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The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin (1971)

Coming to this novel was a shock after reading five of Le Guin’s Hainish cycle, science fantasy novels in a row. The Hainish stories are set in a remote future on remote planets and feature a range of humans, humanoids and aliens with Lord of the Rings-type names like Shevek, Ong Tot Oppong or Pemmer Harge rem ir Tibe, who travel vast interstellar distances in spaceships or ride flying tigers, use telepathy and fire laser guns.

So it was a surprise to read this 1971 novel which is:

set on earth
in the very near future
above all, features recognisably ‘normal people with names like George, William and Heather

George Orr the dreamer

The premise is disarmingly simple: George Orr is an ordinary, unassertive 30-year-old office worker living in Portland, Oregon, who has started to have particularly intense dreams which come true – his dreams alter reality and retrospectively change history!

The dreams started fairly modestly – as a shy teen he was irritated by an aunt living with his family who kept trying to hit on him. One night he dreamed the aunt had died in a car crash 18 months earlier and when he woke up – it was true! He was living in a new reality in which the aunt had died 18 months earlier, and his parents and all his relatives and the authorities all accepted the fact, had never known any other reality, lived entirely inside the alternative history he had dreamed into being. George’s dream had not only changed reality but he was the only one who knew it had changed.

The narrative opens a few years later with George on the verge of a nervous breakdown because he is dosing himself with high-powered drugs to try and stop himself doing any more dreaming. When he nearly overdoses and a local doctor is called in who refers him to a psychiatrist, a certain Dr William Haber. Haber is a specialist in dreams and the human brain and is working on an invention, the Augmentor, a device which detects and amplifies a person’s natural brainwaves, with a view to treating the people with mental problems who are referred to him by identifying and restoring their ‘normal’ brainwave patterns.

In their first interview, Haber slowly wheedles out of George his incredible story and, of course, as a scientist and psychiatrist, dismisses it as one more of the many florid hallucinations and delusions he’s dealt with over the years. He puts George to sleep with a combination of hypnosis and pinching his carotid artery which he has perfected over the years and, as he goes under, suggests he dream of a horse running free. When George awakes, the big picture of Mount Hood on Haber’s wall has changed into a big picture of the horse he saw running wild and free in his dream.

Did Haber notice the change or is he like everyone else who lives in whatever new reality George dreams into existence, as if it has always been that way?

Over subsequent sessions, George realises that Haber, being at the epicentre of The Change, right next to the Dreamer, does notice the change. At the next session Haber witnesses George’s dream turn the horse picture back into a view of Mount Hood. Haber insists they continue the ‘sessions’, but George starts to realise the doctor has plans to plant evermore ambitious suggestions into his head.

Thus soon Haber is transformed from a struggling researcher in the cramped room on the 64th floor of a rundown building, but the head of a prestigious dream research institute with a big office and a stunning picture window commanding a view over the surrounding landscape. And each successive phase of the story records Haber’s increasingly ambitious attempts to restructure the entire world to make it a better place.

Unfortunately the human mind, the unconscious dreaming mind, or George’s mind anyway, responds to Haber’s prompts in unnervingly indirect or unexpected ways. Thus, when Haber puts George to sleep, turns on the brainwave Augmentor and suggests to him that he overcome his fear of people, of being claustrophobically trapped in the overcrowded transport system and inadequate housing of modern Portland – George responds with a particularly vivid dream in which mankind has experienced a horrific plague a few years earlier, which devastated the earth’s population, reducing it from 7 billion to less than 1 billion. In this new reality everybody has experienced and refers to the Crash (p.79) a carcinomic plague caused by toxic chemicals in the air from car and industrial pollution.

And when he wakes up – it is true: George’s dream version of events has become human history, the overcrowded city of Portland with its gleaming skyscrapers has morphed into an underpopulated town of 100,000 whose outer suburbs were looted then burned down in the social chaos which followed the Great Plague. Both Orr and Haber manage to accommodate to this new reality – and to the fact that all their loved ones, parents and wives, have died in this vast global holocaust.

Even more drastic is Haber’s next attempt to make a better world. Throughout the narrative characters have been referring to a war bubbling away in Eurasia, which seems to involve Israel, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, India, Pakistan and threatens to drag in other countries. So at their next session Haber puts Orr under and, as he goes into deep sleep, suggests that George creates World Peace.

Unfortunately, Orr’s imagination does this via the unexpected route of inventing an attack on humanity by aliens from outer space who capture the moon, murder the handful of earth colonists living on a moonbase and then threaten earth itself. George has certainly achieved peace on earth, and united the squabbling nations of the world – but at the cost of threatening all mankind with attack by ferocious aliens, methane-based forms of life from the planet Alderbaran (pp.132,142).

And so, bizarrely, on – each successive dream world session raising the stakes, and plunging George into deeper and deeper panics and bewilderment.

Even more dramatic than the Crash, the next sequence in which the aliens suddenly attack Portland, leading to the US launching nuclear weapons and bombing raids against them which go horribly wrong and end up doing far more damage to the city and its inhabitants than to the aliens. They even trigger the dormant volcano, Mount Hood, into having a full-blown volcanic eruption and raining lava bombs onto the terrorised city. Chaos!

In the midst of this pandemonium, Orr makes his way across the ruined city dodging bombs and flying lava and makes it up to Haber’s office, where, ignoring the pandemonium, Haber puts George into deep sleep just as an alien appears, hovering at Haber’s smashed-out window and threatens to blast them all, and….

George’s dream once again transforms reality. For now it turns out the aliens are peace-loving, the attack on the moon settlers was a misunderstanding, they don’t have any weapons, there are only a thousand or so of them and they came in peace. So much so that, in this new reality, aliens are integrated into human society, walking the streets (admittedly in their eight-foot-tall spacesuits which make them look like giant turtles), Portland is restored to pristine condition and Dr Haber has been promoted once again, becoming a leading light in the World Planning Centre, the chief agency of the new, global ‘Federation of Peoples’ (p.126).

The future

So far I haven’t mentioned an important element of the novel which is that it is set in the future – not the remote, far-distant future of the Hainish novels but what was then – for Le Guin writing in 1970 – a mere thirty years in the future: the novel is set in 2002.

Quite apart from the mayhem caused by George’s dreaming, this futureworld is quite a lot to take on board, for Le Guin sees it as a dystopia. In this future, the global population is over seven billion, with the result that there isn’t enough food: many foodstuffs we are familiar with have disappeared, such as meat and any interesting alcoholic drinks. The doctor who first treats George casually mentions the incidence of kwashiorkor, a disease caused by malnutrition, among the city’s children. An oppressive aspect of George’s life in the early parts of the story is the horrifying cramped and packed conditions of public transport (private cars have long since been banned) – an anxiety which eventually leads him, as we’ve seen, to dream of a global plague which kills off most of the human population.

(I smiled as I read the ‘horrifying’ descriptions of George being pressed up against the other commuters on Portland’s packed trains and trams – that’s what I and tens of thousands of Londoners experience every day, trying to fight our way onto tube and overground trains every morning and evening.)

But by far the most striking aspect of Le Guin’s mentions of Global Warming. 1971 and she is talking about Global Warming! As Le Guin envisions it, the huge increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from industrial output and unfettered internal combustion engine usage has set in train global warming, which, by the time the novel is set – 2002 – has become unstoppable. The polar ice caps are melting, New York is going to be drowned, the average temperature has gone up – with the result that Portland experiences a permanent warm drizzle:

the endless warm drizzle of spring—the ice of Antarctica, falling softly on the heads of the children of those responsible for melting it.

It is like, George reflects, walking around in a thin warm soup.

It is quite a thing to be reading, in 2019, a novel which warns so accurately and prophetically about the catastrophic impact of manmade pollution and global warming. Shows you just how long anyone who cares about the environment, or understands environmental science, has known about the threat – fifty years! And yet what has been done to reduce carbon emissions, to limit car and plane and ship use, industrial emissions or ruinous agricultural practices in all that time?

Nothing.

Love interest

The other big thread I haven’t mentioned yet is the love interest. On page 40 George goes to visit a lawyer, Heather Lelache. Characteristically for the original version of the ruined dystopia, Heather works at a law firm whose offices are in a converted multi-storey car park – remember that, by 2002, private cars are a thing of the past and the huge concrete infrastructure built around them has had to be repurposed.

As with all Le Guin’s novels, it is nothing like a conventional love affair. Heather is described as being festooned with bangles, hard and clacking, a loud brass necklace, and is hugely unsympathetic to George when he comes to see her. He wants her to intervene with Haber somehow, maybe under privacy law. Heather listens with ill-concealed boredom as George tells his increasingly mad tale about how his dreams can change the world. She finally reluctantly agrees to arrange to visit Haber’s practice in the guide of a health and safety lawyer – but he persuades her to attend a session with Haber under the guide of a kind of health and safety inspector and arrange it so she sits in on a session with George.

This she duly does, and is present to witness the dream in which George dreams of the Great Plague, the Crash, which wiped out six-sevenths of the human population. She is staring out Dr Haber’s window over the skyscrapers of downtown Portland as the Change kicks in and she watches them shimmer, melt and disappear, to be replaced by the ruined low-rise town which Portland has become six years after the Crash (p.61).

Whereas Haber is a megalomaniac who quickly seizes upon the situation to implement his world reforms, Heather is more like you and me and responds to the change with terror and confusion. From that moment on she believes George but struggles to really accept the implications. A few days later she goes to see him at his rented apartment and discovers him in a terrible state, having tried to stay permanently awake. She persuades him to leave the city and drives him to the cabin in the countryside (which he has awarded himself as winner of a state lottery, in one of his many dreams) and here she cares for him, feeds and waters him, loads him onto the cot bed and falls asleep beside him.

They are both jerked out of their sleep by sirens and explosions. It is the invasion of the aliens I mentioned above, in which the US responds by firing nuclear missiles into space, some of which are deflected back to earth and explode setting off the vast volcanic eruption of Mount Howe, and so on. It is Heather who helps George drive back to the city and make it up to Dr Haber’s office, be wired up to the Augmentor and go into deep sleep just as a weird ovoid alien vehicle smashes through Haber’s office window…

In the new peaceful world which follows George sorting out this crisis, Heather and George become close. She is black, one of many black or non-white leading characters which populate Le Guin’s novels. She explains that her father was a radical black activist back in the 1970s (i.e. when the novel was written) and her mother a rich man’s daughter who rebelled against her privileged background (p.102).

Heather is, potentially, an interesting character and yet… Le Guin never really conveys her as a character apart from having lots of clacking bangles and clicking handbags and projecting a tough armature.

Humour

Le Guin is not a very funny writer. There is hardly any humour and certainly no warmth in her novels. I find them cold and heartless. But, unlike any of the Hainish novels, this one does have some attempts at humour.

There is some fairly crude satire in having the President of the United States named President Merdle (Albert B. Merdle, in fact):

the association with the French word merde meaning shit and
the other association, with the fictional character in Dickens, the millionaire financier Merdle in Little Dorrit who turns out to be a complete fraud

There is a flicker of humour in the start of the scene where Heather visits Haber’s office, and uses a pocket tape recorder to record their conversation which goes teep every few seconds and at one point Haber’s phone goes off, making a deep bong noise, the two sounds creating an antiphonal piece of minimalism.

And there’s humour of a sort in the unintended shape some of George’s dreams take: – I suppose it’s ‘funny’ that when Haber tries to get him to create World Peace, George does so at the cost of inventing an alien invasion!

Along the same lines, once the alien situation is dealt with and it turns out that they were friendly all along and are perfectly integrated into human society, Haber has a go at solving another social problem, the ‘race problem’ (like the references to global warming, it’s salutary and rather shocking to be reminded how long topics which are in the headlines as some kind of ‘news’ have in fact been around).

Anyway, when George comes round from this dream it is to find that he has indeed solved the ‘race problem’ – by turning everyone grey! There are no longer white or black or brown or yellow people. Everyone is the same uniform shade of battleship grey.

I suppose that’s sort of funny, but Le Guin has a way of draining the life out of everything. What could possibly have become a funny theme is made to feel tragic when George realises that Heather – who he has come to love who, indeed, in one of the worlds he creates, he has made into his loving wife! – as George realises that his beloved Heather is gone. Gone. Everything he loved about her, the tone of her jet black skin, the shape of her skull, her black physiognomy, and the feisty, no-nonsense attitude it gave her…. all these have disappeared in a world of same-colour but drab and rather sad humans.

Le Guin is making a sort of interesting point – that maybe the inequalities and frictions between races, genders and classes are precisely what make life interesting – but the reader – well, this reader – experienced it simply as a loss. The same kind of loss as when Falk leaves behind Parth or Strella is revealed to be a treacherous alien in The Lathe of Heaven or when the swashbuckling Lord Mogien, who we’d got to like in Rocannon’s Planet, is killed off, or – much more seismically – when Lord Estraven, one of the two central protagonists whose strange alien condition we had grown to understand and respect in The Left Hand of Darkness is simply machine-gunned to death, pointlessly, to no-one’s advantage, by overzealous border guards.

So many of the details are what old hippies called downers. In a tiny example, in the post-alien-war peaceful world where Dr Haber has become a senior official at the World Planning Centre, George is walking across of futuristic plaza when he witnesses a ‘citizen’s arrest’ i.e. a public-spirited citizen has tracked down a man who was diagnosed with a terminal cancer and gone on the run. But now he’s been tracked down and, once he’s rounded up the ten witnesses required by law, the public spirited one euthenases the cancer sufferer with a poison dart gun.

It’s a throwaway detail, a moment in a much larger narrative and I can see it’s making a point about a new and different type of dystopia which George has dreamed and yet…it’s harsh and cruel, and… unnecessary. Cruelty is thrown in; the extra detail will always be brutal.

Le Guin’s fiction seems to me to be full of these moments of loss or cruelty and, after a while, I find the cumulative effect to be emotionally draining and upsetting.

Pessimism

So the occasional flickers of possible humour cannot outweigh the relentless negative pessimism of her worldview. It is a bleak future indeed that she foresees for us, living in an over-populated planet characterised by food shortages and malnutrition, many familiar animal species wiped out, much of the forest chopped down, the thin permanent polluted drizzle falling on everyone, the sea levels rising and drowning coastal cities.

And, as if this wasn’t bad enough – there’s a horrifying moment in the middle of the novel where George revels his really big secret to Heather; not that his dreams change reality – but that the world has ended. The over-pollution and radioactive waste was so severe that by April 1998 most of humanity had died out, and he, George, was sick and ill and dying and staggering through the corpse-strewn streets of Portland and, as he collapsed on a cracked concrete step, with his last flickering moments of life, he dreamed, dreamed of a better world, dreamed that humanity survived.

In other words the badly polluted, overpopulated, malnourished world the novel opens in, is a saved version of the world. The real one came to an end in April 1998 (p.104). He explains to a horrified and disbelieving Heather that all the subsequent versions of reality they have lived through together are not only dreams, they are essentially lies, fictions, inventions. The real world ended ‘and we destroyed it.’

Eastern mysticism

A lot is made of Le Guin’s abiding interest in Eastern mysticism, which informs her whole approach to character and plot, and underlies her interest in alternative states of mind, of perception, of consciousness. Indeed the title of the book is a quote from the writings of Zhuang Zhou, specifically a passage from Book XXIII, paragraph 7, quoted as an epigraph to Chapter 3 of the novel:

To let understanding stop at what cannot be understood is a high attainment.
Those who cannot do it will be destroyed on the lathe of heaven.

And at moments, very characteristic Le Guin moments, the narrative steps back from what you could call its Western technocratic mindset to create epiphanies of peace and detachment. In particular, at several points George – for most of the book a whining, stressed individual – is portrayed as momentarily monumental, the still point of a chaotic world, somehow the centre of something awesome.

George himself is aware of the value of silence and contemplation. In a central scene (pp.136-140) Haber tells George that all the tests he’s run on him indicate that he is dead centre, totally average, average height, weight, brain patterns, EEG; in a weird way he is kind of at the dead centre of the human condition.

‘If you put them all onto the same graph you sit smack in the middle at 50. Dominance, for example; I think you were 48.8 on that. Neither dominant nor submissive. Independence / dependence – same thing. Creative / destructive, on the Ramirez scale – same thing. Both, neither. Either, or. Where there’s an opposed pair, a polarity, you’re in the middle; where there’s a scale, you’re at the balance point. You cancel out so thoroughly that, in a sense, nothing is left.

(Either/or. Aha. Now we see the meaning of George’s name. George Orr, a kind of permanent doorway into alternatives…)

This scene evolves into a confrontation where the pair challenge each other with speeches outlining the aggressive, technocratic, always-busy, improving and building western mindset (Haber) – and George’s intuition that humans are also capable of just being, and of going with the flow of nature and the universe – the Le Guin worldview.

So her feel for apparently Taoist, Eastern values threads in and out of the narrative, with sometimes very powerful effects in some scenes, butwith fortune cookie glibness at others. The aliens from Aldabaran have a very detached pint of view, if you can call it that. After all, they are inventions of George’s passive, middle-of-the-road imagination. As one alien tells him,

To go is to return

And yet, for me, whatever associations Eastern mysticism is meant to have with detachment and serenity are utterly overshadowed by Le Guin’s very Western obsession with technology, cities, urban living, drugs, dystopias, end of the world, science fiction, spaceships and aliens and murders and death. There is nothing detached, serene or blissful about any of these subjects. The Taoist thread is there to light a scene and gild a few perceptions. But for me it is totally outweighed by a heavy, endless acid rain pours grim and unrelenting pessimism over all her books.

Heather returns

Distraught at losing Heather, George drops into an antiques shop run by one of the now-friendly aliens. The aliens have their own language and somehow seem to know that George possesses a skill which they have a word for, iahklu. After a weird Zen conversation which may, or may not, mean anything, the alien apparently on the spur of the moment gives George an ancient 45rpm single vinyl record. George takes it home to his modest apartment, pouts it on the turntable, and plays it over and over again. It is Help From My Friends by the Beatles. He falls asleep and dreams.

Suddenly we are in the mind of Heather, as she awakens in George’s apartment, watching him sleep, listening to the Beatles on a loop. She’s back! He’s dreamed her back! Although it becomes clear this version of her has not experienced the Change and so doesn’t know about George’s dreams.

At almost every turn of the story Le Guin wrings the maximum amount of confusion from her characters.

The end

The narrative had been heading for the moment when Dr Haber perfected his ‘dream augmentor’ and this is the trigger for the book’s climactic scenes.

Haber puts George under one last time and instructs him to dream that his dream skills have gone, disappeared, ended. George awakens, and they have.

Haber thanks George for all his co-operation and bids him and Heather goodbye and they set off across the now, finally at-peace city — but they have got only a mile or so away when the entire world begins to fall to pieces.

Haber has hooked himself up to the Augmentor and is copying and augmenting the brain rhythms he’s spent the book recording off George. Now he is having his own reality-changing dream and it is a nightmare. Because he has no personality, no inner life apart from his burning ambition, the dream is the first genuine nightmare we’ve experienced, in which everything disintegrates into a terrible swirling maelstrom of emptiness.

George makes his way through the mounting chaos as the city and landscape melts into a tornado of meaninglessness, by sheer effort of will maintaining just enough physical reality to allow him to walk up melting stairs, cross disappearing floors, and ride disintegrating escalators to the collapsing office where Haber is lying wired up to the Augmentor and with one, final, terrific effort of willpower… to turn it OFF.

Coda

The scene cuts to a few months later, and the world is still struggling to come to grips with what everyone refers to as The Event. The world was restored to a kind of reality after Haber’s nightmare, but seriously out of kilter, with buildings, roads and so on half-built or built in two zones or clashing styles, starting and ending abruptly. As do people’s personal lives, and human history, which is now full of all sorts of inexplicable and nonsensical non-sequiturs – a kind of world of solidified chaos which has given rise to an epidemic of mental illness. Among whose victims is Haber, who is now confined to a mental home, silent, withdrawn, catatonic.

In this topsy-turvy world George has got a job in an antiques store, working for a detached, courteous ten-foot-tall, turtle-suited alien named E’nememen Asfah (now there’s the Ursula Le Guin I’m used to, with her silly made-up names).

George mourns for his lost wife, beautiful black Heather. Then one day he bumps into her in the shop being sold kitchenware by her boss. But she is not the same Heather. She is back to black (the grey world has gone) and is much harsher and harder than the grey woman who became his wife. She tells him she is married and his heart quietly breaks. She tells him her husband died in that war in the Middle East and his heart quietly soars.

She vaguely remembers meeting him once or twice at some doctors’ office; wasn’t he the guy who thought his dreams changed everything. Is he cured now? Yes, quite cured he say. And he invites her for a cup of coffee, both of them with a whole new unknown future to pay for.

Reviews of Ursula Le Guin novels

1966 Rocannon’s World
1966 Planet of Exile
1967 City of Illusions
1968 A Wizard of Earthsea
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness
1971 The Lathe of Heaven
1972 The Word for World Is Forest
1974 The Dispossessed

Other science fiction reviews

Late Victorian
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1900s
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth’s atmosphere and brings about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ until one of them rebels

1910s
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1920s
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…

1930s
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars

1940s
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950s
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind’s colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the ‘Overlords’ who arrive from space to supervise mankind’s transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
— Some problems with Isaac Asimov’s science fiction
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport, a terrifying new weapon has been invented, and tattooed hard man Gulliver Foyle is looking for vengeance
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish’s Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe

>1960s
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard space travelling New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – a ‘planetary romance’ or ‘science fantasy’ set on Fomalhaut II where ethnographer and ‘starlord’ Gaverel Rocannon rides winged tigers and meets all manner of bizarre foes in his quest to track down the aliens who destroyed his spaceship and killed his colleagues, aided by sword-wielding Lord Mogien and a telepathic Fian
1966 Planet of Exile by Ursula Le Guin – both the ‘farborn’ colonists of planet Werel, and the surrounding tribespeople, the Tevarans, must unite to fight off the marauding Gaal who are migrating south as the planet enters its deep long winter – not a good moment for the farborn leader, Jakob Agat Alterra, to fall in love with Rolery, the beautiful, golden-eyed daughter of the Tevaran chief
1967 City of Illusions by Ursula Le Guin – an unnamed humanoid with yellow cat’s eyes stumbles out of the great Eastern Forest which covers America thousands of years in the future when the human race has been reduced to a pitiful handful of suspicious rednecks or savages living in remote settlements. He is discovered and nursed back to health by a relatively benign commune but then decides he must make his way West in an epic trek across the continent to the fabled city of Es Toch where he will discover his true identity and mankind’s true history
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into a galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and ‘retire’ escaped ‘andys’ – earning enough to buy mechanical animals, since all real animals died long ago
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by ‘inertials’. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after they are involved in an explosion on the moon
1969 The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin – an envoy from the Ekumen or federation of advanced planets – Genly Ai – is sent to the planet Gethen to persuade its inhabitants to join the federation, but the focus of the book is a mind-expanding exploration of the hermaphroditism of Gethen’s inhabitants, as Genly is forced to undergo a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love

1970s
1970 Tau Zero by Poul Anderson – spaceship Leonora Christine leaves earth with a crew of fifty to discover if humans can colonise any of the planets orbiting the star Beta Virginis, but when its deceleration engines are damaged, the crew realise they need to exit the galaxy altogether in order to find space with low enough radiation to fix the engines – and then a series of unfortunate events mean they find themselves forced to accelerate faster and faster, effectively travelling forwards through time as well as space until they witness the end of the entire universe – one of the most thrilling sci-fi books I’ve read
1971 The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula Le Guin – thirty years in the future (in 2002) America is an overpopulated environmental catastrophe zone where meek and unassuming George Orr discovers that is dreams can alter reality, changing history at will. He comes under the control of visionary neuro-scientist, Dr Haber, who sets about using George’s powers to alter the world for the better with unanticipated and disastrous consequences
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
1972 The Word for World Is Forest by Ursula Le Guin – novella set on the planet Athshe describing its brutal colonisation by exploitative Terrans (who call it ‘New Tahiti’) and the resistance of the metre-tall, furry, native population of Athsheans
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre-long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it in one of the most haunting and evocative novels of this type ever written
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the ‘ordinaries’ and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1974 The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin – in the future and 11 light years from earth, the physicist Shevek travels from the barren, communal, anarchist world of Anarres to its consumer capitalist cousin, Urras, with a message of brotherhood and a revolutionary new discovery which will change everything

1980s
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the ‘Golden Era’ of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1984 Neuromancer by William Gibson – burnt-out cyberspace cowboy Case is lured by ex-hooker Molly into a mission led by ex-army colonel Armitage to penetrate the secretive corporation, Tessier-Ashpool at the bidding of the vast and powerful artificial intelligence, Wintermute
1986 Burning Chrome by William Gibson – ten short stories, three or four set in Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ universe, the others ranging across sci-fi possibilities, from a kind of horror story to one about a failing Russian space station
1986 Count Zero by William Gibson – second in the ‘Sprawl trilogy’
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a ‘thriller’ notable for Clarke’s descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley’s Comet and Europa
1988 Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson – third of Gibson’s ‘Sprawl’ trilogy in which street-kid Mona is sold by her pimp to crooks who give her plastic surgery to make her look like global simstim star Angie Marshall who they plan to kidnap but is herself on a quest to find her missing boyfriend, Bobby Newmark, one-time Count Zero, while the daughter of a Japanese ganster who’s sent her to London for safekeeping is abducted by Molly Millions, a lead character in Neuromancer

1990s
1990 The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling – in an alternative history Charles Babbage’s early computer, instead of being left as a paper theory, was actually built, drastically changing British society, so that by 1855 it is led by a party of industrialists and scientists who use databases and secret police to keep the population un

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by Simon on December 14, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in America, American literature, Books, Novel, Science Fiction

Posted by Simon on December 14, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/12/14/the-lathe-of-heaven-ursula-le-guin/

Corita Kent: Power Up @ the House of Illustration

Corita Kent (1918 to 1886) was a nun, who began making personal, rather Expressionist prints with religious subjects in the 1950s, and then swiftly evolved in the early 1960s into a pioneering political print- and poster-maker. In 1968, under pressure from the revolutionary times and enjoying greater artistic and commercial success, she asked to be released from her vows, left her order, and became a fully commercial artist, continuing to make prints as personal statements, but also for a wide range of commercial clients, up to her death.

The House of Illustration has brought together some 70 large, colourful Corita Kent prints to create the largest ever show in the UK of this ‘pop artist, social activist and nun’.

The exhibition is bright, uplifting, thought-provoking and, as usual, divided between the gallery’s three exhibition rooms and small video room.

Introduction room

In 1936, aged 18, Frances Kent entered the Catholic Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and took the name of Sister Mary Corita. In 1951 she was introduced to the technique of print-making by Maria Sodi de Ramos Martinez.

The first room displays a handful of Kent’s early works, which are dark and stormy, every inch of the surface covered with often dark browns and blacks, amid which you can see outlines of primitivist or Byzantine images of Christ the King. Dark and troubled, packed and claustrophobic, they’re redolent of the Abstract Expressionism which dominated the American art world of the time.

As A Cedar of Lebanon by Corita Kent (1953)

In their murkiness they reminded me a bit of the art of Graham Sutherland, the presence of the religious imagery reminding me of Sutherland’s work for Coventry cathedral.

Within a few years Kent had begun to experiment by including handwritten text into the designs. The need to make the text legible meant she had to declutter the images though they are still, in this first room, a little scary, apocalyptic, done in drab austerity colours.

Christ and Mary by Corita Kent (1954)

Main room

This first room is sort of interesting but it doesn’t prepare you at all for the impact of walking into the next space, the gallery’s main room – which features a riot of colour, an orgy of huge colourful prints and posters, showcasing a wide range of fonts and lettering set against vibrant dynamic colour designs.

Installation view of Corita Kent at the House of Illustration. Photo by the author

It’s difficult to believe it’s the same artist. Out have gone the minutely detailed, busy and cramped designs, and in have come big white spaces used to emphasise the use of primary colours to bring out simple texts and slogans laid out in a dazzling variety of formats and designs.

Some of the prints still use religious texts from the Bible, but these are accompanied by slogans from protest movements, song lyrics, modernist poetry and lots of subtle or overt references to the signage and billboard adverts of Kent’s native Los Angeles.

There’s a sequence of searing prints protesting against the war in Vietnam and unashamedly using images lifted from magazines and newspapers, hard-core images of soldiers and war of the kind the American public was watching on their TVs every night from the mid-60s onwards, alongside images and slogans protesting against black segregation, celebrating the Civil Rights Movement, bitterly lamenting the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so on.

Where have all the flowers gone? by Corita Kent (1969)

Everywhere you look are classic slogans from the long-haired, dope-smoking, flower power protests of the day. ‘Where have all the flowers gone?’ ‘Stop the bombing’. ‘Get with the action’. ‘Violence in Vietnam’. ‘Yellow submarine’. ‘Come Home, America’, and the slogan which gives the exhibition its title, the words POWER UP spread across four enormous prints. (Which, on closer reading, we discover was the slogan used by the Richfield Oil Corporation in their ads, and one of the many elements of signage in the cluttered visual landscape of her native Los Angeles).

Installation shot of Corita Kent at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

It is an astonishing transformation, from the personal and cramped and expressive, to the public and political, big, bright and open, in half a decade.

One of the videos playing in the video room shows ancient footage of young men and woman dancing in circles and painting their faces and carrying all manner of props and decorations and art works, to and from the numerous ‘happenings’ which blossomed all over America.

Earnest young women in mini skirts, men in Grateful Dead sideburns, dancing and painting themselves, intercut with the usual footage of napalm over Vietnam, the assassination of Martin Luther King, and so on. It’s the ever-popular 1960s, the decade we can’t leave alone.

The exhibition feels like the poster and print accompaniment of that era, flower power, hippies, protest songs, the stormy later 1960s.

The Fraser Muggeridge studio

A word on the design and layout of the exhibition which is beautifully done by Fraser Muggeridge studio. They have very successfully replicated the super-bright, Pop Art colour palette of the original works without in any way over-awing them, which is quite a feat. The result is that the main and final room themselves take part in the exhibition’s vibrancy and dynamism.

At the end of the main room is a set of 26 prints, Circus Alphabet, from 1968, each one of which combines one of the letters from the alphabet done big, set against a fascinating variety of layouts, some simple, other cluttered with text, in a wide range of fonts. Reminded me of the imagery surrounding Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and the song Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite.

Apparently, Kent was inspired by the poet e.e. cummings who was devoted to the institution of the American circus (‘damn everything but the circus’, he is quoted as writing), and the prints combine political texts with material she found at the Ringling Museum of the Circus in Sarasota, with images from A Handbook of Early Advertising Art, compiled by Clarence P. Hornung.

Circus Alphabet by Corita Kent (1968) Photo by Paul Grover

What fun! What a tremendous eye for layout and design. What an consistent thirst for innovation and experiment.

End room

The smaller final room is painted a deep azure blue. This space showcases work Kent produced after she asked to be released from her vows and left the convent in 1968. At which point she moved to Boston and became a fully commercial artist. Apparently, her sister became her business manager.

Installation view of Corita Kent at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

Installation view of Corita Kent: Power Up at the House of Illustration. Photo by Paul Grover

The photo above captures pieces which demonstrate a new variety and style in her work.

At the bottom right you can see ‘our country is red spilled blood’ from 1970, a poster commissioned by the Vietnam Moratorium Committee to promote a three-day fast for peace and depicting a Vietnamese woman grieving over the body of her dead husband. (At the turn of the 60s, early 70s, a lot of the titles omit capital letters, another testament to the influence of the laureate of lower-case, e.e. cummings).

The wide, thin poster to the left of it uses the slogan, ‘Come home America’, the slogan used in the campaign of Democratic Presidential contender George McGovern during the 1972 presidential campaign.

Above it, the piece divided between blue on the left and orange on the right, is ‘the Ellsberg poster’ from 1972, containing a quote from US government analyst Daniel Ellsberg who decided to leak the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971 (subject of the recent Stephen Spielberg movie, The Post). The quote reads: ‘Wouldn’t you go to jail if it would help end the war?’

The display case in this room shows a number of books Corita illustrated, including several by Catholic priests protesting against the war.

But it isn’t all political protest. The two works on the right hand wall in the photo above, are designs to accompany purely literary texts, by James Joyce (on the left) and Rainer Maria Rilke (the pink and orange one on the right).

You have a sense that Kent was exploring beyond the dayglo and sometimes rather baroque stylings of the 1960s (the Sergeant Pepper circus chic) into a more laid-back 1970s. I suppose low-key minimalism was coming in during this period to replace plastic Pop Art.

The work in this room all feels cooler. More understated. The Joyce and Rilke ones look like a cross between Mark Rothko and Matisse’s late paper cuts in their combination of bold colour with abstract patterning.

And I also realised that the texts in all the works in that photo are hand-written and in relatively small point sizes. You have to go right up to the Rilke piece to even realise there’s writing on it. This is a sharp contrast with the Circus works – which use an entertaining variety of ready-made, machine fonts in massive sizes – and with the other more political works: these had non-machine font, hand-cut-out texts and slogans, but they were enormous and simple. The works in this room feel more… intimate in scale and effect.

On the wall opposite is a montage of prints featuring quotes from classic authors, each one treated in interesting new ways, experimenting with fonts and layouts and colours and designs. These are ads commissioned by Group W Westinghouse Broadcasting, a TV station. Kent began working with them as early as 1962 and continued to produce magazine-page-sized ads until nearly the end of her career.

A wall of Corita Kent’s work for Westinghouse Broadcasting. Photo by the author

The texts are fairly trite – worthy and high-minded quotes from Shakespeare or Dr Johnson or Thoreau – the kind of unimpeachable uplift any corporation could use to mask its commercial operations in spiritual guff (‘The noblest motive is the public good’). Taken together, I found they called into question the whole point of pithy slogans. Somehow the way she could turn her vivid imagination to souping up Shakespeare in order to promote a TV channel undermined the seriousness of the ‘political’ work. I could almost hear a stoned hippy saying ‘All artists sell out, man’. She was 52 at the dawn of the 1970s. ‘Don’t trust anyone over 30, man.’

Content aside, what impresses is the way Kent produces such a wonderful variety of fonts, designs and layouts in which to set the text, and yet still manages to retain a visual unity and identifiable style. No wonder Westinghouse stuck with her for nearly 20 years.

IBM

The whole final wall is a blow-up of a magazine advert for computer manufacturer Digital. They commissioned Kent to create three suites of screen-printed decorative panels for Digital’s range of desks and computer cabinets. You see the blue and green wash panels at the end of the guy’s desk, on the side of the filing cabinet? That’s Kent’s design. This was in 1978, ten years after the heady year of the King assassination, the Democratic convention riots and all the rest of it. Her designs no longer hope to change the world but to beautify its everyday element. ‘Sold out to the man, baby.’

Advert for Digital computers by Corita Kent

Videos

In one of the two videos running in a loop in the small projection room (a spot of googling shows that there are quite a few films about Kent and extended interviews and documentaries), Kent is quoted saying something very interesting about the interaction of text and design. She relates it right back to the work of medieval copyists and the unknown monks who produced the extravagant decorations of illuminated manuscripts (of the kind to be seen at the British Library’s brilliant Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms exhibition).

As she puts it, from those early textual illustrators right up to the times of her and her peers, there is some kind of joy and delight in the way colour and pattern brings out additional meanings latent in texts, and words crystallise and empower what would otherwise be abstract colours and designs.

For some reason, no doubt to do with the wiring of the human brain and the way we separately register colour and meaning, the power and variety of interplay between the two systems can often be extremely powerful and, as her work goes to prove, seems to be never-ending.

In my ignorance I’d never heard of Corita Kent. This is a wonderful – and wonderfully designed and laid out – introduction to the development and variety and life-affirming positivity of this scintillating artist.

More House of Illustration reviews

More House of Illustration reviews

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by Simon on March 6, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in America, American literature, Art, Exhibition, Vietnam War

Posted by Simon on March 6, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/03/06/corita-kent-power-up-house-of-illustration/

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut Jnr (1976)

This is a really weird story, a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife.

The main story (pp.15-170) is narrated by the two-metre tall man, christened Wilbur Rockefeller Swain but now known as Dr Wilbur Daffodil-II Swain.

It is a morbid and depressing story. Swain is just coming up to his 101st birthday. He lives amid the ruins of New York. The rest of America has been depopulated by Albanian Flu (p.33), but New York had a special plague of its own, known as the Green Plague. Now it is almost empty, with only Swain and a handful or relatives and friends living in the overgrown ruins. To survivors on the mainland it is known only as ‘the Island of Death’.

So Slapstick is a post-apocalypse story.

As so often in fictional memoirs, two timelines run in parallel 1. The ‘present’ in which the narrator wakes up and potters round and we are introduced to the main characteristics of the post-apocalyptic world. Thus Swain starts each chapter with a bit of gossip about his current companions, his emaciated though pregnant grand-daughter Melody, and her husband Isidore, or about their best friend Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa who keeps a farm worked by ‘slaves’.

Before 2. returning to a conventional chronological account which begins with the birth of him and his twin sister, follows them through their early life, and on to the series of events which led up to the disaster.

Vonnegut uses Vonnegutian tricks such as:

The entire text is broken up into very short sections, sometimes a few paragraphs, but sometimes just a few words, all divided by three asterisks in the centre of the page, creating the sense that the whole book is made of fragments glued together, a suitable feel, maybe, for post-apocalyptic fragments.
And just as the catchphrase ‘So it goes’ appeared on every page of Slaughterhouse-Five and ‘And so on’ capped every anecdote in Breakfast of Champions, so almost every bit of prose which tells a significant story or anecdote in this book is capped with ‘Hi ho’. At one point the narrator says he must go back through the book and delete all the ‘Hi ho’s’. Which he follows with another Hi ho. Hi ho. I think it is safe to say this use of ironically off-hand taglines has become a mannerism.

From his birth up to the age of 15, Wilbur and his twin sister, Eliza Mellon Swain, pretend to be drooling idiots. In fact they are geniuses, especially if they physically touch their heads together. When they do this they share a joint super-intelligence. But for 15 years all they do is pretend to be retards, and are locked by their parents in their posh Boston home. (They are from a super-rich family.)

This is every bit as weird as it sounds. On their fifteenth birthdays, they overhear their parents discussing sending them to separate homes and so make the startling announcement that they are not brain damaged but the reverse – hyper-intelligent and articulate young people.

This shocks their parents even more, who promptly call in a high-powered women psychiatrist who, vindictively knowing the damage it will cause them, recommends they be separated, declaring Wilbur is the clever one and Eliza is the defect.

So Wilbur is packed off to medical school and becomes a successful pediatrician, while Eliza goes to rot in a home for the mentally defective.

Cut to about ten years later when Wilbur is confronted by Eliza, who has been sprung from the home by a money-grabbing lawyer on the news that their parents have died. She is a wreck, distraught and determined on revenge as she confronts him at his grand mansion. But the moment they actually make physical contact, the old telepathic communication is revived and they have a five-day long orgy during which they tie up all the servants.

Maybe this whole plotline is intended as satirical but it comes over as a kind of poor man’s Philip K. Dick, with its dwelling on identity and reality, and sick obsession with a dead sibling (both Dick and Vonnegut had dead sisters).

Meanwhile, in the background of the story, we learn that oil has been running low, and that American science and technology has stagnated. The sky has turned yellow because of gases released by underarm deodorants. The Chinese are making all kinds of new discoveries. The West is collapsing. Americans are becoming more lonely.

Eliza takes her cut of Swain’s estate and goes to Macchu Picchu. Why? Because it

was then becoming a haven for rich people and their parasites, people fleeing social reforms and economic declines, not just in America, but in all parts of the world. (p.93)

An absurdist theme which runs through the book is that the Chinese, as part of their transformation into top economic power in the world, undertake a programme of miniaturising human beings. There are so many of them, they can only survive if they get smaller.

Thus it is that a lot later in the book, Swain is visited by the Chinese ambassador who is only a few inches tall (the size of Wilbur’s thumb, p.101). Piling absurdity on absurdity, he is named Fu Manchu. He asks Swain to take him to the family mausoleum in which are hidden the various writings Swain and Eliza did when their heads were together and they were a super-genius. Swain doesn’t understand why, but some of these writings are of immense importance to the Chinese – now the leading scientific and technological country in the world.

A second major idea has to do with gravity. When Swain describes life in post-apocalyptic America, he has dropped hints about there being a problem with gravity, that it varies from day to day like the weather, with some days of heavy gravity, some of light. This is, apparently, caused by scientific experiments by the Chinese, though by this stage nobody in America understands what or how or has the power to stop it.

The first time gravity changes is on the day Swain picks up a telegram at his local post office which tells him that Eliza is dead, crushed under an avalanche on Mars (p.106). Mars? Yes she had tipped off the Chinese about the secret documents hidden in the mausoleum and, as a reward, was transported to the new Chinese colony on Mars. Ill-fatedly, as it turns out.

As he walks out onto the steps outside his local post office, gravity changes – for just a minute or so it is doubled, quintupled, and Wilbur falls through the wooden steps he’s standing on, people fall through ladders, chairs, and flimsy flooring. Bridges and tall buildings collapse, elevators plummet to the ground and so on.

The Gravity Shift only lasts a minute or so but undermines the confidence of Americans even more than the failing oil supply and yellow sky.

It is against this backdrop of America’s economic, scientific and political decline, that Swain runs for president on a platform of radically reorganising society. He decides the problem with Americans is they are lonely and isolated. He comes up with a scheme whereby all Americans will be given new middle names by computer. The number of names will be calculated so that each new ‘family’ has about 10,000 members. I.e. if something happens to you there will be 9,999 other ‘family members’ you can call on.

He runs for senator, then president, on the slogan of ‘Lonesome no more’ – which is the sub-title of this book (p.112).

It is hard not to think that this plotline – the satire on American loneliness – is a separate short story or plot idea which Vonnegut has bolted onto the weird story of two twin giants who are cruelly separated. Chucking in Chinese miniaturisation, and the notion that the Earth’s gravity can be played with, as additional sweeties.

By this stage we learn that, because of the end of oil and technology, America has collapsed as a political entity. There are no more printing presses, no more radio or TV – because there is no more fuel (p.117). it has been replaced by warlords which control territories like Michigan or Dakota – hence the King of Michigan, the Great Lake pirates, and other satirical names the narrator casually mentions in passing.

(In a satirical touch, the only way to power the computer which doles out new middle names to the population of America, is by systematically burning all the paper archives in the White House and Congress.)

(In another satirical touch he throws in the fact that the new religion which the general crisis gives rise to is the Church of Jesus Christ the Kidnapped.)

Also, by this stage, Wilbur tells us he has become addicted to some kind of tranquiliser named tri-benzo-Deportamil, which helps him to cope with all the ups and downs of his life with equanimity.

Vonnegut devotes an extensive passage to describing his happiness at visiting a lodge of his own ‘family’, the Daffodils, in Indiana, how kind and welcoming they are. And to explaining how his successful family plan meshes or overlaps with the numerous small wars which the King of Michigan and so on are fighting against each other.

In fact there is a satirical scene where Swain is summoned by the grandiose young King of Michigan who wishes him to solemnly sign a document reversing the famous Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and handing over rule of what was then the vast territory in the centre of the USA over the king. Fine, thinks Swain, and signs.

Epilogue

At this point the memoir written by Wilbur Swain comes to an abrupt end. It is succeeded by an epilogue tying up loose ends.

This takes the story from the meeting with the King of Michigan to his death.

Swain had been contacted by a woman who had discovered a way of contacting the dead. An old farmer arranged a bucket and antique pipe in just such a way atop a defunct particle accelerator (no more electricity; hadn’t worked for years) and, to his surprise, began hearing voices out of the pipe.

Swain, still nominally president although now with few if any powers over a disintegrated country, is told about this and invited to try it. He manages to get through to his sister Eliza, who tells him the afterlife is dreadful. Swain can hear a babble of people coughing, shouting and farting in the background. Eliza says the afterlife is like a badly managed Turkey Farm. She begs him to die and join her. The device for communicating with the dead is known as ‘the Hooligan’ after the name of the farmer who accidentally created it. (p.160-164)

Convinced that she needs his help, and in a hurry to die, Swain persuades the pilot of the helicopter (Captain Bernard O’Hare – sharp-eyed Vonnegut readers might remember that Bernard O’Hare plays an important role in his 1962 novel Mother Night) which flew him to the Daffodil reunion in Indiana (and is himself a member of the Daffodil family) to fly him to Manhattan, long since known as ‘the Island of Death’ because of the mysterious epidemic which wiped out almost its entire population.

Hovering over the empty, overgrown avenues, Swain climbs down a rope ladder and onto the balcony of the Empire State Building, whose staircase he proceeds to walk down. But instead of quickly dying, in the ruined lobby of the building Swain is kidnapped by some ‘Raspberries’ a really primitive clan of humans who live by eating nuts, and berries and whatever they can forage.

As it happens these people have unwittingly stumbled on an antidote to the Green Death, namely fish from the rivers either side of Manhattan which are so polluted that some of the rare chemicals in them act as antidotes.

Now the narrator now tells us that the flu which killed everyone was caused by an invasion of microscopic Martians, whose invasion was repelled by antibodies in the systems of the survivors (p.163). While the Green Death was caused by microscopic Chinese floating through the air who were peace-loving but were invariably fatal to normal-sized human who inhaled or ingested them (p.164).

Swain proceeds to live on derelict Manhattan for a very, very long time. Back around the time when he used the Hooligan and sold Louisiana to the King of Michigan, his last few pills of tri-benzo-Deportamil ran out and he went mental. He had to be tied down for five days in the farmhouse, but managed – in the impossible way characteristic of this narrative – to have sex and impregnate the wife of the old farmer.

She had a son.

He had a daughter, who was packed off to join the seraglio of the King of Michigan who was, by this time, a disgusting old man. She managed to escape and set off East towards New York to try and track down the mythical grandfather her dad had told her about. Her name is Melody Oriole-2. She was helped along the odyssey by strangers who gave her a baby pram, a candlestick, a compass and an umbrella. And one who rowed her across to the Island of Death.

And that’s how Swain was reunited with his grand-daughter and came to be chatting about her at the start of the book’s 49 chapters. He has his drunken 102nd birthday, organised for him by his old friend Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa, and drops dead.

Thoughts

It’s a short book (170 pages) but with enough ideas in it to blow anyone’s mind.

Whether any of them – plausible, fantastical, surreal, satirical – are any good, was hard to tell. I was so dazed by the relentless nonsensicality of much of the narrative that it was difficult to take a view. Is it a farrago of rubbish, which a summary of the plot might lead you to think? Or, as a friend of mine who’s a Vonnegut fan thinks, one of his best books?

I couldn’t work out whether the four or five hours it took me to read it were time well spent or not.

I think it feels to me like a last hurrah of the absurdist approach, and typographical experimentation, which Vonnegut launched in Slaughterhouse-Five and brought to a climax in Breakfast of Champions. But then Cat’s Cradle which preceded both also has an end-of-the-world, post-apocalyptic setting. In fact, both books consist of the memoir of one of the few people who survived the end of the world.

But when I saw how his next novel, Jailbird, reverts to a much more conventional layout and prose style, and to realistic subject matter, this adds to the sense that Slapstick is like the fagged-out hangover of the absurdist approach which characterised its three predecessors.