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Pond Scum: Sever the Earth
By Steve Finbow
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Remember, when you look at the stars you are looking back in time. James Strausbaugh, in a review of "J.G. Ballard: Quotes" in Salon, asked the question "Why do British writers so love predicting the future?" He answered himself by stating, "Maybe it's because their culture is so thick with the past. Or maybe it's because the British are not very good at making the future happen; for that they rely on others, like the Americans, Germans and Japanese." Now, I don’t know about you, but where I come from, which is about a mile from where J.G. Ballard lives, that there’s fighting talk.
Art by Nicholas Allanac
Mr Strausbaugh’s comments are wide of the mark; they are generalizations, mere patooey. “Why do British writers so love predicting the future?” I wouldn’t say this was a peculiarly British trait, or that science fiction necessarily predicts the future with any more success than tarot cards or horoscopes. The best SF writers have always been social commentators – Bradbury, Dick, Vonnegut, and Ballard himself. Science fiction is a creative response to science and technology. The genre, although ghettoized by critics, invades the work of Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow, Don DeLillo in Ratner’s Star, even John Updike in Toward the End of Time. The subject matter of SF is not, nor has it ever been, the prediction of the future but the interpretation and representation of everyday life. Vonnegut responded when told that he was an SF writer:
I didn’t know that. I supposed that I was writing a novel about life, about things I could not avoid seeing and hearing in Schenectady, a very real town set in the here and now.
A large planetoid of American SF has left the orbit of social commentary and moved into interplanetary fantasy – Le Guin, Stephen Baxter, Ben Bova; this form of SF and its nine-eyed, three-headed, mutant ilk is not premonitory but is rather a dream of empire. Other American SF writers – Rudy Rucker, William Gibson, Cory Doctorow – write about the American present. This brings me to Mr Strausbaugh’s second assertion.
“Maybe it’s because their culture is so thick with the past…” Britain does tend to mire itself in the past and its literature, not just its SF, is sometimes enisled, parochial and costive. In Julian Barnes’ novel England, all major English tourist sites – Stonehenge, Buckingham Palace, Manchester United – are relocated for tourists on the Isle of Wight. This is satire. This is not reality – see Epcot. America has become a Ballard locus, the World Trade Center the ultimate High Rise destroyed by the West’s technology. In the opening pages of Ballard’s Hello America, “the twin columns of the World Trade Center and the 200-storey OPEC Tower which dominated Wall Street, its neon sign pointing towards Mecca,” are the first buildings seen by the novel’s protagonist, who has come to America to escape the past – Britain/Europe – but finds an America abandoned by its people and remembered only in sepia photographs. This is the revenge of technology. Was it al Qaeda’s desire to send America back to the past or was it an attempt to suspend America in an international vacuum, alienated from the rest of the planet, secluded and secreted behind a surreal film of war and paranoia?
British SF writers such as Ballard, Moorcock, and M. John Harrison explore the psychological realm of post-empire Britain – the “inner space” of post-cataclysmic Europe (WWI & WWII). These writers ask whether the future still has a future. If England is so “thick with the past” then it is also abundant with writers such as Ballard, Amis, Rushdie, etc, who question that past and attempt to map the intrinsic environment of the present.
After the destruction of the World Trade Center – those first-person-camera shots of cruise missiles in Gulf War I turned right back on you – it is apparent that technology and our response to it is one of the main subject matters not only of SF but of art as a whole.
Mr Strausbaugh’s third point is that the British “are not very good at making the future happen; for that they rely on others, like the Americans, Germans and Japanese.” Do we? Most research facilities, universities, and mega-corporations employ international staff. No one country has a stranglehold on innovation. What Britain has is a (healthy) fear of and skepticism about the future role of technology. (Aside: I always find it funny that William Gibson wrote Neuromancer on a manual typewriter). This isn’t a modern reaction. In Gulliver’s third voyage, Jonathan Swift mocks the Academy of Lagado’s experimental science. America is over-dependent on its technology and sense of its place in the future. Technology creates an imposition of a skewed idea of world peace; a world in which proscription rules and the advancement of Western civilization is mandatory. Writers do not predict the future but use writing as a cognitive ancillary in the demystification of the present. The future does not just happen. The future is now – as the advert says. William Gibson and Bruce Sterling wrote an interesting novel called The Difference Engine, in which the past informed us of the present. Likewise, the literature of the future informs us of the present.
England is fighting against the inevitability of decline; America is hurtling towards it – think of the rusting spaceships in Star Wars and Alien, look at the streets of LA in Blade Runner. America is shuddering to a halt. The moral and psychological advancements of the first part of the 20th century are now in perpetual recess and shifting into reverse. SF is important because it conjugates alienated and inchoate ideas and questions contemporary values. SF at its best is a form of Menippean satire because “even when [the satirist] presents a vision of the future, his business is not prophecy, just as his subject is not tomorrow…it is today.” (Menippus quoted in Dead Babies by Martin Amis). But America doesn’t want to know about today. The future consumes America as much as the past obsesses Britain.
Ballard’s American editors had a problem with the ending of The Drowned World. At the conclusion, the hero heads south, into the jungle, into chaos. Too negative. The American publishers wanted him to head north, back to civilization. I refute Mr Strausbaugh’s accusations but I applaud his championing of Ballard. Let’s hope that all literature, British and American, can, as Ballard hopes, “place some kind of metaphysical and philosophical framework around man’s place in the universe.” If it doesn’t, then America may be heading toward the fate imagined for it by Jacques Spitz in his novel Sever the Earth – America has sloughed/slipped off the earth and has formed its own planet – Americans are the new super-aliens. With apologies to Ray Bradbury:
Behind them is an abandoned city. Is it London? Is it LA? Two men – one American and one British – face each other on a deserted road. Their hands met – like mist – fell through each other. The American rode his Electra-Glide quietly away into the hills. The Brit turned his bicycle and rode it silently in the opposite direction. On the air could be heard their faint voices, and both men were speaking to the wind, “What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in ten thousand years.”
Click here to read previous Pond Scum columns.
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Steve Finbow writes out of London, England. He has worked for the poet Allen Ginsberg, the writer Victor Bockris, and the artist Richard Long. His fiction, essays, and short plays appear, or will appear, in Eyeshot, 3am Magazine, Yankee Pot Roast, uber, Locus Novus, InkPot, Dicey Brown, The Guardian Online, and Pindeldyboz. He is currently working on a novel (Yeah, right). He can be contacted here.