Literary Science Fiction

Science fiction is often viewed as an inferior form of literature; despite the prolific, intriguing and insightful works of such authors as Frank Herbert (of Dune (1965) fame) and, of course, Isaac Asimov, the genre has taken a back seat to the more respected genre of literary fiction. For instance, in an interview with Anthony Burgess for the LA Review of Books (interviewed by Jonathan Lethem), Burgess stated emphatically: “I don’t read science fiction”, prompting the notion that many authors are hesitant to align themselves with the genre (despite the author’s arguable engagement with science fiction in his work The Wanting Seed (1962)). Science fiction is so often associated with ostensibly low-brow cultures that many avid readers dismiss the genre as too commercial, clunky, juvenile or lacking in the literary prowess of more literary novelists. But many science fiction authors, if indeed they ought to be called such, have attempted to shut down this assumption. In his introduction to Ender’s Game (1985), Orson Scott Card writes: ‘a great many writers and critics have based their entire careers on the premise that anything that the general public can understand without mediation is worthless drivel […] If everybody came to agree that stories should be told this clearly, the professors of literature would be out of job, and the writers of obscure, encoded fiction would be, not honored, but pitied for their impenetrability.’

The science fiction genre is split into various sub-genres, including cyber-punk, sci-fi noir, space opera and sci-fi westerns, but also includes more literary works by authors more often associated with literary fiction. Often it is forgotten that such illustrious authors as Mark Twain and Jack London also penned works considered to belong to the science fiction oeuvre (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and The Iron Heel (1908) respectively). J.G Ballard, whose semi-autobiographical work Empire of the Sun (1984) celebrates its 30th anniversary this year, penned some of the more intriguing works of sci-fi including his The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964) and The Crystal World (1966). His short story collection Vermilion Sands (1971) also provides generous insight into the mysteriousness surrounding the darker side of sci-fi, though most would know Ballard for his salacious and controversial novel Crash (1973). Ballard is perhaps one of the few authors who has successfully managed to negotiate between the psychological explorations of humans known to high-brow literature, with the speculative imagination of science fiction.

  

The science fiction genre is often split into two groups: hard and soft sci-fi, the former featuring meticulous scientific detail of astrophysics and chemistry, while the latter involves more elements of the social sciences, including psychology. The latter, moreover, is much more character-oriented, making it a more palatable version of sci-fi for those reticent to engage in the genre. Although George Orwell and Aldous Huxley are perhaps the most notable of this stream of sci-fi, others, including Haruki Murakami, Don DeLillo and many others have dabbled in the experimental process of literary science fiction. One of the more obscure, psychological works of literary science fiction is Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975), a incredibly complex work that rivals the lyrical complexity of James Joyce. The criticisms of this infinitely complex work have apparently come from within the science fiction community, though the work has been praised as a revolutionary work of literature, as well as an unsolvable riddle. Its influence can be seen in later novels including Jonathan Lethem’s science fiction work Amnesia Moon (1995), with comparisons often made between the work and Thomas Pynchon’s equally complex Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), written two years before Delany’s work.

 

The master of lyrical prose and a frequent individual on this blog, Vladimir Nabokov, possesses the rare chameleonic quality of adopting different literary styles. In his work Ada or Ardor (1969), Nabokov turns again to the theme of incest that proved so integral in his seminal Lolita (1955), and the book provides an alternative universe and history of the earth, where the United States (including Central and South America) have been colonised by the Russians, featuring provinces such as Estoty and Canady. Nabokov provides the same meticulous detail that he devotes to his earlier works, and explores his characters with the same intimacy. Similarly, channeling the imaginative Borges, Italo Calvino, most known for his metafictional If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (1979) and the speculative Invisible Cities (1972), dabbles in the sci-fi genre with his collection Cosmicomics (1965). Featuring cover art by MC Escher, the collection features a narrator, Qfwfq, who narrates all except two stories, one of which is the romantic ‘The Distance of the Moon’, based on romantic relationships between people who jumped from the earth to the moon and vice versa. Similarly to Nabokov, Calvino provides alternate and elaborate histories of the earth, featuring time before the universe, and discusses notions of civilisation, geographic development, guilt, fear and love. Calvino’s Complete Cosmicomics (2009) features both the stories from the aforementioned edition as well as the short stories from his postmodern sci-fi short story collection t zero (1967). The interplay between science fiction and literature seemed to reach its artistic pinnacle in the era of postmodernism, with Kurt’s Vonnegut’s phenomenal Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) revolutinising the relationship between the two, featuring an historical account of the bombings of Dresden amidst an intergalactic zoo that mates humans and animals. It seems the heyday of literary science fiction was the 60s and 70s.

The assumption that a genre containing the rigid and systematic element of science cannot exist alongside the flexible and imaginative world of literature is therefore somewhat of an erroneous notion; older examples include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and anything by H.G. Wells, as well as the ever-popular works of Philip K. Dick, and Ray Bradbury’s colourful works (including his consequential Fahrenheit 451 (1953) undermine this notion, and yet the prominence of science fiction as a literary endeavour remains problematic. In 1998, Lethem wrote of the death of science fiction in society, arguing that the passing over of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow in favour of Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama: ‘stands as a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction was about to merge with the mainstream.’ But perhaps science fiction’s inclusion in the mainstream of Hollywood itself has actually dampened its reputation in a literary context. The poor adaptations of such illustrious works of science fiction including Asimov’s I, Robot series is a testament to the inability, or unwillingness, of the mainstream to remain faithful to the originality of the genre’s genius. By elaborating certain plot points of characters, the science fiction adaptation rarely does justice to the actually intricate psychological elements of the novel’s world. But simply the assumption that science fiction and literary fiction are incompatible is erroneous; the term ‘literary writer’ almost ought to be obsolete, since so-called ‘literary writers’ have continuously engaged in science fiction, such as Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (1975), part of the 70s pinnacle of literary science fiction, and, of course, Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), despite the fact that he chose not to read that particular genre…

Beyond the Furthest Palm: A new work by Rodger Jacobs

As Paris was used for Hemingway and Woody Allen as a specific motif, Rodger Jacobs uses L.A., the city in and of itself, as the setting for his most recent work The Furthest Palm (2012). The title, taken from Kerouac’s masterpiece On the Road, exhibits the penultimate stage of one’s career and life, where the protagonist has reached the furthest palm and is forced to contend with the nothingness thereafter.

The coldness of L.A. is something visited by various writers, including Bret Easton Ellis, James Ellroy and Raymond Chandler. Even in Seinfeld, Kramer utters, ‘What do you want me to say? That L.A.’s a cold place even in the middle of summer? That it’s a lonely place even when you’re stuck in traffic on the Hollywood freeway?’ The point to take away from this is that L.A.’s existential nature, like other notorious cities, changes depending on the characters and the narrator, and evidently the writer. So there is Chandler’s Los Angeles and here we read Rodger Jacobs’ Los Angeles.

The non-linear method of story-telling, while epitomised in works such as William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and James Joyce’s Ulysses, is still an undervalued method of conveying scenes and characters for more contemporary literature. While Rodger Jacobs’ The Furthest Palm is not completely out of linearity, it breaks the story up enough so that it delivers to the reader a semblance of otherworldly delirium. The movement of the story feels as though Trace is coming into things near the end of one large meta-narrative, into a time where everything new has been absorbed, and that the source of creativity has been tapped. On author Hunter S. Thompson’s death, Trace laments, ‘Everyone and their mother is writing about his death already. I don’t know what I have to contribute. I can say that a great deal of what I know about writing I learned from reading Thompson but everyone else is saying the same thing. This is as big as Fitzgerald’s passing.’

What strikes me is the cautious optimism of the character, similarly to Jacobs’ Lewis Hogue in his play Last Summer at the Marmont (2012). Trace appears to be living in a time that exists in the wake of all else that has been, a severely postmodern attack on contemporary existence. Where there was a golden time, there exists now simply the present. As Jacobs says, ‘The unifying theme of the 70 pieces that comprise The Furthest Palm is the disintegration of one’s sense of self, and the inability of the protagonist to reinvent himself in a town (Los Angeles) that, paradoxically, people are known to flock to for just that purpose.’ But rather than being wholly consumed by existential grief, Jacobs’ Trace appears not entirely nonchalant but at least determined to orchestrate something from nothing, as my favourite quote from Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris attests to: ‘The job of the artist is not to succumb to despair but find an antidote to the emptiness of existence.’ Thus Trace is not a defeatist but somewhere in between an optimist and a pessimist. And this is the main strength of the character, avoiding the ‘bastard with a heart of gold’ cliché, and instead adopting the more humanly and believable character of the bastard with a weary heart.

The memory of F. Scott Fitzgerald re-enters the author’s nostalgic typewriter, so much so that the Fitzgerald’s subtle mythology acts as a parallel to many of Jacobs’ protagonists. And why not? The great writer was both esteemed as a genius but also familiar with the hollowness what was the Hollywood life. The poignant memory in Marmont, where Lewis recalls the story of Fitzgerald’s death near the mantelpiece, is here substituted with the story of his funeral, in which Dorothy Parker, at Fitzgerald’s mortuary, says ‘Poor Sonofabitch.’  One can assume Trace half-heartedly hopes the same may be uttered at his own passing.

The work is rather metafictional, a postmodern technique (or postmodern reinterpretation of earlier techniques) that works as a book within a book, or mise-en-abyme. While we read the assorted tales or drugs, human excrement, salacious affairs, and the everyday problems of McDonald’s workers, we also read of Trace attempting to become inspired to write his magnum opus, and we later enter a parallel universe where Jacobs is attempting to sell the work. There’s a connection between Jacobs and Trace, as Jacobs’ identity is later confused with Trace’s. After all, Marcel Proust wrote that the novel is a mirror held up to reality, but that the virtue of the work is in the quality of the mirror. The work also borders on gritty existentialism, a tougher look on the emptiness of existence though nicely balanced with private investigator Dan Knight’s rough-and-tumble ‘bad guy’ character costume. Meanwhile a montage of literary and filmic heroes from Henry Miller to Franz Kafka, and from Sam Peckinpah to Herman Melville and Humphrey Bogart, are delightfully injected into the text as what feels like a cultural homage, a deliberate nod to Jacobs’ own cultural tastes but, of course, an example of all the ghosts of L.A.’s artistic past that forever haunt the creative efforts of those living in the present. As Jacobs prepares to leave the fiction arena in late 2013 for creative non-fiction, it is safely assumed that The Furthest Palm is a good work to go out on.

The work is available at Amazon

 

Time Enough at Last: End of the World Reading

As the Mayan calendar ends today, what better way to fit the theme of the end of the world than do another dreaded list, this time of the best/most notable, or even the most neglected apocalyptic, end-of-the-world novels.

In an episode of the much-loved television show, The Twilight Zone, called ‘Time Enough at Last’, an avid book-lover is discouraged by his work and his wife from reading, until a nuclear explosion destroys everyone and everything, except a library, with the books still intact. When the man rejoices in the ability to read for the rest of his life, his glasses break, rendering him basically blind, fitting the characteristic dire endings of the series. Here are eleven other apocalyptic concepts, some popular, others that have fallen by the wayside:

 

1. The End of the World News- Anthony Burgess, 1982

Three stories vaguely interwoven, including a story about Trotsky and another about Freud, the last segment of the book is set shortly before an extrasolar planet is to collide with the earth. Less illuminating than much of Burgess’ work, though similar to The Devil’s Mode, the cameo of famous figures lifts the story up.

 

2. The Drowned World- J.G. Ballard, 1962

A refreshing take on apocalyptic fiction, Ballard characteristically avoids predictability and features a protagonist who gladly welcomes the end of days, manifested through the flooding of the world. He uses the end of the world as a metaphor for the collective unconscious of his characters.

 

3. The Day of the Triffids- John Wyndham, 1951

Described as ‘cosy science fiction’, in which many of the characters are able to go about their lives throughout disaster, this science fiction classic features giant plants that attack the world, rendering many blind. While some survivors attempt to help the blind, others attempt toe set up a colony including only those that can see.

 

4. The Road- Cormac McCarthy, 2006

One of the more sinister, uncomfortably realistic novels to emerge in the genre, this story features a father/son, man/boy duo in a post-apocalyptic world, the catalyst of which is unexplained, where they encounter rampant cannibalism and starvation. More grim than many others, this novel focuses on the darker and less surreal aspects of end times.

 

5. Sleepless, Charlie Huston- 2010

From the author of Six Bad Things, Huston posits Insomnia as humanity’s Achilles Heel. A noir detective/crime work, the story follows Parker Haas, LAPD officer investigating the trafficking of the drug ‘dreamer’, which is the only drug that enables temporary relief from insomnia, as society breaks down.

 

6. The Machine Stops- E.M. Forster, 1909

A short story, Forster invents a world in which it has become impossible to exist on the surface world, and so society are forced to live in cells underground, all powered by a machine that, as the title suggests, stops, putting society in jeopardy once again.

 

7. The Last Ship, William Brinkley, 1988

By the author of The Fun House, Brinkley, who began his career as a Naval Officer, fittingly wrote this apocalyptic work about a nuclear war that ensues between a fictional US naval ship, and the Soviet Union. After the destruction, the ship sails around looking for a new place to call home.

 

8. The Scarlet Plague- Jack London- 1912

With The Iron Heel as his ode to the Dystopian novel, The Scarlet Plague is London’s ode to the apocalyptic, set in his favoured city of San Francisco. The tale takes place in the year 2073, after the Red Death, an epidemic that gas devastated the world. The protagonist, James Howard Smith, is one of the last survivors in San Francisco, and attempts to pass on his wisdom to his grandsons before time runs out. A more poignant addition to the genre.

 

9. Cat’s Cradle- Kurt Vonnegut, 1963

A satirical science fiction novel, Vonnegut attempts to make light of the impending doom of the planet, injecting humour in places other authors might avoid, to produce a novel that science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon called annoying, albeit a must read. Most of humanity is destroyed by the alternative water-material, ice-nine, which is a form of water that is solid at room temperature.

 

10. The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion- Edgar Allen Poe, 1839

With the author’s loyalty to surrealism and the gothic, this short story, published originally in the ‘Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine’, takes place after the world has ended, when two re-named souls, Eiros and Charmion, discuss the apocalypse. A neglected but intriguing concept from Poe’s macabre oeuvre.

 

11. The Burning World- J.G. Ballard, 1964

Another overlooked Ballard work, The Burning World features a world in contrast to his Drowning World, one that is suffering from drought. If it has a moral, it is not to dump industrial waste into the ocean, lest the ocean dries up.