PERCEPTION

   The ways in which we become aware of and receive information about the outside world, mainly through the senses, are together called perception. Philosophers are deeply divided as to whether our perceptions of theoutside world correspond to an actual reality, or whether they are merely hypotheses, intellectual constructs, which may give us an unreliable or partial picture of external reality, or whether, indeed, outside reality is itself a mental construct.Perception is and always has been a principal theme of sf; it is the philosophical linchpin of many stories and has played a subsidiary role in hundreds more. (Many perception stories are discussed, from a different perspective, under PSYCHOLOGY.) For convenience, we can divide sf perception stories into 5 groups: stories about unusual modes of perception; stories about appearance and reality; stories about perception altered through drugs; stories about synaesthesia; stories about altered perception of time. The groups are not mutually exclusive, and several stories fall into more than one category.Unusual modes of perception appear early in sf. R.H. HORNE's The Poor Artist (1871), which is partly devoted to the way the world wouldappear as perceived through the senses of animals, was the first book ever to be described as "science fiction" (by his contemporary William WILSON). Edwin A. ABBOTT's Flatland (1884) is an exercise in how beings from a one-or two-dimensional universe would perceive reality, and about how we would perceive a fourth DIMENSION. J.H. ROSNY aine's "Un autre monde" (1895; trans as "Another World" 1962) tells of a MUTANT with a very fast metabolism who can see colours beyond violet (and new life forms) invisible to ordinary humans. David LINDSAY developed a similar idea in A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), in which the protagonist, mysteriouslytransported to another planet, keeps forming and then losing new organs of perception whose functions run from seeing additional colours to sensing emotions to intensifying the will.Many sf writers have followed Rosny's lead in imagining modes of perception which allow the direct sensing of ALTERNATE WORLDS or other dimensions, often through ESP (see also PSIPOWERS). (It is probably more accurate to suppose that the idea was popularized by an H.G. WELLS story of the same year, "The Story of Davidson's Eyes" (1895), though Rosny's story is superior as sf.) A.E. VAN VOGT's melodramatic Siege of the Unseen (1946 as "The Chronicler"; 1959; vt as title story in The Three Eyes of Evil coll 1973 UK) has a hero with a third eye which allows him to perceive and then travel into another dimension. In Richard MCKENNA's "The Secret Place" (1966) no special organ is required; a world of the distant geological past is perceived direct by the mind of the heroine. Nearly all McKenna's work involves the perception and/or construction of alternate realities. Another of his stories, "Hunter, Come Home" (1963) involves an alien lifeform that perceives byinstant molecular analysis - which is not too far removed from our own sense of smell - an example of the strange modes of perception which appear in many of the stories described in the entry on ALIENS. James TIPTREE Jr often used perception themes, notably in the almost surreal"Painwise" (1971), in which a human explorer, surgically modified to feel no pain, takes up with a crew of hedonistic aliens fixated on taste sensations; pain is rediscovered. Several of Ian WATSON's novels have dealt more seriously with perception, as in The Jonah Kit (1975), where the perceptions of a whale are mediated through (and modified by) a human intelligence, and The Martian Inca (1977), where the perceptions of two South American Indians are changed by the accidental intake of a Martianorganism, so that their model of the world becomes very much more complex. Watson here, as elsewhere, touches on the relation between externalreality and the way that reality is perceived and modified by mental programmes in the observer. These are questions that emerge regularly in the second category, stories of appearance and reality.Appearance and reality is one of the fundamental themes of sf. It has as much to do with METAPHYSICS and CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH as with perception per se (and sois discussed, from rather a different perspective, in those two entries also; relevant stories treated in more detail in the latter are "The Yellow Pill" (1958) by Rog PHILLIPS and Counterfeit World (1964 UK; vt Simulacron-3 US) by Daniel GALOUYE). The difficulty in perceiving the difference between the real and the illusory is a central theme in ABSURDIST SF and in FABULATION, as it is in surrealist literaturegenerally; it comes up often in the stories of Josephine SAXTON and is the subject of Angela CARTER's The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972; vt The War of Dreams USA) and Salman RUSHDIE's Grimus (1975). Allthree writers regularly use the quest format, life being seen as a journey through baffling illusions, the desired end being understanding. Ed BRYANT's Cinnabar (coll of linked stories 1976) is set around an enigmaticcity where desires can be made flesh in various ways, and where reality itself is ever dissolving from one form to another; always changing and diverse, its one unchanging quality appears to be the evanescence of external reality. In James MORROW's The Continent of Lies (1984) "dreambeans" (which grow on genetically engineered trees) are used todissolve, temporarily, the boundaries between appearance and reality; the hero is a dreambean reviewer.Richard COWPER has written that "one single theme which intrigues me above all others is the nature of human perception". Where van Vogt's ESP breakthroughs into other realms of perception tend to be brutally direct and melodramatic, Cowper has approached the subject more obliquely and sensitively; a kind of further reality, not explicable in everyday terms, makes itself known to several of his characters in dreams, intimations - glimpses caught, as it were, out of the corner of the eye. Cowper clearly believes that our everyday reality is only partial, and has expertly evoked a kind of quivering, tense broadening of perception, especially in Breakthrough (1967) and The Twilight of Briareus (1974). Sf stories commonly dwell on the strangenessof such experiences, and the protagonist's feeling that he might be going mad. Another example is Arthur SELLINGS's The Uncensored Man (1964), in which drugs are used to increase receptivity, a theme we will examine further below.Several sf stories have combined ideas from MATHEMATICS (strange topologies and geometries) with stories of perception. Arthur C.CLARKE's "The Wall of Darkness" (1949) describes how it feels to live in a world which is a three-dimensional analogue of a moebius strip; it is all inside and no outside. Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon" (1990), in which M. C. Escher (1902-1972) seems to be an unacknowledged collaborator, has itsarchaic people building a tower from Earth to Heaven, from which perceptions of Earth's nature evolve the higher one climbs until, in a perceptual loop, the top turns out to be the bottom. R.A. LAFFERTY's "Narrow Valley" (1966) is quite remarkably bigger on the inside than it ison the outside - like DR WHO's Tardis - and the perceptions of the observers are driven to the brink of insanity. John CROWLEY uses a similar but much more developed version of the theme in Little, Big (1981), more fantasy than sf, in which the land of Faerie is described as having the characteristic that the further in you go the bigger it gets. Christopher PRIEST's INVERTED WORLD (1974) is a fascinating story of perceptualparadox in two respects; first, the progressive spatial distortion that takes place north and south of a shifting zone of stability on the hyperboloid planet; second, the revelation that the planet may in fact be our own Earth, viewed by a group whose perceptions have created a model of its shape which inverts the spheroid to a hyperboloid, and who cannot escape their own intellectual construct. Such stories approach genuine philosophical questions, though these are evoked in sf more commonly than they are actively explored; but even in such cases as Priest's novel (and most like it), where the scientific and philosophical argument is not really rigorous, there is a compulsive, teasing quality about the central image that amply compensates.Stanislaw LEM has several times written about the difficulties of transcending our perceptions. SOLARIS (1961; trans 1970) asks the pessimistic philosophical question: "Can we ever regardreality as knowable, given the limitations of the senses with which we apprehend it and the mental programmes which force us to relate our understanding of it always to human experience?" Barry N. MALZBERG is also intrigued with this area of speculation and pessimistic. Beyond Apollo (1972) has an astronaut returning from a disastrous expedition to Venus;he tells the story of what went wrong over and over again, always differently, but it seems that the real tragedy cannot be put in terms of his human perceptions, and all his analogies can give only a partial truth. This theme, of course, is as familiar outside sf as it is inside, though sf has remarkable resources of image and metaphor with which to explore it.The two sf writers who have played the most extravagant and kaleidoscopic variations on the theme of appearance and reality are J.G. BALLARD and Philip K. DICK. Almost all of Ballard's early work, and muchof his later, deals with the various psychological processes to which we subject our perceptions of reality. One of his earliest stories, "Build-Up" (1957; vt "The Concentration City") is a kind of bravura replayof the Clarke story cited above. A young man living in claustrophobic circumstances catches a train to escape; after weeks of travelling in one direction he finds he is going east, not west; the space of the city is curved; there is no outside, just as with our own Universe. In "The Subliminal Man" (1963) the very quickness of our perception is exploitedby advertisers. In "Manhole 69" (1957) an experiment in sleep deprivation gets out of control as the subjects' apprehension of reality shrinks their universe, smaller and smaller, effectively strangling them. The whole of Ballard's oeuvre is, in effect, an extended exploration of the inner,psychic universes made up by our selective perceptions of the external world - hence the term he popularized, used often of his subject matter, INNER SPACE.The paradox in Ballard is that, although our inner reality ismade up of data from the outside (in such a confusing hotchpotch that the system can short out through overload), the inner pattern created by the data mediates the reception of further data in a kind of vicious circle, where no certainty is possible. Dick's emphasis is a little different; his realities often require inverted commas: they are "realities" consistently adulterated by false constructs, hallucinations, counterfeiting. Ultimately the conjuring is so baffling that the stability of any realitycomes to seem suspect; the external world suffers a kind of dissolution. In its place we are left with a view which is surprisingly far frompessimistic, as Dick implies it; it can be synopsized (only crudely) as "the universe is what we perceive it to be". This is not necessarily anintolerable labyrinth, for Dick provides a dogged survival factor connected somehow to innate human decency, by which the construction of simple, often ethical reference points may prevent the self from spiralling inwards into subjective madness: handholds for the mind. The most important works by Dick relevant to perception are Eye in the Sky (1957), Time Out of Joint (1959), THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE (1962), THETHREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH (1964), Martian Time-Slip (1964), The Penultimate Truth (1964), Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb, (1965), Now Wait for Last Year (1966), Ubik (1969), A Maze of Death (1970), and Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Together they constitute a kind of meta-novel, unique in literature. Ursula K. LE GUIN moved briefly into Dick's territory with The Lathe of Heaven (1971), in which a man has the power to alter reality through his dreams; here, although the reality-shifts are adroitly managed, the central theme bears more on the making of ethical decisions than it does on questions of appearance and reality per se.Several of the shifting realities cited in the Dick novels above were catalysed by drugs, his A SCANNER DARKLY (1977) being his most prolonged exploration of the theme. The late 1960s saw a general interest in the drug-culture. In the air was a romantic belief that drugs could open the gates of perception, and offer heightened and perhaps superior versions of reality. Very few sf writers subscribed to this myth, and indeed when drugs had figured in earlier sf - as in Aldous HUXLEY's BRAVE NEW WORLD (1932), where drugs are used to dim perceptionand bring about a false euphoria - they had usually been seen as detracting from rather than heightening the powers of perception, although Margaret ST CLAIR in Sign of the Labrys (1963) has theconsciousness-heightening power of some fungi as potentially transcendental. Similarly, in Robert SILVERBERG's Downward to the Earth (1970) a drug is the agent for the transcendent rebirth undergone by thehero, who, like the despised natives on the planet he has revisited, is suffused by a new and joyful perception of life's harmony. Also relevant here is The Butterfly Kid (1967) by Chester ANDERSON, in which the drug-induced mood is more cheerful than transcendent.More common, even in the 1960s, at the height of the drug culture's years of euphoria, were sf stories about the distortions of perception brought about by drugs, especially those written by NEW-WAVE writers, who could not generally be described as conservative and who indeed lived in the main closer to the drug-culture than sf writers a little older. Drug-taking, for example, plays a role in Charles PLATT's The City Dwellers (1970; rev vt Twilight of the City 1977) and M. John HARRISON's The Centauri Device (1974). Perhaps the most vivid of all new-wave sf works dealing with perceptionshifts through drugs is Brian W. ALDISS's Barefoot in the Head (fixup 1969), in which hallucinogenic drugs have been used as a weapon in Europe,and the entire freaked-out population shifts into a euphoric anarchy that changes easily to violence. Norman SPINRAD has written some notable stories about drugs, including "No Direction Home" (1971), where a future USA is so used to orchestrating its mental states by drugs that perceptionof naked reality without any chemical assistance is seen as the worst trip of all.Synaesthesia is an interesting perceptual state which occasionally appears in sf; it is a condition where the senses become confused and feed into one another, so that, perhaps, a vision can be smelt. Alfred BESTER exploited it in Tiger! Tiger! (1956 UK; rev vt The Stars My Destination 1957 US), where, in a compelling passage, the hero's apotheosis comesabout (with many verbal fireworks) in a synaesthetic rite of passage which mixes agony and exultation. Spinrad envisaged synaesthesia as perhaps addictive in his strong story "All the Sounds of the Rainbow" (1973).Drugs can be seen as a quasi-natural or at least organic method of altering modes of perception. Sf, naturally, has many times invented technological means for doing the same thing. Bob SHAW has persistently written about alternate forms of vision: in the Slow Glass stories collected in Other Days, Other Eyes (fixup 1972) a glass is invented which slows the passageof light through it, so that the past can be directly perceived in the present; in Night Walk (1967) a blind man invents a device which allows him to see through the eyes of other humans and animals; and in A Wreath of Stars (1976) a device is invented to render visible a world (coexisting with our own) made entirely from antineutrinos.The Slow Glass stories bring us directly to the last category: unusual perceptions of time (see also TIME TRAVEL). Spinrad has written in this area: "The Weed of Time" (1970) is about a drug which makes its victim see all his lifetime asco-present; the effect is retroactive, so that the hero as a child knows he will be affected by the drug before he has been. Dick's Martian Time-Slip (1964) sees schizophrenia (PARANOIA) as bringing with it analtered time perception. In James BLISH's "Common Time" (1953) the altered time perception is brought about by pseudo-relativistic effects in a rapidly accelerating spaceship. Eric Frank RUSSELL's "The Waitabits" (1955) is an amusing story about a race of aliens who experience time muchmore slowly, appearing almost static to humans. Kurt VONNEGUT Jr's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) has aliens who, like Spinrad's hero, see alltime as existing simultaneously, which gives them a somewhat deterministic view of the Universe. In Jacques STERNBERG's "Ephemera", one of the stories in Futurs sans avenir (coll 1971; trans as Future without Future 1974), survivors of a spacewreck are doomed when they land on a planet inwhich, as in Russell's story, the inhabitants see time more slowly. Ballard, as might be expected, has several stories about the perception oftime, the most powerful being "The Voices of Time" (1960), in which the Universe is running down and time perception on Earth is altered invarious ways; one man is able to sense geological time directly, as if he smelt it. Time is a dominant theme of Aldiss's work; his stories about time perception include the strange "Man in His Time" (1965), about a man who perceives time a few minutes ahead of everyone else, and "The Night that All Time Broke Out" (1967), in which a time gas used for controlled mental time travel gushes out and affects everyone. His most notable story of this kind is An Age (1967; vt Cryptozoic! 1968 US), in which it finally turns out that time actually runs backwards, but our minds defensively perceive it as going forward. The same notion was used at around the same time, quite coincidentally, by Philip K. Dick in Counter-Clock World (1967), but the Aldiss book, though uneven, has the greater imaginativebrio; more recent treatments of the ideas of An Age and "Man in his Time" are, respectively, Martin AMIS's Time's Arrow (1991) and Eric BROWN's "The Time-Lapsed Man" (1988). The strangest of all such stories, however, mustbe David I. MASSON's "Traveller's Rest" (1965), about a war against an unknown enemy on the northern frontier of a country where the perception of time slows down as one travels south; a soldier on indefinite leave marries, raises a family, grows middle-aged, and is eventually called up again to find himself back in his bunker 22 minutes after he left. The story is told with extraordinary conviction.The time-perception stories cited above are generally of a very high standard, demonstrating clearly the way that sf thought-experiments can stimulate the mind and move the feelings in ways that are almost closed to traditional realist fiction. We take time for granted without fully understanding it, or how it works; these stories, with some intensity, stretch our perceptions of what meaning it might have for us.

   PN