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Hello America by J.G. Ballard (1981)

An odd look came into Manson’s eyes, a dead dream of all the empty highways and drained swimming-pools of America.

It’s a hundred years in the future, a hundred years since America was abandoned because of some vast environmental disaster which led to the desertification of the entire continent.

The novel opens as a steam-powered ship ‘from a tired and candle-lit Europe with its interminable rationing and subsistence living’ arrives on an expeditionary mission to explore the long-abandoned continent.

Sounds promising, doesn’t it, and in another author’s hands this scenario might have made for a gripping adventure story, but by the late 1970s something bad had happened to Ballard’s writing.

Almost all Ballard’s earlier works are carried by the brilliance of the idea – from The Drought to High Rise you are as dazzled by the basic premise as by the treatment, and read on to find out how the basic premise will unfold. But by 1981 it feels like his store of ideas was played out. By 1981 I felt I had read enough descriptions of abandoned resorts and empty cities and derelict hotels and drained swimming pools covered in shifting sand dunes to last me a lifetime.

The steamship which the explorers are arriving in is officially titled Survey Vessel 299 but the crew vote for a name change to SS Apollo in honour of the optimism which fuelled the long-defunct space programme. As it pulls into New York harbour, it is holed below the waterline by one of the spurs of the crown of the Statue of Liberty which is now lying along the bottom of the East River. I think we are meant to experience that frisson which the best science fiction can give you, a sense of the brilliantly unexpected and uncanny intersecting with the world we know, that secret thrill which well-done dystopian stories give us. Except that, for some reason, it’s an all-too-expected image, it feels all too inevitable.

Same goes for many of the other images: when we read about the millions of windows of the glass and steel skyscrapers of Manhattan staring at the sun, or the long canyons of Fifth Avenue et al buried under ten-feet-high drifts of sand, it all feels dreadfully familiar.

As if to compensate for the well-trodden subject matter and treatment, Ballard concentrates more on the characters than in previous books but, unfortunately, this tends to highlight his inability to create believable characters.

The best of the earlier novels and stories led with the weird scenario and the characters tended to be functions of the weird situation, mostly going mad in their own private and intriguing ways.

But this is a long book by Ballard’s standards, 236 pages in the Grafton edition, and so more weight is thrown onto the characters to carry it, to be plausible enough to maintain our interest. Unfortunately, Ballard is losing this game right from the start:

Wayne is the young stowaway who has come to find his father, a scientist who went missing on a previous expedition to abandoned America 20 years earlier, and who has spent years poring over yellowed old copies of Time and Life magazines, learning everything he could about the culture of Old America: is his name a joke reference to John Wayne?
McNair is the grizzled chief engineer of the ship, a descendant of refugees from America who settled in Scotland, who volunteered for the expedition excited at reviving the lost technologies of the abandoned continent
Captain Steiner is the imperturbable ship’s captain, an ex-Israeli with characteristically ‘mixed motives’, who is on ‘a private quest’
Dr Ricci is the ship’s doctor
Professor Anne Summers is the only female character, the leader of the scientific cohort of the expedition, beautiful but aloof – is her name a jokey reference to the ‘multinational retailer company specialising in sex toys and lingerie’?
Gregor Orlowski is the Russian political commissar in charge of the expedition

The characters all have the trademark Ballardian difficulty making out each other’s motives and, once they’ve landed and found their feet, almost immediately become more absorbed in their own thoughts and obsessions. In the earlier novels this made the entire experience feel bewildering and strange, but now it makes them come across as dim, their puzzlement at each other forced and contrived.

What was Steiner playing at, this curious man with his intense, unsettling eyes, forever gazing at her?

Everyone was retreating into their own dreams… Already Wayne felt a sense of challenge – the five of them were effectively alone on this continent, free to behave in any way they wished. Their only loyalty was to their own dreams, and to the needs of their own nerve-endings…

It feels like the characters are going to follow the exact same narrative trajectory of pretty much every previous book Ballard wrote i.e. becoming self-absorbed and losing the ability to communicate with each other – but this time without the conviction or novelty.

During the next few days Wayne noticed that the expedition began to lose its momentum, or at least to change direction, its compass turning to some new internal bearing…

It feels like he’s applying the style or approach which made sense in his avant-garde psychodramas to a set-up which ought to be a straightforward adventure story. The classic Ballard moments when characters go into distracted fugue or fantasy states, when the story becomes about ‘inner space’ and not the real world, no longer have the same punch, no matter how many times he repeats the trope.

Under the guise of crossing America, as Wayne soon discovered, they were about to begin that far longer safari across the diameters of their own skulls.

You won’t remember them, but the 1970s saw a spate of Hollywood disaster movies which were astonishingly cheap and cheesy, humiliating able actors by placing them in silly catastrophe stories with pathetic special affects (Airport, the Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, The Swarm). Writers, directors and actors who had all made wonderful, innovative and exciting movies in the 1960s now seemed incapable of making anything except bloated, overblown and flatulent stinkers.

This novel feels the same. All the elements are here which made Ballard’s stories from the 1960s so thrilling, but they’ve been spun out to inordinate length, hampered by cardboard characters, and distracted by a litany of over-familiar effects.

When, a few days after they’ve been in New York, Wayne comes across the physicist Dr Ricci in a private room where he’s dressed up in a gangster suit, cradling a tommy gun and surrounded by dollar bills which he’s looted from somewhere, ‘ a dream of gangsters in his dark eyes’, you feel this isn’t how any real physicist would behave – this is how a Ballard character behaves in a typical Ballard fantasy.

At moments like this you realise that Ballard had stopped being an innovative writer and was becoming a parody of himself.

The disaster explained

Chapter Seven gives a detailed description of how it all went wrong. Basically, the oil ran out. In this version of the future the last barrel of oil was pumped in 1999. From then on a paltry amount of electricity was generated from renewable sources, but the age of cars was over, and of heavy industry. Electricity was rationed, food production (powered by oil, fertilised by oil-based fertilisers) collapsed. The first emigrants left. Crucially (and typically for Ballard) there was a profound psychological collapse. Americans stopped believing in the future.

The socialist states of Europe and the Communist bloc had a tradition of central planning which met the emergency more efficiently. Also, living standards and expectations were already pretty low in the USSR and much of Europe so a downward adjustment was manageable by lots of the population.

But the thing which really triggered catastrophe in America was the epic engineering achievement by the Soviet Union of damming the Bering Straits. This had the positive effect of drawing warm Gulf Stream type oceans over north Europe into the Arctic, and thus bringing huge new areas of Siberia into food production; but as the resulting freezing water was pushed over the Bering dams into the Pacific they froze Japan into a block of ice and diverted the temperate Humboldt current away from the American Pacific seaboard, the gap being filled by hot water flowing north from the equator.

Thus unprecedentedly hot ocean streams now impacted on both the East and West coasts of America and it was this which racked the temperature up a couple of degrees and resulted in the massive desertification of America. Hence the sand dunes filling abandoned New York, and stretching away inland as far as our explorers can see.

Accounts of future disasters are always oddly heartening to read, and this chapter is no exception. It’s obviously inspired by the very real oil price hikes and energy crisis of the early 1970s and the resulting morbid popularity in the 1970s of all kinds of doomy, end-of-the-world scenarios, in popular culture but also among the educated commentariat.

However, the much vaunted energy crisis of the 1970s turned out to be a chimera: new reserves of oil continued to be discovered, and it is currently predicted there will be plenty of oil into the 2050s. In fact for the first time in nearly 50 years, America is the world’s largest producer of oil:

America is now the world’s largest oil producer

As to the book’s fundamental premise that all of America is turned into a desert as flat and lifeless as the Sahara, this has more to do with Ballard’s personal obsession with deserts and dunes washing over abandoned cities and clogging once-busy roads than it does with any sober examination of the facts around global warming.

Plot summary

Not only has America become a wasteland but Russia has taken over much of the rest of the world. Hence the presence of Gregor Orlowski as Russian political commissar in charge of the expedition. Partly the expedition has been prompted because rising levels of radiation have been detected emanating from the deserted continent: is a reactor failing, a nuclear weapons dump degrading? Orlowski hopes to identify the problem, report it to his superiors, then set sail back for Europe with a clutch of antiquities which will bring him a fortune.

They go ashore in New York. The city is buried by ten-foot sand dunes created when the Appalachian Mountains were destroyed. The exotic foliage growing out of skyscrapers and the gilla lizards eyeing them from windowsills come straight from imaginarium of The Drowned World. The long-abandoned showrooms with their mannequins sitting round tables piled with plastic food are almost word-for-word copies of the same scenes in The Ultimate City.

They head south

The five core characters – Captain Steiner, Commissar Orlowski, Wayne the stowaway, creepy Dr Ricci, and the token woman Dr Summers – set off on an expedition south along the coast. McNair is left behind to supervise repairs to the SS Apollo (which I am surprised can be repaired given that it was holed below the waterline and had heeled down onto the sunken Statue of Liberty; given that there is no dry dock, no heavy equipment, and no power source of any kind. Still, plausibility isn’t the point of this book which is more of a soaring fantasy).

Everywhere is desert with no discernible rivers or even streams. Thus they have to locate water tanks on the top of apartment buildings or hotels and siphon it into their distilling apparatus which they fuel with wood from chopped-up furniture. This is a laborious process and doesn’t produce enough water.

Just outside Trenton, New Jersey, they encounter a strange sight – a small group of ‘aborigines’ i.e. three men and a woman wearing desert cloaks and Arab burnouses and riding camels. They are nervy but friendly enough, speak English, and identify themselves as Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox – i.e. named after long-defunct consumer brand names. The woman is named Xerox because all women are named Xerox: ‘they make good copies’.

These ‘natives’ share roast rattlesnake with Wayne and Steiner and tell them about the other ‘tribes’ of America, being the Executives from New York, the Governors from Washington, the Gangsters from Chicago, the Gays from San Francisco, and the Divorcees, a women-only tribe of tough ladies with blue-rinse hairdos.

This satire on contemporary American society is so crude it shifts the book onto a different register, making it feel more than ever like a cartoon.

The natives tell our guys they see bright lights in the sky, flying silver objects, great explosions like the ones which appear to have devastated Cincinnatti and Cleveland.

Washington DC

Our heroes move on and finally arrive at Washington DC. This is the opportunity for an orgy of sci-fi Schadenfreude and crude satire. The sand has covered the Mall and the legs of that huge statue of Abraham Lincoln, the huge freeways and concourses are all empty and abandoned – spooky sci-fi feeling. But it’s accompanied by satire about mid-70s America, because the characters refer to a fictional ‘Nixon Memorial, and to the ‘Jerry Brown Islamic Centre’ (Brown was a notable liberal in the 1970s) and to the three terms of President Teddy Kennedy (brother of the assassinated JFK and for decades afterward a figurehead of liberals).

It’s like Ballard’s jokey reference to the fictional ‘OPEC tower’ in New York. This kind of heavy satire on what was then contemporary American society feels terribly dated in a way which the earlier novels, by avoiding this sort of thing, manage not to.

The characters roam about the abandoned city, increasingly succumbing to their own personal obsessions and dreams, as Ballard characters typically do. Wayne and Commissar Orlowski are having a stupid argument in the Oval Office about which one of them can sit in the President’s old chair when Summers runs in to interrupt them with the news that there’s been a massive explosion in Boston, her and Ricci’s scientific equipment has picked it up. Not only that but they left radiation detectors (the main aim of the expedition being to locate the source of the increasing radiation) atop the Pan Am building in New York and these are now showing radiation levels which are lethal. Summers and Ricci fear that McNair and the rest of the crew must be dead by now.

They wait impatiently for the radio message they’d scheduled for 7pm that evening, but when McNair comes on air it’s clear that it’s a recorded message scheduled to be played by a tape machine, which sounds bright and cheerful and doesn’t refer to fleeing the radiation cloud which must have enveloped them. Summers and Ricci conclude that McNair et al must be dead by now, and with them went the expedition’s hopes of a) rendezvousing with the ship b) ever getting back to Europe.

Our five characters hold a team meeting at which some are for pressing on south to the location of the scheduled rendezvous with the SS Apollo but the casting vote falls to Wayne and he, by now, is dominated by dreams and fantasies about America, about is hidden promise, about reviving this sleeping goliath and so he casts the deciding vote that they head in the traditional American direction – West! They barter some of their horses for the natives’ camels and set off.

Wayne’s diary and deterioration

The text switches to a verbatim transcription of Wayne’s diary, describing how they head West for weeks, trekking across the vast desert and becoming ever more dehydrated, ill and malnourished.

Orlowski picks up an infection from bad water, becomes delirious and dies. Ricci recedes deeper and deeper into his gangster fantasies. Captain Steiner keeps disappearing off on his own, following his own ‘ambiguous motives. Anne Summers discovers make-up and spends increasing amounts of time at the end of each day’s slow march across the desert, holed up in the derelict room of whichever motel they’ve taken shelter in for the night, applying heavy make-up. His diary gives the impression he is keeping the expedition together but the people who find them, later, report that Wayne had liberally applied make-up to himself – clearly he’d been deteriorating as quickly as the others. In fact all the members of the dying expedition were covered in swathes of make-up which seemed like tribal masks.

On 21 September they arrive at Dodge City, famous for its Wild West legends, and crawl up to a Wild West theme park. Here several things happen. Delirious, Wayne realises that Ricci has stolen the last of the water. Lying against the wall of a theme park Western saloon clutching a rifle, Wayne sees Ricci coming up the hill towards him, wearing full Wild West cowboy outfit complete with gun in a holster, obviously hoping to re-enact the gunfight at the OK Corral or some such.

He realised that the whole secret logic of their journey across America had been leading them to this absurd and childish confrontation in a theme park frontier street, in a make-believe world already overtaken by a second arid West far wilder than anything those vacationing suburbanites of the late twentieth century could ever have imagined. (Chapter 14, Wayne’s Diary: Part One)

Wayne’s account of events becomes blurred and confused, but we later learn that at the last minute the confrontation is avoided because Captain Steiner, from some hidden location, shoots Ricci through the head. The expedition’s not going well, is it?

Wayne sets off looking for Summers and spends hours blundering round the theme park till he comes to the Boot Hill cemetery and slumps exhausted. He sees the Captain walking across the car park towards him and, seized with resentment, shakily raises his rifle to shoot him.

But at that moment an immensely weird thing happens: vast cowboy figures appear in the sky. Thousands of feet tall the images of first John Wayne then Henry Fonda then Alan Ladd appear in the sky towering over Wayne and he passes out.

Rescue by McNair and the steam-cars

Hours pass. He wakes up to see something flying in the sky overhead. It is a propeller-powered glider, a kind of microlight. To his amazement he realises, as it swoops low, that it is being steered by none other than McNair, the ship’s engineer they’d assumed had perished in New York. He lands and comes to help Wayne at the same moment as three enormous steam-powered motor cars come roaring into the car park, driven by Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox.

They gives Wayne water and food and nurse him back to health as McNair explains that, back in New York he and the crew had felt the Boston nuclear bomb, then gone up to the roof of the Pan Am building and read the radiation meters, and decided to leave town quickly. Almost all the crew escaped except two who were off ransacking New York shops and couldn’t be contacted.

McNair had discovered the three steam-cars – hand-built for America’s last President, President Brown, but then abandoned – in a Brooklyn warehouse and had been tinkering with them in between repairing the SS Apollo. Now he and the crew jumped into them and high-tailed it south. They came across Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox who confirmed they’d seen Wayne et al and took them with them onto Washington. Here the ship’s crew opted to stay, near the sea, treating the natives who, they discovered, are suffering from leukaemia and a range of radiation-caused illnesses, and can search for batteries and radio equipment to rig up and make calls back to base in Moscow to send a rescue ship.

McNair, Heinz, GM, Pepsodent and Xerox opt to head West in search of our guys. McNair had discovered the microlight, The Gossamer Albatross (‘a delicate pedal-driven glider, now a dusty relic but once a poem to challenge the sun’) on display in the abandoned Smithsonian Museum, fixed it up (like so many of the characters fix so many old machines, in this frictionless dream of a story) and has flown ahead of the steam-cars as they head West, till he saw a tell-tale of wreckage and dead camels (the camels they set off with had died one by one; as they left each town behind the increasingly deranged Dr Ricci had set fire to it) and eventually traced what was left of the expedition to this Wild West theme park.

Ballard tells us that the steam cars are pulling a truck which is full of coal. OK. But what about the water? The whole point of Wayne and team nearly dying is they couldn’t find any water. Wouldn’t a steam-driven car need water, a lot of water? It was paying close attention to details like this which made his early, disaster novels so harrowing. Maybe writing the wild fantasy of The Unlimited Dream Company liberated Ballard, but he no longer lets facts and plausibility get in the way of the increasingly ridiculous fantasy.

California is an Amazonian rainforest

So they now carry on pounding West in the three noisy exciting steam-cars, slowly climbing into the foothills of the Rockies, higher and higher until they encounter something they’d forgotten about – snow!

After some frolicking and snowball fights they carry on, crossing the Rockies and descending the other side to discover that California has become a vast extension of the Amazon rainforest. The hot ocean currents which now run from South America up the Pacific Coast and have helped desertify most of the country have, on the contrary, led to heavy tropical rainfall on the west side of the Rockies, turning it into a tropical jungle. Through it wander descendants of the animals set free from various zoos including elephants and giraffes, leopards and cheetahs. Which lets Ballard’s imagination run riot and allows him to write sentences like:

The giraffe paused among the pools of water in Fremont Street, raised its delicate muzzle to the rain-washed air and gazed at the glittering facade of the Golden Nugget. (Chapter 21, Crash Landing)

Las Vegas is ablaze with light

But the main thing that happens is that they head for Las Vegas because from up in the microlite McNair has seen it all lit up with lights. I was puzzled by the geography of this because I thought Las Vegas is east of the Rockies, but… anyway, they drive into Las Vegas to find all the lights fully functioning, the casinos and hotels all lit up but nobody at all around. They park up and hear sound from the Sahara Hotel. They push through the heavy theatre doors into the auditorium and discover a packed audience applauding like crazy as Frank Sinatra sings My Way on stage. Then Ol Blue Eyes introduces Dean Martin who saunters on, and little Judy Garland runs onstage too. Entranced, Wayne blunders up onstage and bumps into Sinatra who falls over knocking Dean Martin off the stage into the orchestra pit where the band goes berserk, poking themselves in the eye with their instruments

As the music trailed away into a painful see-saw the spotlights swerved across the auditorium. Waiters dashed about like maniacs, one of the blue rinses poked out her right eye, the huge Texan in the plaid jacket stood up, jammed his cigar down his throat with one hand and knocked his head off with the other. When Dean Martin splashed the last drops of whiskey into his face the audience applauded so vigorously that their hands came off. Judy Garland’s winsome skipping had become a St Vitus-like blur, she moved to the edge of the stage and fell into the woodwind section, where the musicians were calmly stabbing themselves in the face. (Chapter 18, The Electrographic Dream)

They are robots.

President Manson

Wayne, McNair and the ‘natives’ are just processing this surreal vision when they are arrested by a small group of Chicano teenagers carrying guns. These teenage toughs (including a girl, Ursula) drive them in real, petrol-fuelled cars (a Buick, a Pontiac and a Dodge) down the light-filled Strip to a huge hotel, the Desert Inn, last refuge of the mad millionaire Howard Hughes. In they go and up in the lift to the penthouse where they are introduced to ‘President Manson’. Now presumably this is one more ‘joke’, satire or piece of satire at America’s expense, because Manson was of course the name of the psychopath who ran the gang which murdered Sharon Tate on 9 August 1969.

Anyway it’s not the same guy, obviously. This flabby white man, naked except for a towel, lies on a medical couch in front of a rack of TVs with a disinfecting aerosol can in his hand in front of a battery of TV screens. He is intended to be a strange and eerie figure.

The man’s strong forehead, fleshy nose and jowls reminded him immediately of the former President Nixon, now sitting out a century’s exile in the old Hughes suite in Las Vegas. The resemblance was uncanny, as if the man in front of the television screens was a skilful actor who had made a career out of impersonating Presidents, and found that he could imitate Nixon more convincingly than any other. He had caught the long stares and suddenly lowered eyes, the mixture of idealism and corruption, the deep melancholy and lack of confidence coupled at the same time with a powerful inner conviction. (Chapter 19, The Hughes Suite)

Now we discover that Manson’s people, about 100 in number, are running a nuclear fission reactor at Lake Mead. The lights are all on at Las Vegas because the reactor generates so much power it needs to be burned off somehow. This makes the TV cameras and sets go. Not only that but he has TV monitors in cities across the country. And it was his people who projected the 1,000 feet tall holograms of Hollywood cowboys over Wayne’s head in the Dodge City theme park. ‘Manson’s team had been moving from city to city, putting on these laser shows to warn the Indians away.’

Manson himself made the long trek across America from East to West a generation ago, one of the men who helped him was a professor who helped revive the nuclear technology at the Lake Mead reactor and so restore Las Vegas (and who spent his time building the life-sized replicas of Sinatra and Martin who our heroes saw earlier). But Manson is convinced he picked up some virulent virus or bacterium. Manson has big plans which include a) moving on from Lake Mead to reactivate some of America’s other 300 nuclear plants b) destroying the cities of eastern America in order to kill off the virus he’s convinced he’s got, to stop the spread of this ‘plague’. He’s clearly psychopathic.

This impression is rammed home when Manson takes Wayne on a random three-day trip to his outpost at the Beverley Hills Hotel in Los Angeles. Partly this is to allow Ballard to poke fun at all the self-important movie people who used to inhabit it and are now as dead as the sand b) it leads into a stomach-churning scene where Manson takes control of the helicopter gunship they’ve flown there in and machine guns all the wild tropical animals he can see, including a bull elephant and any number of pink flamingos. Perhaps this is some last after-flicker of anti-Vietnam war satire, but it just felt unpleasant.

Nonetheless, Manson has played successfully on Wayne’s own feverish dreams of single-handedly making America great again. Manson jokily suggests that maybe Wayne can be the 46th President. Yes. He gives a speech at one of the meetings Manson chairs with some of his young helpers in which he proposes advertising for more young people to come from Mexico (where the present helpers originated), jokily saying they’ll get an old Coca Cola and burger factory working to attract them, then get them restoring old tech – more helicopters, cars, and then the nukes. He and Manson share an uneasy ambition to get the nukes revitalised, though for differing reasons…

Wayne is woken in the night by alarms and shouting. Paco and the other helpers are running around, the TV screens are flickering. Apparently a rescue ship from Europe has docked in Miami. Should Wayne throw in his lot with President Manson and his nuclear arsenal and his dreams of reviving America… or stay true to his background and help the rescue ship?

Dr Fleming

Wayne is out flying in the microlight when a combat helicopter deliberately flies close – Manson’s Chicano friends resent his influence with the President – ripping the delicate frame to bits and Wayne tumbles down into the jungle.

When he regains control he is surrounded by Presidents. Robot replicas of all 44 Presidents of the United States who all march forward giving their most famous speeches simultaneously till he screams. At which point a short, bearded, twinkly eyed professor in a white coat emerges from between them. This allows Ballard to write this sentence:

Sidestepping through the Kennedys, he smiled reassuringly at Wayne.

Which, like so many of the sentences and scenes in the book, you sense was written more for Ballard’s entertainment than ours. You can almost hear him chortling at his surrealist brilliance.

Anyway this caricature prof declares that he is Dr William Fleming (if I had a pound for every Ballard character who is a doctor), he was part of the expedition which came to America twenty years ago and was also dying in the desert when Manson saved them and took them in. Fleming is the brains behind restoring all the old tech, getting the nuclear plant running again, and all the lights in Las Vegas, and restoring the cars and all the other things Manson’s young technicians are now working on. This is all so wildly improbable it’s not worth troubling your mind about. On the other hand, it gives Ballard permission to write descriptions of Fleming’s extensive robot workshops which sound like a novelistic version of the 1973 movie Westworld complete with Ballard’s by-now trademark extreme obviousness.

One section, at the rear of the auditorium, resembled the studio of a demented sculptor. Here the faces and hands were cut and modelled from sheets of flesh-tinted plastic, then moulded on to the metal armatures of the arms and heads. Dozens of familiar figures stood around, a pantheon of popular Americana gathered dust. Huckleberry Finn and Humphrey Bogart, Lindbergh and Walt Disney, Jim Bowie and Joe Di Maggio, lay stiffly across each other on the floor like drunks. Bing Crosby stood golf club in hand, throat exposed to reveal his voice synthesiser. Muhammed Ali posed in boxer shorts, the stumps of his wrists trailing veins of green and yellow wires. Marilyn Monroe smiled at them as they hurried past, her breasts on the floor at her feet, open chest displaying the ball-joints and pneumatic bladders that filled the empty spaces of her heart. And last of all there were the Presidents, a jumble of arms, legs and faces lying on the work-benches as if about to be assembled into one nightmare monster of the White House. (Chapter 23, The Sunlight Flier)

Fleming also happens the very man that Wayne’s mother, in one of her rare sober spells, told him was his father.

But once, during a brief moment of lucidity while recovering from an overdose of Seconal, his mother fixed Wayne with a calm eye and told him that his father had been Dr William Fleming, Professor of Computer Sciences at the American University, who had vanished during an ill-fated expedition to the United States twenty years earlier. (Chapter 2, Collision Course)

Way back at the start of the book we were told part of Wayne’s motivation in coming to America was to find the father who left when he was small. Well, here he is and Wayne immediately dismisses any thought that this funny little man is his dad. Which is a bit of an anticlimax.

Fleming is mad. He explains his plans. He is converting his 44 robot Presidents into a production line. They are creating an air force of microlights out of a special kind of laser glass which was developed at the end of the Oil Age in the 1990s, a type of high tensile glass which incorporates miniature lasers which super-heat the air below them, thus creating the thermals on which they can fly. If this sounds like nonsense, it’s because it is. Fleming’s plan is to create an air force of these glass microlights and then escape to the sun!

He also tells him the truth about Manson. Manson was originally incarcerated in Spandau Prison in Berlin, which was turned, after the end of the Oil Age, into a lunatic asylum. Before Manson broke out, blagged his way onto a ship to America, survived crossing the great desert and changed his name, adopting Manson as a new name. He is, in fact, genuinely insane.

Las Vegas under attack

Fleming keeps Wayne prisoner for a week in the Vegas Convention Centre, occasionally expanding on his mad plan. Helicopter flights overhead become more regular and urgent. Then they hear guns, missiles. Then the ceiling of the Convention Centre shatters and in the confusion Wayne escapes.

Outside the city is a warzone with areas round Manson’s hotel surrounded by sandbags. Making an escape in a car, Wayne bumps into a fleet of cars coming the other way carrying Anne Summers and a badly injured McNair. She tells him that 1. a rescue fleet has landed, three ships carrying some 500 soldiers and six aircraft, a smaller expedition coming up from Phoenix, and both have joined forces with Mexican and Indian mercenaries; and that 2. Manson has gone quite mad and has his ginger on the button of eight missiles tipped with nuclear warheads. ‘Wayne, we have to do something!’

There is a prolonged description of the battle for Las Vegas, dominated by the radio controlled helicopter gunships Manson has had built for him, but also by the last fling of the 1,000 feet high holograms which he tries to intimidate the invaders, images of John Wayne as marine, which morph into other Hollywood figures, before finally settling into the nightmare image of the actual Charles Manson, the black-eyed psychopath.

Slowly the lights go out across the ruined town as the smoke from napalm floats across the Strip and Wayne makes his way through the wrecked cars toward a final showdown with President Manson in Caesar’s Palace which has been converted into a war room, complete with map of the world.

Nuclear roulette

Manson is sitting naked in a chair by a roulette table with the map of America louring over them. As the roulette wheel turns it highlights the names of American cities, lights come on by each city, and the illuminated names flicker across Manson’s naked body. It is meant to be a macabre image of twisted madness. Manson rolls a big marble ball into the roulette wheel and the name it stops at will be nuked. Minneapolis. Manson programs the missile and Wayne watches remote control cameras record its firing sequence and then blasting into the sky on its journey to obliterate the mid-West city.

This makes no sense because Manson can see, on other cameras, the expeditionary force working its way through the jungle from the coast, cutting through with machetes and tanks. It will be at Vegas in a few hours. There seemed a total absence of logic in why Manson was blasting mid-West cities and not his enemies near at hand.

Wayne joins in the macabre game and they let off six cruise missiles at six abandoned American cities, but then Manson reveals there is one left, one Titan. Wayne rolls. It lands on zero. Manson reveals zero means Las Vegas. It will launch in three hours time, go up vertically, then descend on Las Vegas and cleanse it of its germs.

Wayne makes to attack Manson but Paco, his faithful bodyguard, clouts him round the head. When he comes to, he has been handcuffed to the ornate doorhandles of the War Room.

The military expeditions arrive

Over the next hour the military expeditions arrive in a lightless abandoned Las Vegas. They think the war is over and Manson fled. Wayne is astonished to see – on the array of Manson’s TV monitors – a small plane land and an obvious leader of the troops emerge, none other than Captain Steiner. Ballard gives half a page explaining what happened to him after he abandoned the expedition at Dodge City, was picked up by Mexicans, then volunteered to help the invading forces, felt guilty about abandoning them etc etc. It doesn’t matter, it’s all twaddle by this stage.

Then Manson makes a broadcast over the loudspeakers hidden around the city to the effect that a nuclear bomb is about to go off and cleanse them all. As the soldiers, Captain Steiner, injured old McNair, plucky Anne Summers all start panicking up the street marches a cohort of men in tight formation though with a bewildering variety of uniforms.

It is the robot Presidents. Directed by Dr Fleming they storm Caesar’s Palace, burst through the locked doors of the War Rom, surround Manson in an android firing squad and riddle his body with bullets.

Freed, Wayne stumbles out into the main strip and is reunited with Summers, McNair and hugged by Captain Steiner. They are all wondering what to do, it’s less than an hour till the nuke explodes over them, Manson told Wayne that there were no recall codes, and they can’t get far enough away in just an hour…

But oh yes they can. Emerging from the wrecked Convention Centre come the glass microlights steered by the survivors of Manson’s Chicano army. Many have room for two, three or six passengers. All the soldiers climb in, Steiner, McNair, Summers and then, last of all, the man who was briefly 46th president of America.

The glass microlights rise up into the air and chunter off at speed towards the Rockies. Looking back Wayne sees a vapour trail rise suddenly from the jungle south of Vegas. That’s the Titan rocket launching from its silo. But he and the others are safely behind the shield of the mountains when the missile descends and evaporates Las Vegas for ever.

Clustering together, like fireflies warming themselves in their own light, the squadron of Fliers hovered above the jungle canopy, safe behind the protective bulk of the mountain. Wayne embraced Ursula’s shoulders, reassuring the suddenly panicky young woman. Already his confidence was returning. As he waited for the flash that would signal the death of Manson’s empire, Wayne briefly mourned the end of his own short Presidency. Yet the dream remained, he would enter the White House one day and sit in that office he had cleaned, without realising it at the time, in preparation for himself. He would arrive at his inauguration in one of these crystal aeroplanes, be the first President to be sworn in on the wing. The old dreams were dead, Manson and Mickey Mouse and Marilyn Monroe belonged to a past America, to that city of antique gamblers about to be vaporised fifty miles away. It was time for new dreams, worthy of a real tomorrow, the dreams of the first of the Presidents of the Sunlight Fliers. (Chapter 32, California Time)

Thoughts

Some Ballardians are cross that the academy doesn’t take him seriously as a writer, doesn’t acknowledge him as a great contemporary writer, doesn’t teach him on courses about ‘literature.’

Remind anyone who ever makes that argument about this book: it is is slack-minded, half-arsed garbage.

Reviews of other Ballard books

Novels

Short story collections

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 Foundation Trilogy, which describes 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 until one fireman, Guy Montag, rebels
1953 The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester – a breathless novel set in a 24th century New York populated by telepaths and describing the mental collapse of corporate mogul Ben Reich who starts by murdering his rival Craye D’Courtney and becomes progressively more psychotic as he is pursued by telepathic detective, Lincoln Powell
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 fast-paced 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 revenge
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding novel of Blish’s ‘Okie’ tetralogy in which mayor of New York John Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1959 The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut – Winston Niles Rumfoord builds a space ship to explore the solar system where encounters a chrono-synclastic infundibula, and this is just the start of a bizarre meandering fantasy which includes the Army of Mars attacking earth and the adventures of Boaz and Unk in the caverns of Mercury

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 The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Kerans is part of a UN mission to map the lost cities of Europe which have been inundated after solar flares melted the worlds ice caps and glaciers, but finds himself and his colleagues’ minds slowly infiltrated by prehistoric memories of the last time the world was like this, complete with tropical forest and giant lizards, and slowly losing their grasp on reality.
1962 The Voices of Time and Other Stories – Eight of Ballard’s most exquisite stories including the title tale about humanity slowly falling asleep even as they discover how to listen to the voices of time radiating from the mountains and distant stars, or The Cage of Sand where a handful of outcasts hide out in the vast dunes of Martian sand brought to earth as ballast which turned out to contain fatal viruses. Really weird and visionary.
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
1962 Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut – the memoirs of American Howard W. Campbell Jr. who was raised in Germany and has adventures with Nazis and spies
1963 Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut – what starts out as an amiable picaresque as the narrator, John, tracks down the so-called ‘father of the atom bomb’, Felix Hoenniker for an interview turns into a really bleak, haunting nightmare where an alternative form of water, ice-nine, freezes all water in the world, including the water inside people, killing almost everyone and freezing all water forever
1964 The Drought by J.G. Ballard – It stops raining. Everywhere. Fresh water runs out. Society breaks down and people move en masse to the seaside, where fighting breaks out to get near the water and set up stills. In part two, ten years later, the last remnants of humanity scrape a living on the vast salt flats which rim the continents, until the male protagonist decides to venture back inland to see if any life survives
1964 The Terminal Beach by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s breakthrough collection of 12 short stories which, among more traditional fare, includes mind-blowing descriptions of obsession, hallucination and mental decay set in the present day but exploring what he famously defined as ‘inner space’
1964 Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb by Peter George – a novelisation of the famous Kubrick film, notable for the prologue written as if by aliens who arrive in the distant future to find an earth utterly destroyed by the events described in the main narrative
1966 Rocannon’s World by Ursula Le Guin – Le Guin’s first novel, 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
1966 – The Crystal World by J.G. Ballard – Dr Sanders journeys up an African river to discover that the jungle is slowly turning into crystals, as does anyone who loiters too long, and becomes enmeshed in the personal psychodramas of a cast of lunatics and obsessives
1967 The Disaster Area by J.G. Ballard – Nine short stories including memorable ones about giant birds, an the man who sees the prehistoric ocean washing over his quite suburb.
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
1966 The Anti-Death League by Kingsley Amis –
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 undertake a gruelling trek across the planet’s frozen north with the disgraced native lord, Estraven, during which they develop a cross-species respect and, eventually, a kind of love
1969 Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s breakthrough novel in which he manages to combine his personal memories of being an American POW of the Germans and witnessing the bombing of Dresden in the character of Billy Pilgrim, with a science fiction farrago about Tralfamadorians who kidnap Billy and transport him through time and space – and introduces the catchphrase ‘so it goes’

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 ever read
1970 The Atrocity Exhibition by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s best book, a collection of fifteen short experimental texts in stripped-down prose bringing together key obsessions like car crashes, mental breakdown, World War III, media images of atrocities and clinical sex
1971 Vermilion Sands by J.G. Ballard – nine short stories including Ballard’s first, from 1956, most of which follow the same shape, describing the arrival of a mysterious, beguiling woman in the fictional desert resort of Vermilion Sands, the setting for extravagantly surreal tales of the glossy, lurid and bizarre
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, leading to harum scarum escapades in disaster-stricken London
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, with their culture of dreamtime and singing
1972 The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe – a mind-boggling trio of novellas set on a pair of planets 20 light years away, the stories revolve around the puzzle of whether the supposedly human colonists are, in fact, the descendants of the planets’ shape-shifting aboriginal inhabitants who murdered the first earth colonists and took their places so effectively that they have forgotten the fact and think themselves genuinely human
1973 Crash by J.G. Ballard – Ballard’s most ‘controversial’ novel, a searingly intense description of its characters’ obsession with the sexuality of car crashes, wounds and disfigurement
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
1973 Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut – Vonnegut’s longest and most experimental novel with the barest of plots and characters allowing him to sound off about sex, race, America, environmentalism, with the appearance of his alter ego Kilgore Trout and even Vonnegut himself as a character, all enlivened by Vonnegut’s own naive illustrations and the throwaway catchphrase ‘And so on…’
1974 Concrete Island by J.G. Ballard – the short and powerful novella in which an advertising executive crashes his car onto a stretch of wasteland in the juncture of three motorways, finds he can’t get off it, and slowly adapts to life alongside its current, psychologically damaged inhabitants
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
1974 Inverted World by Christopher Priest – vivid description of a city on a distant planet which must move forwards on railway tracks constructed by the secretive ‘guilds’ in order not to fall behind the mysterious ‘optimum’ and avoid the fate of being obliterated by the planet’s bizarre lateral distorting, a vivid and disturbing narrative right up until the shock revelation of the last few pages
1975 High Rise by J.G. Ballard – an astonishingly intense and brutal vision of how the middle-class occupants of London’s newest and largest luxury, high-rise development spiral down from petty tiffs and jealousies into increasing alcohol-fuelled mayhem, disintegrating into full-blown civil war before regressing to starvation and cannibalism
1976 Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut – a madly disorientating story about twin freaks, a future dystopia, shrinking Chinese and communication with the afterlife
1979 The Unlimited Dream Company by J.G. Ballard – a strange combination of banality and visionary weirdness as an unhinged young man crashes his stolen plane in suburban Shepperton, and starts performing magical acts like converting the inhabitants into birds, conjuring up exotic foliage, convinced his is on a mission to liberate them
1979 Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut – the satirical story of Walter F. Starbuck and the RAMJAC Corps run by Mary Kathleen O’Looney, a baglady from Grand Central Station, among other satirical notions including the new that Kilgore Trout, a character who recurs in most of his novels, is one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves a two year sentence, one Dr Robert Fender

1980s
1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – set in an England of 2035 after a) the oil has run out and b) a left-wing government left NATO and England was promptly invaded by the Russians – ‘the Pacification’, who have settled down to become a ruling class and treat the native English like 19th century serfs
1980 The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard – seven very early and often quite cheesy sci-fi short stories, along with a visionary satire on Vietnam (1969), and then two mature stories from the 1970s which show Ballard’s approach sliding into mannerism
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
1981 Hello America by J.G. Ballard – a hundred years from now an environmental catastrophe has turned America into a vast, arid desert, except for west of the Rockies which has become a rainforest of Amazonian opulence, and it is here that a ragtag band of explorers from old Europe discover a psychopath has crowned himself President Manson, has revived an old nuclear power station in order to light up Las Vegas, and plays roulette in Caesar’s Palace to decide which American city to nuke next
1981 The Affirmation by Christopher Priest – an extraordinarily vivid description of a schizophrenic young man living in London who, to protect against the trauma of his actual life (father died, made redundant, girlfriend committed suicide) invents a fantasy world, the Dream Archipelago, and how it takes over his ‘real’ life
1982 Myths of the Near Future by J.G. Ballard – ten short stories showing Ballard’s range of subject matter from Second World War China to the rusting gantries of Cape Kennedy
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 – Gibson’s stunning debut novel which establishes the ‘Sprawl’ universe, in which 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 gangster 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 version of 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 suppressed

Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick (1974)

What can I tell him? Jason Taverner asked himself as he sat mutely facing the police general. The total reality as I know it? That is hard to do, he realised, because I really do not comprehend it myself. (p.119)

It is 1988 and Jason Taverner is the host of the immensely successful Jason Taverner Show which attracts 30 million viewers to its regular Tuesday evening slot. On this particular evening he’s featured guest star gorgeous, red-haired Heather Hart with whom he just happens to be having an affair, sharing his jet-set lifestyle, although she is impatient for him to actually marry her so they can settle down, have kids etc.

Part of their success is down to the fact that they are sixes. It is not explained, more hinted at in stray references, that sixes were genetically imprinted with superior genetic qualities, and that his happened at his birth, back in the 1940s (rather implausibly).

Jason and Heather complete another chart-topping show and are on board their Rolls Royce jet rocket (!) shooting up over Los Angeles when he gets a call from an ex, Marilyn Mason, a little flit of a thing who begged for help getting into show business, who he wangled a few auditions, and who he slept with him rather a lot before tiring of her. Heather is furious at the call, but Marilyn screeches down the phone that she’ll kill herself if he doesn’t visit her NOW, so Jason says we better go and check she’s OK.

Jason has barely got down into her flat before Marilyn, furious at having been dumped and ignored for six months, throws a bag at him containing ‘the gelatin-like Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes’.

There’s no explanation of what this thing is or where it comes from, simply that the feeding tubes swiftly enter the human body and kill if not counter-acted. Jason has the presence of mind to grab a nearby bottle of alcohol and pour it onto the creature which falls off him, onto the floor, dead. But it leaves its feeding tubes inside him, and he passes out. He regains consciousness on a hospital gurney being rushed to an operating theatre with Heather peering over him, weeping, and then he blacks out.

The alternative world

All this happens in just the first chapter. In chapter two Jason wakes up and the world has changed. He awakens in a seedy motel room to discover that nobody knows who he is. In this world there is no Jason Taverner Show on TV, the motel manager has never heard of him, nobody has heard of him. When he phones his agent, then his producer, both say they’ve never heard of him and put the phone down.

He also has no ID cards and now, for the first time, we begin to learn about the world of 1988, namely it is some sort of military dictatorship. All across America identity checkpoints run by the national guard or the police pop up at random to check people’s ID cards. If you don’t have one or have a forged one, you are sent off to a Forced Labour Camp (FLC).

So, while he is still reeling from the fact that nobody recognises him, Jason is all-too-aware that down here, in the world of the ‘ordinary’ people, he needs ID cards fast. Luckily, he’s wearing the same clothes he had on when Marilyn attacked him which, conveniently enough, contained a big wad of cash. Now he bribes the desk clerk, Ed Pricem, to recommend a forger. The clerk (who, in a casual aside, mentions that he is a telepath – putting us in mind of the universe of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).

Ed the desk clerk takes Jason through darkened streets into Watts which was, when Dick was writing, a slum. In a darkened garage Ed introduces Jason to a very young woman, Kathy Nelson, maybe only 17 or 18 (she eventually tells us she’s 19), who takes him to her workshop and turns out to be a master forger.

Here commences the troubled relationship which last for the next third or so of the book, for Kathy has impressive mental problems. Initially the conversation is fairly rational and, while she’s making him the forged IDs (he needs half a dozen in this police state) they recap a bit of future history, namely how there was some kind of Insurrection led by sixes like Jason, but it was repressed and most of the sixes were rounded up and shot and the government became even more repressive.

(In what I presume is a humorous / paranoid reference to the student unrest of the time the book was written, the early 70s, the narrative informs us that all universities have prison walls round them. Any students or lecturers caught escaping are sent to forced labour camps. Later we are told that up to 10,000! students at Stanford were massacred in one particular police action back during the Insurrection.)

(In another throwaway reference, we learn that Congress passed a bill led by someone called Tidman to solve ‘the race problem’ by restricting black couples to only one child. Over the generations this will or has hugely reduced their numbers. So much so that black people are now endangered and it is a crime to hurt them, p.29.)

But Kathy is odd, very odd. She’s convinced that her husband, Jack, is in a forced labour camp but approves of her sleeping with other men, something they discuss at length. She confesses that she was placed in a mental hospital for eight weeks. She is convinced she met a number of famous celebrities there, and slept with them.

Then she reveals that she is a great forger but embeds electronic tagging devices into her forged documents and tips off the police about the customers. Why? Because the police have promised her that if she helps them catch enough criminals, they’ll release her husband, Jack. (Later, when we meet her police controller, McNulty, he tells Jason that all this is a delusion: Kathy’s husband is in fact dead, died in a car crash, but she hasn’t got over it.)

Kathy insists that Jason – tall, handsome, confident – sleeps with her, which he is initially cheerfully in favour of until he begins to grasp how nuts she is. This is forcibly demonstrated when he takes her to a (terrible) restaurant of her choosing and when she doesn’t get her way, falls off her chair onto the floor screaming at the top of her voice. Till the waiters throw them out.

Walking back to Kathy’s flat, Jason manages to give her the slip. He phones his partner back in ‘the real world’, Heather Hart, on her personal vidphone but of course she’s never heard of him. He pesters her with several calls despite her repeatedly hanging up, and freaks her out with his intimate knowledge of her anatomy (she has a false tooth she calls Andy, p.58) and all her phone numbers. But he has clearly erupted into a parallel universe in which he was never born, never existed. Nobody knows him.

Puzzling this over Jason almost immediately walks into a pop-up police checkpoint. Paranoia and fear while they check the papers Kathy just made him. But they pass. Grudgingly the ‘pols’ let him go. But the checkpoint has given Kathy time to catch up and find him and once again he finds himself, immensely reluctantly, walking back to her flat. Here is horrified to find Kathy’s ‘control’, Inspector McNulty waiting for both of them. McNulty, in the way of scary totalitarian cops in this kind of fiction, now becomes politely but firmly interested in Jason and asks him along to the station.

There he makes him wait while the cops search the (global) database for him. By mistake the machine spits out the details of a ‘Jason Taverner’ born about the same year, but in the mid-West to farmers, a very ugly redneck. Thinking on his feet, Jason claims to be the same guy and makes up a story about him running away from the farm and using his grandfather’s inheritance to get comprehensive plastic surgery.

Yeeeees, McNulty says, staring at him, not really believing it. After several false releases – being let go then called back for ‘a few more questions’, which ratchet up the pressure – Jason finally gets to walk away. He had to hand all of his ID papers over to McNulty to be triple-checked, but the cops handed him a week-long total pass (a ‘pol-pass’) in exchange. So he has a week to figure out what the hell is going on, which gives the novel a sense of urgency and a clear timeframe.

Recap

So the first hundred pages of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said are set in an America of the future which has become a police state (what Jason calls ‘a betrayal state, p.58) in which a genetically engineered man has made himself a successful career as a rich and famous TV star. But, after a near-fatal experience, he wakes up in a parallel universe where he appears never to have existed, is thrown down among the plebs, the ‘ordinaries’, stripped of his wealth and fame, and experiences life on the run.

Part two

Part two introduces new characters, namely McNulty’s boss, Police General Felix Buckman. He scares and intimidates McNulty, who tells him about this Tavern guy they just picked up. By this stage McNulty has discovered that the mid-West story is a fake. What puzzles him is that ‘Taverner’ has no records of any kind.

‘Jason Taverner doesn’t exist.’ (p.82)

Buckman is intrigued but has to cope with his no-good, drug addict, bondage addict sister, Alys who has, yet again, got past the guards and into his office where he finds her sleeping off another dose of something.

He wakes he up and gives her a sound telling off for being an addict.We learn that she paid for the removal of the ‘responsibility’ parts of her brain, leaving her just the pleasure centres, which she stimulates by ‘diddling’ (presumably masturbating) all day long.

Jason, with a week to find out what the hell is going on, takes an air taxi to Las Vegas hoping to find a woman whose pad he can crash in, maybe a woman he knew in the other life. Sure enough he has barely settled himself at the bar of ‘the Nellie Melba room of the Drake’s Arms’ in Las Vegas (p.85) than he spies an old flame of his, Ruth Rae. Knowing her sex addiction, he finds it easy enough to chat her up and soon they head back to her place, first for championship sex, and then for a long discussion about love and, unexpectedly, the power of grief.

But then the police burst in, having detected Jason via the microtransmitter the slipped into his clothes.

He is transported in a police ‘quibble’ (Dick’s humorous word for car or transport) back to LA, to the 469th Precinct Police Station, where he is ushered into the rather luxurious room of General Buckman. Buckman is one of only a handful of police generals in the country. Clever, he proceeds to bluff Jason that he is a seven (Jason didn’t even know sevens existed, but Buckman knows enough about the head of the research programme which developed the sixes to bluff him), trying to get him to spill the beans about the plot or conspiracy which he is convinced Jason must be involved in.

Eventually Buckman comes to believe that Jason really doesn’t know what he’s doing in this dimension. He decides to let him go, but to tag and trail him. Next morning Jason walks free into the LA sunlight (and the thick traffic pollution).

Someone calls his name. It is Alys Buckman, six foot, dressed in leathers with a metal chain. Where’s the whip, Jason thinks. Clearly she is visually meant to look like a bondage dominatrix. Alys explains she’s Buckman’s twin sister. She hates him. She tells him he has a microtransmitter and – surreally – a minute nuclear bomb – embedded on his person. She removes both with a kit she has. She flies him in her quibble (these ascend vertically and, apparently, have rotor blades) to the general’s luxury mansion which she shares with him. On the way she says she knows who he is! She is a big fan! She has two of his long playing records in the back of the quibble!

My God! Maybe she knows how to get back to his own world.

But, immensely frustratingly, Alys refuses to answer any of his questions, instead politely offering him some mescaline (‘Harvey’s yellow Number One, imported from Switzerland’, p.134) and, as he begins to trip out, fills the time with what appears to be a series of inconsequential chatter. She shows him her brother’s rare and precious stamps, his collection of snuff boxes.

As Jason’s trip reaches extremes Alys realises he’s too far in and offers to go get some thorazine to counter the mescaline. Jason staggers to the record player and, through his hallucinations, manages to get one of his records out of its sleeve and turn on the record player and drop the needle with a bump onto the play-in groove, but…. there’s just static. There’s nothing on the records. They’re blank! (p.144)

Part three

Jason staggers upstairs, looking for Alys and then, to his horror, opens a bedroom and finds… her leather clothes and stilettoes on the floor and inside them, wearing them, a long, long-dead shrivelled corpse! Horrified, he blunders, half falls down the steps, across the lawn of the mansion and to the guard by the gate. His drugged slurred speech alerts the guard who runs inside – he hears a shout – and the guard comes running back after him, letting off a few shots from his laser gun, obviously thinking Jason murdered his employer, before running back inside.

This gives time for Jason to escape from the grounds and blunder into a young woman just getting into her ‘flipflap’. Yes, flipflap. Like Kurt Vonnegut, you have the strong feeling that Dick, by now, in the early 70s, has taken enough drugs, written enough fantasy sci-fi books, to realise that he can make up anything, say anything, the more ludicrous the better – and people just as stoned as him will lap it up!

So he begs for a lift in this young lady’s flipflap and, although reluctant, she (name: Mary Anne Dominic) lets him fly her downtown (so she can post the ceramic pots she makes for a living) then they go to a coffee shop.

Jason is trying to make sense of Alys’s fate. For a start how come she knew who he was, the only person in this world to do so? But then again, how come the records were blank?

While he’s thinking out loud the young woman he’s sort of kidnapped picks up on the fact that he thinks he’s a famous TV star and singer and says, ‘Shall I go see if they’ve got any of your songs on the jukebox?’

To his amazement they have, and she puts a coin in the machine to play it. What? And the people in the café start to recognise him, applaud when the song ends, and some shy kids come up asking for an autograph. It’s all coming back, the ‘normal’ world he lives in, bit by bit, faster and faster.

Jason says goodbye to Mary Anne (after she has insisted on giving him one of her most beautiful deep blue pots, carefully wrapped) and sets off to see Heather.

On the way he speculates darkly: maybe the reality is that he’s an unknown pauper living in a crappy motel and it’s the drug which Alys gave him which takes him out of that world and into the world of fame. Maybe the world of fame is the drug-induced fantasy, which he needs Alys to regularly supply him the drugs to experience?

Meanwhile we cut back to the cops back at the death scene of Alys. The LA police forensic scientist says Alys died from an experimental new drug. There follows a long pseudo-scientific explanation that the drug suspends the brain’s ability to distinguish between fixed blocs of time and space i.e. the ability to compartmentalise events into before and after, and to compartmentalise space into separate, well, spaces. In a bit of a leap, they claim the drug allows more than one reality to exist at once, and in a further leap, that this leads to multiple universes existing at the same time. Alys’s use of the drug created an alternative universe into which Jason was pulled.

I.e it was all her fault. Jason’s entire experience of being pulled into this alternative universe in which he was never born – is solely the result of Alys’s trip on a new experimental drug.

I admit to being disappointed. I thought it was going to be something to do with toxins release by ‘the Callisto cuddle sponge’. Remember that, back at the start?

Now a newly confident Jason phones up Heather and – she recognises him! Darling where have you been, I’ve been so worried etc. But when he flies to her flat to meet her neither of them refer to the incident with Marilyn Mason. What? Last thing we saw in that universe, he was being rushed into surgery with Heather crying her eyes out? Did it not happen? Or has Dick now got bored of it and not bothered to link it to how his narrative has ended up?

To me the complete lack of follow-up to the Caliisto sponge scene doesn’t say anything about Dick’s clever manipulation of reality, it says everything about how he and his tripped-out readers don’t really care about logic or consequences or coherence,as long as the narrative contains loads of gee whizz references to drugs and the police state.

In a nutshell Alys took an entirely new, made-up drug, and this had the entirely made-up effect of dragging Jason (and Buckminster and everyone else around her) into her fantasy in which Jason had never existed. Until she died – at which point the ‘real’ world started flooding back. I still don’t understand this. Why him, why Jason? What is the meaning of the records which won’t play?

Anyway, now a completely new plotline kicks off. Backat police headquarters Buckman’s Machiavellian adviser points out that Alys’s suicide will make the gutter press snoop around, and that Buckman’s incestuous relationship with her is bound to come out, and that this will give his enemies and rivals among the four or so other Police Generals the opportunity to get him demoted or sacked.

Instead, Buckman had better get his retaliation in first, by concocting a scandalous story which somehow implicates them – the other generals. What they need to do is present Alys’s death as a murder resulting from some great conspiracy into which he can drag his rivals, ideally involving some high level, public figure who will divert attention away from the incest.

And it is at just this moment that the latest file on Jason Taverner is placed on Buckman’s desk. The perfect fall guy! They’ll say Taverner was driven mad with jealousy when he discovered that Alys had been having a lesbian love affair with his own long-term partner, Heather Hart, went round and murdered her. The security cop saw him at the scene. The police coroner can be ordered to change the evidence to do whatever it takes to incriminate Taverner.

They agree this plan and make a public announcement they’re seeking Taverner on a warrant for murder. Taverner has just arrived at Heather’s empty apartment feeling mighty happy to have his old life back when Heather storms in waving the newspaper with its front page headline about her and Alys (they did in fact have a lesbian affair) and the cops wanting to arrest them both. Jason and Heather argue and have tantrums and then realise there’s nothing to be done but hand themselves in.

Passivity

Having read four Dick novels in a row, one of the subtler threads or similarities between them is how passive his protagonists are. Frank Frink just accepts it when he’s arrested. Juliana shrugs when she finds out she’s living in a parallel universe. Rick Deckard undergoes mad experiences including inexplicable hallucinations, but ends up chatting sensibly with his wife. Joe Chin has moments of panic in Ubik but by and large functions efficiently and logically, despite finding out he has died and is being kept in cryogenic storage.

Similarly, at every moment when the cops confront him Jason Taverner… just gives up and goes meekly. There’s something very underpowered about Dick’s protagonists. They passively submit to weird hallucinations, mad revelations and terrifying time travel parallel universes.

Maybe the central protagonist has to remain calm and rational, in order to allow the weirdness to really come out.

Coda

I’ve also noticed that Dick’s books tend to get to what is definitely the end of the story… and then have an extra bit tacked on afterwards.

On paper (and in the movie) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? should end when Deckard ‘retires’ the last of the six androids he has been tasking with killing. Sure enough he goes home to see his wife. But then there is an extra and completely unnecessary chapter where he flies north into the radioactive wilderness and finds himself climbing the hill and somehow changing into Wilbur Mercer. And then a further extra bit, when Deckard finds the live toad and takes it home to his wife.

Same here. Having made the reasonably rational decision to frame Taverner for his sister’s death, Buckman then flies home. Job done, game over, right? But in the event he finds himself crying, torn by an impulse to go back and rescind the arrest warrant for Taverner.

Instead he pull up (i.e. descends to) an automated gas station in the middle of nowhere. One other quibble is there, its owner a smartly dressed black guy, pacing up and down as he waits for his quibble to be topped up with gas. On impulse Buckman takes a piece of police notepaper and draws a heart with an arrow through it and gives it to the black man. The black man looks at it, looks at Buckman, looks at the paper again, then lets it drop and blow away. Buckman gets back into his quibble and flies off.

OK, so far so far out, man. There’s still ten or so pages of text left so you’d expect to return to the plot, right?

But no. Buckman cries more tears, veers his quibble round and goes back to the gas station. Black guy is still there. This time they talk, and the black guy turns out to be remarkably perceptive, realising Buckman is in a weird emotional state, sympathises, gives him his card, says ‘Call me sometime’. Buckman gets back in his quibble and this time does fly back to his fine home.

What was that about? Is Dick playing with the format of the novel by consistently adding these overspill sections (rather as he plays with various conventions in this novel by dropping characters and forgetting loose ends – e.g. ‘the gelatin-like Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes’)? Is he screwing with our heads, man?

Drugs

The four novels of Dick’s I’ve read all feature drugs as a common-or-garden, accepted element in the societies he describes.

Even in The Man in the High Castle, supposedly set in a parallel 1962, not only do some of the the characters (Frank Frink) smoke marijuana cigarettes, but these are commercially available i.e. not illegal.

In Ubik the owner of the half-life moratorium casually offers Runciter amphetamines when he looks like he needs pepping up, not as some illicit substance but as a perfectly ordinary element of polite society.

In this novel the cops not only smoke weed but offer Jason a joint after they arrest him. McNulty’s boss mentions that he should take some amphetamine.

And then there’s Dick’s prolonged portrayal of a mescaline trip at the police general’s mansion.

At the time (the late 1960s, man) I think this familiarity with drugs, drug paraphernalia and experiences and risks, gained Dick a vast audience among students and dropouts, and a reputation as a prophet of the alternative culture. So cool, man.

45 years later America is hooked on opioids which result in 122,000 deaths in 2015, not to mention the massive worldwide organised crime associated with heroin and cocaine trafficking. Only the relatively young and naive can any more think that any form of drugs is cool.

Sex

Sex doesn’t have the centrality in Dick’s work that it does in many other writers. It comes across as more of a plot device than an end in itself, designed to amplify the more important ideas around it such as fractured identity, altered mental states, parallel universes, and the general unreliability of ‘reality’ – whatever that is.

What’s interesting is the way the sexual element becomes more overt as you track these novels from the early 1960s through to the mid-1970s.

Following the trend, sex plays a bigger role in this story than all previous ones. The fact that he’s had sex with so many different women marks Jason as a product of the Hugh Hefner Playboy era. The introduction of Alys in particular, the leather-clad bondage girl, reminds me of all the leatherclad cartoon women from the 1950s.

But Dick piles on the perversion by having Alys and Buckman (whose name, if you replace the B with an F, would become more counter-cultural and, like, subversive,man) be not only twins but incestuous. really incestuous. So incestuous that they have had a son, Barney, who they’s packed off to boarding school in Florida. Weird enough for you, man?

And it is Alys who introduces Jason to the idea that there is a matrix or ‘grid’ of people who all go online to make mass phone calls at the same time, during which they live out their sexual fantasies. Alys explains that this can quickly become an addiction and that you can tell the people who are addicted to it by the way they look aged and drained. Nowadays, of course, we call this the internet.

Although the story is meant to be about a parallel world brought about by someone’s fantasies, it would not be hard to do an entry-level feminist critique of the narrative to bring out the way it is a picaresque story in which a tall, handsome rich man encounters a whole succession of women who represent different female stereotypes:

mature girlfriend Heather who wants to marry and have his babies
psychotic 19-year-old Kathy, with her undeveloped body (she laments her lack of bust) and paranoid possessiveness
Alys the six-foot, bondage lesbian
Mary Anne Domenico, the plain, sensitive, ‘artistic’ virgin

When Jason gets to Heather’s flat at the end, after what we can all agree has been a very trying two days, she’s out and he finds her faithful maid, Susie, at work. So he sidles up, slips his arm around her and grips ‘her firm right boob’ (p.178), behaviour which would see him arrested and sent to prison these days.

Dick fans may see Flow My Tears as a highly artful exploration of themes of identity, reality and mental illness. #metoo activists might not be wrong to see Jason Taverner as a forerunner of Harvey Weinstein.

Swearing

In the same way as sex becomes a more dominant theme, over these four novels I’ve noticed the way Dick’s characters swear more and more. I’m not sure anyone swears in The Man in the High Castle (1962), whereas only 12 years later pretty much everyone is saying ‘fuck’.

‘Do you think I’m a CF, a celebrity fucker?’ (Kathy, p.55)
‘Don’t use that “I don’t give a fuck” tone with me.’ (Jason, p.58)
‘Fuck off,’ said Ruth Rae (p.101)
‘In what fucking way?’ he said, harshly. (Jason, p.104)
Isn’t it possible they’ll fuck up all down the line? (Jason thinking about the cops, p.107)
Her face glowed hotly and she said, ‘That motherfucker!’ (Alys, p.135)
‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-Up’ (Jason’s most recent hit, p.155)
‘We’ll kill you in the end, you miserable murdering motherfucker.’ (General Buckman, p.188)

Not just ‘fuck’, but a lot of the character use the cool groovy slang of the late 60s, early 70s.

‘Can you lay a joint on this brother?’ (a Jesus-freak cop, p. 114)
a freak thing (Ruth Rae p.103)
‘If you dig what I mean’ (Ruth Rae p.104)
‘If you split now…’ (Ruth Rae p.106)
‘Can’t you hold your hit, man?’ (Alys, p.140)
‘Please don’t freak, I won’t hurt you.’ (Jason, p.152)
‘You’re really far out,’ Mary Anne said enthusiastically.’ (p.156)
‘Let’s get it on’, he said. (p.178)
‘It’s OK. I can dig it.’ (the unnamed black guy, p.197)

Yeah baby, lay some skin on me, let’s stick it the Man, tell it like it is, right on sister.

It’s tricky to know whether Dick thought he was just updating his prose style and dialogue to reflect the way people were speaking in 1973 – or whether he was satirising the way people were speaking in 1973.

He’s certainly satirising the shallowness of TV and and the mind-boggling inanity of pop music – like the pretty crude joke that Jason’s most recent hit song, the one which Mary Anne puts on in the café as ‘his’ reality starts to flood back, is titled ‘Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-Up’. But then, what modern writer doesn’t satirise TV for its inanity? It’s a cliché of 20th century post-war fiction.

Either way, whatever the motivation, it’s another of the attitudes which – along with the glamorising of drugs and the hero’s casual expectation that he can sleep with any woman he wants to – make the novel seem such a period piece.

This sense – that a lot of the plot and comment is dated late-60s, early-70s satire – was hugely confirmed for me when, in a minor scene, the cops go to Ruth Rae’s apartment building to arrest Jason but break into the wrong room. Before they discover this they tiptoe across a wall-to-wall carpet depicting Richard M. Nixon’s ascent into heaven as God’s Second Begotten Son (p.108)

Over-excited satire of Richard Nixon belongs to a specific time and place which most people alive do not now remember or understand (he resigned the presidency in August 1974, presumably a little after this novel was published, and a long, long 45 years ago.) This really gross satire reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson’s obsession with Nixon in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971) and the way Thompson devoted an entire book to Nixon’s re-election campaign, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.

This detail made me realise how much Dick was writing for a very specific audience, addressing the pressing social, cultural and political issues of his day which seemed to be caught up in a really seismic crisis – and therefore how, at least on the level of his attitudes to politics, sex and drugs, his books are not prescient and prophetic but rather backward-looking and dated. Can you dig it, man?

Philip K. Dick reviews

The Man in the High Castle (1962) 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 Japanese officials the Germans are planning a surprise 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
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) n 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
Ubik (1969) 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 a catastrophe on the moon
Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974) 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?

Other science fiction reviews

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

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, leading the human giants 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 trailing gasses through earth’s atmosphere 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

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

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, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

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

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 – the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known 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 tale of 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
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
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

1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke – a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of quicksand-like 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 New York
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman transformed into a galactic consciousness

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic
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

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, namely the 1950s

Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming (1956)

Opens with a kind of pre-titles chapter in which we meet a dentist who is smuggling diamonds out of a British diamond mine in Sierra Leone by paying the black workers to smuggle uncut stones out of the mines in their teeth. He pays the miners cash, takes the stones, assembles them into a package and every month drives out to remote part of the desert to rendezvous with a helicopter. He flashes a code phrases (A, B, C) before the chopper lands, hands over the pack of diamonds to the pilot, and is assured payment has gone through to his bank account in London.

London

Cut to the Secret Service building overlooking Regents Park (p.55), where M briefs Bond about the significant losses to British diamonds caused by smuggling. The FBI have helped identify a ‘pipeline’ which goes from the mines in Africa, to London, and on to America. Has he heard of the ‘House of Diamonds’, an up-market retailer in Hatton Garden, run by a man named Rufus B. Saye? (p.20) Might be something to do with it. His mission is to track down the gang responsible. As part of this:

1. Bond goes for a briefing with Assistant Commissioner Vallance of Scotland Yard, who we first met in Moonraker (p.25). Vallance gives Bond further details about the scale of the smuggling and the seriousness of the American gangs. Despatches him with a plain clothes man to interview Saye, at the ‘House of Diamonds’ office. Saye turns out to be a big, very hard American who listens to their ‘enquiries’, then rudely turfs them out (p.37).

2. The plan is to drop Bond into the pipeline as the courier of a package they know is waiting in London to be carried to America. Each month it’s a different courier, but Scotland Yard have their eye on the ‘escort’ who often accompanies them, an attractive woman named Tiffany Case. This month she’s expecting a certain Peter Franks to be the courier (p.25) and be paid $5,000. The Yard will pick up Franks and Bond will impersonate him, courier the diamonds into New York, then try to inveigle his way into the gang, and get evidence against the top people.

So Bond goes to the Hotel and meets Tiffany, the hotel room door opening to reveal her at her dressing table wearing only bra and panties (p.40). Despite this promising beginning, she insists their relationship is purely professional. She suggests Bond pose as a tourist going on a golfing holiday, with a bag of clubs etc, and her people will get the diamonds inserted into golf balls, easy to smuggle. He’ll be collected from the airport and taken to meet Michael ‘Shady’ Tree, who’ll take the stones and pay him. Later, Tiffany makes a call to someone she only knows as ABC, who confirms the golf balls plan, though she herself doesn’t know who she’s speaking to or where the call is taken.

Back at the hotel which he’s checked into as a cover (the Ritz!) Bond receives a hand-delivered letter from M with more information (p.52). Further research has shown that Rufus Saye is none other than Jack Spang, twin brother of Seraffimo Spang, joint controller of ‘the Spangled Mob’, a well-known American crime gang. They bought ‘the House of Diamonds’ five years earlier and there’s every suspicion that it’s a front for the smuggled stones.

Next day a driver turns up to collect Bond, tips the contraband golf balls in amongst all his other balls, then drives him to the airport for his flight to New York. (There’s a long description of checking in and the joys of international jet travel – Fleming is very aware of flying; cf the description of Bond’s momentary panic on the flight to Jamaica in Live and Let Die – maybe it was still a rarity in 1956 and therefore had exotic interest for his readership. He certainly describes the flight to New York in great detail, and then again the flight from New York to Las Vegas, p.160).

New York

Bond gets through Customs and is met by a New York gang member who drives him into the City and to meet Michael ‘Shady’ Tree, who turns out to be a fierce, red-haired hunchback (p.68). Bond carries on playing the part of a mercenary courier and asks for his money. Tree says they’ll pay him some in cash but then arrange for the rest to be paid tax-free and innocently with a scam. Tree gives him the name of a horse to bet on in an upcoming race at Saratoga, the famous racing track in upstate New York. It’s a dead cert; he’ll get his money. Bond has to agree.

Out on the street, Bond becomes aware he’s being tailed and then is gripped by the neck and a hard object shoved in his back. After a tussle there’s a burst of laughter, and his assailant is revealed as Felix Leiter, his buddy from the CIA, who we last saw having been half eaten by a shark in Live and Let Die, swathed in bandages and barely alive. Here he is on the streets of New York, now working for the Pinkerton Agency, limping heavily from his artificial leg and using an artificial arm with a metal hook (p.82).

They banter a lot in a free and easy way which is still appealing 60 years later – ‘you old Limey bastard’ etc, while Leiter explains that he’s been tasked by the Pinkertons to cover corruption up at Saratoga. Ie he’s going to the same race meeting Bond was told to attend by the red-haired hunchback. As M did, Leiter warns Bond that these gangs may have garish silly nicknames – Shady Tree, the Spangled Mob – but they are seriously hard men.

Saratoga

Bond has a day to himself to groom, eat and sleep – cold showers, padding his room naked, ordering steak and champagne. Next day Leiter picks him up and they banter about cars, women and criminal gangs as he drives them 200 miles north to Saratoga. Fleming has done his research: he captures the atmosphere of this horse town, both by quoting a long passage by sports writer Jimmy Cannon (as he previously quoted long passages by Leigh Fermor to describe Haitian Voodoo in Live and Let Die) and by his own sections of bravura description (p.109). Bond and Leiter check into a motel then stroll around soaking up the vibes, watching the horses and owners and jockeys, listening to the accents.

Now, the diamond smugglers had told Bond to bet on an outside horse named ‘Shy Smile’ to win one of the races. They’ve fixed for him to win by the simple expedient of killing the real ‘Shy Smile’ and replacing him with another much faster horse, made up to look like him. But it turns out that Leiter (in an everso slightly enormous coincidence) has been briefed by the Pinkertons to stop ‘Shy Smile’ winning. He’s been told to bribe the jockey – ‘Tingaling’ Bell – to throw the race by committing a brief but decisive foul in the final stretches. Fleming well conveys the noise and excitement of the big track and of the race and, sure enough, Tingaling throws it, resulting in an official foul and ‘Shy Smile’ being disqualified.

In another improbable twist, Leiter asks Bond to deliver Tingaling’s bribe to him, at the Acme sulphur spring and mudbath outside town. In a sequence which reeks of being a documentary description of a place Fleming had really visited, Bond describes every detail of the hot spring/mud bath establishment in Saratoga, the half-hearted attendants, the concrete walkway into the big mud room itself, the disgusting smells, the ominous tall smokestack louring over it all. Here, yet again, he must strip naked before being encased in a coffin-shaped box filled with ‘healing’ hot mud. It is while trapped in this device that he witnesses two hooded hit-men enter the mud room, locate the bribed jockey Tingaling, slap him about a bit with the usual sadistic banter and then – with typical Fleming cruelty – pour a tub of super-boiling mud over his face, thus burning and melting his flesh. Then they go.

After the cops have arrived and sorted everything out, and after Bond has given his testimony as an innocent bystander, showered and returned to his hotel – he describes it all to Leiter who immediately identifies the two men, Wint and Kidd as well-known hoodlums working for the Spangled Mob. Bond phones the hunchback in New York, still playing the part of an aggrieved small-time crooked courier, saying, ‘Hey that horse didn’t win, I lost all my money’. So the voice tells him to go to Las Vegas, check into a specific hotel (the Tiara) and be at a specific blackjack table at a specific time and make a specific bet and he’ll get his money.

Continuing the stream of coincidences, Leiter tells Bond that he has also been ordered to Las Vegas – he’ll arrange for Bond to be collected by a cabby he knows and trusts – and so there’ll be more buddy-buddy hanging out together. Why bother too much about plausibility…

Las Vegas

Another plane journey – New York to Las Vegas – and Fleming giving us a detailed description of the view out the window as the plane turns over the Pacific and heads through a pass in the Sierras into the Martian landscape of the desert before coming in to the unexpected green urban island of Las Vegas.

The heat hits him like a punch, and he’s collected by the friendly cabby Leiter’s assigned him – Ernie Cureo (p.152) – who gives Bond (and the reader) a useful update on Vegas’s recent history ie organised crime has moved in and taken over everything. Ernie indicates the extent of the control – for example, Bond will have been photographed at the airport with a secret camera and the photos will be being scanned against the mob’s databases as they speak. If he’s carrying a gun, Bond will be shadowed by an unseen armed escort. His every move will be followed, especially at the gambling tables. Note the use of modern overhead lighting in all the gambling halls. But note also, how half the light sockets are empty. They’re the one with the cameras recording everything everyone does. Nothing is left to chance. Bond is impressed by the total efficiency of the gangs.

Bond has another day in hand in a luxury hotel to swim, eat well, sleep. Finally he dresses for his appointment at the blackjack table, as arranged by the hunchback in New York. Once again there is a very good, very atmospheric account of Vegas, of the hotel and of the coercive design, sound and behaviour in the massive gambling hall packed with slot machines and ringing to the continual shouts from the crap game tables. Bond is at the appointed table at the appointed time to find the croupier is none other than Tiffany Case! They play it dead straight – she deals him five sets of winning cards and he collects the $5,000 owed him and walks away.

But Bond is irked at having to play this dumb role. He was warned to leave the gambling hall and leave town so instead he walks straight over to a roulette table where he makes four risky bets in a row, winning and raising his takings to $20,000. He notes the hard men standing around with guns barely concealed. As his stakes go up a hard man appears at the dealer’s side with the same cold eyes and black hair styled en brousse; must be Seraffimo Spang, brother of Jack. His cigar points at Bond like a gun, while Bond wins the last turn of the wheel and quits while he’s ahead. But he’s made his mark.

Spectreville

Next evening Ernie picks Bond up in his cab for a cruise round town and this turns out to be the beginning of the climax of the book. While Bond is reminiscing about unnerving Jack Spang in person with his unscripted gambling win the night before, Ernie gives Bond (and the reader) some background about Jack Spang’s hobby. He has bought an abandoned mining town some way from Vegas, fully restored it and the one-track railway line that used to service the mine, along with a vintage locomotive. It is Spang’s (eccentric and garish) hobby to take his gang, associates and girls on champagne trips to this fake Wild West town and make everyone dress up for the weekend.

Ernie notices they’re being followed and Bond, itching for some action, encourages him to try to give the tail the slip. Cue a high-speed chase, in which Ernie shunts the following car, then swerves into a side alley so Bond can get some shots off at the other following car, crash bang! Then they go hide out in a drive-in movie but a) Bond discovers Ernie was injured in the shooting b) the tail follows them, arriving with guns poking through the cab’s doors. Bond is pushed at gunpoint into the baddies’ car and driven out to Spectreville.

Here, as he’s pushing open the swing doors of a fake saloon, he takes the opportunity to jump his two gunmen (McGonigle and Frasso, p.200), badly hurting both of them, before a voice says, ‘Put the gun down’ and – in a stock scene – he realises Jack Spang and some associates in ominous black hoods, and Tiffany Case (!) have been watching all along. The new tough guys manhandle Bond out into the station platform, to view the astonishingly beautiful vintage locomotive, The Cannonball (p.207), then up the stairs and into the luxuriously-appointed Pullman carriage. The characters sit. Bond is fixed a drink. Then his blood runs cold as Spang reveals he’s received a telegram from London saying the real Peter Franks is in police custody. Bond plays the aggrieved innocent so Spang casually tells his associates to put on football boots and kick the crap out of Bond.

In the next chapter Fleming brilliantly describes Bond’s sensations as he slowly, painfully recovers consciousness. The boys kicked him unconscious, left him in a side room, ate dinner and went to bed. Tiffany tiptoed downstairs in the early hours and is now trying to revive him. They are near the railhead and she points out a railroad handcar ie one of the small open machines engineers use to putter up and down lines. Tiffany has planned their escape. But first Bond just about manages to empty petrol cans all over the wooden building and lights it Whoosh! Then onto the handcar and off they go.

Out into the cold desert as Bond’s senses slowly return, he checks that no bones are broken and realises his passport and money are still in his jacket pocket. Phew. But then they sense a rumbling on the line, which gets louder: The Cannonball is after them, and it’s going to catch them.

At just that moment the handcar engine goes put-put and runs out of gas. Great. But Tiffany thinks they’re not far from a railroad junction where a spur of track headed off towards the old mine, they could switch the points, push the handcar down it, then switch the points back. Better still, suggests Bond, go beyond the junction and switch the points so the Cannonball itself is sent hurtling down the sidetrack towards the old mine.

Which is what they do after much straining with the rusty old points. And, moments later, the Cannonball comes hurtling towards them, then hits the points with a judder and is violently switched to the spur line. Not before there are shots from the engine house and – just as it flashes by – Bond carefully looses off the four bullets remaining in his gun and has a split-second impression of Jack Spang’s body lifted and spread-eagled against the side of the cab, then it’s flashed by. Moments later it is out of sight behind the start of the low hills and moments after that – Bang, Crash, BOOM! as the huge locomotive hits the mine railhead at 60 miles an hour, derails, crashes and explodes with a melodramatic fireball. So much for Seraffimo Spang.

Exhausted, Bond collapses, and he would have died then and there in the desert if Tiffany hadn’t guided him and supported him the couple of miles to the nearest desert highway. Here she flags down the only car passing at that time of the morning to discover – and here the coincidence-ometer explodes – the mop of sandy hair and hawk-like features of Felix Leiter! (p.226) who had heard about his pal Ernie being taken into hospital, got the story of Bond’s abduction, driven out to Spectreville to find it going up in flames, got the story from a surviving hoodlum of Bond’s escape on the handcar, and driven out into the desert looking for his old buddy.

All very convenient. Leiter drives Bond to California where they get him patched up by a doctor, checked into a hotel and cleaned up with new clothes. – It is notable how throughout the process Tiffany cradles his wounded head, looks after him but then how, as he slowly revives, she returns to being distant and cold. Much earlier, Leiter had told Bond her life story. Daughter of a single woman who ran a brothel, Tiffany grew up in a harsh environment and then one fateful night was gang-raped by her mother’s customers. Since when she has been a hard and professional survivor. And yet Bond finds himself falling in love with her (p.232).

Leiter books them on a flight to New York, and then onto none other than the luxury cruise ship, the Queen Elizabeth, which is steaming back to England. – Note the chasteness and prudery of the 1950s – Leiter books them into separate cabins, a distinction they themselves maintain throughout the voyage.

The Queen Elizabeth

Here there is a lot of low key relationship stuff between Case and Bond. Dinner, conversation, getting to know each other as Bond falls deeper in love with her but has to overcome the reluctance caused by her brutal past. They discuss marriage and even having children (pp.240-246). Bond says that once in London she can put up in the spare room of his little flat and be looked after by his adorable housekeeper, May. It is a love affair. They are falling in love. They attend an auction for charity where guests in the big ship dining room bet on how long it will take the ship to reach the UK. An odd couple of men take the bidding unusually high and bet it will take much longer than anyone else is predicting.

Bond looks at them, an uncomfortable fat man and a good-looking blond man, and something nags in his memory but at that moment he is distracted by Tiffany’s hand on his. They go walk along the deck, admiring the sea and the moon and the reflections etc and then back to his cabin where they, finally, make sincere and deep love, after which Tiffany kisses him goodnight before tiptoeing back to her cabin and Bond falls into a deep sleep.

He’s awoken by room service with a telegram. It’s a coded message from M in London that they raided the ‘House of Diamonds’ – Jack Spang having fled the country, probably into Africa – and discovered telegram exchanges with a Mr Winter aboard the Queen Elizabeth and Saye/Spang sending orders to ‘despatch’ Case. Jumping into the shower then pulling his clothes on Bond races along to Tiffany’s room to find it empty and ransacked. Christ. Christ, the reader is on tenterhooks because Fleming has led us right into a gentle, loving, tender place only to yank us back into the brutal world of sudden death. Remember how Bond fell in love with Vesper but she died, in Casino Royale.

Bond quickly goes through the ship’s manifest that is given to every passenger and discovers Wint and Kidd are in the cabin directly below Tiffany’s. If he tried to break down the door chances are they’d kill her before he got in. In a desperate expedient, he ties together sheets from her bed and attaches one end to a bulkhead, then swings out the porthole and lets himself slowly, painfully down the ship’s side, trying to forget the immense size of the ship, the fact it is steaming at speed, the way he could probably die from the impact if he fell into the sea, or by sliced to pieces by the ship’s four massive screws.

Now he’s at the porthole of the cabin below, and hears a slap and a girl cry out and with no more prompting swings through the porthole and rolls into the middle of the room, to his feet with his gun in his hand. Tiffany is naked, pinioned by Kidd who is slapping her. Both men turn to face him, ready to draw. Bond tells Tiffany to get up and go into the bathroom and lock the door. Nobody moves while she goes. There is a very intense moment of delay, released when Wint shouts American football numbers for a ‘play’ and both men move in different directions and pull their guns. Bang! Bond shoots one in the head then turns to the other just as his hand reaches for his ankle and twists up. Bang! Bond shoots the other dead, but not before he gets off a cunning throw and Bond looks down to see a knife sticking out of his ribs (p.290).

Complete silence. Bond extracts the knife then moves carefully, staggering, arranging everything so it looks like the two fell out over a card game, he throws Kidd out the porthole and arranges the gun to look like Wint killed himself. It’s not much, but it should delay or puzzle the ship’s authorities. Then he gets Tiffany from the bathroom, they return to her room and tidy up, then she takes him back to his room and tends his wounds.

Epilogue

Bond is in the desert with troops from the nearest British Army garrison and a Bofors gun. They have followed the smuggling dentist out from the mine and are now camped silently half a mile away. Bond remembers the phone call he had with M once the Queen Elizabeth docked at Southampton. a) He put Tiffany into a Daimler taxi to London, to drop her at his flat and into the care of May. b) The police are enquiring into a double murder aboard the ship, does Bond want M to cover it up? Yes. c) Vallance has raised the possibility of prosecuting the girl. Should they? No. d) Will Bond catch an RAF jet to the desert to track down the last link in the pipeline, the missing Spang? Yes.

The helicopter arrives but instead of the German pilot it is – as expected – Jack Spang himself. He takes the dentist’s pack of diamonds, listens to his feeble whining, then shoots him dead. At that moment the loudspeaker from Bond and the army’s truck tells him to freeze. But he jumps back into the helicopter and takes off. Bond in person tracks him with the Bofors gun and lets off a series of shots, one of which hits bull’s eye and the chopper collapses and crashes back to earth with a big explosion. The pipeline is closed. Thank God he can go back to London and the warm arms of his beloved.

Death is forever. But so are diamonds. (p.289)

Themes

Organised crime

The text goes to great lengths to emphasise the breadth, the scale and the ruthlessness of American organised crime. You’d have thought readers were aware of this from the well-publicised lawlessness of the 1930s, featuring Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Pretty Boy Floyd among many others, and all those Jimmy Cagney, George Raft film noirs.

But apparently it needs to be explained all over again, so Fleming has M explain in person and then in a hand-written note, and Leiter telling him several times, and then the cabby in Las Vegas explaining once again, that the Organised Crime gangs of America are well organised and ruthless. At least twice, characters refer to the Kefauver Report (p.159) for a full understanding of the breadth and depth of organised crime’s grip on American society, and this turns out to be a very contemporary reference.

The Kefauver Committee Wikipedia article

Fascinating to learn that these Senate Committee hearings into organised crime feature in fictionalised form in The Godfather part II. My understanding was that the Godfather books and movies trace the transition of Mafia operations from explicitly criminal activities like bootlegging, blackmail, extortion etc, into ‘legit’ businesses, specifically on the move from New York-based crime into the gambling operations in Las Vegas – precisely the setting of the second half of Diamonds.

Enjoyment

Bond enjoys life and his enjoyment is infectious.

It was a beautiful day and Bond enjoyed absorbing the Saratoga idiom, the mixture of Brooklyn and Kentucky in the milling crowds, the elegance of the owners and their friends in the tree-shaded paddock, the efficient mechanics of the parimutuel and the big board with its flashing lights recording the odds and the money invested, the trouble-free starts through the tractor-drawn starting-gate, the toy lake with its six swans and the anchored canoe and, everywhere, that extra exotic touch of the negroes who, except as jockeys, are so much a part of American racing. (p.125)

The cold showers, the luxurious hotels, the very good food, the cocktails prepared just so, his own superb physique – Bond is an instrument through whom we feel the vicarious enjoyment of being alive in such a diverse and interesting world.

Naked

It’s a little detail, in a way, but it’s very symptomatic of the sensuality of the books and their continual physical hyper-awareness, that Bond is frequently naked. He is visiting America in high summer of August, so that New York, Saratoga and – especially – Las Vegas are blisteringly hot. And so it is that Fleming describes Bond’s routine of (generally ice-cold) showers – one day he has four – and then moving around his luxury hotel suites naked. At the mud bath he strips naked and stands like one of the thoroughbred horses, on display to all the other customers in his physical prowess.

Bond stood naked in front of him (p.137)

Bond himself, Fleming, and the reader, are all invited to savour the sight of Bond’s hard, suntanned body – not all the time, but at regular intervals, just often enough to keep us alert to his persistent sensual self-awareness. At the Tiara hotel after his long flight, Bond

took off his clothes and threw himself naked on the bed. (p.169)

Self consciousness

In my reviews of other thrillers from the period, I point out the almost compulsory reference that authors make to the hamminess of their own plots, the often cartoon nature of their own characters, and the way so many of the baddies are acting a tough guy part they’ve learned from the movies.

Typical, thought Bond. Mike Hammer routine. These American gangsters were too obvious. They had read too many horror comics and seen too many films (p.65)

Pissaro looked like a gangster in a horror-comic. (p.121)

Bond is struck throughout by the wacky names and cartoon behaviour of the thugs. His most penetrating comment is that they are overgrown teenagers, kids with guns.

Bond remembered cold, dedicated, chess-playing Russians; brilliant, neurotic Germans; silent, deadly, anonymous men from Central Europe; the people in his own Service – the double-firsts, the gay soldiers of fortune, the men who counted life well lost for a thousand year. Compared with such men, Bond decided, these people were just teenage pillow-fantasies. (p.122)

… he] might then, if he found favour in the eyes of Mr Spang, be given regular work with the rest of the teenage adults who made up the gang. (p.175)

So that was the end of one of the Spangs, one of the brutal, theatrical, overblown dead-end adults who made up the Spangled Mob. He had been a stage-gangster, surrounded by stage properties, but that didn’t alter the fact that he had intended to kill Bond. (p.225)

Attitudes to homosexuals and women

In this novel homosexuality is mentioned for the first time in the series and when it is, it’s a description of the killers Kidd and Wint. Leiter reckons they shack up together, are what we today would call an item, and comments:

‘Some of these homos make the worst killers.’ (p.147)

Later the good-hearted cabbie, Ernie, is given some lines about gay gangsters.

‘I know them guys. Detroit Purple Mob. Couple lavender guys. You know, pansies. Golf ain’t there game. The only irons they can handle are in their pockets.’ (p.190)

In his 1966 essay on the Bond novels, the structuralist literary critic Umberto Eco patronisingly comments from his lofty left-wing point of view that Bond is not a fascist or a racist (interesting to learn that these insult weasel words were being thrown around as long as 50 years ago). He is obviously conservative, but with ‘a cautious middle-class chauvinism’. Race Mr Big is obviously a black criminal mastermind but Live and Let Die is full of characters bending over backwards to say how much they like and admire black people (or ‘negroes’, as Fleming writes, in the terminology of the day). In this book Fleming comments ‘Bond had a natural affection for coloured people’ (p.134). Anti-Semitism I can only remember one Jewish character in these first four novels, and he is a diamond merchant in Hatton Gardens where, I imagine, lots of merchants in the 1950s were Jewish. Sexism His women are in fact more feisty and resistant to his charms than I remembered, and if he has patronising attitudes towards them, then they were the attitudes of his day.

As Eco sums it up, neither Fleming nor Bond display the obsessive hatred of blacks or Jews or women which should really be what we mean by racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and so on. Instead he displays:

‘an art of persuasion that relies on endoxa, that is, on the common opinions shared by the majority of readers’.

For me it seems pointless sticking the same old labels on the Bond books (reactionary, racist, sexist, misogynist and all the rest) and thinking you’ve achieved something. You are merely echoing the stock beliefs of today, as Fleming was echoing the stock beliefs of his day; you are as much in thrall to contemporary values as Fleming was to his.

I think it’s more thought-provoking to take Fleming as a popular writer who wanted to make money from his work and so simply echoed the accepted beliefs of the time. Seen from this perspective, his views actually seem a little progressive. Rereading the novels, I am particularly struck by how independent and feisty his women are. There is actually very little sex in the Bond novels but a great deal of thinking about emotions and feelings and respect. It takes the whole novel for Bond to fall in love with Tiffany Case and to win her over, by which stage he really respects her body and soul. When they finally sleep together (just once in the whole story) it is the climax of a very slow process of learning about each other, rescuing each other from peril, getting to know and respect each other as people. They discuss the possibility of Bond leaving the Service to marry her. They even discuss the possibility of having children (Bond says, Yes, he’d love to have children, but not before he’s retired).

Most people who think about Bond think about the crass, vulgar movies. When my teenage daughter has watched any of the old ones, she is repelled by Bond who she finds ‘rapey’, with his casual expectation that he will have sex with every pretty girl he meets. And the movies are creepy, chauvinist and sexist. This makes it all the more surprising to go back to the source novels from the early and mid-1950s and realise that society’s attitudes were actually more respectful of women, as real people with agency and the ability to rebuff men, as decision-makers and owners of their destinies, before the Swinging Sixties turned them into Playboy dolly birds.

As to homosexuality, we know that Fleming mixed on friendly terms with the gays of his day, for example Noel Coward, who owned a seaside villa just down the coast in Jamaica from him. If Fleming has Leiter comment on the particular creepiness of the two gay killers a) this is a character talking; characters have views different from authors b) Leiter is expressing some of the anti-gay prejudice of his day, no more no less. To us his opinion seems nonsensical: he spends most of the novel warning Bond how psychopathic the American gangs are, and Bond meets plenty of brutal heterosexuals. Why either of them should single out gay killers as being particularly more or less brutal is, to us nowadays, hard to fathom. But it was obviously significant then. It obviously added an extra frisson to think that a pair of killers not only killed, but ‘shacked up’ together – made their criminality more creepy, somehow. And these kind of vanished opinions add to the social historical interest of the books, as windows into a vanished world, with its vanished technologies, attitudes, simplicities and reassurances.

Bond’s breakfasts…

… and lunches and dinners. Bond’s meals are a continual punctuation mark in the texts, far more so than car chases, shootouts or sex (of which there is actually precious little). We are treated to descriptions of:

Lunch with Leiter: smoked salmon and Brizzola (beef, straight-cut across the bone, roast and broiled), then half an avocado with French dressing and an Espresso (p.80-84)
Dinner with Tiffany: caviar, cutlets, pink champagne (p.88) the cutlets accompanied by asparagus with mousseline sauce (p.94). As apéritif Bond orders Martinis, shaken but not stirred (p.89), the first time that phrase has appeared. As liqueurs to follow the meal, they have Stingers made with crème de menthe (p.94).
Lunch by himself at Voisin’s: two vodka Martinis, oeufs Benedict and strawberries (p.99)
Lunch with Leiter: at a roadside diner they have scrambled eggs, sausages and Miller Highlife beers (p.102).
At the race track: bourbon old-fashioneds and a cheap chicken dinner (p.110).
With Leiter: broiled Maine lobster with melted butter and a very dry Martini made with Cresta Blanca Vermouth (p.151).
Waiting to go gamble, Bond has a dozen cherrystone clams and a steak, washed down with a Vodka dry Martini (p.175).
On the Queen Elizabeth Tiffany sends Bond a room service meal of four small slivers of steak on toast canapés, and a small bowl of sauce Béarnaise (p.248)

Credit

Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming was published in 1956 by Jonathan Cape. All quotes and references are to the 2006 Penguin paperback edition.

Other thrillers from 1956

The Bond novels

1953 Casino Royale Bond takes on Russian spy Le Chiffre at baccarat then is gutted to find the beautiful assistant sent by London to help him and who he falls in love with – Vesper Lynd – is herself a Russian double agent.
1954 Live and Let Die Bond is dispatched to find and defeat Mr Big, legendary king of America’s black underworld, who uses Voodoo beliefs to terrify his subordinates, and who is smuggling 17th century pirate treasure from an island off Jamaica to Florida and then on to New York, in fact to finance Soviet spying, for Mr Big is a SMERSH agent. Along the way Bond meets, falls in love with, and saves, the beautiful clairvoyant, Solitaire.
1955 Moonraker An innocent invitation to join M at his club and see whether the famous Sir Hugo Drax really is cheating at cards leads Bond to discover that Drax is in fact a fanatical Nazi determined on taking revenge for the Fatherland by targeting an atom-bomb-tipped missile – the Moonraker – at London.
1956 Diamonds Are Forever Bond’s mission is to trace the route of a diamond smuggling ‘pipeline’, which starts in Africa, comes to London and then to follow it on to New York, and further to the mob-controlled gambling town of Las Vegas, where he wipes out the gang, all the while falling in love with the delectable Tiffany Case.
1957 From Russia, with Love Bond is lured to Istanbul by the promise of a beautiful Russian agent who says she’ll defect and bring along one of the Soviets’ precious Spektor coding machines, but only for Bond in person. The whole thing is an improbable trap concocted by head of SMERSH’S execution department, Rosa Klebb, to not only kill Bond but humiliate him and the Service in a sex-and-murder scandal.
1958 Dr. No Bond is dispatched to Jamaica (again) to investigate the mysterious disappearance of the station head, which leads him to meet up with the fisherman Quarrel (again), do a week’s rigorous training (again) and set off for a mysterious island (Crab Key this time) where he meets the ravishing Honeychile Rider and the villainous Chinaman, Dr No, who sends him through a gruelling tunnel of pain which Bond barely survives, before killing No and triumphantly rescuing the girl.
1959 Goldfinger M tasks Bond with finding out more about Auric Goldfinger, the richest man in England. Bond confirms the Goldfinger is smuggling large amounts of gold out of the UK in his vintage Rolls Royce, to his factory in Switzerland, but then stumbles on a much larger conspiracy to steal the gold from the US Reserve at Fort Knox. Which, of course, Bond foils.
1960 For Your Eyes Only (short stories) Four stories which started life as treatments for a projected US TV series of Bond adventures and so feature exotic settings (Paris, Vermont, the Seychelles, Venice), ogre-ish villains, shootouts and assassinations and scantily-clad women – but the standout story is Quantum of Solace, a conscious homage to the older storytelling style of Somerset Maugham, in which there are none of the above, and which shows what Fleming could do if he gave himself the chance.
1961 Thunderball Introducing Ernst Blofeld and his SPECTRE organisation who have dreamed up a scheme to hijack an RAF plane carrying two atomic bombs, scuttle it in the Caribbean, then blackmail Western governments into coughing up $100,000,000 or get blown up. The full force of every Western security service is thrown into the hunt, but M has a hunch the missing plane headed south towards the Bahamas, so it’s there that he sends his best man, Bond, to hook up with his old pal Felix Leiter, and they are soon on the trail of SPECTRE operative Emilio Largo and his beautiful mistress, Domino.
1962 The Spy Who Loved Me An extraordinary experiment: an account of a Bond adventure told from the point of view of the Bond girl in it, Vivienne ‘Viv’ Michel, which opens with a long sequence devoted entirely to her childhood in Canada and young womanhood in London, before armed hoodlums burst into the motel where she’s working on her own, and then she is rescued by her knight in shining armour, Mr B himself.
1963 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service Back to third-person narrative, and Bond poses as a heraldry expert to penetrate Blofeld’s headquarters on a remote Alpine mountain top, where the swine is carrying out a fiendish plan to use germ warfare to decimate Britain’s agriculture sector. Bond smashes Blofeld’s set-up with the help of the head of the Corsican mafia, Marc-Ange Draco, whose wayward daughter, Tracy, he has fallen in love with, and in fact goes on to marry – making her the one great love of his life – before she is cruelly shot dead by Blofeld, who along with the vile Irma Bunt had managed to escape the destruction of his base.
1964 You Only Live Twice Shattered by the murder of his one-day wife, Bond goes to pieces with heavy drinking and erratic behaviour. After 8 months or so M sends him on a diplomatic mission to persuade the head of the Japanese Secret Service, ‘Tiger’ Tanaka to share top Jap secret info with us Brits. Tiger agrees on condition that Bond undertakes a freelance job for him, and eliminates a troublesome ‘Dr Shatterhand’ who has created a gruesome ‘Garden of Death’ at a remote spot on the Japanese coast. When Bond realises that ‘Shatterhand’ is none other than Blofeld, murderer of his wife, he accepts the mission with gusto.
1965 The Man With The Golden Gun Brainwashed by the KGB, Bond returns from Japan to make an attempt on M’s life. When it fails he is subjected to intense shock therapy at ‘The Park’ before returning fit for duty and being dispatched to the Caribbean to ‘eliminate’ a professional assassin, Scaramanga, who has killed half a dozen of our agents as well as being at the centre of a network of criminal and political subversion. The novel is set in Bond and Fleming’s old stomping ground, Jamaica, where he is helped by his old buddy, Felix Leiter, and his old secretary, Mary Goodnight, and the story hurtles to the old conclusion – Bond is bettered and bruised within inches of his life – but defeats the baddie and ends the book with a merry quip on his lips.
1966 Octopussy Three short stories in which Bond uses the auction of a valuable Fabergé egg to reveal the identity of the Russians’ spy master in London; shoots a Russian sniper before she can kill one of our agents escaping from East Berlin; and confronts a former Security Service officer who has been eaten up with guilt for a wartime murder of what turns out to be Bond’s pre-war ski instructor. This last short story, Octopussy, may be his best.

Books & Boots

All posts tagged Las Vegas

Hello America by J.G. Ballard (1981)

The disaster explained

Plot summary

They head south

Washington DC

Wayne’s diary and deterioration

Rescue by McNair and the steam-cars

California is an Amazonian rainforest

Las Vegas is ablaze with light

President Manson

Dr Fleming

Las Vegas under attack

Nuclear roulette

The military expeditions arrive

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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick (1974)

The alternative world

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Part two

Part three

Passivity

Coda

Drugs

Sex

Swearing

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Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming (1956)

London

New York

Saratoga

Las Vegas

Spectreville

The Queen Elizabeth

Epilogue

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Organised crime

Enjoyment

Naked

Self consciousness

Attitudes to homosexuals and women

Bond’s breakfasts…

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