Polish Vampires from Space!

(Here's a brief distraction from a reality more threatening than any fiction emerging from across the pond: my introduction to Kosmiczne Wampiry (2024), the Polish edition of Colin Wilson's The Space Vampires (1976))

Existential Science Fiction: Colin Wilson and The Space Vampires

          In an essay called “Science Fiction and Existentialism,” (Existentially Speaking, Borgo Press, 1989), the British existentialist philosopher and novelist Colin Wilson tells the story of attending the Science Fiction Writer’s Convention in Hollywood, California in 1967. He remarks that his own first work of science-fiction, The Mind Parasites, was not yet published, and that he was not there as a contributor to the genre, but as a visiting writer. Wilson’s first book, The Outsider, had brought him practically worldwide fame a decade earlier, and by the time of the convention, he had several novels and volumes of philosophy under his belt.

As a boy, Wilson had loved the old classic science-fiction of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, and he was also a fan of the great pulp sci-fi magazines, like Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder Worlds, Startling Stories, and others from the 1930s and 40s. He had been invited to the convention to speak about what he called “the new existentialism,” an approach to the themes of human freedom and purpose he had developed in the books of his “Outsider Cycle.” It was one that he believed avoided the gloomy conclusions of Sartre, Camus, and Heidegger. Wilson’s “new existentialism” offered a more positive, optimistic vision of existence than they did; nevertheless, as he says in the essay, the world of Sartre, Camus and Heidegger seemed “a bleak and barren place” compared to the world of the best of science fiction. And while he lectured on their ideas, he secretly wished he could indulge his nostalgia and blast off for “strange new worlds.”

What excited Wilson about science-fiction – the best of it at least -  was that it was able to convey “an exciting and life-enhancing sense of the mystery of the universe.” Now, if you know your existentialism, this is a very different view of our place in the cosmos than what the existentialists offer. For Camus, life is “absurd,” and he likens it to the fate of Sisyphus, who is condemned to the futile act of pushing a boulder to the top of a hill, only for it to roll down again. For  Sartre, “man is a useless passion,” and it is “meaningless that we live or die.” Heidegger sees us “thrown” into existence, our “being here” itself nothing more than the prologue to our inevitable death.

All three offer visions of a stoic endurance in the face of a meaningless universe, in which we can hope for little more than a grim determination not to be “defeated.” Sisyphus, Camus tells us, can be happy. While it may take some effort to get a chuckle out of such Sisyphean work, it is easy to see that it is an example of what Wilson called “futile heroism,” and one more symbol of the tragic view of human existence.

Now while Wilson appreciates what we might call the critical work of these philosophers, who refuse to close their eyes to the chaos upon which human life is founded - unlike most of us, who turn away from it hoping it will disappear – he could not accept their conclusions. One reason he couldn’t was that he had a powerful sense of the sheer interestingness  of the world we have been “thrown” into, its strangeness and, as mentioned, its mystery. For all their depth, Sartre and Co., never stray far from a “dreary insistence on everyday reality.” They keep their reader’s nose smack on the pedestrian grindstone, arguing that any hankering for anything more is merely a form of escapism.

Such a penchant for the meagre fare of ‘realism’ is shared by other critics of ‘escapism,’ Marxists, for example, and other proponents of various forms of “social realism” prevalent today. And while ‘realism’, in the sense of accuracy and believability are not foreign to Wilson’s novels – see the gritty graphic narrative of his first novel, Ritual in the Dark, a study in sex crime – he is not inclined to limit his scope to the “trivialities of everdayness,” as his esteemed existential forebearers do. What strikes Wilson as the essence of science-fiction is its “attempt to stimulate the earth-bound imagination of  man to grasp the immensity around him.” This is why it struck Wilson that science fiction was “perhaps the most important form of literary creation that man had ever discovered.” Far from an escape from reality, as its critics often claim, science fiction is actually a gateway to a much larger, more fascinating and meaningful reality than the one in front of our noses.

How does the best sci-fi achieve this kind of imaginative lift-off, reaching escape velocity and carrying the reader to “infinity and beyond?” By its use of ideas. We find this in Wells, and in Olaf Stapleton in his remarkable Last and First Men and Starmaker. We find it in David Lindsay’s unclassifiable masterpiece A Voyage to Arcturus. We find it in the novels of John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cukoos and others. We find it in Wilson’s friend, the pulp master A. E. Van Vogt, known as the “undisputed ideas man of sci-fi.” And we find it in Wilson.

          Wilson’s first entry into the sci-ranks was, as mentioned, The Mind Parasites. He wrote it in response to a challenge by August Derleth, the writer and publisher, after Derleth had read Wilson’s criticisms of H. P. Lovecraft in his book The Strength to Dream, a study of writers and the imagination, part of his ‘Outsider Cycle’. Derleth, a friend of Lovecraft, kept his work in print through his Arkham House Press after his death. Wilson took up the challenge, but rather than try to frighten his readers with a tale of “eldritch” and “unspeakable” horror – as the over-writing Lovecraft did – he instead used some Lovecraftian themes to convey his ideas about human consciousness.

The Outsider had asked why so many men of genius in the nineteenth and early twentieth century died young, went insane, committed suicide, or in some way cracked up? Think of Nietzsche, Baudelaire, Strindberg – the list could go on. The Mind Parasites is a philosophical fable offering an explanation: that the human mind had been invaded by a kind of psychic parasite, that lives off courage and optimism, and eliminates those it cannot control. The parasites are eventually defeated by a group of scientists and philosophers who have grasp the fundamental idea of the “new existentialism,” that consciousness is intentional , an insight Wilson acquired from the philosopher Edmund Husserl. It was out of Husserl’s ‘phenomenology’ that existentialism arose, through his student Heidegger’s misunderstanding of its basic premise. We can see Wilson’s fable as an illustration of how he went wrong.

Similarly, in Wilson’s second sci-fi effort, The Philosopher’s Stone, Wilson again uses Lovecraftian elements to embody his account of how a delicate brain operation reveals unthought of powers in the minds of those who undergo it. Among the many ideas the book gives body to is that of the “undoubted queerness of time,” and the little understood “relationality” of consciousness. This is Wilson’s coinage to convey the ability of consciousness to “reach out” beyond the present moment and grasp “the reality of other times and places,” what in his magnum opus The Occult, Wilson called “faculty X.” We can say that the book is a fable of the imagination’s ability to participate in “realities not immediately present.”

The inspiration for The Space Vampires, the work you have in your hand, is an example of how our unconscious mind can often hand us a powerful idea on a platter. Wilson tells of how, resting after a long train journey, he had a sudden vision of “a vast space craft – fifty miles long and twenty miles high – floating in space…” A space ship from Earth – the story, written in the 1970s, takes place some years in the future – discovers the craft and draws alongside it. Its sides, battered by meteors, rise up like cliffs…

          Wilson wondered if he had tapped some realm of the Jungian “collective unconscious.” He had been thinking recently about how certain people seem to drain our energy, as if they were unwitting vampires of some kind. And of the contrary, why some people seemed able to project their energies onto others… And now this image of a colossal space craft, floating derelict in our solar system, appeared in his mind…

What ideas are at work in the novel that Wilson wrote in six weeks at top speed after that startling vision? That would be telling, but they include longevity, extraterrestrials, metamorphosis, telepathy and sex – plenty of it. (With the absence of any sex in his first two sci-fi efforts, he may have wanted to rectify the imbalance.) Going into detail, however, would spoil the readers’ fun in discovering them themselves. And it would also deprive readers of this excellent translation of the great joy in having “an exciting and life-enhancing sense of the mystery of the universe,” served up to them by a master.

London January 2024