Unsettling Futures - Deep Strata: Spider World and sci-fi's psi-power obsession
The three ingredients of classic sci-fi – pulp stories, literary seriousness, and deranged woo-woo nonsense.
Giant mutant telepathic man-eating spiders!
Welcome to Deep Strata, the (very) intermittent feature where I talk about a book that was influential on me in some way, for good or ill.
The first thing that drew me to Spider World: The Tower when I was a wee little adolescent sci-fi nerd was definitely the cover. I didn't know who Chris Foss was yet, but I knew that this looked COOL. A giant spiderweb strung between the towers of a ruined city! With, er, hot air balloons? Maybe they were advertising post-apocalyptic Re/Max, I don't know?
Anyway, take a look at this and tell me that you, aged twelve to fourteen, wouldn't have grabbed this one off the library shelf.
The cover copy doesn't exactly repel young boys either. It's about a world taken over by giant spiders? With psychic powers? Who eat and enslave humans? And the one special, special lad who will lead the resistance? I couldn't get my grubby mitts on this fast enough.
Well. That was a while ago.
I acquired a cheap copy of the paperback recently (thanks, Internet!) and have been re-reading it for the first time in decades, and you will be shocked, totally shocked to know that as an actual story, it doesn't really hold up.
But the ways in which it doesn't hold up are kind of interesting and tell us a lot about the history of science fiction, so let's talk about that for a while.
The Outsider
When I read the Spider World series (follow ups: The Delta, The Magician) I had no idea who this Colin Wilson guy was. It was only after Wilson died that I spotted a piece Scottish SF writer Ken MacLeod wrote for Aeon about him. Turns out there was a lot more to Wilson than merely a pulpy 1980s SFF writer.
Read the whole essay at the link, or this Guardian obit, if you want more, but the short version is that Wilson was a huge deal in the 1950s, and then suffered from a major dip in prestige.
A working-class kid without much formal education, but with a tendency to inhale books, Wilson aspired to be a serious thinker and writer. In his early 20s, he wrote 1956's The Outsider, which was hailed as a major work of existentialism. For a brief time, Wilson was one of the Angry Young Men of the post-war British literary scene.
But by the time his follow-up books came out, the reviewers seemed embarrassed by their earlier enthusiasm. The next several books were not received as well. Wilson's research and arguments were disparaged. Whether that would have happened if he'd been a middle-class or wealthy member of the British establishment would be an interesting debate, but the result was that Wilson had a measure of fame, but zero chance of clinging to a position as a literary and philosophical wunderkind. And he had a family, and they all had to eat.
So he kept writing.
He churned out not only follow-ups to The Outsider, but pulpy thrillers and sci-fi novels (in the 1970s he wrote The Space Vampires, later to be adapted into pre-Star-Trek-Patrick-Stewart-movie Lifeforce) and a string of true-crime books. He also drifted, as so many people with contrarian modes of thinking did, into woo-woo nonsense.
Wilson was a contributor to the mid-century boom in books about parapsychology, psychic phenomena, Atlantis, Stonehenge, the "secrets" of the pyramids, all that crap. He's one of many people who ensured that my 1980s childhood would include those unceasing commercials for Time Life books about twins who could sense when the other was in danger and so on.
The paranormal and sci-fi
The origin story of science fiction goes like this: you take a scientifically plausible what-if idea (what if we could travel faster than light or through time, what if we could create new intelligent life forms and they hated us, what would aliens be like?) and you work out what the world would be like. Then you write a story to illustrate that change, and how it would affect people.
But under this story there's always been a bubbling sewer of toxic gunk.
Sci-fi loves to pretend it's a child of the Enlightenment, of reason and science and Newton and Tesla and Edison.
But it's also a child of the 19th century occult revival, of Theosophy and mesmerism and table-rapping, of the Society for Psychical Research, the Cottingly Fairies, the Loch Ness monster, Chariots of the Gods? and Ancient Aliens, the 1896 mystery airships, blurry pics of bigfoot* and UFOs, of Spring-heeled Jack and the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. **
Hoaxes, scams, personal delusions, conspiracy theories, and mass psychogenic illness are a part of the DNA of sci-fi too, and they can't be removed.
This includes the belief in psychic powers, from the mutant Slans, to the precognition of Dune's spice addicts, to Heinlein's reality-bending Valentine Michael Smith.
This thread goes back to the proto-pulps and Victorian novels, and was promoted further during the "Golden Age" by influential editor John W. Campbell, who was a believer in ESP and encouraged many popular writers to throw it into their stories. Undoubtedly many of them also believed in it too, and before long, it was firmly part of the furniture of mainstream science fiction, like faster than light travel, time travel, and other ideas that were probably physically impossible, but made for fun stories. It also proved useful for people who were trying to write fantasy before there was a fantasy category. As I mentioned a while back, until the 1980s, fantasy didn't often have its own shelf in the bookstores, and so there are many novels (like Anne McCaffrey's Pern books) that are set on regressed colony worlds with alien animals suspiciously similar to dragons/manticores/goblins etc., with psi powers providing a convenient stand in for magic.
For once in the history of SFF, Campbell was not the worst person in this particular sphere. That honour goes to Amazing Stories editor Ray Palmer, who published the "Shaver Mystery" stories. This began with letters to Amazing Stories from a man named Richard Shaver, about the aliens/Atlanteans in the hollow earth who were tormenting him at a distance. Palmer laid a gloss of narrative over the letters, and published them for several years, toying with the notion that they were true accounts. It's a grotesque example of an editor exploiting a man who almost certainly suffered from mental illness.
This ignoble history of flirting with nonsense has never really gone away or gone unnoticed – The X-Files is built on pure Forteana, and William Gibson's The Gernsback Continuum nods to tabloid weirdness as a kind of parallel track to the raygun gothic futures of the 1940s – but by the 1980s it was settling down. Psi powers were part of sci-fi, but they were treated more frequently like superpowers, just something fun and pulpy to throw into the mix.
This is not true of Spider World.
Spiders and beetles and scorpions, oh my!
This is the plot of Spider World: The Tower – Niall is a teenager who lives in a cave in the post-apocalyptic desert with his extended family. They live a neolithic existence of hunting and gathering, fighting the giant insects, scorpions, and millipedes that roam the landscape, and avoiding the feared spiders, who roam in their balloons, seeking free humans who have avoided enslavement outside their cities.
The first third of the book is by far the strongest, with Niall, his brother and father and grandfather going hunting, exploring, avoiding death at the hands of many, many things with mandibles, and trying to scratch out a living. It's pulpy nonsense, with fights with scorpions the size of large dogs and so on. At its best, it reminds me a little of the YA novels of John Christopher.
We also get quite a few hints that Niall's psychic powers are more developed than those of his family (everyone seems to have minor levels of ESP) and are getting stronger as he grows up.
But eventually the family is caught by the spiders, and dragged off to servitude in a ruined human city now taken over by the fearsome "death spiders!"
Niall naturally manages to get into an impenetrable super-science tower in the center of the city, where he finds a still-functioning human-built supercomputer called, and I am not making this up, "the Steegmaster."
Some people should not be allowed to name things.
Here everything grinds to a halt for several chapters so the Steegmaster can exposit/download knowledge into Niall's brain. When Niall asks how the spiders came to conquer humanity, the computer's two-chapter explanation starts with the formation of the solar system. TL;DR, the spiders got big and smart because of a radioactive comet or something.
Around the two thirds mark, I began skimming.
Finally, in the final 150 pages (of 496) things pick up steam, Niall and some buddies loot an armoury that has still-functioning super-science ray guns, many spiders are incinerated, there's a pirate-themed British pantomime (I… don't know) and there's a bit of politicking between the death spiders and some intelligent beetles, and the book ends with a cliffhanger.
Spider World: The Tower has many conventional problems.
Niall's family seems to have no culture of any sort – no stories, no religion, no belief in gods or an afterlife. Even the tale of his grandfather's escape from slavery in the city of the spiders, many years before, is only relayed when he's dying, as if it wasn't the kind of story you'd beg gramps to tell all the time. It's one of many places where the worldbuilding seems slapdash and wildly out of date, even for the 1980s.
Women in the story are ciphers or worse – one character could be succinctly described as "stupid nagging harridan" – and yes, there are mentions of breast size, sometimes in bizarre circumstances.
For a book that trades in long slogs of exposition, Wilson just doesn't have the voice to carry it off the way someone like Heinlein could. It's always a little distanced and sterile.
Worst of all, Niall has the personality of a damp wool sock. There's no there there, the boy just takes up heroing like someone handed him a note that tells him he's supposed to protag. He's a camera directed by Wilson, shoved here and there to take a look at the worldbuilding and (poorly paced) action set pieces.
This book would be 150 or 200 pages shorter (and a lot more fun) in the hands of a true pulp author, because Wilson deluges us in interiority. We are told of every fleeting sensation and thought that passes through Niall's brain, which he will then turn over and examine, often ad nauseum.
How is it possible to have so much interiority, and yet no actual personality? Because Niall's purpose isn't to be a character, it's to smuggle in Wilson's views on psychic phenomena.
Psychic World (also with some spiders)
I don't know if Wilson started this book with the idea that it would be a lecture on paranormal crap, but it ends up as one. We get so many sensations and feelings from the point of view of Niall because Wilson is showing the development of his "will-force" throughout the story. There are pages and pages given over to Niall reading the minds of giant insects and spiders, influencing them, getting into mental duels with them, and if this sounds interesting, I am telling it wrong.
The back half of the book feels like Wilson gave himself free rein to indulge in his pet obsession. There are still some interesting adventure bits here and there, some wish fulfillment stuff that would be of interest to a teenager back in the 1980s, but for the most part, it's baffling that his editors let him get away with it.
It's more baffling that two more books followed, along with a fourth in the 2000s, years after the original trilogy. But I suppose there is a market for this stuff. I believed in psychic powers and the Loch Ness monster and UFOs until I was eleven, and there are lots of people who keep believing in it. For some readers, a how-to guide to psi-powers is a feature, not a bug.
These books were oddities when they came out in the 1980s and early 1990s, and they look even stranger after thirty more years of evolution in the field.
Wilson walked into sci-fi through the back door. Becoming a science fiction writer wasn't his main ambition in life. He wanted to write about philosophy and crime and psychology and parapsychology, and the Spider World books gave him a chance to indulge one of his ambitions, because the Venn diagram of SF adventure stories overlapped heavily with his actual beliefs about the world. Throw in some giant bugs, et voila!
As my wife pointed out, Wilson has a lot in common with Roland Emmerich, who uses big, dumb action movies to smuggle in stuff about ancient aliens and Area 51. In an Emmerich movie, the conspiracy theorists get proven right, whether it's about Roswell or the Shakespeare authorship question.
When it comes to Fortean and conspiracist sci-fi, like Spider World, Moonfall, or The X-Files, you can ignore that stuff, and the fact that the creators believe in it to some extent. There are a few examples where it even makes for good sci-fi and fantasy, although as conspiracies like QAnon's grow more widespread and more dangerous, it leaves an increasingly bad taste in my mouth when it's part of a work's core concept.
Spider World is largely forgotten, and for good reason. But it's an interesting snapshot of the world that gave us books like Whitley Streiber's Communion, The Celestine Prophecy, and would shortly birth The X-Files and Alien Autopsy.
Recent reading
Speaking of interiority, I just finished Donna Tartt's The Secret History, a book that actually does a lot of work on its characters. They're all terrible people, but still.
I'm also just a few chapters in to a couple of newer books.
First is Paul McAuley's War of the Maps, a far-future story set on some kind of Dyson sphere. I've loved McAuley since Fairyland, and he deserves more readers. Check out Austral from a few years back – it's a story of crime and pursuit in a post-climate change Antarctica. With cloned mammoths!
I've also just gotten a library copy of Max Gladstone's Last Exit. Only a couple chapters in, but it kind of reminds me of The Dark is Rising, but for adults. Which seems like a much more fertile field to explore than "Harry Potter for adults" or "Narnia for adults," come to think of it.
Notes
*Fun fact: I live less than two hours drive from where "bigfoot" was made up out of restitched Indigenous stories about the Sasquatch.
** If you think I'm being unnecessarily hard on belief in psychic crap or cryptids or whatever, you should know I am only accepting criticism or feedback via telepathic communications. Think your arguments at me really hard!