Angels and Aliens

It’s a short section of a long book, a lyrical description of a surfer riding a big wave in Santa Monica Bay. Wait, did I say a big wave? I meant a tidal wave hundreds of feet high, sweeping toward downtown Los Angeles and destroying all in its path. Gil, the hedonistic surfer in the novel Lucifer’s Hammer, sees the flash from a comet falling into the Pacific and knows what’s coming next, and he makes his decision in an instant with a very L.A. thought.

“If death was inevitable, what was left? Style, only style.”

The page-and-a-half recounting his ride on that giant wave has been studied in writing classes all over America. The reader meets Gil in the last minute of his life, perhaps in the sole moment of nobility he has ever had, and it’s an indelible image. It’s also a portrait of a very believable, very L.A. character, one of many in the field of science fiction.

It’s not surprising that Los Angeles has been the setting for many science fiction stories; it has been the city where the future happens first for most of the last hundred years. Giants of the field called it home for at least part of their careers – Ray Bradbury is a native, and Robert Heinlein lived here when he sold his first stories and used his home address as a location in one of them.

The city was exciting, a magnet for visionaries and authors. As soon as Aldous Huxley earned enough money from the royalties on Brave New World, he moved from rural Sussex to Hollywood. He figured the place out quickly, and his first novel set in California, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, includes a savage portrait of an immortality-obsessed Hollywood millionaire and his shallow coterie. Huxley remained in Los Angeles for the rest of his life and set another satirical futurist novel, 1948’s Ape and Essence, in the film community.

They were some of the first science fictional treatments of Hollywood, but far from the last. SF authors realized the potential power of media concentration far earlier than the rest of America; the cynical, manipulative talk show host in Norman Spinrad’s 1969 novel Bug Jack Barron understands his power to shape society in a way that real TV personalities didn’t for at least another decade. Other SF writers played silver screen mania for laughs, none more successfully than Ron Goulart in the unjustly obscure novel Skyrocket Steele (1980), set in Hollywood in 1939. The actors in a low-budget science fiction movie about an alien invasion notice that the props look great and work extraordinarily well. This is because they aren’t props – there’s a real alien invasion disguised as a bad movie about an alien invasion. It’s a delirious premise beautifully realized, bringing the naive themes of early science fiction films in conflict with menacing contemporary visions of domination and conquest.

Science fiction isn’t always about aliens or the future, except as they act as metaphors for trends in current society, and Los Angeles has been a canvas for many a cautionary tale. Temporary Angeleno Philip K. Dick was the master of the genre, and the film Blade Runner, based on his book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, created an indelible impression of a polluted, claustrophobic future L.A. (There is some irony here; Dick wrote several books set in greater Los Angeles, but this wasn’t one of them – the novel was set in San Francisco, but director Ridley Scott moved the movie to L.A.) Dick’s best portrait of the city was Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, which portrays a repressive society in which failing to show your ID upon demand makes you subject to arrest by a brutal, paranoid police force. (In 1970, this was science fiction.) The protagonist is a movie star who wakes up one day to discover that his ID has been stolen, and records of his existence have disappeared from every database. Nobody else was thinking about identity theft and counterfeiting electronic records in 1970, but Philip K. Dick had worked out the details, and his themes of multiple personalities and fragile reality are all the more powerful in this setting. It’s an L.A. nobody would want to live in, but everybody recognizes.

Of course, sometimes it’s not enough to make Los Angeles into a hellhole; there are days when you just need to blow it up, shake it to bits with an earthquake, set it on fire, or drop a meteor on it. A slew of science fiction disaster novels have been set here, but Lucifer’s Hammer, the book that featured that memorable moment with the doomed surfer, is the one that got it all right. The settings and characters feel authentic, the action speeds right along, and authors Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle portray the courage, cowardice, and humanity of people facing the destruction of everything they know. The same authors wrote Oath of Fealty, which combines sharp action and interesting characters with a philosophical look at the gated community a decade before City of Quartz did. Suppose that over time it came to resemble that other gated community, the medieval castle. It might then become the hated community, resented by the people outside. Oath of Fealty explores how an enclosed, cultured, and privileged society might appear to people on both sides of the fence, and if it comes down firmly on the side of those who live inside, it makes clear that there are responsibilities and relationships on both sides that need to be maintained.

In this litany of books about disaster, disorder, dysfunction, and dystopia, are there any that portray an unreservedly sunny portrait of a future L.A.? Alas, no. Utopias are boring, and whatever Los Angeles is, has been, or might become, it is not dull. If someone writes a book where it is, that would be fantasy.

Richard Foss has a novelette titled “To Leap the Highest Wall” in the current issue of Analog and thanks George Van Wagner for assistance with this story.

Standup Tragedian

For Thomas M. Disch, America has a brilliant future behind it
The Walls of America By Thomas M. Disch (Tachyon)

“Nothing,” as Neil Gaiman put it, “ages harder and faster and more strangely than the future.” The SF comic-book Proust was going on about Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, but that quip might just as well reference the mandarins of SF themselves in the utopia-incinerating years since 9/11. The eventual triumph of Philip K. Dick over Robert A. Heinlein is mainly due to the fact that, while both writers invented intricate immediate futures based on Cold War ideology, the one imagined by the deranged drughead who saw God turned out to be a lot truer than the can-do rationalism posited by a libertarian Rear Admiral. Small wonder that having to actually live in such an alt-tomorrow might prove too much for more than one old genre hand: Mark Vonnegut’s touching intro to father Kurt’s posthumous essay collection Armageddon in Retrospective described his father as “An optimist posing as a pessimist, hoping people will take heed. It wasn’t until the Iraq War and the end of his life did he become sincerely gloomy.”

That America’s future isn’t what it used to be didn’t surprise Thomas M. Disch, which might’ve been why killed himself last July 4. The coolest, most cunning of the 1960s New Wave that nudged transatlantic SF in experimental and postmodern narrative directions, Disch was, until The Brave Little Toaster books, the least known. This was partially due to a view of the world uncommercially bleak enough to make Vonnegut’s output look like an assortment of gumdrops, but mostly because he was so innocently, ghoulishly cheerful about it. His first novel, The Genocides, detailed the annihilation of humanity and, his most famous, Camp Concentration, speculated on the syphilitic nature of human intelligence in jollier terms than Bill Burroughs could manage. Intellectual slapstick was Disch’s specialty in poetry, criticism, historical fiction (Clara Reeve, written as “Leonie Hargrave,” was taken as a Gore Vidal joke, certainly no higher compliment for a stylist), plays (the Archdiocese of New York tried to shut down his The Cardinal Detoxes), and numerous other forms, but he didn’t do much SF after the failure of 1978’s On the Wings of Song to win readers. The genre was becoming less literary and more right wing when Fundamental Disch, the author’s previous short story collection, dropped in 1980.

The Wall of America collects Disch’s occasional SF exercises over the past quarter-century as they appeared in magazines like Playboy, Omni, and The Hudson Review. The emerging narrative around the writer’s suicide leans heavily on declining powers and decades-long depression, but there’s little in the extraordinary wit and gusto of these stories to support either contention. Buried inside tales like “The Abduction of Bunny Steiner: A Shameless Lie” and “The Man Who Read a Book” is a single evil satire of the publishing industry. Others deal with the siren attractions of big-A Art, like the title yarn, set in a minimally tweaked future where millions of feet of fresh public wallspace between the U.S. and Canada opens up appalling prospects for immortality. Disch had John Collier’s knack for squeezing fantasy elements into quotidian reality, with especially telling effect on “Canned Goods,” in which a prolonged aesthetic disagreement between two cultured boors turns on a haggle over food in yet another post-Apocalypse. A life spent on Parnassus isn’t quite enough in the last extremity, it seemed to Disch, who was living in the shadow of eviction from a rent-controlled apartment in Manhattan when he pulled the trigger on himself. (Ron Garmon)

Gert Jonke
Homage to Czerny: Studies in Virtuoso Technique (Dalkey Archive)

Dalkey also had the goodness to send along this antic Austrian’s 1969 debut, Geometric Regional Novel, which was kind of like sending a joy-buzzer to explain a whoopee cushion. Set in a barely fictional middle European village where near-lifeless inhabitants inhabit metronomically orderly lives in a wilderness of surreal laws and repressed impulses, this is an open-ended postmodern hypertext, one last echo of a crashed Modernism or a big ornate goof on rural literature, depending at which end of the Jonkean rabbit hole you buy your ticket. Lyrical passages alternate with long, repetitive pages of comic officialese that start and stop the narrative like a wheezy city bus to a freakish nowhere-in-particular and the reader is uneasily thankful for the ride.

The “Czerny” in question is Carl, the 19th century piano composer, and this Homage consists of two ludicrous events in the sodden life of composer Fritz, a young man of promise and thirst who first moves through photographer Anton Diabelli’s party in “The Presence of Memory,” which is to be an identical replica of last year’s party, down to canapes and booze intake. Landscape paintings hang everywhere, encouraging confusion between realist art and artless reality, while the photographer takes pictures that compare identically to shots taken last year and guests babble nonsensically of cities made of smoke. Music thunders, clotting the senses and inspiring floods of prose, gorgeously descriptive even in translation. There are many minutely detailed dirty jokes, some involving the proctologist’s wife. Jonke rings Fritz back on for “Gradus ad parnassum,” a series of meandering Good Soldier Svejk colloquies about piano cases and destroyed reputations. The composer’s disintegration from D.T.’s is as harrowing as a Nelson Algren junkie fit, but rendered in bemused and jaunty language that projects, as brother Otto puts it, “your predicament on your environment.” He sees heads on fire in the street and imagines the world drowned in bubbling mucous.

This first English translation of Gert Jonke’s 1977 novel is a fierce and febrile comedy taking place in an alternate reality you don’t so much discover as surrender to. Widespread dissimilation of Jonke on this side of the pond can’t help but expand job opportunities in poetic terrorism. (RG)