A collaborative blog by authors, reviewers, academics, and editors on SFnal commentary and notes and whatever else comes to mind. Blog posts do not represent Locus Magazine or Locus Online policy or perspectives.
Ballard didn't go to cons, do speeches, or hang around with the literary crowd. He mostly stayed home. The only exception was a tour for The Day of Creation. He came up to the office for an interview and lunch in May 1988 (his publicity handler was a close friend of mine). It was the only time I met him. He was friendly, answered questions, and even liked lunch. He talked about his relationship to SF and how he considered himself an SF writer even when not writing SF. Here are some quotes:
I’ve always thought of myself as a science fiction writer, and I've admired a great number of SF writers over the years. I’ve always believed that science fiction was immensely important, more the true literature of the 20th century... Science fiction is part of a larger stream. The way the imaginative writer sees the world is the way the SF writer sees the world. So a book like The Day of Creation, which isn't science fiction, or even Empire of the Sun, which clearly isn't, nevertheless does have the same kind of unconscious mechanism at work, generating novels, as in earlier books of mine like The Drowned World and The Crystal World...
SF writers tend to work in a cautionary mode, to put up street signs saying, 'Danger: Trends ahead.' That's an important social and imaginative function, undervalued by mainstream critics, who are full of praise for great masters like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, and with justice, but they've tended to underestimate the function of modern science fiction in providing a continuous running commentary on what is going on. Over the last 40-50 years, even if the average reader is unable to name a single SF writer, most people have absorbed the overall warnings, the overall picture of the future that SF writers have been conveying...
But I've wished science fiction could enlarge its scope, its pool of ideas and vocabulary and ambitions. What I regret is the way that in recent years –- maybe I'm showing my age here –- the science fiction of the '50s (much of which would have difficulty getting published these days), that sort of realistic concern for what is going on, is rather out of tune with all the sword and sorcery and futuresque sagas masquerading as science fiction...
Not only the realism of the '50s, but also the special enthusiasm of British SF in the '60s, seems to have departed from the field today... It was a wonderful afternoon, and I'm sorry it ended so soon.
Michael Moorcock announced, and then the BBC followed up, the news that J G Ballard died this morning. It wasn't unexpected: Ballard had stated a while ago that he had advanced prostate cancer, and his recent book Miracles of Life was organised around that fact. But it's still a shock.
My instant reaction is that it's very difficult now to understand just how subversive his first works were in the late 50s, how much they went against the grain of what sf had done up till then. Instead of stories of humanity triumphing by Campbell/Heinlein smarts, here were tales of entropy, defeat, drained swimming-pools, abandoned nuclear test sites, and above all, no sense in the orthodox sf way of causality, of why this has happened. It's from the stories that you get that unmistakable Ballard landscape – depopulated, bare, filled with now-useless works of technology and culture. Novels like The Drowned World and The Crystal World pushed the argument further, and also made clear his stunning ability as a visual writer. Then there came the engagement with Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and works like Crash and The Atrocity Exhibition that were even more radical in form and content. The semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun is often understood as the hinge work in his career, unpacking his landscape and sense of dislocation in terms of what happened to him while interned in Shanghai during World War II. Other books followed Empire – the semi-sequel The Kindness of Women, the strange police procedural Running Wild, consumerist satires like Millennium People and – a personal favorite – The Day of Creation. If I had to pick one emblematic Ballard book, though, it'd be the Arkham House retrospective Memories of the Space Age, which collected stories about space travel (or its failure) from across his career. I make the choice partly because it includes a number of favorites such as the title story, “The Cage of Sand” and “The Man Who Walked on the Moon”. Partly, its cover (Max Ernst's “Europe After the Rain”) makes clear Ballard's deep debt to the Surrealists. Partly, so many of the motifs he returned to again and again are there: the abandoned Cape Canaveral, the imagined America it's a symbol of, the rusting rockets, the mysterious aeroplanes – all beautifully illustrated by J K Potter. It looks like there are some reasonably-priced copies out there, but failing that I'd recommend almost any Ballard short fiction collection as a good place to start. There's probably a lot to be said about his career – I'm not sure if he was the first author to cross over from sf into “mainstream” respectability, but he was certainly one of the most important – and also adaptations of his work, which brought out surprising things in directors as different as Spielberg and Cronenberg. But I'll finish instead with two links: to the hugely detailed Ballardian site and to JGB's own “What I Believe”.
It's deadline time for us Locuspeople, so I'm afraid an extended post isn't on the cards right now. However, I did want to link to the YouTube video below, which got my sense-of-wonder antennae twitching. I'd like to write more about s-o-w later but, in the meantime, I'd be interested to know what recent works of sf have evoked it for readers out there. And, more trickily, is there any way to define it that doesn't boil down to "You know it when you see it"?
Like many reviewers, I've been looking through The Best of Gene Wolfe in the last few weeks. Most of the stories were familiar to me - the selection skews very heavily towards those from his firsttwo collections - but I found myself with the same feelings of disorientation as when I'd read them the first time. So I thought it might be worth talking about just one story to try to illustrate just why Wolfe is such an extraordinary writer.
The story I'm going to pick is "The Toy Theater"; I'm afraid it's not online (hardly any of Wolfe's work is), but it is at least short, and can be found here or here. Since I can't get cut-tags to work, consider yourself warned now about the spoilers to follow.
The story follows an unnamed narrator on a visit to the planet Sarg, where he is to meet a man called Stromboli. The narrator is a performer who uses animatronic puppets to mimic human activity. These “dolls” are lifesize, and controlled from a box used by the operator; the narrator has brought with him his own doll, called Charity. Although the narrator is evidently very skilled in using the dolls, Stromboli (though now retired) is a master with them, and the narrator has come to learn from him for a few days. He arrives at Stromboli's rural house and is greeted by Madame Stromboli – despite her age, still a very striking woman. Several days of tuition from Stromboli follow. On the day when he is to leave Sarg, the narrator discovers that his “second best pair of shoes” is missing. He decides to leave them, and is taken in a buggy back to the spaceport. This buggy is driven by Lili, a woman the narrator has not seen before. She says that once she and Stromboli were notorious, but now no longer; she lives in a house near to Stromboli, but his wife does not realise it. She asks the narrator whether he finds her attractive, but “the delicately tinted cheeks beneath the cosmetics showed craquelure”: she is also a puppet. She says that she has been with Stromboli many times. She tries to seduce the narrator, but he declines her approaches: he lies that he has someone else whom he can't betray. So Lili leaves him at the spaceport as planned. Then, just as he's about to go, Zanni arrives: he's Stromboli's most famous puppet, a comic butler figure, and is carrying the narrator's second-best shoes. The narrator looks for Stromboli and sees him, as he has to be, off in a corner, operating the controls that puppet Zanni. Zanni asks the narrator to consider his talk with Lili “under the rose” - that is, confidential; if Stromboli succumbed to a young man's temptations when on tour with Lili, it's best for all concerned to keep that quiet. Zanni continues:
“The master [Stromboli] expresses the hope that you know with whom you are keeping faith. He further expresses the hope that he himself does not know.” I thought of the fine cracks I had seen, under the cosmetics, in Lili's cheeks, and of Charity's cheeks, as blooming as peaches. Then I took my second-best pair of shoes, and went out to the ship, and climbed into my own little box. (29-30)
And the story ends; it covers, in the new collection, a little less than five pages. In his afterword, Wolfe talks about drawing some inspiration from G K Chesterton's description of his own toy theater and, later, from his knowledge of “certain sad toys possessed by adult men”. In trying to make sense of it – in trying to arrive at a reading that gives a consistent account of why everything that's in the text is there – I find myself having the following thoughts:
Zanni's last words have always seemed especially hard to parse. “[Stromboli] expresses the hope that he himself does not know.” The lack of anything after that last “know” is a little dizzying for me. Stromboli hopes that he does not know with whom he, Stromboli, is keeping faith? Or that he does not know the person with whom the narrator is keeping faith? If the latter, is that a reference to Charity? Is Stromboli saying that he hopes that the narrator is not pretending to have a relationship with Charity rather than one with a real human?
Why the second-best shoes? The reference that evokes, at least for me, is Shakespeare bequeathing his wife his second-best bed; but I don't see what significance that has for the story.
Names are always important in Wolfe stories. In this case, the name Stromboli is surely meant to remind us of the monstrous puppet-buyer in Disney's Pinocchio(1940), who has a different name in Collodi's original book. The reference is reinforced by the description of Stromboli's house as being “of the Italian Alpine style”. But Stromboli does not seem, at least on the surface to be either a monster or (as many other Wolfe protagonists are) someone imprisoned by his own sins.
The very last line, about the narrator climbing into his “own little box” could be taken to suggest that he is, literally, a puppet, one more of Stromboli's automata. But that feels to me like overinterpretation, even with the Pinocchio references above. (Does the narrator want to become a real boy? Not particularly.)
A problem of consistency arises. We're told throughout that the operator must be within sight of the puppet he is operating, as Stromboli is of Zanni in the last scene. In that case, though, if Lili is a puppet, how was Stromboli operating her? If they're sitting in a horse-drawn buggy piled with luggage, it would be difficult – though not impossible – for Stromboli to be with them unseen.
To what does the title refer? What is the Toy Theater? (Nowhere in the story has there been a literal theater.) Where is its proscenium, what does it frame? I think the answer to this is that you have to take the whole of the story as a theater, with Stromboli as the person directing it. In particular, you have to see the conversations with both Lili and Zanni as designed by Stromboli. In that context, it's a reasonable inference that Stromboli orchestrated the disappearance of the narrator's second-best shoes from his room – something not sufficiently valuable for him to search high and low for, but something that it would be worth Zanni returning. The last line of the story, then, is not the narrator realising his status as a literal puppet, but as someone who has been manipulated by Stromboli in the more general sense. And the point of the performance, from Stromboli's point of view, is Zanni's last line, which I do increasingly see as a warning to the narrator about the dangers of using puppets as a substitute for people – and, in turn, a strong hint that Stromboli is not as content as his idyllic life seems to suggest. The one loose end, then, is Lili's status: what kind of puppet is she? My hypothesis, for which I can see no textual evidence for or against, is that Stromboli might have been able to construct dolls with limited kinds of self-awareness; but I'd rather I could find a more explicit pointer in the text to what's really going on. That wonderfully well-chosen word craquelure ends up as the keynote of the story, suggesting just how fake everything in it might be.
Does anyone have any better answers than this? I'm ducking a whole series of issues, I realise: is the narrator a reliable one? Is Lili, in turn, reliable in her claims about Stromboli? Why does the narrator give us so few clues about what he himself is feeling? (In this, he's very much like other Wolfe protagonists.) That a story of, I guess, no more than 3000 words can generate so much exegesis (and a feeling that you've still not exhausted it) is a huge tribute to the density that Wolfe achieves in his best short fiction.
