Sociopathic personalities in the SF of Sir Fred Hoyle?

[major_clanger]

Has anyone ever written a serious study of characterisation in Fred Hoyle's sf? I've been re-reading The Black Cloud and something that's very striking is how the protagonist Prof Chris Kingsley is not just manipulative and arrogant but displays every trait of being an outright sociopath. Yet he is portrayed by Hoyle as an enlightened technocrat who simply arranges less rationally-effective members of society to suit the greater good.

Now, The Black Cloud was Hoyle's first novel, published in 1957 - slightly suprisingly, given its underlying theme, two years before C.P. Snow's 'Two Cultures' lecture. It may be that Hoyle was expressing, in his typically blunt and acerbic manner, his own take on the issues Snow was later to articulate. But I've read most of Hoyle's fiction, and as I recall Kingsley is an extreme but by no means atypical Hoyle leading man. It's tempting to review his work to see if his attitude to such personality traits evolves over time, but I wonder if anyone has already looked at this?

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I think he might just be reflecting the hero type typical of genre writing at the period in the UK. If you look at 50s genre romance, this kind of dominant behaviour is standard for heroes and the same goes for adventure novels. (LoTR is different, yes. That's becaase Tolkien was not writing in a genre voice but rather took his hero-types from mediaeval models, which are rather different.)

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

This my say something about the great divide running down the Madingley Road at the time, and the characters he was bumping into every day.

The Madingley was was still described as the 'widest road in astronomy' when started in the field, 30 years after the Black Cloud.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Greenwich House in on the north side (bellinghwoman works there), but what's on the south side? (Excluding the William Gates III building, the veterinary school and the British Antarctic Survey that I can think of.)

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

On one side is the Institute of Astronomy - once the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, and Hoyle's baby - and on the other is The Cavendish Lab, home of the physics department and the evil radio astronomers who sought to kill the Steady State Theory.

[bellinghman.livejournal.com]

Of course. I have a mental map of Cambridge that never quite pinned the Cavendish down.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

But Kingsley was right, damnit! :)

I've always felt him to be a deliberately exaggerated contrast to the political classes whom Hoyle held such obvious (and entirely justified) contempt. Kingsley wasn't entirely socipathic either: he (whether deliberately or otherwise) failed absolutely to communicate with the establishment, but I think he would've happily mixed in some of the less salubrious haunts of his fellow physicist, Feynman.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Except that I've reached the bit of the book where he ends up being horribly wrong (his catastrophic misreading of how the US and Soviet leadership would respond to his statement that he could persuade the Cloud to destroy their countries.) Whether Hoyle was highlighting the limitations of Kingsley's intelligence or the irrationality of politicians is arguable, mind you.

Reading the book, I find I get a very strong impression of Kingsley's persona: Avon, from Blake's Seven. I wonder if Terry Nation ever read The Black Cloud? Hoyle's writing achieved national prominence in the early 1960s after A for Andromeda, so it wouldn't have been surprising for Nation to have been familiar with his work.

[perlmonger.livejournal.com]

Both, I'd say: Kingsley's intelligence was incapable of predicting the irrational response of politicians. He would have found the cover up utterly incomprehensible if he'd lived to witness it.

To quote another character (from memory: it's years since I last read the book): "Worst thing for Kremlin is losing power."

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

Well...

At a tangent, I had a friend, now dead, who went to school with Fred Hoyle, and she thought him something of a sociopath himself.

Make of that what you will.

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

I've often thought something similar of Edmund Cooper's 'heroes' and J T McIntosh, come to that (though I'm sure he's rather later)

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

This may be a bit tangential, but.... When reading Science Fiction, I generally turn off any higher analytical components my mind might possess, so I can't contribute any insights beyond saying that I've not read much Hoyle, presumably because I didn't much like what I have read of his sf, and that featuring borderline-sociopaths as protagonists would be a reasonable explanation of this dislike.