John Clute once described Coelestis (1994, USA) by Paul Park, one of my favourite science fiction novels, as “Third World sf”. I think it was in a review in Interzone shortly after the book had been published. The phrase “Third World” is of course less acceptable now than it was thirty years ago, but even so I’ve always thought “postcolonial sf” a much better fit for Coelestis.
Brontomek! (1976, UK) by Michael G Coney, winner of the BSFA Award for Best Novel in 1977, seems to me to be a good example of “colonial sf”.
There was a type of English sf which appeared in the late 1960s, and lasted a decade or so, by writers not directly linked with the New Wave, but whose output was similar in many respects to some fiction by New Wave writers. Their novels were more literary, and much better-written, than their US contemporaries, and very English in tone and setting, almost as if they were imagining the future, even on alien worlds, as extensions of England — never Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, of course — populated by English people, and perhaps the odd alien, with a way of life little different to that enjoyed by expatriate communities of the English in various ex-empire or Commonwealth countries. It’s something likely best expressed in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet (1966–1975, UK), but writers such as Lawrence Durrell — the Alexandria Quartet (1957–1960, UK) — covered similar ground, although perhaps in their case “post-empire” would be a better label than “postcolonial”.
That, I think, is the point from which Brontomek! should be understood. From empire fiction to post-empire fiction, which is itself a subset of postcolonial fiction, and so to a nostalgic look, perhaps unintended, through the lens of science fiction, back at empire and colonialism. There may be no empire as such in Brontomek!, but the novel is set in a “subcolony”, a village on an alien world which has been colonised by Earth. Its cast are not native to the world, indeed some of them are recent immigrants. Their society and lifestyle echoes that of their Earthly origins — in some respects, it’s almost a parody.
Brontomek! opens with a horrible massacre, in which Arcadian native plankton, triggered by a fifty-two-year conjunction of the world’s six moons, sends out a telepathic signal causing people to walk into the sea to be killed and eaten by native marine predators. It is later labelled the “Relay Effect”, and is one reason for the decline in Arcadia’s fortunes. This is covered in the earlier novel Syzygy (1973, UK).
Some years later, the Hetherington Organisation purchases Arcadia and all it contains, and they bring in an alien workforce. These are the “amorphs”, amorphous blobs who can mimic humans so effectively they are indistinguishable, other than their tractability, from the real thing. These form the subject of the novel Mirror Image (1972, UK).
Brontomek!, the third novel in a loose trilogy, is ostensibly about the Hetherington Organisation’s actions on Arcadia. And, of course, the “brontomeks”, which are enormous automated farming machines. They appear only briefly — and the one brontomek which goes rogue has little impact on the plot.
The narrator of Brontomek! is Moncrieff, who emigrated from Earth to Riverside, the seaside subcolony where much of the story takes place. Moncrieff is a boat-builder, and he is ambivalent about the Organisation take-over. He understands why it has happened, he hopes to profit from it, but he’s not invested in Riverside to the extent, as others are, that he objects to the Organisation’s brutal tactics. Which read like the worst kind of corporate over-reach, perhaps even a parody of it— but are perhaps not so unusual when considering the depredations of the British Empire, or the likes of John Company, around the world. After a series of events, including a rebellion by the Riverside inhabitants, their capture of several amorphs, and the destruction of a number of brontomeks, the novel focuses on a PR exercise backed by the Organisation. A boat built by Moncrieff, and crewed by Riverside’s doctor, Streng, who is the sort of arrogant and self-obsessed “expert” who forms the centre of small social expatriate groups, will circumnavigate Arcadia.
The Organisation want Streng’s journey to succeed — and they’re beaming it out live to all the other human-settled worlds — in order to encourage emigration to Arcadia. Of course, it goes horribly wrong, and the Organisation fakes a happy ending. But that’s hardly unexpected.
In fact, little in Brontomek! is entirely unexpected. Moncrieff’s love interest proves to be an amorph, the Organisation discovers Arcadia’s one profitable asset, a drug derived from a local plant, is also subject to the fifty-two-year cycle, and so pulls out, the various Riverside factions eventually reconcile their differences, and life returns to some semblance of normality.
I’ve not read much fiction by Coney, and perhaps I should have read the two novels which precede Brontomek!, Mirror Image and Syzygy, before reading this novel. I certainly plan to read them, but I’m pretty sure knowledge of those earlier books is not necessary when reading Brontomek!.
I find Coney’s prose generally good — the late Eric Brown was a big fan of Coney’s work — but I’m not convinced Brontomek! is especially good science fiction or particularly well-structured. I’ve no idea if it deserved the 1976 BSFA Award —at that time the winner was chosen by a committee from all sf novels published in the UK the previous year, with no shortlist.
But there is, as I mentioned earlier, something about the English sf of the late 1960s and 1970s which I find appealing. I’m a big fan of the novels of DG Compton, who produced his best work during that period, and I rate highly the early sf works of Robert Holdstock, best-known for his fantasy Mythago Wood sequence, and fiction by Keith Roberts, Christopher Evans and Richard Cowper. Not to mention Josephine Saxton, Tanith Lee, Sue Thomas or Jody Scott. (But those latter are writers with different concerns.)
Brontomek! is a confused work, which tries to make a point about corporatisation, but instead says more about English colonialism. Not only is the community of Riverside centred on a social club, but the subcolony has its own Morris dancing troupe (although it’s called something else), sailing is a popular past-time, the chief topic of conversation is the love-lives of friends and rivals, and everyone spends most of their time bickering. To anyone who has spent time in an English expatriate community in the 1970s, particularly in a country with a hot climate, it’s all too familiar.
Coney was British, but was resident in Antigua when he began his science fiction career. He moved to Canada in 1972. I don’t think he knowingly wrote English sf from an expat perspective — colonialism was not a common subject in science fiction back then— but it colours his fiction far too heavily to be ignored. Brontomek!, in fact much of the English sf of the time of its type, is very much an historical document. One of the sf genre’s biggest problems has always been an uncritical, and ahistorical, appreciation of popular genre writers — Coney, despite winning a BSFA Award, could hardly ever be called popular — but recognising the time and place from which a particular sf writer wrote is important in understanding their works and their impact on the genre.
However, it’s unlikely to shed light on why they might remain popular decades after their death.
