Norman Spinrad and Radical Science Fiction

What's in a title? For something like The Void Captain's Tale, Norman Spinrad's 1983 confession of one such, you would be forgiven for expecting space opera fare with little to differentiate it from the post-Star Wars gold rush of star fighters, blasters, and explosions. Albeit with a darker tinge. Void, after all, is not just a synonym for space but for negative absence. Likewise, after learning the main conceit of the book - that interstellar travel of the future is powered by women's orgasms - one might expect the tacky, questionable sexploitation that is the hallmark of low rent science fiction, and of which there was plenty around at the time. Happily, on both counts, these assumptions are wrong.

Spoilers follow.

The titular void captain, Genro Kane Gupta, is looking forward to journeying on the Dragon Zephyr. This will be a routine flight transporting cargo and 10,000 passengers in cold sleep to a far-flung destination. In this future, instantaneous FTL is possible but this can only happen in short hops of three to five light years. The technology, which was salvaged and retro-engineered from a precursor race of sentients referred to as We Who Have Gone Before requires a living component - a pilot. They are inserted as a node into the star drive's circuitry, and they have to be willing. It won't work if someone is forced in against their will. Unfortunately, experimentation has adduced that only a vanishingly tiny population of women are capable of the rigours of piloting and only 200 out of untold billions were in service. At the moment of the jump, the instantaneous translation of the ship from one point in real space to another is experienced by the pilot as a moment of bliss and release whose nearest approximation is sexual ecstasy. Typically, the pilot is left inert and unresponsive and requires at least 24 hours to recover before the next jump. This experience also exacts a physical toll. The career of a pilot is not a long one.

Star flight abides by strict social etiquettes. Genro oversees a very small crew such is the ship's automation, and the captaincy is largely ceremonial. While responsible for the ship, the main duties on a flight are to press the jump button and be active in the shipboard society of awake passengers. The captain is expected to partner with the Honoured Passenger, the ship's social lead who spends their time contriving entertainments, occasions, and fitting out cabins and decks to fit the travellers' moods. It is typical, as the ship's two points of authority, that their relationship is sexual. The purpose of this is not just to entertain, but to overlay and suppress how the interstellar arteries of this far future society are effectively dependent on the (ultimately fatal) sexual labour of a minority of women.

What happens if the facade breaks down? This is the domain of the Void Captain's Tale, and as such should be approached as an SF novel of manners. For the ship to work as per convention, there must be strict separation between them and the pilot, with their only being attended to by the three medical crew in-between jumps. This is broken within the first few pages as, on the shuttle up, Genro has an awkward encounter with Dominique Alia Wu - the assigned pilot. Having already stumbled over the contact taboo, following the first jump Dominique breaks protocol by shrugging off the usual medical ministrations and taking up a place in the officers' restaurant. Not only is this shocking, her plain appearance, workmanlike uniform, and buzz cut hair outrages and offends. Which does not deter Dominique from demanding the privileges she, as an officer, is entitled to. Genro is called in to negotiate a compromise that would please all parties, but in so doing begins nurturing a sexual obsession with her. Partly because she's taboo, but mainly because she speaks to his sense of sexual inadequacy. He wants her precisely because her sexual experience far exceeds his own. Dominique has touched something he can never experience, and he becomes haunted by how no matter how expert his technique or attentive his lovemaking, this will only be a faint shadow of the ecstasy that explodes through her at the moment of the jump.

There starts the unravelling. Genro stops being able to perform his conjugal duties according to expectations, suffering the dysfunctions of impotence and premature excitement in equal measure - forcing a rupture between the captaincy and the Honoured Passenger, who is quick to communicate her displeasure to the other tourists. He steals away for private liaisons with Dominique, which only affirm his feared inadequacies. He appears distracted, he goes for a space walk while the ship is travelling at relativistic speeds, and all this is draining him of authority. And when his affair with Dominique is found out, there is uproar. The man charged with veiling the grim reality of FTL travel not only fails in his task, but by his obsession he has eroticised it. However, worse is to come. In their tete tete, Dominique tries to describe the ineffable experience of the null space that enables the transmission of the ship. She requests that Genro does not input any coordinates prior to the next jump. She argues the technology the star drive is based on was not meant for fast travel but was for the precursor race to transcend and inhabit the next layer of reality she has had glimpses of. Jumping blind would enable her to shed her body and inhabit this realm. The only problem is that should the ship survive, there's no telling where it might re-emerge into reality, there's very little chance of any other female passenger being able to become the next pilot, and at relativistic speeds it would take years to reach the nearest inhabited system. And that's without taking the supplies situation into account. Will Genro run the risk of sacrificing all to free - and satisfy - his lover?

Spinrad's book is what you would expect from something sat at the intersection of the transatlantic new wave. There is the concern with literary sensibility it shares with the British school, and the punkish tear-it-all-down attitude of the Americans. It also bears witness to a distinction Spinrad makes in his 1990 book of SF criticism, Science Fiction in the Real World. Here, he posits "sci-fi" as a specific sub-division of science fiction, which he associates with the space operas of the Golden Age. These are swash-buckling adventures with heroes, villains, space weapons, and clear story arcs in which everything comes good in the end. This, he argues, is the way the mainstream sees science fiction and why they are wary of ever trying it. Science fiction proper, however, is about experimentation, future visions, imagining new ways of being and becoming, and pushing literature's envelope. Good SF should provoke and unsettle, while avoiding the temptations of neat narrative resolution - something that might comfort publishers and readers, but serves to undermine the innovative or revolutionary character of the work. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale is singled out as an example, with its academic-sounding epilogue closing down the ambiguity of the ending and the idea the horrors of Gilead persisted for any length of time. The same could be said for Keith Roberts's Pavane, on the end of which is appended an explainer which is very sci-fi, unnecessary, and a touch cringe.

The Void Captain's Tale is a contribution to the revolutionary SF tradition. Its society is post-scarcity and sounds much better than ours, but here it is a foil for critiquing the vanities of bourgeois culture in its high and mass forms. For the former, ritual, manners, and "high art" species of cultural capital paper over the brute realities of economic necessity. For the latter, it's the immediacy of the commodity as one among many purchasing decisions to be made that divorces that separates if from a biography produced under a determinate set of production relations for profit. Dominique is of a minuscule cohort of pilots, but without sexually exploiting their talents Spinrad's interstellar society would crumble. It is a way of thinking through masculine sexual anxiety, and how it might lead to individual behaviours that impact on and endanger the community. And a meditation on radical action, that a politics guided by an understanding of how the world really works is by no means a guarantee of success. This novel confounds and challenges, it plays with and dumps on the space lasers and pervy sex beloved of more conservative-inclined SF authors of the time, and while trashing the tropes tells a compelling story that does not shy away from ambiguous conclusions. A book that, over 40 years on, still deserves a wider readership.