The Human Front (11 page)

There are many possible worlds, and in almost all of them humanity didn’t survive the time from which most of us have been taken. Either the United States and the Soviet Union destroyed each other and the rest of civilization in an atomic war in the fifties or sixties, or they didn’t, and the collapse of the socialist states in the late twentieth century so discredited socialism and international cooperation that humanity failed utterly to unite in time to forestall the environmental disasters of the twenty-first.

In a few, a very few possible worlds, enough scattered remnants of humanity survived as savages to eventually—hundreds of thousands of years later—become the ancestors of the posthuman species we called the Venusians. Who in turn—millions of years later—themselves gave rise to the posthuman clade we called the Martians. It was the latter who discovered time travel, and with it some deep knowledge about the future and past of the universe.

I don’t pretend to understand it. As Feynman said—in a world where he didn’t die in jail—it all goes back to the experiment with the light and the two slits, and Feynman himself didn’t pretend to understand
that.
What we have been told is simply this—that the past of the universe, its
very habitability for human beings, depends on its future being one—or rather, many—which contain as many human beings and their successors as possible, until the end of time.

It is not enough for the time-travellers to intervene in histories such as the one from which I come, and by defeating Communism while avoiding atomic war, save a swathe of futures for cooperation and survival. They also have to repopulate the time-lines in which humanity destroyed itself, and detonate new shock-waves of possibility that will spread humanity across time and forward through it, on an ever-expanding, widening front.

The big mare stops and looks at me, and whinnies. The sun is low above the hills to the west, the hills where I once—or many times—fought. Its light is red in the sky. The dust from the last atomic war is no longer dangerous, but it will linger in the high atmosphere for thousands of years to come.

I unharness the horse, heave the plough to the shed at the end of the field, and lead the beast up the hill towards the village. The atomic generator is humming, the lights are coming on, and dinner in the communal kitchen will soon be ready. Tracy will be putting away the day’s books in the library, and yawning and stretching herself. Maybe this evening, after we’ve all eaten, she can be persuaded to tell us some stories. For me she has many fascinations—she’s quite unlike any woman I’ve ever met—and the only one I’m happy for her to share with everybody else is her stories from the world where, I still feel, history turned out almost as it would have done without any meddling at all by the time-travellers: her world, the world where the prototype bomber didn’t work; the world where, as she puts it, the Roswell saucer crashed.

E
VERY ALTERNATE HISTORY HAS
implications, explicit or otherwise, for how we think (or how the author would have us think) about the course history actually took. Ward Moore’s
Bring the Jubilee,
set in the 1960s of a history in which the South won the Civil War, shows us an America much less attractive and advanced than the one we know. Few stories in the apparently endless “Hitler Wins!” subgenre show us a better world than ours.

The Human Front
is set in a world where the Soviet Union ceased to exist in 1949 or thereabouts, roughly forty years earlier than it actually did. The (literal) mechanism by which this happens is improbable, and I hope amusing, but irrelevant to the question of whether the resulting world is an improvement on the one we live in, and of whether it’s a logical result of the change. In this case the moment of change—the Jonbar point, to use the skiffy jargon—is a frivolity, but the history that diverges from it isn’t.

The reasoning behind Matheson’s world goes like this: The Soviet Union is defeated and occupied in the late
1940s. Stalin survives as a figurehead of continuing resistance, and the Chinese Revolution takes place much as in our world, but this isn’t enough to stop the old colonial powers hanging on to their possessions. Without a Soviet or Chinese nuclear deterrent, the West has a free hand to use nuclear weapons against the independence movements—as indeed was seriously contemplated in our own history. Without African and Asian independence, and the general inspiration of the colonial revolution, the Black movement in the U.S. arrives later and less powerfully. Jim Crow in the U.S., and the “colour bar” in the British Empire, remain. Other movements that in our world were influenced by the Black struggle, such as the uprising of the Catholics of Northern Ireland, never take off. The Communist movement, with no uncontested sovereign territory but China left to lose, and no divisions arising from the Sino-Soviet split and de-Stalinisation, retains its post—World War II militancy, and its global leadership passes to the most leftist wing of Chinese Communism, identified with Lin Piao. There’s no Vietnam War in this world—instead, the world becomes Vietnam.

What this implies about how I see the world we actually live in is left as an exercise for the reader.

An alternate history usually begins with the question: what if some real historical event had happened differently? This story seeded itself from a different question: what if something that
didn’t
happen had happened differently? I had in mind a particular event in 1947 that never happened, and that has become the foundation of a genuine modern myth. (You know what it was.) And that raised another question.

The other question, of course, was why on Earth should a flying saucer crash at all, let alone close to an Air Force base? One possible answer to that was obvious: the saucer was on a test flight, or—aha!—a demonstration flight, for the Air Force. If the well-known saucer crash (which didn’t happen)
hadn’t happened
—why then, the Pentagon would have gone ahead and ordered more of them! And used them to win the Cold War before it had got properly started!

But then—a whole different 1950s would have unfolded, and 1960s, and …

And there I left it, for several years. The weight of research needed to build such an elaborate alternate history struck me as too heavy for such a slender reed of a premise. It was only when Peter Crowther proposed that I write one of a projected series of novellas that I took the idea down and dusted it off. It still seemed that a lot of research would be required, even for a novella. As I pondered that, I had what I still think were my two best ideas about this story.

The first was that I didn’t need to research the late 1950s and the 1960s, because I
remembered
them. The second was to write the story in the first person, as alternate autobiography. By following the track of my own life—born on the Isle of Lewis, moving to Greenock at the age of ten—and reversing and distorting various circumstances within and beyond it, I could depict the background and backstory without having to explain it in tedious alt-historical detail.

The narrator’s father is a doctor, not a minister. As a teenager, young Matheson falls under the influence of an orthodox but militant Communism, not Trotskyism. And so on. Some of it is real: Lewis, the RAF base at Aird, and Greenock in the 1960s, are not that different in their texture from my own recollections. Yes, the air pollution really was that bad. Yes, the English voices on Radio Moscow really did sound posh. The 1963 eulogy to Stalin is lifted more or less straight from the real 1953 obituary by Palme Dutt.

The world that Matheson sees is a distorted reflection of the world that his equivalents in our world saw in imagination: one in which the Soviet Union no longer existed as a socialist state, and in which every struggle was part of the apocalyptic confrontation of U.S. imperialism and its allies versus the revolutionary peoples rallied behind the Chinese banner. This view was deluded, as events soon showed, but it resonated even with many who rejected it, including me.

As a schoolboy I was intrigued, to be sure. I studied with some scepticism a copy of the Little Red Book given to me by a Maoist classmate. But by 1972, when I read Han Suyin’s rose-tinted rubbish Penguin tract
China in the Year 2001,
I had encountered the theory of state capitalism, which seemed entirely applicable to what was then going on in China—and all the more so to China in the year 2001, as it turned out.

In 1976 I heard on the radio that Mao had died. To my immediate and immense chagrin, I caught myself thinking:
We’re on our own now.

Where, I asked myself, had
that
come from? Writing this story was for me part of finding an answer.

M
IAVAIG, IN UIG, ON
Lewis, is a scatter of houses—and three churches—across a convergence of hillsides around the place where a short burn connects a loch with a sea-loch. In the culvert where the burn passes under the road lives a black eel that was a good eighteen inches long when I first saw it. (And when it saw me—I remember the cold thrill, a new experience then, when its eyes looked back.) It or its replacement—the wee burn, a hundred yards long and a few inches deep, was wriggling with elvers—may be longer now. I don’t know. I’ve never been back to look, except in dreams.

Around Uig you can find deep, dark glens and wide sandy beaches. There are traces everywhere of a more populous past: the old drove roads snaking across the hills, the roofless rectangles of black houses, the drystone walls under green mounds of moss and turf. It’s like growing up in a single enormous ruin that compasses all you see, and includes, in a child’s imagination, the rusting carcasses of cars and buses on the moors, the pools of a tidal fish-trap
locally attributed to the Vikings, and the brochs and standing stones far away. Above it all were installations of a present guarding against a possible future: the radio mast on a hilltop, the big radar dish revolving black against the sky at the headland of Aird, overlooking the angular concrete blocks of the RAF base.

I lived in Miavaig until I was ten, and then we moved to Greenock, on the Clyde. For summer holidays we always went to Lochcarron, in Wester Ross. The contrast between Uig and Lochcarron was, to me at the time, stark. Lochcarron had far more, and far taller and more various, trees. Some hillsides around it were forested (in Miavaig, a stand of a few spindly pines was called “the plantation”). Its gardens were lush and sprouted exotica—clumps of pampas grass, endless rhododendrons, monkey-puzzle trees. Fires burned wood and coal, not peat. Most people spoke English in everyday life. The hills were higher and the loch was wide and deep.

Across that loch and to the west lay Plockton, a village on a sheltered shore, whose surroundings were lusher even than Lochcarron’s: calm waters, green glens and slopes, numerous islets bearing stands of Scots pine, the whole aspect a sight-line for red-and-black sunsets whenever the rain isn’t marching in from the west. A short drive south, and up, and you’re on the bleak rocky moors of Duirinish and Balmacara, the shadows purple with heather in the late summer.

On these landscapes of early memory I’ve inflicted science fiction. Made them the battlefields of wars both guerrilla and global. Crashed flying saucers and tactical nukes into them. Crushed them under the mechanical
sprawl of runaway artificial intelligences. Choked them with mutant jungles. Made their sea-lochs ring with the din of spaceship yards. Settled their villages with ageless retirees scoffing illegal life-extension drugs. Carpeted their roofs and walls with thick insulation against the big freeze as the Gulf Stream downshifts. And, on the plus side, expanded their villages into thriving industrial towns, repopulating the glens as the Brahan Seer foretold. I’ve even let the
Press and Journal
soldier on, through wars and revolutions and across the collapse and rebuilding of civilization, into a future several centuries hence.

I haven’t spared the urban landscapes I’ve lived in either. Turned Greenock into a vast naval base, Edinburgh into a dark haunt of terrorists and robots, Waverley Station into the target of a cruise missile strike, Glasgow into a civil war zone, the Clyde into a string of crater lochs, the Firth of Forth into a frontier in a fragmented Britain, and both of the Forth’s great bridges into mangled wreckage. But again on the plus side, I’ve also imagined these cities enduring, Edinburgh reinvent itself as a biotechnology capital, West Lothian flourish as Carbon Glen, and the University of Glasgow sail on through dark centuries as an ark of reason, which one of the characters hails as the Church of Man.

In
Sin Bio,
[eventually
Intrusion,
Orbit, 2012] the novel I’m writing at the moment, I again revisit Lewis—and indeed Miavaig, though not under that name. All I’ve done to it so far is marred its every horizon with wind-farms, and opened what may be a time portal under a hill, but I plot a lot more harm to the place as the book goes on.

This talk about damage is, of course, a joke. You can’t really hurt a place by using it as a setting for fiction, no matter how dark the tale. Quite the contrary. The real life of a place is added to if it’s lived in imagination, including in the imaginations of people who’ve never been there. This seems plain enough for mainstream fiction—Greenock has never looked finer than it does in
A Green Tree in Gedde,
and Edinburgh’s sense of itself (never knowingly undersold, as the John Lewis advertising boast goes) has gained even in tourism revenue from its many grim phantoms from Deacon Brodie to DI Rebus—but science fiction can add an extra shiver of significance by saying of a place: the future will happen here, too. In an age of increasingly metropolitan media focus, it’s easy to accept that Paris, London, New York and all the other cities so readily evoked by their recognisable skylines in disaster movies and in technothrillers should have their place in imagined futures. But other towns and villages and open spaces will still be there, and deserve their piece of the action as part of our futures. Even futures that didn’t happen. Without the Martians, who would have heard of Woking? Today, maybe in grateful civic recognition of this, Wells’s alien invaders are memorialised by a fine steel statue of a Fighting Machine looming over the pedestrian precinct in the town centre.