieces, half an American car, stairways that led up to the sky and amazed my three infants. And their father: days of wonder that I wish had lasted for ever.

I thought of my children then, and still think of them, as miracles of life, and I dedicate this autobiography to them.

16 This is Tomorrow (1956)

In 1956, the year that I published my first short story, I visited a remarkable exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, This is Tomorrow. Recently I told Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate and a former director of the Whitechapel, that I thought This is Tomorrow was the most important event in the visual arts in Britain until the opening of Tate Modern, and he did not disagree.

Among its many achievements, This is Tomorrow is generally thought of as the birthplace of pop art. A dozen teams, involving an architect, a painter and sculptor, each designed and built an installation that would embody their vision of the future. The participants included the artist Richard Hamilton, who displayed his collage Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?, in my judgement the greatest ever work of pop art. Another of the teams brought together the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, and the architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who constructed a basic unit of human habitation in what would be left of the world after nuclear war. Their terminal hut, as I thought of it, stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.

The overall effect of This is Tomorrow was a revelation to me, and a vote of confidence, in effect, in my choice of science fiction. The Whitechapel exhibition, and especially the Hamilton and Paolozzi exhibits, created a huge stir in the British art world. At the time the artists most in favour with the Arts Council, the British Council and the academic critics of the day were Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper and Graham Sutherland, who together formed a closed fine art world largely preoccupied with formalist experiment. The light of everyday reality never shone into the aseptic whiteness of their studio-bound imaginations.

This is Tomorrow opened all the doors and windows onto the street. The show leaned a little on Hollywood and American science fiction; Hamilton had got hold of Robby the Robot from the film Forbidden Planet. But for the first time the visitor to the Whitechapel saw the response of imaginations tuned to the visual culture of the street, to advertising, road signs, films and popular magazines, to the design of packaging and consumer goods, an entire universe that we moved through in our everyday lives but which rarely appeared in the approved fine art of the day.

Hamilton’s Just what is it…? depicted a world entirely constructed from popular advertising, and was a convincing vision of the future that lay ahead – the muscleman husband and his stripper wife in their suburban home, the consumer goods, such as the tin of ham, regarded as ornaments in their own right, the notion of the home as a prime selling point and sales aid for the consumer society. We are what we sell and buy.

In Paolozzi’s display, the power tool laid on the post-nuclear sand was not just a portable device for drilling holes but a symbolic object with almost magical properties. If the future was to be built of anything, it would be from a set of building blocks provided by consumerism. An advertisement for a new cake mix contained the codes that defined a mother’s relationship to her children, imitated all over our planet.

This is Tomorrow convinced me that science fiction was far closer to reality than the conventional realist novel of the day, whether the angry young men with their grudges and grouses, or novelists such as Anthony Powell and C.P. Snow. Above all, science fiction had a huge vitality that had bled away from the modernist novel. It was a visionary engine that created a new future with every revolution, a hot rod accelerating away from the reader, propelled by an exotic literary fuel as rich and dangerous as anything that drove the surrealists.

If pop art and surrealism were a huge encouragement, my work at Chemistry & Industry kept me up to the mark about the latest scientific discoveries. An established science magazine receives a steady flow of press releases, conference reports, annual bulletins from leading research laboratories around the world and publications put out by UN scientific bodies and organisations such as Atoms for Peace. I feasted on all this material, the accounts of new psychoactive drugs, nuclear weapons research, the applications of the latest-generation computers.

For several years I commuted to Belgrave Square, first from Twickenham and then from Shepperton, a long journey that left me too tired to write, except at weekends. After being cooped up all day with the children, Mary needed to breathe. I remember her saying when I reached home at 7.30 and was pouring a stiff gin and tonic: ‘Are we going out? I can call the babysitter.’ I thought: Out? I’ve been out. But we would go down to one of the pubs on the riverbank, and she would come alive when I bought a sandwich and threw bread to the swans.

In 1960, sadly for himself and his family, the editor of Chemistry & Industry, Bill Dick, killed himself with a gas poker and a plastic bag. He had been the once celebrated editor of the science magazine Discovery, but had become an argumentative alcoholic. After his death I was left alone to produce the magazine, and adjusted my time so that I could write in the office. My one piece of out- and-out commercial fiction, The Wind from Nowhere, was written straight onto the typewriter during a fortnight’s holiday in 1961, and was published by an American paperback firm, Berkley Books. I received an advance of $1000, which seemed a fortune. I celebrated by moving from the 3/6 (three shillings and sixpence) lunch menu at the Swan pub in Knightsbridge to the 4/6 menu, an extravagance that alarmed the waitresses, to whom I had proudly shown a photograph of my three children. It is easy to forget how thin was the line between poverty and bare survival.

In 1963 The Drowned World was successfully published, and with Mary’s encouragement I gave up my job at Chemistry & Industry and became a full-time writer. Despite the many editions of The Drowned World, this was a huge gamble, and I’m grateful and impressed that Mary urged me to take it. The novel was published all over the world, but the amounts of money forthcoming were modest.

Victor Gollancz, the patriarch of English publishing, paid me an advance of ?100, barely enough to keep a family afloat for a month. When Gollancz took me out to lunch at The Ivy and I saw the prices on the menu I was tempted to say: I’ll have nothing to eat, and just take the cash. But I knew that being lunched by Gollancz was a significant honour. He had dominated London publishing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and had a huge influence on literary editors and readers. As we sat down in The Ivy he boomed in his loud voice: ‘Interesting novel, The Drowned World. Of course, you stole it all from Conrad.’ The Ivy was a haunt of senior journalists, and I saw heads turning. I thought: My God, this grand old man is going to sink my career before it’s launched. As it happens, I had not read anything by Conrad at the time, though I soon made up for this.

My first decade as a writer coincided with a period of sustained change in England, as well as in the USA and Europe. The mood of post-war depression had begun to lift, and the death of Stalin eased international tensions, despite the Soviet development of the H-bomb. Cheap jet travel arrived with the Boeing 707, and the consumer society, already well established in America, began to appear in Britain. Change was in the air, affecting the nation’s psychology for good or bad. Change was what I wrote about, especially the hidden agendas for change that people were already exposing. Invisible persuaders were manipulating politics and the consumer market, affecting habits and assumptions in ways that few people fully realised.

It seemed to me that psychological space, what I termed ‘inner space’, was where science fiction should be heading. But I met tremendous opposition. The editors of the American s-f magazines were nervous of their readers, and would refuse to accept a story if it was set in the present day, a sure sign that something subversive was going on. It was a curious paradox that science fiction, devoted to change and the new, was emotionally tied to the status quo and the old.

While I was at Chemistry & Industry I would regularly meet my fellow writer Michael Moorcock, who later took over Carnell’s magazines when he retired. We had spirited arguments at the Swan in Knightsbridge over the direction science fiction should take. Moorcock was a highly intelligent and warm-