Bury My Heart At W. H. Smith’s. Brian Aldiss

could comfortably identify, and related his adventures in a series of easily readable novels (no easy task, as imitators have discovered). The adventures took on a formulaic, almost heraldic, pattern, from which Fleming did not depart. James Bond did not age. The closer Fleming kept to the established pattern, working minor variations within the pattern, the more he pleased his readers. Fleming roused and then fulfilled generic expectations, as Agatha Christie had done.

      These matters are clearly understood. It is useless to be too clever. We cannot have Hercule Poirot throwing up his hands in Chapter Thirty-three, declaring that he is baffled, and retiring to Belgium. Dr No cannot actually remove James Bond’s threatened testicles. That’s a no-no. The cleverness of Ian Fleming was in not being too clever: he fulfilled generic expectations.

      It is easy to understand the success of James Bond after the event. On the whole, the mass of people share Bond’s tastes. Expensive cars, pretty girls, adventure, drink. All the world loves a dry martini. But to deliver with Fleming’s style – that’s another matter.

      In 1955, the Fleming craze was in its infancy; but the general principles of his later success were already accepted. Tarzan, Bulldog Drummond, The Saint and other formula heroes had been there before him. If at the outset of one’s writing life one decided to make a lot of money, one could follow that trail. Not only did it seem profitable, thrillers were also respectable. Dons read them, horsy people in country houses read them, clergy read them.

      If at the outset of one’s writing life one decided to fail at literature, science fiction was a good bet. No one read it. Not knowingly.

      The British have the best science fiction writers in the world. All the ignorance of critics cannot make it otherwise. Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, E. M. Forster, G. K. Chesterton, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, J. R. R. Tolkien, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Adrian Mitchell, Angela Carter, Doris Lessing, Anthony Burgess have all written science fiction or something very like it. Yet the mode remains largely ignored by critics brought up only to appreciate the novel of character.

      Commercial science fiction, branded as such, had, in 1955, only just escaped from a shuttle service of magazines, mainly American. Some regular hardcover American publishers had taken it on to their lists. In consequence, British publishers, making their annual raid on the fleshpots of New York, had returned with a token handful of this mysterious new literature which their US counterparts, barely concealing their mirth, had assured them would sell like crazy.