Frederick Pohl died
this year back in August. It’s a great loss to the SF world and of
course to his family, but we can can take some comfort from the fact
that he had a long and productive life as a writer, and lately memoirist.
This is a great example
this terrific writer in his prime. It’s classic SF of the late
Golden Age, where you can sense post-war doubts beginning to show
through the façade of apparent normality. Stories from this era are
steeped in discontent with the modern commodified world and distrust
of its rulers. Nothing’s ever quite as it seems and things are
always worse than you imagine.
This is the story of
Guy Buckhart, an ordinary joe who works in the accounts department of
a big factory at the edge of town. His job’s a bore and the town’s
a dump. One the morning of June the 15th, he goes through
his usual routines, but feels weirdly disconnected or disturbed.
Things are slightly off - the ‘usual crowd’ aren’t on the bus
in the morning, his boss is uncharacteristically missing and most
irritatingly he’s continually harassed by weird and intrusive
attempts at advertising.
The next day Buckhart
goes about his business with the same distracted air, but there’s a
twist: it’s June the 15th athe old hundredethgain. Guy
doesn’t realise it, but he goes through the whole day again.
At this point, we’ve
taken a left hand swerve into Philip K Dick territory. During this
late era we get Philip K Dick, Robert Sheckley and Kurt Vonnegut
among many others, who use SF of writers who used SF to examine
themes of angst and contemporary despair.
Like a lot us,
Buckhart’s found himself in the middle of an industrialised
dystopia. He’s haunted by dreams of violent death, and resentments
at his job and his boss. His life is quite literally stuck in a loop
of unchanging discomfort and unease, that he can never quite put his
finger on.
This kind of twisted
reality thriller is popular in movies these days – Oblivion, Moon,
Source Code, The Truman Show and of course the Matrix and its
sequels. In this case, I suppose it’s a kind of mid-life crisis
story. Buckhart’s stifled and stultified, and finds escape in a
kind of folie a deux with his friend Swanson. Suddenly their sense of
oppression has a source, and like maniacs throughout history they
find comfort in pursuing their psychosis. It’s another conspiracy
theory, like Don’t Look Now,
but in this case it isn’t played for laughs – its deadly earnest.
Like the best of these
types of stories, it’s got a dark ending. In the end they learn
there’s no escape. There is a better world, but they can never be
part of it. The despair seems truer than the sunny happy endings you
get in other stories. It’s an acknowledgement, maybe, that the
strongest cage is the one we walk around in and we’ll never be free
of it.
Themes: Despair, modern
life is rubbish, anti-consumerism, dystopia, mind fuck.
.
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