by Edmund Cooper
Yet still pick it up. The idea of trying
to overcome a world made of fantasy is such a compelling theme, and it
doesn’t matter if it’s somewhere between The Truman Show, The Stepford
Wives and The Matrix, the very fact that it’s got Zeppelins in it
betrays its fast-beating steampunk heart.
Edmund Cooper (1926 – 1982), who also
wrote under the names Richard Avery, George Kinley, Broderick Quain and
Martin Lester (those are just the ones I know about) wrote quickly, like
many SF authors, and his books are typical to the genre, and very often
about one person against the world, and very often a post-apocalyptic
world at that.
Time and again Edmund Cooper has been in
trouble for his supposed attitude towards women and gender equality.
This is always problematic when one of your favourite writers turns out
to have had an unethical or downright amoral (or should I just say
‘wrong’) stance concerning something. I think of the problems I’ve had
with Céline over the years, and no matter how much one can ignore these
things, or write them off as culturally specific or inherited traits, it
still doesn’t make it easy. In Cooper’s case with gender equality, it
seems that while he believed in equality, he didn’t give it much
thought, and even less when it came to expressing it. Although quotes
have surfaced which make Edmund Cooper look like a misogynist, and
Céline look like a Nazi, I can in both cases think of quotes which
redress or would at least attenuate these sentiments.
In the case of Edmund Cooper, his Wikipedia entry
notes that the novel Five to Twelve (1968) ends with the phrase "if we
do not make any more mistakes, we can create a balanced world of men and
women", which would seem fair enough.
Whichever way the cookie crumbles,
Edmund Cooper was one of these writers that was in big demand when he
was alive, for the quick fix SF he wrote, which was always of interest
to the fans of the genre. In the 1980s, the science fiction section of
our local bookshops always featured a row of his titles, but nowadays
I’m lucky if they even turn up in the second-handies.
The Overman Culture is one of the better
written Edmund Cooper novels in my opinion. They pretty much always had
far-fetched and fantastic premises, but this wasn’t always dealt with
in a style that was completely riveting. Many writers come alive when
writing about children and childhood, and Edmund Cooper wasn’t an
exception. It must have been great fun to write The Overman Culture,
simply because of the massive jam that Cooper creates — Spencer Tracy,
Queen Victoria, Apollo 12, Gone with the Wind and Emily Bronte, all
hemmed into the same mad circumstance.
What I recall as being most dear about
The Overman Culture was however the research that the young protagonist
does to establish what the hell is going on in his world. It’s a simple
metaphor for something that every teenager goes through to a degree,
when the facts of the universe are there to be discovered for the first
time. Going to the library, or the cinema, both are valid explorations
and discoveries as a young person, there is lurking an expectation that
new knowledge will be found, but often that new knowledge just generates
more and crazier questions. And as this goes on, and as the hero’s
relationship with his parents deteriorates, we inch closer and closer to
the truth.
It’s one of the great catharses of
science fiction that in a good book like this, we reach the end with the
truth in hand, although the reality of life is that generally, although
we get the facts, the truth eludes us like a shifting horizon,
remaining as a philosophical promise as opposed to a dramatic revelation
which will resolve everything on page 190.
‘The night spent in the library had been
harrowing, exciting and finally restful. For the first time in their
lives, forty-three human beings felt both free and united. They had been
made free by their discovery of the truth; and they had been united by
the discovery of their origin.’
This is why it’s such a great metaphor.
Should the world turn out to be an illusion, as it often does, so very
much would be explained.
The Overman Culture at Epic Volumes Home Planet
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