Thursday 5 April, 2007

Howl

Beth's post on The Road reminded me that I have been meaning to write, for months now, on the best 3 books I've read in the last year. And since I'm disappearing for five weeks, now seemed like the time for a companion piece to that post. Yes, one of those book's was The Road. The other two were Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro and The Drought by J.G. Ballard. The relationship between them is that they are all speculative fiction, or literary science fiction or whatever the phrase is these days. In his review of The Road in The New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon considered the increasing popularity of the this hybrid form of writing. He argued that, 'the post-apocalyptic mode has long attracted writers not generally considered part of the science fiction tradition. It's one of the few sub-genres of science fiction, along with stories of the near future (also friendly to satirists), that may be safely attempted by a mainstream writer without incurring too much damage to his or her credentials for seriousness.' I would go a step further and ask whether Science Fiction is now being taken more seriously than it once was.

Certainly Ballard's book, (first published as The Burning World in 1964) written is breathtaking in its predictive qualities. It is about a planet that, after centuries of misuse, turns on it's occupants and prevents rain (and this concept is being stated 15 years before the publication of books on Gaia Theory, though the science was being developed in the 1960s). A drying out world and endless fires result. Thousands, if not millions, are killed in water wars. But I don't mean to reduce the novel to Ballard's prophetic capacities - in fact The Drought is so surreal it couldn't be seen to actually represent any realistic world. But it evokes the times that are upon us now more vividly than realism, or science, ever could.

(I took this photo of land not burning, but dying, all the same, just out of Ararat.)

Never Let Me Go (which was shortlisted for The Booker in 2005 ) is speculative conceptually, though I wouldn't call it science fiction. The novel explores the ethics of human cloning with no reference to science other than it being the cultural form that is being serviced by these schools of young people bred for body parts. Ishiguro's interest, as it was in Remains of the Day is, philosophically speaking, fate, and, politically speaking, class. If we knew our fate would we choose to avoid it? His answer seems to be NO - yet such a profoundly pessimistic world view still allows for moments of poignancy and beauty. Though the book itself asks if beauty and poignancy are enough to justify a life. They may not be.

The same question is asked in The Road and I posted my thoughts about that novel, here when I first read it. Is love enough if it is all that exists? We need to think so - but that need is not really an answer. Is the ephemeral flick of a fish's tail spied through golden waters enough to give us hope that in millennia to come, the world may rebuild itself? The Road, like Never Let Me Go, seems uncertain.

I think I've mentioned before that my father, Peter Nicholls, is the co-author of The Encyclopedia of Science FictionWhen I interviewed him about the future of science fiction for Meanjin he claimed: 'You could sum up science fiction's special qualities by observing Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. High culture or low? It is SF I think, the science being psychology. It was published as a pulp story in 1886, and some people find it disgustingly crude, though it's remained a perennial favourite, on the big screen as well. Yet think of it as a novel of ideas, a thought experiment. All that disturbing stuff about reifying the subconscious and bringing it to life anticipates Freud by a big margin. Here's a writer, effectively writing a novel about Freudian theory thirteen years before Freud published his first major work, The Interpretation of Dreams. It's one of the great things about science fiction, it gets in early. Science fiction writers are the hounds of hell, they raise their shaggy black heads and sniff the wind, and feel the future coming. And then they howl.'

Well, if it's the future I've been reading in these novels, I'll most certainly be howling. But reading them also reminded me how much I love a hybrid form. A novel or film or television show that can't easily be classified. Forms, to get back to Cormac's metaphor, that are slippery as fish.

Cross-posted at Sarsparilla

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