Every literary novelist apparently knows that science fiction is “all about” robots and spaceships and other planets. Oh, there’s plenty of that stuff as topdressing, but at its best science fiction is about us and our Faustian bargain with our big brains, which dragged us out of the trees but may yet drag us into the volcano. The best science-fiction book ever is only erratically in print, and it is The Evolution Man by the late Roy Lewis. Look in vain for robots. In fact, look in vain for Homo sapiens, probably, since the cast is a family of Pleistocene humanoids.
They’ve learned to walk upright and now they’re ready for the big stuff—fire, cookery, music, arts, and the remarkable discovery that you shouldn’t mate with your sister. Because it’s too easy, says Father, the visionary horde leader. In order to progress, humanity must create inhibitions, frustrations, and complexes, and drive itself out of an animal Eden. To rise, we must screw ourselves up. Wonderful stuff, and my annual read. It’s about time it had a mass-market publisher again.
Finally, you won’t find this one in a modern bookshop but most good secondhand bookshops have it (unless I’ve been past, because I buy them up and press them on friends). It’s The Specialist, by Charles Sale, and is only a few dozen pages long. Strictly speaking, it’s the reminiscences of a privy builder, but it’s really a gentle education in the nature of humour. That stuff needs deep soil; you can grow wit on a damp flannel.
INTRODUCTION TO ROY LEWIS’S The Evolution Man
Corgi, 1989
You hold in your hands one of the funniest books of the last 500,000 years.*1
At its simplest, it is a comic account of the discovery and use, by a family of extremely Early Men, of some of the most powerful and fearful things the human race has ever laid a hand on—fire, the spear, marriage, and so on. It’s also a reminder that the problems of progress didn’t start with the atomic age but with the need to cook without being cooked, and eat without being eaten.
It’s also a reminder that the first weapon to kill people but leave buildings standing was a club.
It hasn’t been a bestseller yet (at least in the commonly accepted sense of the word), and perhaps that is because it is so difficult to categorize—nothing hurts a book more than people not knowing what shelf to put it on. Since it was first published in 1960, it has gone through a variety of printings and a variety of names (not just The Evolution Man, which is what Brian Aldiss wisely rechristened it that year when he chose it as one of the first novels to start the Penguin SF list, but also Once Upon an Ice Age and What We Did to Father).
Aldiss spotted what had not, until then, been noticed by anyone else, including the author—that it was, in fact, extremely good science fiction. The genuine article. Of course it didn’t have rockets in it. So what? You don’t need rockets. We all know this now. In 1960, that perception was less general.
I bought my copy then because it had “SF” on the cover. I’d buy anything that had “SF” on the cover in those dark days, in the same way that you’ll drink anything marked “liquid” if you’re in a desert. And then I realized that I was reading something literate, novel, and very, very funny. After twenty-eight years that original copy has been loaned to friends so often that the print has nearly been worn off the pages by eyeball pressure.
If you’ve read this far, it’s probably safe to tell you that this is a cult book. But don’t worry about it. The term simply means that people have stumbled upon it not because of massive advertising but by happy accident, and then cherished the wonderful warm feeling that they’re the only ones who know about it. In other words, it’s a good cult book. By the time you’ve finished it, the cult will be bigger by one.
It will change your life in little ways. For example, the opening scenes of 2001 will never look the same again, because you’ll be wondering which ape is Uncle Vanya. And you’ll find yourself thanking, next time you see one of those helpful little books that identify edible and poisonous mushrooms, all those hundreds of research ape-men who sacrificed their lives to establish precisely which was which.
And you can savour the true story that the germ of the idea for all this came to Roy Lewis when, as The Economist’s Commonwealth Affairs reporter in the mid-fifties, he asked the renowned anthropologist Louis Leakey to explain the meaning of some prehistoric cave paintings. Leakey danced the meaning for him.
From this, and from observations of the dismantling of British colonial rule in Africa, and from reflections on the depths of history that lay under the political goings-on, Lewis crafted this book.
The famous French biochemist Jacques Monod subsequently wrote to point out one or two technical errors, but added that they didn’t matter a damn because reading the book made him laugh so much he fell off a camel in the middle of the Sahara.
So sit on something solid.
April 1988 (somewhere in the Holocene)
*1 Well, sadly, you don’t—at least not The Evolution Man—but if you can you should get your hands on it.
THE KING and I
or How the Bottom Has Dropped Out of the Wise Man Business
Western Daily Press, 24 December 1970
Working at this paper was my second job—I had just started there, after leaving the Bucks Free Press, when I wrote this piece. It was at the Bucks Free Press, my first job out of school, that I knew three real wise men: Mr. Church was a solemn one. He took his position seriously and he made us newcomers take it seriously as well. Then there was Bugsy Burroughs, who would bawl you out when you did something wrong. They taught me a lot between them. On my first day I saw my first dead body—an extremely dead body. I was scribbling away with Mr. Alan, the third wise man, showing me the ropes, and I thought, “I’ve learned more today than I think I ever did at school.”
All I wanted was gold, frankincense, and myrrh. Like a latter-day oriental king. That’s all. There couldn’t be a simpler Christmas shopping list. Easy, I thought. Basic.
I ended up in the middle of Broadmead, Bristol, in the rain, dressed like a refugee from The Desert Song and feeling like a very recently deposed Middle Eastern potentate.
I kept thinking: “You’re not cut out for this sort of thing. If they gave you a camel you wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
I started out happily enough, I even took a carrier bag. That shows how innocent I was.
Gold. Well, that’s common enough, you get it in rings and teeth. Frankincense turned out to be a bittersweet-smelling powder; myrrh a medicinal gum.
Medicinal: I headed for Boots.
“Frankincense? Who makes it?” asked the lady in the perfume department.