First published in New
Worlds #99, October 1960.
Interestingly, J G
Ballard reviewed The Golden Age of Science fiction for the Guardian. He mentions the stories in passing, praising the selection rather
faintly as one of ‘accurate judgements’, but he’s not
unjustifiably annoyed at some of Amis’s comments in the
introduction. Ballard quotes the same section as I did in my note
about The Old Hundredth.
The perpetrators of all this are whipped unmercifully. Moorcock's fiction "gives rise to little more than incurious bewilderment." Aldiss, in Barefoot in the Head, "interlards an adventure story with stylistic oddities, bits of freak talk, poems, some of them ‘concrete'." As for Ballard, on whom no verdict can be harsh enough: "Solipsistic… mystification and outrage… physical disgust… stories with chapters subdivided into numbered paragraphs [not true]… has never been in the genre at all."
According
to Ballard the old man is out of touch; saying his hatred of modern
SF is bound up with his hatred of modern life in general. He’s just
a bitter old critic who backed the wrong horse.
To some extent Amis's distaste for science fiction can be put down to simple pique. Sharp observer though he was of 1940s and 1950s s-f, his prediction in New Maps of Hell that science fiction would become primarily a satirical and sociological medium proved totally wrong. In fact, American s-f veered away into interplanetary fantasy (Le Guin, Zelazny, Delaney), while the British writers began to explore the psychological realm of inner space.
However,
it’s a long race and sometimes it has a surprise finish. Coming in
on the inside straight was a dark horse that I think proves Amis
right: cyberpunk.
As
I’ve noted several times previously, this book was published at the
same time as William Gibson’s ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, the
first story in Mirror Shades. And it seems to me that all
those dark commentaries on capitalist economies and the
commodification of the self or fierce critiques of government control
and state intervention were exactly the sociological satires Amis was
looking for.
Or
course, cyberpunk brings the two elements together. Gibson and
Sterling in particular cite the New Wave writers as a huge influence,
but the stories also feel very much like a return to the classic SF
of days gone by. They had computers in them, and sometimes they ran
amok in interesting ways. They were set in a definite future time,
with cool new gadgets available. They were clearly addressing the
effects of technological advance, albeit with an eye on what had gone
before: what punk music was to fifties rock’n’roll, cyberpunk was
to the SF of the past, reclaiming the raw popular spirit of the
original and brining up to date with late-twentieth century
alienation.
Ballard,
on the other hand, was ready to leave SF behind all together.
Already, the claims of the genre on some of his mid-period novels –
High Rise and Crash, for example – were sketchy. They had much more
in common with avant garde literature. And that whole business about
‘exploring inner space’ always sound like a crock of shit to me:
too often it led to the sorts of story that Amis fingers in his
intro.
Out went the teams of dedicated and resourceful explorers getting into trouble on conscientiously described distant planets; in came shock tactics, tricks with typography, one-line chapters, strained metaphors, obscurities, obscenities, drugs, Oriental religions and left-wing politics.
Well,
the cyberpunks kept most of that, but they added plausible
technologies and well-considered consequences. I don’t know if Amis
ever passed judgement on the cyberpunks, but I seem to recall Ballard
welcoming them in – he got that right at least.
I
don’t want to carp too much about Ballard, he’s one of my
favourite writers. I am a fan of all his periods, although mostly the
books written after Empire of the Sun. That novel is a classic, but
obviously not a science fictional one and the books that followed,
particularly in the nineties, appeared to leave SF far behind.
I
say ‘appeared’ here, because there’s an argument that they’re
driven by SF under the hood. I don’t really buy it: I still cling
to a pretty fundamentalist set of core genre ideas. Technological
advances expressed through fantastical elements – so impossible or
unknown things like space ships, robots and time travel – is pretty
central to my definition of SF. Of course, there’ll be edge cases,
but I don’t think any of Ballard’s final sequence of novels are
among them.
I
think Ballard was primarily a surrealist. He liked the disjointed and
juxtaposed elements of surrealism and he could spot them out in the
real world. If you think of his novels as films by Luis Buňel
then they fit much more easily into the main stream cultural
landscape.
He
was never really was an SF writer, then, in the classical sense. I
know we’ve seen that SF is a broad church, but if you think of real
SF as something like High Anglicanism, then it’s maybe easier to
understand why I don’t think Ballard makes the cut.
For
much of the first part of his career he wrote something very like
conventional SF – set in the future, examining the effects of
technological or social change – but he was only ever there for the
imagery and its philosophical impact. He was never, as far as I can
tell, especially interested in building convincing settings another
key SF trait. Scientific dressing of his stories was only ever there
to lead him to the startling imagery.
This
story (at last!) is instantly recognisable as Ballard. There’s a
repressed and doomed stiff upper lip type as protagonist, startling
and vivid transformations in the natural world echoed and an alluring
woman on the outskirts to stand around and hear the protagonists
theories about the coming metaphysical catastrophe. So, if you’re a
Ballard fan then this one’s vintage stuff.
Themes:
entropy, ennui, exhaustion, mutation, transformation, a dignified
exit.
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