James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’ – A Spoileriffic Review

This review is here rather than on Goodreads because I am rubbish at not revealing spoilers. I was once sitting in the cinema with my brother waiting for a film to start, and just as the lights went down, I blurted out the ending and ruined the whole experience for him. Funnily enough, one way of looking at James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’ is that it’s about what would happen to society if we all just followed our immediate impulses and intrusive thoughts, largely motivated by anger.

BE WARNED, THEREFORE: THERE WILL BE SPOILERS IN WHAT FOLLOWS.

It’s been said that there are three genres of excess in literature: pornography, melodrama and horror. Of these, melodrama seems to be largely out of fashion, although it’s possible that EastEnders constitutes this. Pursuing this thread, it’s also possible that Jeremy Kyle served a similar function. Viewers of those two programmes sometimes need to have their lives thrown into contrast with other people’s fictional or manipulated lives which are even worse. Even ‘The Simpsons’ has had this rôle in the past. Porn and horror are generally looked down upon and possibly read in secret by people who are ashamed of doing so. They’re considered qualitatively to be the bottom of the barrel in writing, although porn is sometimes relabelled erotica. I could turn this whole post into advice about how to write non-objectifying pornography but I actually wat to focus on horror.

I was twelve when I read James Herbert’s ‘The Fog’. I’d already read ‘The Rats’ and ‘Lair’ by that point, the last being newly published. I never actually owned any of his books up until about a week ago, when I bought the subject of this review. They come out of a time in my life when I was trying to fit in with boys, in the layer of nastiness and bigotry which sits across male childhood just before the onset of puberty. I feel like this layer is self-sustaining and operates like a standing wave in male development, and also that some men never emerge from it. It also seems to be sustained by schooling and it’s pretty damaging to everyone, whether one is inside or outside that demographic. It’s about cruelty, prejudice and in-group identification and is violent and aggressive.

In terms of writing and other creative work, this age corresponds to porn and horror. One thing to say in favour of horror is that it at least distracts from porn, except that there can be pornographic elements to horror. I’ve mentioned Alan Frank’s ‘Galactic Aliens’ before on this blog, which it took me a long time to get until I realised it wasn’t so much supposed to be science fiction as space horror, and was aimed at this age group. ‘The Fog’ is one of those books I attempted to read in order to break out of my science fiction ghetto, only to find that in an odd way it was kind of science fiction itself.

Skill in writing is still required to horrify and disgust the reader without forcing her to put the book down or throw it across the room. It isn’t enough to horrify alone: it needs to be horrifyingly fascinating, so you can’t look away. Stories are sometimes described as “car crashes” or “train wrecks”, but our worse sides are often brought out when we witness disasters such as these and can’t look away. It isn’t good to encourage this tendency, but maybe fulfilling this urge to experience horror outwith rather than within reality helps prevent this. Rather than attempting to defend this, I’ll just dive in and talk about the book.

Here’s the plot. A quiet Wiltshire village’s peace is disrupted by an apparent earthquake which injures and kills a number of residents and also seriously injures our hero John Holman as he drives through the settlement. It also releases a fog which turns out to drive air-breathing vertebrates violently insane, including humans. Unsurprisingly, the story focusses on the last. The story is structured as a series of increasingly deranged vignettes as the fog is blown towards London and climaxes with its arrival and its effects on millions of people, as Holman and the government try desperately to prevent more deaths. It becomes clear that the fog is in fact a pathogen created at Porton Down, though not explicitly blamed, and disposed of irresponsibly, although Porton Down scientists are also trying to neutralise the threat. Towards the end, it’s suggested that the fog might actually be sentient and purposeful. It’s ultimately destroyed when it enters the Blackwall Tunnel and is blown up with explosives and blocked in by concrete.

There are a number of interesting diversions along the way. My favourite is when one member of a lesbian couple who has just separated because her partner has gone “straight” decides to drown herself in the sea off Bournemouth, then changes her mind, only to find that the entire population of the town, 158 000 people if I recall correctly, has decided to do the same. There’s also a scene where the deputy head of a private school who abuses children (and is apparently gay) is massacred by the said children and has his penis chopped off by the caretaker. It’s all pretty graphic, and succeeds in its aim to shock and grab the reader. In the meantime, a pigeon-fancier gets attacked and killed by his birds, a poacher is trampled to death by cows and so forth. Holman’s girlfriend, Casey, is also driven mad by the fog and tries to kill him, then a misunderstanding by the police leads to him being arrested for assaulting her. She later goes on to kill her step-father, who attempts to rape her.

I read a review of the novel which said something like “if you try really hard, you’ll notice all the political incorrectness”. For me reading it in November 2022, it was more a question of trying to suspend my disquiet at the dodginess of quite a lot of it so I could get on with enjoying it. This all went over my head in 1979. I can’t really breeze through the rest of the book without mentioning this, so I’ll put it here to get it out of the way.

The most prominent issue is the relationship between Holman and Casey. Casey is very passive and I got the impression that she’s simply handed over from one paternalistic carer to the other, i.e. from her step-father to her boyfriend. On the other hand, she does stab her father to death with a pair of scissors when he makes sexual advances on her and also tries to kill Holman, both while under the influence of the fog. However, everything she is and does is described with reference to relationships with men and tends to be sexualised. There are maybe three sex scenes in the book which I skipped because I don’t like them and find them boring. I hope they didn’t add to the plot but I’m pretty confident they didn’t. There is, though, another way of thinking about this. There may well have been quite a few women with internalised misogyny in mid-1970s Britain whose character and approach to life were this undeveloped simply by living in such a patriarchal society.

Another issue is homophobia. Herbert conflates the deputy head’s homosexuality with his pædophilia, and in the case of the lesbian relationship, one of the partners is “cured” of her lesbianism by being with a man. This, though, raises some issues. Although these are both unrealistic stereotypes, there isn’t any reason to suppose that there are rare exceptions where these things do apply. I find the homosexuality/pædophilia confusion annoying and defamatory but in the case of the lesbian relationship I can see that one of the partners might turn out to discover her bisexuality, and I actually found that chapter to be quite sympathetically written. I think the problem is of selecting particular situations and portraying them as if they’re the rule. The question of the time it was set in is complex because attitudes and consequently psychology were very different at the time. I am of course overthinking this.

Herbert expends a fair bit of effort justifying the situation through what seems to be more than mere technobabble. ‘The Fog’ is yet another example of a story which I enjoyed and was happy to find myself enjoying a non-science fiction novel, only to find out that it was SF after all. This has happened with Iain Banks in a more general sense and also Kurt Vonnegut, and is a tendency I can’t explain in myself. There seems to be something about the style of certain genres which appeals to me while also suiting itself to sci-fi. This might be to do with shallow characterisation, and on that matter I will defend stories with cardboard cutout characters to the hilt because I’m concerned that a mythos is artificially constructed around the way protagonists behave in mainstream literature which becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and forces us all to act inauthentically. This may not always be so of course. Besides this, there is a sense in which ideas replace characters in this kind of writing, and yet the poverty of imagination not directed towards characterisation and relationships in mainstream fiction is rarely addressed.

There is a very real sense in which the fog is the main character in the novel. It’s described as having agency, and Holman suspects that it has a will of its own. However, this is only hinted at. There’s also the question of the disease process leading to the violent behaviour involving the pathogen colonising the human brain and replacing the neurones. It’s better understood, though, as a kind of psychological force bringing out the worst in people, or rather exposing their more aggressive impulses. In a way, the fog can be seen as obscuring presumed subconscious violent urges in us all, or as paradoxically revealing them. Is it partly about not being able to trust ourselves to be good? Intrusive thoughts are like that. We often have the urge to do something appalling and wonder what it says about us, but what if we acted on those impulses? Are there people who have started to walk across bridges and simply thrown themselves off them to their deaths on a whim?

It says something about Herbert’s apparent view of human nature that the aggression and violence often takes the form of wish fulfillment. He seems to see civilisation as a thin veneer under which base impulses seethe and through which they attempt to push. The colonisation of the brain by the pathogens doesn’t seem to add something new so much as remove a shield. Then again, the transformation is reminiscent of zombies and also rabies, and the two are linked. To an extent, Herbert’s book is “our zombies are different”, and it has similarities to, for instance, ’28 Days Later’, particularly after the fog reaches London, but one difference is the maniacal laughter and amusement the infected exhibit. They’re having fun as they kill and rape. In fact, some of them are just having fun, as with the enormous orgy in London. The fog and their behaviour also tempts those who are not directly infected. Holman feels lured towards the nucleus of the fog in a siren-like manner and also wants to join in with the orgy, although it’s only a momentary whim. It’s about people succumbing to temptation as a form of wish-fulfillment.

‘The Fog’ is of course not the only work of fiction to use clouds, mist and fog prominently. There’s also Stephen King’s ‘The Mist’, Fred Hoyle’s ‘The Black Cloud’, John Carpenter’s ‘The Fog’, Olaf Stapledon’s gas attacks early in ‘Last And First Men’ and the Martian attacks depicted millions of years later in the same work, and the foggy moor in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’. The variants seem to be: fog that is inert but contains supernatural threats, inert fog concealing natural threats, active malevolent natural fog and active malevolent supernatural fog. ‘The Voyage Of The Dawn Treader’ has the Dark Island, both dark and shrouded in mist, where dreams, including nightmares, come true, so in other words a supernatural fog. Sarada has just suggested the Dark Island is the Dark Night Of The Soul, a spiritual crisis on the way to the Divine. Stapledon’s Martians are clouds of microörganisms communicating telepathically to generate a hive mind, and are therefore closest to Herbert’s version, which is interesting because of the similarity between their works ‘Fluke’ and ‘Sirius’. Hoyle’s Black Cloud is linked to his panspermia and Steady State theories and is a vast superintelligent interstellar cloud that blots out the Sun and threatens life on Earth simply because it doesn’t realise there can be planetary life. It sees that one way or another, clouds and fog serve as powerful metaphors for what’s hidden and often what we hide from ourselves, and they are often seen as alive or purposeful.

Herbert followed ‘The Fog’ with the more supernatural ‘The Dark’ but I haven’t read that yet.

Green Lights

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Zubanelchemale, as I call it, may be a quite remarkable star. Incidentally, the name, which is Arabic, can be spelt in various ways and the way I spell it might be quite old-fashioned. Zubeneschamali is another spelling. It means “the northern claw”, from الزُّبَانَى الشَمَالِي , and an accompanying star from our perspective is Zubenelgenubi, “the southern claw”. It might be thought from the name that these stars are in Scorpio or Cancer, and they are in fact next to Scorpio, but it appears that over the centuries what used to be thought of as the scorpion’s claws are now considered a pair of scales, since they are now considered part of Libra. Zubenelgenubi is actually a double star, designated α₁ and α₂, and this is significant because of the remarkable thing about β Libræ, Zubanelchemale, which is that some observers say it’s green. To my naked eye plus glasses, it does actually look slightly green.

Although other stars are reported as being green, they’re usually binary or multiple systems, such as Rasalgethi and ζ Piscium, both of which are multiple. The latter is in fact quintuple. The reason for their apparent colours is probably the contrast with the colour of their companions. The peculiar thing about Zubanelchemale is that it is an unaccompanied star with which there is no contrasting companion to make it look green. In fact it may have a companion but it can’t be seen from here if it has. It isn’t always seen as that colour and there seems to be no explanation for it. It’s a B-type star, making it hotter than the white A-types, but this should make it blue-white if anything rather than green. Because there are no green stars, so it’s said.

This sounds like a really sweeping statement. However, without immediately going into the astrophysics of the situation, it’s relatively easy for astronomers to observe millions of stars in this galaxy and many in other galaxies, and whereas we are somewhat stuck to stars in our own galactic neighbourhood for here, the same doesn’t apply to other galaxies, which can often be seen more or less in their entirety. It isn’t like looking for planets or megastructures. Every star has a window onto the Universe through which it can be seen unless there’s something obscuring the view. Clearly distance leads to stars being too faint to see, but it seems a fair assumption that the stars we can see in our own galaxy along with the ones visible in those nearby are a representative sample of the stars in the Universe, and with the possible, but likely illusory, exception of Zubanelchemale, none of them are green.

I would, though, add one caveat to this which applies to extremely distant stars. Space is expanding, and more distant objects are receding from each other faster than relatively nearby ones. This causes the Doppler Effect to influence the colour of the light such objects emit, meaning that presumably a very distant blue supergiant might look green. However, it would also be too far away to see as an individual star, and from a low velocity relative to it, it wouldn’t look green.

As well as observation, basic astrophysics can be used to demonstrate why there are no green stars. As an object heats up, it emits infrared radiation at shorter and shorter frequencies, until eventually it’s hot enough to glow visibly red. It then becomes orange, yellow, white and blue-white with increasing temperature, as the wavelengths at which it radiates enter the visible spectrum. But these are along a band. The red glow is not isolated but accompanied by infrared light which we can’t see, and the colours of stars, and most hot objects in fact, radiate across a range of frequencies rather than pure colours like a laser or an LED would, and consequently they are never green. There is a point at which the brightest colour is green, but it’s swamped by the other colours being radiated. There are therefore no green stars.

That’s the standard explanation, and it makes a lot of sense, but there’s something it seems to have failed to take into consideration: there are in fact luminous green objects in space, along with purple ones, which would also be impossible for an object glowing simply beause of heat to do. A fairly well-known example is Hannys Voorwerp:

“Voorwerp” is just the Dutch for “object”. This was found as part of the Galaxy Zoo project, which presents images of galaxies to the general public for them to identify and classify. Hanny is Hanny van Arkel, a schoolteacher. The galaxy at the top of the picture is referred to as IC 2497, and is 650 million light years away in the constellation Leo Minor. The Voorwerp is a burnt out quasar which would have been visible from here early in the last Ice Age, and is around sixty thousand light years from the galaxy in question. A quasar is a relatively small object which gives out as much radiation as a thousand galaxies. They used to be thought to be inside our own galaxy because they’re so unfeasibly bright that they surely couldn’t be gigaparsecs away, which many of them are, but they nonetheless are. This confusion turns up in the Star Trek TOS episode ‘The Galileo Seven’, where a quasar is depicted in the Alpha Quadrant. They consist of supermassive black holes surrounded by gaseous discs constantly falling into them and generating light through friction and extreme gravitational pull just outside the event horizon. This object is a trail of gas pulled out from a galaxy IC 2497 was passing and then ionised by a quasar at the centre of the galaxy through the radiation it was emitting. Although it’s gone out, the electromagnetic radiation is still in transit to the object, causing it to glow green. This is known as a quasar ionisation echo. Normally this would be hidden by the glare of the quasar. Around one and a half dozen such objects have since been found in the Galaxy Zoo data. There’s a new class of galaxies based on them called “pea galaxies” because of their colour, and the reason they’re green is that they contain doubly ionised oxygen, which emits primarily cyan light.

This emission of green light is, though, known as a “forbidden mechanism”, because in normal circumstances it can’t happen. It can, however, happen in places such as Hannys Voorwerp because the individual atoms and molecules of the gases are far apart enough that they never collide, as they are in the upper atmosphere of Earth and the lunar atmosphere. This means that when atoms are energised, they will release that energy in unusual ways, such as the greenish light emitted by doubly ionised oxygen. Similar or the same phenomena can be observed in nebulæ and aurora polaris. Oxygen is the third most common element in the Universe taken as a whole. It used to be thought that the light emitted by these mechanisms was an element referred to as “nebulium”, rather similar to the discovery of helium on the Sun before it was discovered here, but it turned out to be oxygen in an unfamiliar state.

Hence, although there are no green stars, there are plenty of luminous green objects in space. There are also green planets, or at least greenish ones, such as Uranus:

Although Uranus is hardly viridian, this comparison to Neptune to his right clearly shows the green tinge. Uranus is that colour due to methane in the atmosphere, and clearly isn’t very green.

However, I do suspect there would be a fairly straightforward way for a star to become green. There doesn’t seem to be any reason why a star wouldn’t be surrounded by a sparse cloud of gas relatively high in oxygen which it could then excite with its radiation, causing it to glow green, although the problem there may be that a star bright enough to do that would drown out the green tinge. Alternatively, maybe a so-called “brown dwarf” could be green due to having an atmosphere of this nature filtering out the red and blue light. It really does not seem to be such an unlikely set of circumstances that not one single star humans can observe in the entire Universe looks green.

Although for some reason no process superimposed on the unimpeded light from any star seems to have turned it green, it would be relatively simple for an advanced civilisation to erect some kind of filter or create some kind of process which would do so. This hasn’t happened either, and these two facts taken together may have some significance. Firstly, the absence of an apparently fairly straightforward process which would make a star green indicates that even in such a large Universe, not all things which are possible actually happen. That could apply to life, complex life or the appearance of intelligence as well. Maybe that’s only happened once, and this too is suggested by the absence of green stars. If intelligent entities wanted to advertise their presence in the Universe, they could do so by making a star green. The absence of such stars might mean there is no other intelligent life in the Cosmos. Or, it could mean that it’s dangerous, or perceived as dangerous, to give potentially hostile aliens a “go” signal, as it were, or that all successful spacefaring civilisations have a sense of environmental responsibility to leave stars as they found them, or that they wish to hide their presence from more primitive civilisations due to something like the Prime Directive.

The other notable non-occurrence of green is among mammals, but that’s another story.