Dick takes a great deal in his stride. He is the typically impatient Hoylean Man: someone who prefers to take as much under his own control as he can rather than simply wait on events, no matter how challenging or unprecedented. (Cameron, the protagonist of The Inferno [1973] was Hoyle’s most vivid portrait of this sort of scientist-hero.) Artist and scientist—Hoyle didn’t seem to have cared for the distinction, being a fusion himself—remain enquirers and explorers. They realise that because the sections from different times must be copies of the originals, they might not be perfect reproductions in every detail. This has an importance that flows back to illuminate the baffling events in the opening pages of the story. With an accurate appreciation of time, the right wisdom should come too.
Hoyle wished October the First Is Too Late to be more than just a provocative work of fiction. A note ‘To the Reader’ declared that the discussions of the significance of time and the meaning of consciousness are intended to be ‘quite serious’. These are linked to concerns—and solutions—that are expressed all the more forcefully for being Hoyle’s own; he shows what is really on his mind. Sometimes only fiction will do. As Clute and Nicholls explain, ‘In his best work, Hoyle demonstrates not the power of scientific method but the personal allure of transcendental intoxication. His appeal is straightforward. In his hands, science fiction does not explain. It releases.’
John Howard was born in London. He is the author of The Defeat of Grief, Numbered as Sand or the Stars, and The Lustre of Time, as well as the short story collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. He has published essays on various aspects of the science fiction and horror fields, and especially on the work of classic authors such as Fritz Leiber, Arthur Machen, August Derleth, M.R. James, and writers of the pulp era. Many of these have been collected in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic.
To the Reader
The ‘science’ in this book is mostly scaffolding for the story, story-telling in the traditional sense. However, the discussions of the significance of time and of the meaning of consciousness are intended to be quite serious, as also are the contents of chapter fourteen.
Chapter One: Prelude
I had been invited to compose a piece for the Festival of Contemporary Music, Cologne, 1966. My intention was a set of variations in serial form. I chose the serial formula, partly as a technical exercise, partly because I had a fancy to end each variation with the sound of a farmyard animal.
The first three variations went smoothly enough but I got stuck on the fourth. I decided a change of air was needed to get me out of the rut. My decision to go for a week down to Cornwall was the trifling beginning of a sequence of momentous events. It was as if I had crossed a more or less flat watershed that nevertheless separates rivers flowing to quite different oceans.
I was lying on the clifftops in the sunshine trying to puzzle out exactly how one might imitate the whinny of a horse. I must have dozed off to sleep for perhaps ten minutes. I woke with a tremendous tune, the melody of a lifetime, running in my head. It flowed on and on, statement and response, question and answer, seemingly without end. It began with a series of rocking chords in the bass. Then the first phrase came in the treble. From there on it took off with a momentum that never seemed to die, the kind of perpetuum mobile you get in the first movement of the sixth Brandenburg concerto. Quickly, I scribbled the cascade of notes on a piece of score paper, for this was not a case in which I dare trust to memory. How inevitable a melody is while you have it running in your head, how difficult to recapture once it has gone.
On the way back to my lodging at a local farmhouse I passed several horses grazing but the thought of my fourth variation was gone now. Late into the night I pondered on the ramifications of that tune. It is rare indeed for a long melody to go well with harmony. To produce striking orchestral effects one normally uses a mixture of several scraps of melody, mere fragments. But this case seemed different. Orchestral ideas grew naturally around it. The instruments thundered in my head, their individual qualities, their distinctive tones, became ever more clear, ever sharper. The people of the farm must have thought me a queer fish, I dare say. I sat all day writing for the fever of creation was on me. By the end of the week the piece was essentially finished. There was still routine work to do but nothing more.
I was already on my way back to London before the problem of the Festival recurred to me. It was obvious the variations would never be finished in time. It wasn’t just a week that was lost. In the past few days I had burnt up a couple of months of normal effort. I wondered about using the new piece. Reason told me no, emotion told me yes. I desperately wanted to hear the new sounds from the orchestra. I had given it everything, maximum sonority. Yet this was exactly where I would run into trouble. A considerable quantity of electronic music would quite certainly be played. My piece, coming late in the programme, would unfortunately look like an all-out attack on other composers. When compared with the full blast of the true orchestra, their stuff would inevitably sound thin and wan.
Then there were two points of conscience. I don’t have any rooted objection to the avant garde. While the new fashions have nothing very great to recommend them, they do at least contribute something to music. Classical methods work wonderfully well for the positive emotions, for sentiments of epic proportions. But the less pleasant emotions cannot be described at all in classical terms. It was beyond the resources of even the greatest of the old musicians to display genuine anger for instance. So really I had no quarrel with modern styles as such. My quarrel was with a fashion that claimed those styles to be everything, as if a craftsman were to insist on always working with a single tool.
My second worry was whether my piece could really be described as ‘contemporary’. Of course it was contemporary in the sense that it was recent, not more than a week old, but there is a sense in which the word represents form and technique rather than chronology.
The choice evidently lay between withdrawing and going ahead with the new piece. After something of a struggle with myself I decided to go ahead. There was a lot to be done, parts to be copied, and then mailed away to Germany. The orchestra was to be the Mannheim Symphony.
The journey to Cologne was uneventful. Two rehearsals were scheduled for me. After a few misunderstandings I managed to get the playing into tolerable shape. My time was an evening of the second week. As it came round I was motivated in the following way. My thoughts on the piece had dulled in the intervening weeks but the sound of the orchestra reawakened something of the fury I had felt in that week in Cornwall. This, and the fact that several people had heard my rehearsals and had already spread critical rumours, put me in a combative state of mind by the time I walked on to the platform to conduct.
All worries disappeared at the first surge of the music. For the next seventeen minutes I was totally committed to the vision I had had on those faraway Cornish cliffs. In rehearsal I deliberately held the orchestra back. When an orchestra becomes excited with a new work it is good policy to wait until the first actual performance before giving them their full head. I not only gave it them now, I drove them with an intensity I had never shown before. In a sense it comes ill of a composer to speak well of his own work; but it is all so far back now that I think I can be reasonably objective. As the melody surged into the final fanfare I knew I had in no way disgraced myself. I also knew I had contributed little to music except a stirring fifteen minutes or so. The musician’s problem is stated very simply: how to display the more worthwhile aspects of human nature differently from the old masters. Modern styles have concentrated in part on the meaner side of things, as I have already remarked, in part on the purely abstract. Modern styles are no solution to the problem but neither was my piece. It was an extrapolation of the old methods. It faced the challenge of comparison with the composers of the past—for fifteen minutes. It pointed no way to anybody else.