Ballard, Wolfe, and a Sci-Fi question

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Finding my thoughts a bit scattered today, I turn to numbers in hopes of giving them a pretense of order. But since I'm writing about science fiction, let's make it a countdown!

3 For the past year and a half, I've been ever-so-slowly making my way through the 1,200 or so pages of J. G. Ballard's Complete Stories. I'm only about 350 pages in--up to 1962--and the thought that keeps returning to my mind (and that I can't be the first to dsicover) is that Ballard is clearly writing in the tradition of Joseph Conrad: Ballard's scientists, marooned on far-flung outposts throughout the galaxy, are merely Conrad's company agents and traders thrown into the future.

Like Conrad's characters, Ballard's have been nominally put in charge of places that are only barely understood back home--and whose history, culture, traditions, and dangers are almost entirely a secret. Their knowledge is limited where it isn't totally useless; their true dominion extends no farther than the walls of their base camp; and the culture they represent is utterly unwanted, even insignificant when set against against the inescapable age of the universe around them.

Look at the opening of "The Waiting Grounds," for example:

Whether Henry Tallis, my predecessor at Murak Radio Observatory, knew about the Waiting Grounds I can't say. On the whole it seems obvious he must have done, and that the three weeks he spent handing the station over to me--a job which could easily have been done in three days--were merely to give him sufficient time to decide whether or not to tell me about them. Certainly he never did, and the implied judgment against me is one I haven't yet faced up to.

Sounds self-consciously Conradian, no? That passage also signals the other key similarity between the writers: their characters, symbols of power without its substance, ultimately have only their honor to fall back on, and even, eventually, to hold them together.

If you're a Conrad fan who hasn't tried Ballard, you've got a treat in store (and vice-versa).



2 I've also been reading The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Short Fiction, which offers different charms. If Ballard's stories are of a space colonialism, about Western civilization's endless attempts to extend its domain into areas where it's not necessarily wanted or needed, Wolfe's are often about our attempts to exert that sort of control over our own selves and beings here at home. His stories are full of mad doctors operating on humans, psychological experiments that kill, houses of human horrors. Wolfe's world is one of knowledge perverted: it's not surprising that he has a story called "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories." (Though it is surprising that he also has stories called "The Doctor of Death Island" and "Death of the Island Doctor"--both written to answer a dare from Isaac Asimov.)

They make a good pair for reading in alternation, Ballard and Wolfe, the antiseptic, plainspoken loneliness of space set against the gothic nightmares we can produce here at home.



1 Which leads me to a question for you all: what good sci-fi writers am I missing? Ballard and Wolfe I enjoy, Bradbury--for all his occasional sentimentalism--is a long-standing favorite, Philip K. Dick and Stanislaw Lem are as well. I tried Iain M. Banks last year, and he decidedly was not for me; I felt the same about Samuel R. Delaney's Nova, though in his case I'm not sure that I ought to give up on his whole ouevre.

Any suggestions?

Apocalypse: Earth!

Enjoying Max Brooks's World War Z (2006) and Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) led me to wonder: if I still worked at a bookstore, what would my Apocalypse: Earth! table display look like? I mean, after I placed Zombie Giambi front and center to scare off the young and impressionable, what books would I stock it with?

Much as I love end-of-the-world stories, my knowledge is pretty spotty; I'm always an amateur when venturing into sci-fi, and in a sub-genre as rich as this one, I'm sure to leave out bunches of good books. But here's my initial list, which is guided by a couple of simple criteria: the story needs to be reasonably plausible, and, while I like a bit of politics in my apocalypse, overall I prefer the gory to the allegorical.

George R. Stewart's The Earth Abides (1949) has to be there, as, from what I understand, it kicked off American sci-fi writers' interest in the idea of the end of humanity. The tools for destroying the world were, after all, suddenly at hand; who knew then that we'd succeed in getting through at least sixty years without using them again? And The Earth Abides is still worth reading for a lot of reasons other than its importance in the genre: for the picture it draws of America's pre-interstate infrastructure, the survivors' stubborn insistence on eating canned foods instead of learning to farm, and the post-apocalyptic community's unquestioned privileging of men--all of which place the book clearly in its time; for the scene where the reconstituted community has to decide how to handle a man set on disrupting what they've built; and for the way it highlights the reproductive dangers, both genetic and cultural, that constantly face small populations: if only one person has a particular skill or trait, the chances of losing it forever are staggeringly high.

Going back to the roots of sci-fi, I think War of the Worlds (1898) belongs, but what about The Time Machine (1895)? After all, although it's set in a future that hasn't arrived yet even within the story's own time, it does show us a collapsed society and a lost humanity. I think I'd include it.

Of more recent vintage, I'd have to include The Stand (1978), though I'd never recommend that anyone read the long version, as I did in high school. Even given that time wasted in high school is a lot like time not wasted at all, I'm not sure it was worth it--and that's all before taking into account that, as usual, King has no idea how to end the book. But I would never argue that it doesn't belong on my table; given King's popularity, it's the first apocalypse book a lot of people encounter.

Another contemporary novel I'd make a space for is Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003). Though I was a bit unsatisfied with it overall, I'd include it if only because it's so bleak for so long--and frequently flat-out scary, as the surviving humans spend a lot of their time dodging packs of genetically engineered wolvogs, rakunks, and pigoons. Don't ask me what wolvogs look like--I just know they're very, very scary.

A Journal of the Plague Year definitely gets a place, despite not being about the end of humanity, because Defoe's descriptions of the streets of London are so similar to the descriptions of zombie-ridden cities in World War Z that, as a bookseller, I'd have fun recommending both to people.

World War Z would also go nicely with the five paperback volumes (so far) of Robert Kirkman's comic The Walking Dead (2003) (though I'm beginning to question Kirkman's attitude towards women--being contemporary, he doesn't have George Stewart's excuse for bad gender politics--though since the series is continuing Kirkman still has time, I suppose, to demonstrate that I'm misreading him). The Walking Dead so far demonstrates that zombie stories are well-suited to serial narrative: the world, as it were, can always keep ending. I'd also have to throw in a George Romero four-pack, even if my store didn't generally carry DVDs, because nothing I could do for George Romero would repay him for his role in clarifying the rules of zombification (just as, in a different way, nothing I could do will ever repay him for scaring me so much the first time I saw Night of the LIving Dead (1968)).

As being a good bookseller means knowing books you haven't read, there are quite a few of those I'd certainly think about adding. John Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids (1951) definitely belongs, but what about Mary Shelley's The Last Man (1826)? I fear it may violate my gory/allegory rule. And do I really have to include Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006), even though the lines I've read in praise-filled reviews have been so implausibly overwritten as to make me laugh? If I were really running a bookstore, I'd probably have to.

What about Adam Johnson's Parasites Like Us (2003)--anyone read it? Or two established classics, Nevil Shute's On the Beach and Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon (1959)? Do they hold up well enough to be worth including?

Are there any crucial books I've missed-- like a nice radium-bound edition of The Revelation of St. John the Divine? Any books I've mischaracterized? Imaginary tables are by their nature accommodating, so I'm happy to take suggestions.