All posts tagged Wehrmacht

The Venus Hunters by J.G. Ballard (1980)

Although published as late as 1980, most of the short stories in The Venus Hunters are from considerably earlier, in fact the first seven stories were published in the 1967 collection The Overloaded Man:

Now: Zero (1959)

Zero is Ballard’s favourite number, denoting the full stop of time and space and energy and human endeavour. Mind you, he was merely adopting a term already fraught with symbolism from his era’s key event:

The origins of the term “ground zero” began with the Trinity test in Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. The United States Strategic Bombing Survey of the atomic attacks, released in June 1946, used the term liberally, defining it as: “For convenience, the term ‘ground zero’ will be used to designate the point on the ground directly beneath the point of detonation.”‘

This is a very early work, told in an arch Gothic style, which could almost be Edgar Allen Poe. The narrator is the overlooked and humiliated middle-manager at an insurance company who describes in prissy mannered prose how he kept a feverish, self-justifying diary recording every petty grievance he bore against his manager, Rankin, till one day in a fit of exasperation he wrote in his diary that the manager died, falling to his death from the seventh floor stairway. And next day he did.

Instead of stepping into his shoes as he hoped, the narrator is overlooked and a younger man, Carter, is promoted who quickly puts him in his place. After a few weeks of humiliation, the narrator writes in his diary that Carter dies, run over in the street the following day. And he is.

He reads about a man who’s been acquitted for a murder he obviously committed and writes in his diary that this man, Frank Taylor, will die next day in prison. And he does.

Getting to grips with his power he describes the deaths of four of the company’s directors, with the aim of being himself promoted to director and then using the same method to gain promotion to the parent company and on to world domination. The four directors die, sure enough, but the company goes into liquidation and, like everyone else, he is laid off. The predictable irony of this feels like a much older type of story, like Poe.

He experiments with the limits of the power, writing in his diary that the entire population of the miserable town where he grew up, Stretchford, will die. They don’t. Aha. The power obviously has limits, the limits of feasibility. Returning home the landlady confronts him with nagging demands for his back-rent and so she very satisfactorily dies the next day.

At this point he begins to notice that people are looking at him in the street. The landlady’s replacement is seen in conversation with the local copper, tapping her head. He thinks they are admiring his confidence and power. The reader is tipped off that people think he’s bonkers. His final plan has a garish, comedy-Gothic feel. He tells us he will publish a story in a magazine, which completely reveals his power, but that the person he has scheduled for death… is the reader!!! That means you!!! and the story counts down to the final sentences and words, at which you, the reader will expire!

Three… two… one… Now! Zero!

Is he mad? Just before the end he refers to ‘the victims of this extraordinary plague’; so is it working, have hundreds of readers of the story already dropped dead? Or is it all a delusion?

The Time-Tombs (1963)

Set some time in the future and on another planet, a group of four men are scraping a living as scavengers of the time tombs. These are buried in the dust of the planet but when they come to light, tomb robbers like themselves break in and steal the tapes on which the long-dead occupants have recorded images of themselves which are projected as 3-D holograms.

The story depicts the uneasy dynamic between a young-ish new recruit to the gang, Shepley, supported by the easy-going Old Man, and the leader of the robbers, Traxel, and his thuggish sidekick Bridges.

Shepley and the Old Man find a new set of tombs in a previously unexplored quadrant of the sea of dust, what’s more they’re priceless Tenth Dynasty tapes. But the second one they come to depicts a hauntingly beautiful princess with an extravagant hairdo and wings. Shepley can’t bring himself to take her tapes, and next day Traxel and Bridges find them at this tomb, Bridges thuggishly kicking his way through the door, ripping out the tapes, only to discover they are almost empty. She was dead when she was buried (the precise working of the technology is hinted at and not properly explained).

Traxel and Bridges make their escape as the Tomb Police come trundling up on a massive sand-rider and Shepley is so distraught at their vandalism of the princess’s tomb that he lets himself be arrested.

Track 12 (1958)

Ballard’s sixth story and a very short one (5 pages). Sheringham, professor of biochemistry ‘at the university’, has invited round for drinks Maxted ‘a run-down athlete with a bad degree… acting as torpedo  man for a company marketing electron microscopes’. Sheringham is ostensibly wanted to play him some of the LPs recording the microsonics experiments he’s been doing. He makes Maxted put on headphones and then listen to the weird sounds generated by recording in super high detail a variety of physical mechanisms. He’s listened to the sound of a plant cell dividing, and then an animal cell dividing and the story opens as he’s listening to the sound of iron filings going down a funnel which turns out to be the sound a pin dropping through a long tube lined with microphones makes.

(It may be worth remembering that experimenting with metal tape recordings was a new technology in the 1950s, prompting an explosion of experimental music recording by the likes of Pierre Boulez and Karl-Heinz Stockhausen.)

All the time Maxted is despising this prissy, fussy academic, lounging back on the chair he’s offered and guzzling down the whiskey and thinking about Sheringham’s wife, who he’s having an affair with.

Until, that is, he starts to feel shivery cold. Really cold. He reaches for his glass but knocks it out of reach. He feels his heart fibrillate. Sheringham is standing in front of him and calmly explains that he spiked his (Maxted’s) drink with chromium cyanate which is making all his cells lose control of their water content. He is going to drown inside.

But not before Sheringham has the time to play him one last recording. As his body collapses, his identity melts, the last thing Maxted hears is the enormously amplified and slowed-down grotesque rhythmic spasms of… a kiss, a kiss between him and Sheringham which the vengeful professor spent months rigging up secret microphones all over the patio to record. And which is now the last sound Maxted hears before he dies.

Passport to Eternity (1961)

Straightaway I notice that the bickering married couple, Margot and Clifford Gorrell, own some kind of sound device, a sound-sweeper, which projects the mood of their conversations as coloured tones across their walls, splashes of colours which leave residues which takes days to drain, and/or can drown out sound. This immediately reminded me of The Sound Sweep a story from a few years earlier. Obviously a very resonant idea.

Oh and they live on Mars. Not the real Mars but the Mars which is depicted as a kind of 1950s American suburb in The Martian Chronicles of Ray Bradbury, or the American cartoon The Jetsons, a Mars which is full of bored wives who refuse to go on another love cruise of Venus or a a stag weekend to the moons of Saturn. A cartoon Mars.

The story is a comedy played for broad laughs as the overworked husband is henpecked into booking a real holiday for his wife, and they dispatch their personal assistant, Tony Harcourt, to make the rounds of inter-galactic travel agencies, which all come off as spoofs and parodies from a Douglas Adams novel.

Two days later Tony returns with a pile of outlandish brochures, but he has been followed by numerous of the travel agencies who begin to stage samples of their vacations in and around the Gorrells’ house, most notably the one which offers ringside seats at a galactic war

In the middle of it all reality shimmers and slides, and they wake up attached to tubes on beds in a room which looks like theirs but is revealed, with a swish of the curtains, to be some kind of spaceship setting off on a non-stop journey into deep space. A ten-page prime exhibit of why science fiction was not, in Ballard’s day, considered serious literature. This story is barely even serious science fiction.

Escapement (1956)

Ballard’s second published story and, tellingly, it’s about distortions in time. A boring suburban couple are having an evening in with the telly on, him doing a crossword, her darning a nightie when he realises the play on TV has slipped a reel and gone back to a scene fifteen minutes earlier. It happens again. He points it out to his wife. She doesn’t know what he’s talking about. It happens again. He phones a friend, who doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

Beginning to panic, the narrator realises he is caught in a loop of time fifteen minutes long which keeps jumping back fifteen minutes, trucking through the same period, then jumping back to 9pm. Then he realises the period of time between the leaps is diminishing – he is caught in a time trap! Steadily it decreases till the loops is only a few seconds long and then… he wakes up with a bad headache. His wife tells him he had some kind of convulsion. The time loop has stopped.

It’s very much like an episode of The Outer Limits (which was broadcast, incidentally, from 1963 to 1965). As he panics and switches channels, the narrator comes across a news programme where a scientist is explaining that these gas clouds released by the sun might not only distort light but time. Aha.

The notion of astronomical phenomenon affecting time here on earth will be recycled as the explanation for the crystallising process in The Crystal World.

Time of Passage (1961)

The story of a man, James Falkman, told in reverse, as the mourners leave the cemetery, the gravediggers dig up his coffin, put it into the hearse which drives back to his grand house, where he breathes his first breath and slowly improves in health, under the tender care of his sister.

His entire life experiences are lived in reverse, all the way through to his return to his mother’s womb and then, nine months earlier, his parents going to a hotel on their honeymoon.

It mirrors or prefigures the really haunting tale, Mr F is Mr F, where a married man shrinks back to a teenager, then a boy, then a baby, then returns through her vagina into his mother’s womb.

Again, it is well done but feels a bit cheap like a cheesy episode of The Outer Limits. The bit I liked was where, at the beginning, both he and his sister euphemistically refer to the place they came from, but how they’re ‘in the world now’ and how they’ll forget, how everyone forgets. Presumably they mean, forget heaven, where they came from.

The Venus Hunters (1963)

At 30 pages, by far the longest story in the collection and the most enjoyable. Dr Ward has just arrived at Mount Vernon Observatory. His new boss Cameron takes him for coffee at a cafe in the town at the bottom of the hill, and introduces him to the tall, bearded, muttering man, Charles Kandinski, a former psychology professor, who claims to have been at a picnic with friends in the desert, gone for a pee and bumped into a creature from Venus by its spaceship, who gave him a tablet and a warning that man must not intrude into outer space.

Kandinski was staggered, tried to contact everyone in authority to pass on the warning, writes a book about it and delivers hesitant lectures… but no-one cares, everyone thinks he’s mad. Cameron jokes that, of course, he believes him. Ward starts off by being utterly sceptical, but over repeated meetings now and then at the cafe, and at a lecture Kandinski delivers to the members of a local astronomy club, he slowly becomes impressed by Kandinski’s sincerity.

At the climax of the story we follow Kandinski cycling off into the desert at dusk, seeing a strange light, clambering up the side of a dune and seeing another circular space ship hovering in the desert. He stumbles back to the nearest farmhouse, begs to use the phone, rings Ward who is at a big conference being hosted by his employer, the 23rd Congress of the International Geophysical Association at Mount Vernon Observatory. Ward is just about to be called to make an opening speech when the call comes through and, despite his boss Cameron clinging on to his arm, he insists on driving off to help Kandinski.

He drives out to the desert, finds the farmhouse as Kandinski instructed him, goes on a bit, sees Kandinski’s bicycle, parks and clambers up the sand dune to the top of the low ridge, finds Kandinski feverishly over-excited, looks down into the shallow bowl between dunes and sees… nothing.

The story jumps to a few days later and we learn that Ward, nonetheless, took part in publishing a statement about the aliens to the New York Times, and has, as a result, been so thoroughly ridiculed that he has been asked to leave the Observatory and is leaving town to go back to university and teach freshman physics.

I didn’t understand. Was Kandinski just deluded? Like tens of thousands of other Americans who, in the decades since have come forward to claim they were abducted and experimented on by aliens? Is it that simple?

You could see the story as a fictional equivalent of the famous statement Ballard made in a 1962 interview that henceforward science fiction (by which he meant, his science fiction) would be concerned with inner space not with outer space. So this is a story in which the entire paraphernalia of outer space (flying saucers, aliens) turns out to be a product of the much-more interesting and fruitful area of inner space i.e. obsessions and delusions.

More tangibly, in structural or thematic terms, the image of driving out into the desert is interesting because it recurs in The Voices of Time; and when Ward sees the strange mandala-like shape Kandinski has marked out at the site of what he claims was the original landing, I was of course reminded of the mandala the dead biologist Whitby has carved into the bottom of the drained swimming pool in Voices and which Powers goes on to build in concrete on a much larger scale out in the desert.

And, of course, drifting sand-dunes haunt no end of Ballard short stories.

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So the first seven stories in this collection are right from the start of Ballard’s writing career. The remaining three were not published in The Overloaded Man collection and two are from nearly 20 years later.

The Killing Ground (1969)

A brutal satire on the Vietnam set thirty years in the future and which foresees the whole world invaded by America and rebel or nationalist forces, just like the Viet Cong, struggling with old weapons and living in holes, against the vastly superior technology of the Yanks whose attacks are computer-guides.

‘The globe was now a huge insurrectionary torch, a world Viet Nam’ and the story concerns a ragtag bunch of insurgents literally holed up in tunnels dug into a hillside overlooking a river over which fly American helicopters strafing the countryside in what, we are told, with a shock, and with blunt satirical irony, is the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede on the banks of the River Thames, near where I went to school, and which I’ve photographed and mapped on my walking blog.

We get to know Major Pearson, leader of the little troop of guerrillas just long enough to be fed all the lines about America’s war against the world, before they saddle up to make an attack across the flat meadow towards the river (I know it well), coldly killing the three American prisoners they’ve taken, before they in turn are mown down by American machinegun fire.

One Afternoon at Utah Beach (1978)

Nearly but not quite successful story about a married couple who are flown to a holiday cottage on Utah beach by a friendly private pilot. During the week they stay there the husband, Ogden, realises the pilot, Foster, and his wife Angela are having an affair.

One afternoon he visits the derelict concrete blockhouse built by the Germans on the beach and is astonished to discover a 19-year-old wounded Wehrmacht soldier nursing a machine gun on a tripod. Taking this in his stride, over the next few days Ogden brings the soldier food and medicine. His wife and boyfriend have taken to going to a wooden shack on the beach to make love in the afternoons. Ogden conceives the idea of getting the German to point his machine gun in that direction and shoot them as they emerge.

On the day in question Ogden takes his own shotgun and, as the adulterous couple emerge, inexplicably fires a warning flare, allowing the pilot to run forward into the long grass as the Wehrmacht soldier finally fires off his machine gun. Ogden stands up in clear sight at his moment of triumph and Foster rises from the dune grass and shoots him dead.

Exploring the blockhouse, Foster and Angela are puzzled why her husband had dressed in a Second World War Wehrmacht uniform.

The 60-Minute Zoom (1976)

The deranged soliloquy of a voyeuristic psychopath who knows his wife is serially unfaithful with strangers at all the resorts they visit, and has now set up a camera with an amazing Nikon long-distance zoom lens in a rented apartment across from the posh hotel he and she are staying in somewhere on the Spanish coast.

The idea is that the zoom of the camera starts off capturing the entire facade of the hotel and them moves in, very very slowly, allowing the narrator to describe the overall scene, comment on particular guests visible in the rooms above and below his, and then as the lens zooms in on their room, recording the entrance of her lover, they strip off and make love as the lens moves in closer, capturing their slow orgasms, ten minutes later he has gone and the camera doesn’t even cover her whole body but a portion of her chest, and, in the creepy final paragraph, who enters the frame, but the narrator and cameraman himself, only seen as a shadow and fragments of clothing above her body in tight close up and then… the shot goes vivid spurting red!

These last two stories have stopped being science fiction and are something else – tales of the macabre and the gruesome, heavily laced with pornography and perversion, which remind me of the grown-up stories of Roald Dahl which I read not so long ago – and somehow dated in the same nice-middle-class-man-goes-mad sort of way.

Related links

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

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by Simon on January 27, 2020  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, Science Fiction, Short stories
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Posted by Simon on January 27, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/01/27/the-venus-hunters-j-g-ballard/

The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze (2006)

If we are to do justice to the Third Reich we must seek to understand it in its own terms. (p.147)

This is a massive book – 676 pages of text, 10 pages of tables, 84 pages of notes, a 25-page index = some 800 pages in total.

Tooze deploys a mind-boggling amount of research and analysis to give a really thorough economic history of the Third Reich from 1933 to 1945. After a brief review of the economic woes of the Weimar Republic (huge reparations to the Allies, hyperinflation, the Dawes Plan) and the complicated series of events around 1931 when America and Britain came off the gold standard, devalued their currencies and began to enact protectionist policies – we arrive at January 1933 when a small group of Germany’s ruling class decided to make Hitler Chancellor on the assumption that they’d be able to control him.

The next 500 pages give a minutely detailed account of the Nazis’ economic policies, from the fiscal or financial level (they reneged on reparations to America, Britain and France, although the details are fiendishly complicated), through industrial strategy (subsidies to industry which then, however, had to do the Nazis bidding in areas like car and airplane manufacture) and agriculture (where Tooze sheds fascinating light on the problems of a still mostly agricultural economy, split into millions of small farms, with an ageing population).

Like anyone who studies a subject really intensively, Tooze’s account tends to undermine accepted myths or accepted wisdom if in part simply because accepted wisdom, by its very nature, tends to be simplistic – in order to be teachable, in order to be memorable – whereas the level of detail Tooze goes into reveals every element of Nazi policy to have been more complicated, contingent and compromised than we read in textbooks or watch on documentaries.

Agriculture

And Tooze takes evident pleasure in overturning received opinion. For example, he says the Nazis’ emphasis on ‘blood and soil’ has for a long time been interpreted as a regressive, turning-the-clock back fantasy on the part of an alienated urbanised society which wanted to return to some kind of peasant utopia. But Tooze devotes a chapter to explaining that Germany was, despite our generalised images of the Nazis’ massed rallies, of bully boys smashing Jewish shop windows in Berlin or Munich, associations of big factories and BMWs, still a predominantly agricultural society in 1939. Factoring in small shopkeepers and workshops who provided goods and equipment to farmers, around 56% of the German population worked on the land. So the Nazi rhetoric of blood and soil was addressing an actual economic and social reality.

Lebensraum

Tooze is at pains to explain Nazi economic policy in the context of the wider system of global capitalism and imperialism, and this is often very illuminating.

Tooze gives a sympathetic reading of Hitler’s analysis of the global economy in the 1920s as expounded in Mein Kampf (1924), and also in ‘Hitler’s Second Book’ (1928), a follow-up full of more anti-Semitic rantings, which he wrote but which was never published. A manuscript was discovered in a safe in Germany in the 1960s and published.

In these works Hitler acknowledges that America has become by the 1920s the dominant economy in the world because its settlers were able to expand across its enormous land area and the huge amount of natural resources it contained – coal, iron, all the metals, endless supplies of timber etc, all of which could be utilised by a population twice the size of Germany’s (America’s 130 million to Germany’s 85 million).

The next greatest economic power was Britain which, although it had a smaller population (46 million) of course possessed a vast and farflung empire a) from which it imported a cornucopia of raw materials b) to which it could export a) its goods, at a guaranteed profit and b) its surplus population, with hundreds of thousands leaving to find a better life in Australia, New Zealand or Canada (where my aunt and her new husband emigrated just after the war).

Even France, Germany’s neighbour, had only half the population of Germany (41 million) while being twice the size (France today is approximately 551,500 sq km, Germany approximately 357,022 sq km), plus the advantages of an overseas empire from which it imported cheap raw materials and to which, like Britain, it could export its surplus population.

Thus, by the mid 1920s, Hitler had reached a simple conclusion – Germany needed more land – and a simple strategy, the Drang nach Osten or push eastward.

In fact this was quite an old idea, having originated among a number of nationalist and right-wing German thinkers in the late-nineteenth century. What was new was Hitler’s determination to carry it out by violence, and the extreme brutality of his plan to not only conquer Poland and push into western Russia, but to subjugate their native Slavic populations as slaves as part of the horrifying Generalplan Ost.

Hitler’s success

As it was, by mid-1939, despite the mire of economic challenges the regime had faced (poor balance of payments deficit, lack of raw materials, housing shortage, crisis in agricultural production, and many more), by a series of extraordinary diplomatic bluffs, Hitler had achieved what no other Germany leader, even the great Bismarck had managed, namely the creation of the Greater Germany of the nationalists’ dreams (incorporating Austria and the Sudetenland), and all without firing a shot (it took Bismarck two wars to create a united Germany, climaxing in the catastrophic Franco-Prussian War).

But all the time Tooze is showing the toll it took on the domestic economy and the frantic juggling behind the scenes among ministries and officials, to try and prevent inflation, preserve the value of the Reichsmark, ensure a decent standard of living for the population while all the time trying to fulfil Hitler and Goering’s enormous wishes for wholesale rearmament.

Familiar and unfamiliar

So Tooze points out counter-intuitive facts (the largely agricultural nature of Germany) which you hadn’t quite grasped before. He goes into massive detail about, for example, the various policy options open to Germany’s finance minister to try and boost exports, improve balance of payments, bolster the currency, and sets all these amid the wider and constantly changing international economic scene, from the gold standard crisis of 1931, through the revival of the global economy in the later 1930s, and then the beginnings of a slowdown in 1939.

All this is new, and puts the main events in a rich and thoughtful context. Also we are introduced to a range of Germany businessmen, financiers and party officials whose internecine fights and feuds helped to shape the Nazi regime, men like the famous Ferdinand Porsche, but also Hjalmar Schacht, President of the National Bank (Reichsbank) 1933–1939, who opposed the scale of Nazi rearmament, was eventually dismissed in 1939, then arrested and sent to a concentration camp in 1944. Or Richard Walther Darré, Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture from 1933 to 1942 and also a high-ranking functionary in the SS.

The pen portraits Tooze gives of these key players, and the extraordinary depth with which he describes and investigates the Nazi economy, enrich your understanding, really bring it to life not as the dark legend we carry in our minds, but a congeries of overlapping and competing bureaucracies, the jostling for money and influence, all set against the fraught context of Hitler pushing the pace and ratcheting up the tension in international affairs.

And yet, stepping back, I didn’t feel Tooze changed the overall narrative much. Germany is prostrate from depression and reparations. Hitler comes to power in the back of mass unemployment. The backroom deal which made him chancellor turned out to be a wild miscalculation. He blames all Germany’s woes on the Jews and immediately sets about overthrowing the Versailles agreement. Through the mid to late 1930s he calls the bluff of the Western powers (Britain and France). Astonishes everyone with the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the invasion of Poland. During the war, from humble makepiece beginnings, a vast network of forced labour and concentration camps is constructed, which is never as productive as its planners hope. Defeat in Russia in 1942 leads inexorably to the defeat of the Reich, but the war is prolonged by the superb fighting qualities of the Wehrmacht and the ability of German armaments industries to struggle through their chaotic mismanagement by the Nazi hierarchy and pour out an astonishing stream of tanks, guns and ammunition almost until the very end.

Tooze’s book deepens and complexifies your understanding of these events, gives names and biographies of the key players, in the Nazi Party, the world of finance and the industrialists who made it possible and, at various key points (what I found most interesting) puts you in the shoes, enters the mindset of the Nazi leaders, to help you understand the choices they faced once they’d set off down their fateful road.

But stepping right back, I don’t think this long detailed and rather exhausting book fundamentally changes your overall understanding of what happened, or why.

Related links

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Holocaust literature

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by Simon on February 15, 2019  •  Permalink
Posted in Books, History, Holocaust, Second World War, War
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Posted by Simon on February 15, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/02/15/the-wages-of-destruction-adam-tooze/

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1962)

I am a mask, concealing the real. Behind me, hidden, actuality goes on, safe from prying eyes. (Mr Tagomi, p.227)

An alternative history

The Man in the High Castle is set in 1962 in an America which lost the Second World War. Through the everyday lives and worries of a bunch of characters in San Francisco, and a couple in Colorado, Dick slowly drip feeds to the reader the story of how this alternative history came about.

Most alternative history have a ‘point of divergence’, the point where the fictional alternative branches off from actual history. Here it is the attempt of Italian immigrant Giuseppe ‘Joe’ Zangara who, on 15 February 1933, to assassinate President Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. In actual history Zangara got off five shots but missed the President; in Dick’s alternative version, Zangara shoots Roosevelt dead.

In ‘our’ history Roosevelt went on to mastermind the New Deal which helped pull America out of the Great Depression and ensured she was ready to wage war in Europe and the Pacific after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour in December 1941. America’s economic and military might were decisive in beating both the Nazis and the Japanese Empire.

In Dick’s alternative universe, no Roosevelt, no New Deal, America was unprepared for war and so a) the Japanese successfully destroyed the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbour, going on to seize the Philippines, Australia, Hawaii, and then the West Coast of America, leading up to Capitulation Day in 1947.

Meanwhile, Dick’s alternative history of the war in Europe has the Nazis seizing Malta forcing Churchill to resign (p.70). His successors are all non-entities who fail to rally Britain while the Germans a) decisively conquer North Africa before b) turning east to defeat Russia, pushing the surviving Russians far back into Asia and then c) sending a fleet across the Atlantic which conquers the Eastern United States. Due to their slow start, the Americans never develop the atom bomb, the Germans get there first and nuke Washington DC. Now the Germans run a unified Europe under German rule, Festung Europa.

As the novel opens the Japanese are smoothly administering what is now known as the P.S.A. or Pacific States of America, main city San Francisco where most of the action is set. Their rule is mostly benign, if very hierarchical based on race, so that everyone has a ‘place’, above or below everyone else: Japs at the top, Caucasians next, Mediterranean Europeans next, blacks at the bottom.

They rule with relative freedom and civilisation compared to the Eastern Seaboard, where the Nazis have implemented their anti-Jewish policies, which they have also extended into Central and Southern America. The Military Governor of the Eastern states was for a while Erwin Rommel, the victor in North Africa. It was only when he was replaced in 1949 that the full implementation of the race laws and the concentration camps kicked in.

We learn that Hitler is now a disease-raddled recluse and has been succeeded as Führer by Martin Bormann, with much gossip about the other Nazi leaders, Goebbels, Göring and so on.

One character admires the Germans’ technical know-how, exemplified by the way they have sealed and drained the Mediterranean (!), giving them a vast new area to colonise. But several characters are less keen about their attempts to solve ‘the African Problem’, which appears to have consisted in exterminating the entire black population. A high level Japanese briefing states that the Germans’ genocidal policies in Eastern Europe, and Africa, have been an economic catastrophe.

There are some readers for whom just the outlines of alternative histories are thrilling, and I have to admit that I’m one of them. It’s fairly standard procedure, but I’m still a sucker for the way the facts which I’ve summarised above, emerge in the narrative only through hints and casual references in the dialogue or thoughts of the characters. This makes the glimpses and hints of what has happened in this alternative view of world history all the more tantalising and intriguing.

The plot

So that’s the dramatic and large-scale historical background against which Dick sets his handful of more or less humdrum characters, and shares their private worries and concerns.

Robert Childan runs American Artistic Handicrafts Inc, a successful business selling senior Japanese officials authentic Americana and antiques, from Mickey Mouse watches to handguns from the Wild West. He is trying to pull off a deal with a Mr Tagomi and goes with great trepidation to his office in the Nippon Times Building. Childan has completely assimilated the Japanese idea of ‘place’, the notion that everyone knows their place in hierarchical Japanese culture. So Childan is alert to keeping the black porters in their place, trying to gain favour and place by bowing and scraping to the Japanese and so on. This assimilation of Japanese values even extends to thinking in a highly fragmented, truncated, Japanese prose style.

An appointment was made for two o’clock. Have to shut store, he knew as he hung up the phone. No choice. Have to keep goodwill of such customers; business depends on them. (p.10)

Not only Childan’s but numerous other characters think and even speak in the same truncated style. It is a bit weird but gives a verbal coherence to the book which really distinguishes it and which I enjoyed.

He held the squiggle of silver. Reflection of the midday sun, like boxtop cereal trinket, sent-away acquired Jack Armstrong magnifying mirror. Or – he gazed down into it. Om, as Brahmins say. Shrunk spot in which all is captured. Both, at least in hint. The size, the shape. He continued to inspect dutifully. (p.219)

Frank Frink is a Jew whose tour of duty in the army got him out of the East, now controlled by the Nazis. He’s been working at a factory run by a Mr Wyndam-Matson but has just been fired for speaking out of turn. But a colleague, Ed McCarthy, suggests they go into business together, manufacturing fake ‘antique’ guns. They blackmail Wyndam-Matson, threatening to expose the fact that he is himself manufacturing fake antiquities as a side activity to his ostensible metal working factory, unless he gives them $2,000. He coughs up, and the pair set up a workshop in a ramshackle basement and start producing a new style, of contemporary jewelry designs, calling the company Edfrank Productions.

Wyndam-Matson has a mistress or girlfriend who irritates him, especially when she decides to tell him at length about the novel she’s reading, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. It is an alternative history whose author, H. Abendsen, speculates about what might have happened if Roosevelt hadn’t been assassinated, but had brought America out of the Depression and pursued aggressive anti-Nazi policies, such that America and Britain had won the Second World War. Nonsense, Wyndam-Matson snorts.

Frank Frink’s ex-wife Juliana Frink left him some while ago, and now scrapes a living as a judo teacher in the Mountain Zone between the occupied West and East coasts. We are introduced to her as she handles two lippy lorry drivers at a truck stop café. She takes one, an Italian, home to bed. Next morning she discovers he fought for the Italian army during the war and Dick uses the Italian’s wartime experiences to gives us more alternative war history, specifically about the campaign in North Africa. They both agree about how fanatical the British became as it became clear the Allies were going to lose, and about the brutality of their use of phosphorus bombs and napalm once the Germans were advancing across England.

More to the point, this guy, Joe Cinnadella, is also reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, and at points in their day Juliana picks it up and reads sections which lead to further comments on whether the right side won the wear, and why. Juliana happens to know that the author of the book, Abendsen, lives in the Rocky Mountain states, somewhere in Colorado, in a heavily fortified encampment which he fancifully calls The High Castle.

The Mr Tagomi that Robert Childan is so anxious to suck up to and sell a good quality piece of Americana to, himself only wants to buy it in order to give it as a gift to, and impress, a visitor from Europe, Mr Baynes. We watch Baynes fly across the Atlantic in one of the new atomic-powered airliners, and wind up a German he gets into conversation with and who turns out to be an unrepentant anti-semitic Nazi.

As the plot proceeds we learn that Baynes is not Swedish, as he pretends to be. His name is Rudolf Wegener, he is a member of the German Abwehr, and he has been sent by a faction of the German Partei to make contact with a retired 80-year-old Japanese general, General Tedeki, former Imperial Chief of Staff, here in San Francisco. Lots of heavy hints are dropped but it’s only at page 190 of this 250-page novel that we find out why.

In the office of Mr Tagomi, Baynes/Wegener reveals to General Tedeki that the German Wehrmacht are planning to create an ‘incident’ in the neutral zone of America, which will lead German forces to intervene, and which will be carefully arranged to draw the Japanese in, escalating diplomatic tension and then – the Wehrmacht are planning a sudden nuclear attack on the Japanese Home Island which will wipe them out. This top secret plan is named Operation Dandelion.

Barely has Wegener handed over a cigarette case full of microfilms proving his assertions when Mr Tagomi’s secretary rings up to announce that a number of Nazi goons are in the lobby throwing their weight around and demanding to be let up to Tagomi’s office. They have come to arrest Wegener. He gave himself away when he made contact with an Abwehr agent in a department store, who was being watched by the Nazi Sicherheitsdienst or SS.

To grasp this plotline it helps to understand that right from the start the Nazi state was divided into mutually loathing sections or departments, which competed and jostled with each other. The Wehrmacht is the army, the Abwehr which Wegener works for is the intelligence service, and the SS is staffed by psychopaths and sadists.

  • Dick has extrapolated the historical tensions which we know about from the history books, on for another 17 years after the end of the war, an intellectually interesting exercise
  • and dramatised these tensions, so that
  • we are witness to the contrasting attitudes of different Nazi officials, often deeply distrustful of each other
  • and, a t a higher level, as it were, we frequently overhear Japanese and American characters expressing their contempt for the endless internecine feuding of the unstable Nazi regime

This is where Freiherr Hugo Reiss, the Reichs Consul in San Francisco, comes in. He cordially dislikes his opposite number in the SS, Kreuz vom Meere, an officious thug. It is vom Meere who is overseeing the trailing and entrapment of Wegener. When he asks for co-operation, Reiss is inclined to delay and obfuscate. Until, that is, he receives a direct personal call from the new Head of the Partei, Kanzler Josef Goebbels. Who orders him to give full co-operation to the SS in the case of Wegener. Jawohl, mein Führer. He puts the phone down, shaking, while vom Meere watches with a brutal smile on his face.

This is the background to the armed goons who come to Mr Tagomi’s office to arrest him. However, they hadn’t bargained with Japanese pride, and in particular with Mr Tagomi’s fondness for authentic American antiques. Now that strand of the plot, which had been introduced right back at the start in Robert Childan’s antiques emporium, comes into play. Mr Tagomi takes an authentic Wild West Colt .44 out of his desk and points it at the door, with the evident approval of General Tedeki. When the SS men smash the door open and saunter towards Wegener, Tagomi shoots them both down. There will be consequences, but this is Japanese territory, so what precisely they will be…

Meanwhile, the scenes with Juliana Frink and her Italian lover, Joe Cinnadella, move on in counterpoint to the San Francisco scenes. First he accidentally on purpose misses the truck he was meant to be part-driving, which leaves without him. Then he suggests they drive to the nearest city, Denver, so he can show his new girl a good time. It’s on the way, in the car (her car), while he’s driving, that Juliana insists on reading out long excerpts from The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which leads to them discussing the national characteristics of the Italians, Germans, Russians, Americans and Japanese. In fact, suddenly and spontaneously she suggests that they drive on the hundred miles or so to the author’s supposed ‘castle’ redoubt up in the hills. Sure, says Joe, after we’ve had a good time in Denver.

But in Denver things turn bad. Joe has a haircut which reduces his hair to a close crop, and has it dyed blonde. He takes Juliana shopping but in a focused mechanical way. He makes sure she buys a low-cut blue dress and half-cup bra. They check into a swanky hotel and she is looking forward to a night on the town, when Joe brutally announces that they are going to dine early, then leave for the High Castle.

Finally, it dawns on Juliana that Joe is not Italian at all. He had been wearing a black hairpiece. He didn’t have a haircut, he simply removed the wig to reveal his blonde Aryan haircut. He is a German agent. He has been sent with a wad of cash to do whatever it takes to assassinate the author of the anti-German novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. ‘So why do you need me?’ Juliana whines pitifully. Because this Abendsen guy has a fondness for sexy black-haired Mediterranean types. Like Juliana. Hence the low cut dress. They’ll get invited in. Abendsen will be attracted to Juliana, while Joe does his dirty work.

Back in San Francisco, someone has reported that Frank is a Jew. He’s having a smoke on the sidewalk outside their workshop when white cops arrest him, take him downtown, confirm that he’s a Jew, and tell him he’s going to be shipped out to the Nazi East Coast.

Probably the biggest event – the one which unifies all the characters in speculating about it – is the death of Martin Bormann, the current Führer. Characters speculate on who will succeed him, with Mr Tagomi’s superiors holding an interesting briefing at which an official runs through the possible successors – including Goring, Heydrich, Goebbels and so on- giving fictitious biographies for what they’ve been doing since the war ended in 1947. For those of us who like actual history, alternative histories like this are always interesting because of the way they shed fresh light and different perspectives on what actually happened.

So:

  • will Wegener and Tedeki escape alive from Mr Tagomi’s office?
  • will Tedeki manage to get the message about Operation Dandelion back to his superiors in time for them to approach the relevant sections of the German state in order to get Operation Dandelion called off?
  • will Frank Frink be deported back to the east Coast and gassed by the Nazis?
  • and will Juliana and Joe find the High Castle of this Abendsen guy, manage to get admission, and murder him?

Madness

In fact, what happens is several of the characters have nervous breakdowns. In response to being told she is being so comprehensively used as cover in an assassination attempt Juliana has a florid breakdown, asking for pills, delirious, getting into the shower fully dressed, stabbing Joe in the neck with a razor blade and wandering down the hotel corridor stark naked, until hustled back to her room by a maid.

Similarly, Mr Tagomi, the day after the unpleasantness in his office, wanders the streets of San Francisco in a daze, fetching up at Robert Childan’s emporium, who rather forcefully sells him one of the new piece of jewelry, which Tagomi takes to a park bench and tries to get to reveal its secrets, shaking it, threatening it, shouting at it, begging it to open the door of the meaning of life.

All the way through the book Robert Childan is on the edge of sweaty-palmed panic. And he only needs to be reminded that he’s a Jew for Frank Frink to fall into a funk of fear, justifiably so, as it turns out.

This is the ground bass of Dick’s fiction. Characters live with gnawing anxiety which sooner or later blooms into goes madness, nervous breakdown, hallucinations. His texts deal you plots and characters but, like an alcoholic sizing up every room for its stash of booze, is constantly manoeuvring the reader to a place where he can let rip with pages of delirious, drug-fuelled, nervous breakdown prose, delirium, bewilderment, hallucinations, confusion, hysteria.

I wish I understood, he said to himself as he moved along the busy evening sidewalk, by the neon signs, the blaring bar doorways of Grant Avenue. I want to comprehend. I have to. But he knew he never would. Just be glad, he thought. And keep moving. (p.232)

Ideas and issues

All the characters are considerably more self-aware, given to long intense internal monologues or to lengthy thoughtful conversations, than most people I’ve met in my life. Much of their thoughts and dialogue is devoted to ideas. They are all much more interested in history than most people I’ve ever met, which is fortunate for it allows Dick, through their conversations, to pass along all kinds of backstory information about the course of events of the previous 15 years or so.

It is a very self-aware book. Dick makes it clear to us he knows what he’s doing, and his lead characters are also painfully self-aware at almost all moments.

Is alternative history a type of science fiction?

Being the very self-aware novelist that he is, Dick has two of his characters debate this very question. When he is invited to dinner with Paul and Betty Kasouras, the trio end up discussing The Grasshopper Lies Heavy (in the clipped verbless style which dominates so much of the text):

‘Not a mystery,’ Paul said. ‘On contrary, interesting form of fiction possible within the genre of science fiction.’
‘Oh no,’ Betty disagreed. ‘No science in it. Not set in future. Science fiction deals with future., in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.’
‘But,’ said Paul, ‘it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.’ (p.109)

There’s plenty of alternative history fiction in the world.

Whether some, all, or any of it qualifies as science fiction is a topic for a different essay.

Alternative histories within the story

Given that the main story is set in an alternative universe, and that half the characters in it are reading a book which gives a further alternative history, the novel thus contains or navigates no fewer than three realities:

  1. ‘real’ history – the one we’re living through
  2. the alternative history of the novel
  3. the alternative alternative history described at some length by H. Abendsen

These three realities curl and intertwine throughout the text, a little like a piece of classical music, with its main theme, secondary theme, and variations on both, reappearing throughout like silver threads. Or, alternatively, like the person standing between two parallel mirrors who sees their reflections stretching into infinity in both directions.

Secrets and lies are a central theme. Or truth and falsehood. Or reality and fantasy. At one point Baynes / Wegener reflects:

Perhaps if you know you are insane then you are not insane. or you are becoming sane, finally. Waking up. I suppose only a few are aware of all this. Isolated persons here and there. but the broad masses… what do they think? All these hundreds of thousands in this city. Do they imagine that they live in a sane world? Or do they guess, glimpse, the truth? (p.45)

Which sums up the broad streak of paranoia which runs throughout Dick’s work – that’s if you take his work very seriously. Or, if you are a tad more critical of his troubled worldview – this kind of thing (‘Look at me, see how I suffer, see how special I am!’) could be interpreted as the adolescent sense that I know this is all fake, but what of all the other poor ‘normals’? Immature.

Similarly, Dick and his characters are well aware of the power of fiction to lie and distort. Since almost every character seems to be reading H. Abendsen’s book, quite a few have extended dialogues or thought monologues about the uncanny power of fiction to create its own realities. These could be quoted to form the basis of a disquisition about fiction and fictions but… don’t we already know that? Isn’t that why people buy airport novels, so they can be completely transported on long haul flights or lying by the pool?

If you were an earnest literary type you could work this insight up into a profound discussion of the nature of fiction. Except it is a nature that pretty much everyone who’s ever read a novel is well aware of.

Childan and Kasoura, America and Japan

A prolonged thread is Childan’s on-again, off-again business relationship with a potential pair of Japanese clients, high-place Mr and Mrs Kasoura. He offers them a high value gift,in response to which they invite him to dinner, a scene which is a prolonged tour de force, describing with minute subtlety the wavering atmosphere and tone of the inscrutable orientals, as Childan desperately tries to be polite and submissive. His problems reach a kind of climax when he presents Mr Kasoura with an example of Edfrank’s new, modern, contemporary jewelry.

(In a painful earlier scene we had watched Frank Frink’s shambling, lanky partner, Ed, try to sell some of their new jewelry to Childan, and Childan’s deliberate humiliation of the salesman: here, as in every other aspect of his life, Childan is keen to maintain his place.)

In this ten-page scene (pp.168-179) Childan goes to visit Mr Kasoura at his office, to ask how his wife liked the new contemporary piece he had given him. Kasoura brings the piece from his deskdrawer and reveals that he never passed it on to his wife. He showed it tovarious colleagues who alllaughed at it for being a shapeless blob of metal. Childan feels justifiably humiliated. But then, Kasoura continues, he found himself becoming beguiled by it, attracted to its very formlessness and lack of design. After pondering why, he has come to the conclusion that is contains wu. At which Childan racks his brains to try and remember what the hell wu is. Is it even a Japanese quality or something else they’ve ripped off from the Chinese?

But, Kasoura continues, when he tried to explain this quality to his superiors, they still dismissed it but came up with a suggestion. The general population of South America is still mostly peasant, and they like good luck charms. One of Kasoura’s superiors has contacts with a man who manufactures and ships trinkets to South America by the tens of thousands. This piece might be a model for a new line of good luck charms and trinkets?

Dick is very careful to have Kasoura explain all this as if he himself is aloof and above mere business considerations. Childan, struggling to keep an absolute straight face throughout, suddenly realises he is being humiliated. Doubly humiliated. Not only did Kasoura start the conversation by saying the piece was junk. But then, having withdrawn that a little with the introduction of the concept of wu, has travelled all the way round to a new level of humilation, this time suggesting that not only is the piece junk, but that it would be appropriate for Childan to take part in an enterprise to mass produce and sell junk.

Childan is flooded with mortification and humiliation and begins to make his departure, promising to take up the contact Mr Kasoura has suggested. Does he read contempt in Kasoura’s eyes? Or professional satisfaction? Or lofty disdain for the whole business?

Suddenly his soul revolts at the endless kow-towing and abasement he has to go through and Childan decides to stand up for his country, its artists and manufactures. Abruptly he changes stance and demands an apology from Mr Kasoura. There is a very long silence as both men stand stock still. Then, very slowly, Mr Kasoura apologises. They shake hands. What expression is in his eyes? Even now, Childan doesn’t know. He leaves Kasoura’s office with a shattering sense that he has no idea what just happened. Did he just throw away the business opportunity of his life? Or did he just proudly stand up for American craftsmanship? Was he tricked into making a foolish decision? Or has he just shown a Jap what spine and character mean? Does Mr Kasoura now respect him? Or despise him even more?

I thought this was a really brilliantly calibrated scene, and more than some of the more obviously thriller-ish moments, really drove home Dick’s central theme of anxiety and disorientation.

The I Ching

Several characters – Frank Frink and Mr Tagomi and Juliana – use the I Ching methodology to make decisions, and Dick explains it at some length – the sorting of the forty-nine yarrow sticks whose shape or number indicates a hexagram, which then has to be looked up in The Book of Changes, which then gives a very oblique analysis of your current situation, and obscure advice on what to do next.

I found this whole theme of the book pretty boring, except insofar as it dramatised the intense anxiety of several of the key characters (Childan, Tagomi). They might as well have been examining the innards of chickens or reading patterns in tea leaves or consulting the stars.

Obviously its inclusion adds to the Japanese and generally oriental flavour of much of the prose and subject matter. More interesting, for me, was the several conversations the antique salesman Robert Childan has with Japanese customers. In these Dick very effectively dramatises the vast gap between Anglo-Saxon common sense and the ultra-fastidious and refined tastes and manners of the Japanese.

Finally, Juliana arrives at the Abendsen house which she finds is a perfectly normal suburban stucco-fronted place, with a little drinks party going on. She confronts Abendsen and in particular accuses him of using the I Ching throughout. Eventually he confesses that at every point, the choice of subject matter, characters, plots and development he consulted the oracle extensively.

Juliana then insists on asking for Abendsen’s I Ching equipment and asks the oracle whether The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is true. The oracle says it is.

I think what this means is Juliana, Abendsen and his wife all realise that the oracle is communicating to them from an alternative universe, from our universe – and that it has told them what really happened. In other words, the characters know that they are in an alternative, and secondary universe.

What’s odd, in the book, is how calmly everyone takes this, this interpenetration of realities. Juliana walks back to her car and the Abendsens get on with their drinks party, so calmly that I wondered if I’d completely misunderstood the ending.

Related links

Philip K. Dick reviews

Other fictional alternative histories

  • The Alteration by Kingsley Amis (1976) – a brilliantly imagined alternative reality in which the Reformation never happened and England is part of the ongoing Catholic Hegemony over all Europe
  • SSGB by Len Deighton (1978) – the Germans conquered England in 1940 and now, amid the ruins of London, Scotland Yard detective Douglas Archer tries to solve a murder which leads him to a massive conspiracy
  • Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis (1980) – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
  • Fatherland by Robert Harris (1992) – it is 1964, Nazi Germany won the Second World War, and in Berlin detective Xavier March investigates a murder which leads him to uncover the horrific fact at the heart of the German Empire

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

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
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
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 fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

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 passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring 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 – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke – a thrilling 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 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

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Red Gold by Alan Furst (1999)

The fifth of Alan Furst’s Night Soldiers series of historical espionage novels, and sequel to The World At Night, Red Gold picks up the career of French movie producer Jean Casson, and follows his further adventures in occupied Paris from 18 September 1941 until 5 April 1942. Once again the book is divided into ten or so ‘chapters’, each sub-divided into short sections headed by a datestamp – so there is a strong sense of the passage of time and the specificity of time.

Jean Marin

The 42-year-old is now hiding out in a poor neighbourhood under a false name – Jean Marin – and down to his last few francs, when he gets chatting to a crook in a low dive. He is recruited into joining a gang which is pulling ‘a job’ in a railway yard, where the gang break in, cosh a guard, and steal sacks of sugar. Flush with his share of the take, Casson goes to a low-life club, picks up a whore and is staggering towards a hotel when he is badly beaten and robbed by some toughs, before stumbling back to his flat.

He has barely awoken from a semi-conscious sleep when there’s a knock at the door and the police arrest him. Oh well. Only a matter of time. He is driven to an out-of-the-way police station where, to his surprise, the arresting officer offers him a job with the Resistance. He is driven to another office where he meets the French officer, Degrave, under whom he served, briefly, as an Army film director up at Sedan, during the German invasion of June 1940. In the same haphazard way as in the previous book, he finds himself being recruited into the Underground and tasked with contacting the communists, who have their own separate clandestine organisation.

In this book we are introduced to rather more characters, with independent storylines. Weiss is a communist agent. He instructs Renan, an old working class activist, to steal machine guns from the Schneider factory. Renan knows it is doomed, makes the attempt, is shot dead after the Germans are tipped off. Similarly, Weiss gets some old pistols and a hand grenade to a group of four students who make an amateurish assault on a German bullion lorry in the village of Aubervilliers, managing to get killed in the process.

In a later episode a young amateur patriot, Slevin, tries to assassinate a Luftwaffe pilot on a flight of stairs down to a Métro station but fails miserably. None of these incidents directly affect Casson. They are there, presumably, to create an atmosphere, to indicate the growing number of attacks made on Germans as the occupation enters its second year.

Casson contacts Kovar, a screenwriter and novelist he met before the war, very left-wing. An interesting character, Kovar marched with the communists but is more of an anarchist. He fills Casson in on the situation in Russia ie the Germans are at the gates of Moscow. Kovar agrees to see if he can put Casson in touch with the FTP, the communist Francs-Tireurs et Partisans. Sure enough, a few days later Casson is taken blindfolded to a safe house and interrogated by a 50-something woman, Lila Brasova, political commissar. Apparently satisfied, she says he and his people must put their money where their mouth is -ie give the FTP guns.

Later we see Brasova meeting with an NKVD officer named Juron, Weiss, who has been commissioning these ill-fated resistance efforts, and a senior NKVD executive, Colonel Vassily Antipov. (Those with good memories will remember Antipov as the mystery man who arrived in a Bulgarian village and recruited Khristo Stoianev right at the start of the first novel in the series, Night Soldiers.) They have a power conversation in which they try to assess whether Casson’s approach to them is genuine or a trap: Antipin tells Weiss the Centre (Moscow) thinks it’s a scam and wants Kovar and Casson liquidated. Give me a month to see if it’s a genuine approach, asks Weiss. OK.

In the event, at further meetings of this group, a deal is done whereby Casson gets to live but Kovar will be ‘sacrificed’. In a later scene we see Casson and Kovar meet one last time and the latter tell Casson he’s going to be making an exit. Towards the end of the novel Kovar evades an attempt by two FTP assassins to kill him, probably on a tip-off from the sympathetic Weiss.

Two strands dominate the second half of the novel:

Hélène

In The World At Night Casson had been desperately in love with the movie actress Citrine. In fact, he jumped off the boat taking him to freedom in England in order to swim back to France and try to be reunited with her. This novel starts a few months later when Casson has been unable to contact Citrine who was located at a hotel in the non-Occupied Zone. Half way through this book, Casson reads that Citrine has married a fellow movie director that he knows. Tant pis.

Luckily it doesn’t matter so much because Casson acquires a new ‘squeeze’, Hélène, the Jewish friend of Degrave’s mistress. She is being bullied by her superior at work, Victorine, who knows she is Jewish and progresses from bullying to extorting money from her. Throughout the novel there is a growing sense of concern about Hélène’s plight, as Casson and other characters read reports in the newspapers about Jews being rounded up, disappearing, and so on. He tries several avenues before speaking to a man, de la Barre, who arranges Hélène’s passage to the Non-Occupied Zone and onto a boat, the San Lorenzo, bound for freedom.

Smuggling guns

At the centre of the novel is a long mission undertaken by Casson and Degrave to collect guns from a tramp steamer arriving at Marseilles. This is told in meticulous detail, starting with a trip to Amsterdam (!) to see a lawyer who takes Casson on to visit a convict with a long political history, currently in gaol, one Visari. It is this venerable crook who, at their request, arranges the transport of French army machine guns from the Middle East to Marseilles.

Then Degrave and Casson drive a lorry down into the Non-Occupied Zone, on false papers. There’s a delay at the port where corrupt officials ask for more money. Finally, the crates of guns are loaded and surrounded by innocuous-looking sardine crates for cover. There follows a long, minutely described journey in a beaten-up old truck north through France. The map of the journey carries great conviction, as do the sights and sounds of central France in winter (it is December).

Unfortunately, they are pulled over by a carload of cocky young milice, ie right wing militia and there is a firefight in which the three youngsters are killed – Casson executing their wounded leader, before running their car over a cliff – but Degrave is mortally wounded and dies later in the cab. Casson takes his body to the priest’s house in a little village, who agrees to bury him, then on to the rendezvous at the Quai Gambetta in Chalon. Here he meets sympathisers who load the crates of machine guns onto a barge, burying them deep in gravel. Gravel which the contact, Henri, points out, is being taken north to Normandy. A lot of building going on along the coast, defences against an invasion.

Luna Park

With Hélène safely despatched on her trip to freedom, and the big gun-running job concluded, Casson is at a loose end and beginning to suffer, once again, from lack of funds. He moves into the cheapest possible hotel, counting the francs, before getting a job at the amusement park, Luna Park. All this time he has been using the identity Jean Marin, and lives in fear that he’ll be arrested and identified as the same man who broke out of Gestapo custody in the first novel.

Casson reads a newspaper and is horrified to see that the ship Hélène was due to leave France on, the San Lorenzo, was blown up in the harbour – probably Resistance sabotage. He is distraught at the thought that he might have been involved in bringing in the munitions which killed her, until he gets a message that Hélène is alive, a little shaken, but basically alright, and heading back to Paris.

In the final scenes Casson is beginning to go hungry and can’t resist getting back in touch with his ex-wife, Marie-Claire, in her luxury apartment in the 16th arrondissement. Here she not only gives him a bath and new set of clothes and jewellery to pawn but also has sex with him. Several times.

Marie-Claire had crept into the bed, then her bare bottom began looking for him. (p.238)

This is the turning point in the plotlines because Marie-Claire, with her impeccable connections among Paris’s élite, knows a senior figure in de Gaulle’s network. To Casson’s horror it is a short, fat, smug man he met a few times and took an instant dislike to, Gueze. Nonetheless, he agrees to meet him at the Bar Heininger (Furst fans know that the Bar Heininger features in every one of his novels, like a running gag). Gueze

  • gives some interesting analysis of the political situation among all the competing resistance groups, some right-wing, some communist, some backed by Army officers, some controlled by de Gaulle from London
  • arranges for a lecherous German records clerk, Otto Albers, to be blackmailed into ‘losing’ Casson’s records at the local Gestapo
  • knows the owner of the high class travel agency where Hélène works, and has a word, suggesting it would be lovely ‘favour’ if she could be despatched to the Lisbon bureau

Happy ending?

In the last ten or so pages there is a rather rushed sequence of events as Casson works with Weiss and a number of other agents in attempts to blow up barges carrying gasoline across France to the Mediterranean ports, where it will be shipped to North Africa to fuel Rommel’s war effort. Casson escapes arrest by a few minutes and two of Weiss’s operatives blow up a dam.

Back in Paris he gets two postcards, one apparently from Kovars indicating he made safely it to Mexico; one from Hélène safely ensconced in Lisbon. With these loose ends neatly tied up, Casson can settle to whatever undercover work his various managers, Weiss, Gueze or others, require. The novel ends on a cliffhanger as he hears footsteps approaching his room in a cheap hotel, and then a knock at the door.

Goodies? Baddies? We are not told.

Comment

Emotionless

Furst’s prose style is pared back, clipped, often skipping verbs to convey urgency. The characters register almost no emotion except fear. This makes for quick, exciting and often very evocative reading.

The Seine, south of Paris. A hard, bright dawn, the sun on frost-whitened trees. Factories and docks and sheds, half-sunk rowing boats, workers’ garden plots – stakes pulled over by bare vines. The Michelin factory, one end of it charred, windows broken out, old glass and burnt boards piled in a yard. Bombed, and bombed again. (p.194)

However, it can sometimes appear rather superficial – in the literal sense that you feel like you are fleeting over the surface of events. As with so many thrillers, any emotions the characters are experiencing are left so much to your imagination that, after a while, you get used to the characters actually having no emotions at all, and settle into reading the narrative as a simple succession of one damn thing after another, with no pauses or analysis.

For example, if I was Casson I think I’d be upset at some level by watching my colleague Degrave bleed to death, but Casson doesn’t break down at any point, he continues driving the lorry on to the rendezvous and then accompanies the barge to Paris and then resumes his ‘normal’ life, going straight into ‘meeting with lover’ mode. At some level this is not good for the reader who, I think, would welcome some occasional concession to human feeling.

In-depth knowledge of France and Paris

That said, there is no denying the depth of Furst’s knowledge of the French, of the customs and dishes of the parts of France his characters travel through and, above all, of Paris. At various moment his prose seems to echo the limpid simplicity of much mid-century prose, like Albert Camus’s.

Historical background

Similarly, this novel like its predecessors, is rich in historical background. The characters routinely read newspapers, listen to BBC broadcasts, or discuss the latest rumours, so that the reader is fully informed of the various developments of the Second World War, mainly the ongoing German attack on Russia which is the backdrop to the novel. In addition, at various points characters have conversations which bring out the attitudes and responses of the different political parties, the different elements of the Resistance and even of characters themselves to each new development.

It was particularly interesting to see how the characters reacted to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour ie some are distraught that the Americans are ‘defeated’; others delighted that previously isolationist America has now been forced into the war, which will cut it significantly shorter.

Sex as anti-suspense

But for some reason the novel never really gripped me. There are tense moments, and plenty of well-written scenes. Furst’s first two novels gripped you by the throat with their all-pervasive air of treachery and paranoia; they terrified me.

By contrast, a lot of the imaginative power of these latter novels is carried by the succession of sex scenes – by Furst’s sensual descriptions of one woman after another standing in her slip, undoing her skirt, pulling off her jumper, undoing her bra and generally stripping off for Casson’s (and the reader’s) delectation, in hotels and apartments across Paris. Sure, barges get blown up and a few people get shot (not that many, actually, for wartime) but the reader can be confident that within a few pages Casson will be feeling another old flame or current lover or temporary mistress stroking his thigh or pressing her bottom into his loins etc.

I think the juxtaposition of tender, sensuous love-making with nerve-wracking secret meetings or sudden violent action, is meant to intensify both, make you feel this is life really on the edge. But, for me, the certainty that another lissom 20-year-old with a willing bottom will be along in just a few pages undermined all the action scenes.

The soft porn quality of Casson’s seemingly endless progress through a succession of willing women gave the whole book a rather unreal sense of fantasy, and this, for me, spilled over into the undercover, espionage and action sequences, making them also feel like harmless fantasy. Furst’s first two novels felt genuinely tense because you felt the characters could die at any moment; you and they are entirely focused on the fraught political environment they were operating in.

By contrast, the way Casson escapes the Gestapo, survives the milice shootout, is selected for survival by the NKVD, is released by friendly police officers (twice), and gets out of a meeting room just a few minutes before the Germans arrive, is of a piece with the unspoken confidence that he’ll open his hotel door and find yet another gorgeous woman waiting in his bed, wearing nothing but a smile. All this sex is a relaxant, nice and soft and easy-going but, for me, ruining any sense of fear and tension.

Métro as character

A great deal of effort goes into describing the characters’ journeys across Paris, generally by Métro. The Métro map, the arrangement of lines and their junctions, is described more fully, and more repeatedly, than many of the actual characters.

Credit

Red Gold by Alan Furst was published in 1999 by HarperCollins. All quotes and references are to the 1999 HarperCollins paperback edition.

 Related links

The Night Soldiers novels

1988 Night Soldiers –  An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.
1991 Dark Star – The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)
1995 The Polish Officer – A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.
1996 The World at Night – A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)
1999 Red Gold – Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)
2000 Kingdom of Shadows
2003 Blood of Victory
2004 Dark Voyage
2006 The Foreign Correspondent
2008 The Spies of Warsaw
2010 Spies of the Balkans
2012 Mission to Paris
2014 Midnight in Europe
2016 A Hero in France

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by Simon on March 29, 2016  •  Permalink
Posted in Adventure, Novel, Second World War, Spy novel, Thriller
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Posted by Simon on March 29, 2016

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2016/03/29/red-gold-alan-furst/