(Note this is a re-read for me as I read this at some point in the 90s.)
For a book written in 1963, this is a really interesting time for the life of this masterpiece. Sometimes the terms masterpiece or classic get thrown around and they don't apply, this book I think would survive without the other media but the strength of the story comes from the power of the writer Walter Tevis. (keep your eye for more writing on his life and career) Despite dying in 1984 his books have remained in print, and the dominance of Queen's Gambit on Netflix made his last novel a household name. This was not the first time when his novels had that kinda reach. The Hustler released in 1959 was turned into a film just two starring a young Paul Newman and became classic outside of the genre ghetto. Tevis was lucky despite taking many years off from writing his work remained popular, in 1976 The Man Who fell to Earth was adapted by Nicholas Roeg into the strange film that has become a cult classic featuring the first film appearance of David Bowie. He was inspired casting and is a huge reason why we are talking about it now. I am not sure the current show produced by Star Trek creators Alex Kurtzman and Jenny Lumet would have gotten the green light if they couldn’t sell it to Showtime as from the novelist of Queen’s Gambit which was a massive hit for Netflix.
Without talking about the film or the new TV series which is essentially a sequel to the movie the novel plays an important role in the genre, beyond just being good. It is more than good, it is a great and important work. It plays a transitional role in two foundational ways. For the genre, this novel marks the last major work of an era, in part because of when it was published. 1963 was still close to the dawn of the space race and it was a time when real exploration of the solar system was happening for the first time. The space operas of the golden age were being knocked out of hard science, and even novels considered to be more possible from Bradbury's Martian Chronicles to pulpy fantasies like Burroughs John Carter books were looking more impossible. Mars was starting to look like the lifeless radiation-drenched desert planet we know it to be now. Thomas Newton doesn't call his home Mars, but it is heavily hinted. It is possible that the dead world we see is what he called Anthea it is left up to us readers to decide.
The timing of this novel is also makes TMWFTE Transitional in the sense that it is one of the early serious Science Fiction novels to address environmentalism. Coming one year after the landmark publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and before the launching of Earth Day. This novel is a true ecologically themed Science Fiction novel every bit as much as Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up or modern novels like Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. While more subtle than say 1984 (about Fascism) or Alas, Babylon (About nuclear war) but just as effective as a warning novel. Tevis expresses through Newton little doubt that the human race as it is currently living will not survive.
Before I start breaking it down let me say this book deserves all the hyperbole thrown on it. It is a classic in every sense. It has a very midwestern pastoral feeling that makes it feel like the works of Clifford Simak. I suspect the Minnesota newspaperman who never broke out of the genre ghetto was a huge influence on Tevis. Simak’s Way Station is a very similar novel released the same year. The Tevis novel was not even nominated, but I would say it is a slightly better novel. The reason the Simak novel won the Hugo is in part because they are voted on by fans. The Way Station Hugo was in part a lifetime achievement award. Tevis was famous because his first novel had mainstream success, but he didn’t have a following in the genre. Remember Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut was released that year, and yeah it didn’t win either.
Okay, all that doesn’t matter you should read all three. You can put The Man Who Who fell to Earth on your list now, here are some reasons why. If you want to go in without a hint of theme or spoilers click away now…
To the best knowledge of the time, Tevis took science seriously enough to make Thomas Newton actually looked and felt alien. While the knowledge of science has pushed forward over the decades this gives the novel a slightly more surreal feel than it had at the time. If anyone was wondering how to feel the author of Queen’s Gambit or The Hustler handled the science fictional aspects don’t worry.
“He was sick, sick from the long dangerous trip he had taken, sick from all the medicine —the pills, the inoculations, the inhaled gases — sick from worry, the anticipation of a crisis, and terribly sick from the awful burden of his own weight. He had known for years that when the time came, when he would finally land and begin to affect that complex, long-prepared plan, he would feel something like this. The place, however much he had studied it, however much he had rehearsed his part in it, was so incredibly alien — the feeling, now he could feel — the feeling was overpowering. He lay down in the grass and became very sick.”
This alien nature of Thomas Newton and the stranger in a strange land vibe is played weirder and with more bizzaro touch in the novel and the 1976 film. The current TV adaptation leans more into camp that feels more like the 1984 John Carpenter movie Starman. I actually think this is a smart choice for the TV show that makes Faraday played by Chiwetel Ejiofor instantly sympathetic. It also makes the show more entertaining.
That pastoral midwestern autobiographical feel of the novel is something that the movie or series doesn’t have but I don’t think that is a bad thing. This is the personal part of the novel, Tevis never felt comfortable growing up in Kentucky a place where he always felt alien and out of place in. It is a theme he would return to. It is not that the series is devoid of this Naomi Harris plays Justin Falls a brilliant scientist who theories were so ahead of her times she is laughed out of academia. When we meet her she is struggling to survive and take care of her dying father.
This is a smart updating of the story, and considering that the series is a directly sequel to the film, in this sense it touches on the often overlooked themes of the novel. That feeling of being a freak. Now that nerd culture is celebrated it requires that we use a Wayback machine like a 1963 novel to remember how alienating it felt to be super smart and into weird things in a part of the world that just wanted down-home country folk conformity. Two decades before he wrote Queen’s Gambit… The Man Who Fell to Earth is totally a novel about being a nerd in the midwest.
Another aspect of the novel that which from being good science fiction to out-of-date surrealism is the world-building. Written in 1961 or 62 but taking place in the late 1980s as Tevis foresaw it gives the novel an extra special feel.
“A newsreel in progress and he watched it dully, with the mild dread that such things gave him. There were pictures of riots in Africa. How many years have they been rioting in Africa? Ever since the sixties? there was a speech by a gold coast politician, threatening the use of 'Tactical Hydrogen weapons against some hapless formentors."
The focus on African nations is a bit strange and certainly, it was an unfortunate choice to only focus on violence in Africa. One of the few things I didn't think aged well. Hydrogen weapons didn’t become a thing. The idea that he saw the world still being in chaos certainly came true. We are not in a positive future free of conflict, Tevis felt comfortable with that prediction. Thomas Newton left a dead world and knows all too well that the earth is on the same path as his homeworld. When he first arrives on earth, it is uncomfortable, scary, and alien to him. As he grows to understand it we also learn that yearns for the world he left even though it is dead.
"He looked out the window at the brighter light of morning, at the pale blue sky, possibly directly where he was looking, was Anthea. A cold place, dying, but one for which he became homesick."
Using the tool of science fiction Tevis does something he couldn’t do as effectively in a straight autobiography about his life in Kentucky. He can step outside of the human race and give it an outsider look.
“Not all of us are insane.’
‘But most of you are. Enough of you are – it only requires a few insane ones, in the right places.”
As for the pastoral passages. I love when the novel perfectly blends the midwestern feel with the pulpy old school feel of 60s science fiction.
“…A home built in heavy-handed and tasteless pride by some unknown and long-dead tobacco or coal or lumber baron more than a century before; and to his left the most austere and futuristic of all constructions, a spaceship. A spaceship standing in a Kentucky pasture, surrounded by autumnal mountains…”
The following moment has a powerful Simak feeling to it. It gives a sense of Kentucky in the summer. The transition from the beauty of the earth to dead Anthea is heartbreaking.
"He liked the woods, the quiet sense of life in them, and the glistening moisture - the sense of water and of fruitfulness that this earth overflowed with, even down to the continual trilling and chirping sounds of the insects. It would be an endless source of delight compared to his own world, with the dryness, the emptiness, the soundlessness of the broad, empty deserts between the almost deserted cities where the only sound was the whining of the cold and endless wind that voiced the agony of his own, dying people...”
This leads Newton to value the earth in a way we take for granted. Someone who knows and understands just how rare and beautiful the earth is. Not only did he come from a dead world but he is not as attuned to it as we are, he struggles to live in our gravity for example. He understands far better than the average human the stakes.
“Do you realize that you will not only wreck your civilization, such as it is, and kill most of your people; but that you will also poison the fish in your rivers, the squirrels in your trees, the flocks of birds, the soil, the water? There are times when you seem, to us, like apes loose in a museum, carrying knives, slashing the canvases, breaking the statuary with hammers.”
In a modern sense, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora does a wonderful job making this same point. This is where the TV series (at the time of this review three episodes have been released) and the novel are most aligned. In the same week that a Kurtzman and Lumet co-scripted episode of Star Trek that had a passionate speech where a Starfleet talked of the civil war that almost lead to our demise, the series of TMWFTE gave us 8 years before we have ended our civilization. It was funny, after the first episode I posted something on Facebook about how I loved the series and someone responded. “Another show ignoring the source material.”
Uh...not at all. Walter Tevis and his themes are alive and well in the series. Kurtzman and Lumet are honoring the novel as far as I am concerned.
“He felt somehow like a college sophomore, arguing human destiny. But this was not exactly abstract philosophizing. “Doesn’t mankind have a right to choose its own form of Destruction?”
It is interesting that Newton mocks democracy in a passage, but doesn’t really go into what exactly the nearly dead world offers as an alternative. Also in the SF masterworks edition, there is a reference to Watergate and the Nixon scandal. The novel was written in 1963, and this edition was 2016. Tevis died in 1984. I assume he added that scene before his death. Anyways it confused me.
Now if perhaps I have given the impression that the novel is all negative, that is not the case at all. Newton is not impressed with how we treated our planet but we are having an effect on them.
“I think you’re lying, Mister Newton. We Aren’t insects to you. Maybe we were at first, but we aren’t now.”
“Oh yes, I love you, certainly. Some of you. But you’re insects anyway. However, I may be more like you than I am like me.”
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a science fiction masterpiece. A novel of environmentalism for sure but I think if you really look deep now at the thing that gives it life is the intense exploration of feeling different. If the novel has a mission statement…
“I’m Thomas Jerome Newton, from Idle creek, Kentucky I’m a physical freak. You’ve seen my birth record in the Bassett County courthouse. I was born there in 1918.”
“That would make you 70 years old. You look forty.”
Newton shrugged his shoulders. “As I say, I’m a freak. A mutant. Possibly a new species. I don’t think that is illegal, is it?”
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