Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 (33 page)
Read Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels 1985-2010 Online
Authors: Damien Broderick,Paul di Filippo
[1]
E.g., Entries 30, 40, 54, 71, 81, 91.
60
J. G. Ballard
(2000)
EXCEPT AT THE VERY
beginning of his career, J. G. Ballard (who died in 2009) was always a hard sell outside his UK homeland. When he first began appearing in American science fiction magazines in the late fifties and early sixties, with his elegant, piercing surrealism and world-spanning cataclysms—consider 1962’s
The Voices of Time
and 1966’s
The Crystal World
—he was greeted with some warmth, as an heir to such British disaster writers as John Wyndham and John Christopher. But by the time of science fiction’s New Wave and Ballard’s increasing experimentalism, he became anathema to the fundamentalist technocratic wing of the field. This phase of his career surely climaxed in 1970 with Doubleday’s pre-release pulping of his already printed book of “condensed novels,”
The Atrocity Exhibition
, deemed obscene and libelous at the last minute by Mr. Doubleday himself.
Undaunted, Ballard forged ahead with such seminal novels as
Crash
,
Concrete Island
and
High Rise
. But his profile remained stuck at a certain plateau until the publication in 1984 of
The Empire of the Sun
, and its subsequent Spielbergization in 1987. This autobiographical transfiguration of Ballard’s World War II childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp in Shanghai brought him new attention and stature, in his native England at least, including annual shortlisting for various literary prizes.
Even so, in America—a country Ballard was always been critically yet lovingly obsessed with—his reputation and sales never really soared. His novel just prior to Super-Cannes, the admirable Cocaine Nights, went two years after British publication without an American edition, and when it finally appeared it was issued by Counterpoint Press: a distinguished imprint, yet surely not one of the larger houses. The reason for this neglect and inattention undoubtedly lies not in any difficulty of language or narrative, for Ballard’s prose is seductive and pellucid and his stories compelling, but in the harsh truths he chooses to render. Consider that The Atrocity Exhibition was alternately titled Love and Napalm: Export USA, and you have Ballard’s themes and topics in a nutshell. Our entry here does not deviate, even as it accosts a global malaise.
The plot of
Super-Cannes
is remarkably simple. A young doctor, Jane Sinclair, and her older husband, cashiered aviator Paul Sinclair, arrive in the French planned residential-community-cum-business-park, Eden-Olympia, for an extended contractual assignment. Jane will assume the duties of the community’s physician, while Paul, our narrator, rests and recuperates from the smash-up of his small plane some months ago. But Eden-Olympia proves to be a whited sepulcher, rife with old-fashioned murder, infidelity and treachery, and also seething with postmodern neuroses and newfangled megalomania. These traits are fostered by the enigmatic staff psychiatrist Wilder Penrose (note a name blending those of a famous film director and a famous theorist of consciousness), who will eventually prove to be the worm at the heart of the hothouse rose.
The crack in Penrose’s deadly game—a crack that Paul Sinclair will deliberately grip and pry apart—lies in the mass-murder that occurred a few months prior to their arrival, when the former physician, David Greenwood, began systematically slaughtering some of the highest placed executives of this Mediterranean utopia. Paul Sinclair’s growing identification with the dead Greenwood eventually culminates in a fusion not unforeseeable yet still totally potent.
On the surface, we have a tale that might almost have issued from the pen of Daphne Du Maurier, ripe for a Hitchcockian transformation to the screen.
[1]
But of course the gulf between the sensibilities of Du Maurier and Ballard is immense.
Ballard is a Hermes of “inner space,” a term he popularized during the New Wave. Whether limned through omniscient narration or firsthand, as here, the psychic landscapes of Ballard’s characters assume a heft and presence congruent to, and substantial as, his meticulously rendered outer geographies (the imaginary resort of Vermilion Sands, the atom bomb-racked atolls of the Pacific, Cape Canaveral succumbing to a plague of Martian dust). The Jungian and Freudian swamps into which Paul and Jane Sinclair plunge with perverse eagerness, lured on by the will-o’-the-wisps of their fellow debauched Eden-Olympians, are the real terrain of the story. Spiked with all of Ballard’s trademarked tropes unrepentantly arrayed—the drained swimming pool, the downed pilot, the sexualized auto-crash, the JFK assassination—as well as his gnomic dialogue and black, black humor, this book is also a captivating Chandlerian mystery whose solution is assembled from honest clues without scanting or cheating.
But at least as important as the psychological explorations are the sociocultural commentary and extrapolative contrarianism for which Ballard is famous. Sf author Bruce Sterling has maintained that out of the past fifty years of science-fictional forecasts, no one has captured the evolving lineaments of our world better than Ballard. Indeed, in sketching the rough beast continually being born out of the confluence of media and dreams, this book comes closer to a report on tomorrow’s headlines than many a “hardcore” science fiction novel. Wilder Penrose’s theory on dealing with modern insanity—”Psychopathy is its own most potent cure, and has been throughout history. At times it grips entire nations in a vast therapeutic spasm”—raises frissons of recognition in the post-September 11th landscape. And Ballard produces actual shudders when he writes, “Like all the graffiti at Eden-Olympia—a fifty-million-dollar office building and a few francs’ worth of paint turns it into something from the Third World.”
Although Ballard had not written a book in which the science fictional elements were foregrounded since at least
The Day of Creation
, the focus here on the abyss before us marked this novel as the work of our bravest oracle.
[1]
Ballard name-checks Hitchcock in Chapter 16; these two mordant, icy auteurs share many qualities, an observation that has not found its way into print before. At least the comprehensive book-
length study by Roger Luckhurst,
The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard
, has no index citation for the filmmaker.
61
Michel Faber
(2000)
CONVENTIONALLY
, horror is treated as a unified genre, a useful marketing category, its products conveniently compartmentalized in the same way that booksellers shelve together all their fantasy stock, their science fiction, their thrillers and their chick lit. However, the curious thing about horror is that the term does not in essence describe a set of tropes or venues—which is notably, if not universally, true of sf and fantasy—but rather a readerly reaction, a frisson, an emotional climate. The set of signifiers that are associated with horror—werewolves and zombies, ghosts and monsters, biological strangeness and madness, to name a few—can be utilized in
echt
fantasy or science fiction, leaving the host genre dominant, with a horror overlay. Whereas the mere appearance of an elf or unicorn—sans explicit scientific rationale—is enough to denote a fantasy, and the mere appearance of a spaceship or alien—sans overt magical basis—is enough to denote a work of science fiction, the mere visitation of a bona fide ghost does not destroy the science-fictionality of a work, as we have seen in Pat Murphy’s
The Falling Woman
(Entry 7).
Horror sf, or sf horror, has a long and notable heritage, extending back at least as far as Guy de Maupassant’s “The Horla” and Ambrose Bierce’s “The Damned Thing.” Lovecraft famously synchronized stark cosmological realities as distilled by contemporary astronomers with horror motifs in his
Cthulhu Mythos
stories. Eric Frank Russell, a dab hand at conventional horror stories for the pulps, injected shudders into his sf novel Sinister Barrier. Colin Wilson pioneered space vampires in his The Mind Parasites. Many of the films of David Cronenberg qualify, as does Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic, and Ridley Scott’s famous series that began with Alien. More recently in prose fiction, Michael Shea has made something of a specialty of sf horror, notably with his award-nominated novella “The Autopsy,” which for a long while stood at the acme of this hybrid kind of tale.
But the arrival of Michel Faber’s first novel,
Under the Skin
, dethroned Shea, and the book seems likely to occupy the pinnacle for a while, so mercilessly, brilliantly creepy is it.
Fittingly enough, we begin intimately, as if parasitically riding the shoulder of a woman named Isserley, while she prowls the highways of Scotland in her beat-up car, looking for hitchhikers. Isserley favors brawny males, and the reader’s first supposition—artfully fostered by Faber’s minimal clues, delivered in elegant prose seasoned with a stream of Isserley’s thoughts—is that the woman is a sex addict. Isserley pictures men naked, dreams of shifting them about into different positions.
When Isserley finally secures a suitable male, her conversation seems to trend in that same direction. We share the hitchhiker’s thoughts, increasing our anxiety for him at the hands of…a dangerous, unstable nymphomaniac? But then comes the first of many jolts derailing our preconceptions. At the flick of a switch, hidden needles filled with a drug spring up and paralyze her rider-victim. The narration cuts away as, we presume, she disposes of him offstage, in some unknown fashion and to some unknown fate.
Another day, and Isserley hunts again. We are now determined she is a serial killer. Ah, but of what stripe? Talk of comrades at a farm lead us to believe she’s part of some Manson-like cult. But little by little, in excruciatingly extracted bits and pieces, as if fragments of a corpse are washing up onto the beach Isserley touchingly loves, the reality is delivered to us. Seldom has a “big reveal” been so expertly and tantalizingly withheld.
Isserley is an alien, surgically altered to resemble an attractive human woman, but only upon cursory inspection. “The rest of her was a funny shape, though. Long skinny arms with big knobbly elbows… Knobbly wrists too, and big hands…but narrow, too, like chicken feet. And tough, like she’d done hard work with them…no disguising how short her legs were. Still, those tits…” It’s no wonder Isserley looks odd, given that
this
is the real conformation of her species, seen undisguised in Amlis Vess, rich scion of the alien corporation that has set up a feedlot on earth, to produce luxury meats for consumption on the home planet:
He stood naked on all fours, his limbs exactly equal in length, all of them equally nimble. He also had a prehensile tail, which, if he needed his front hands free, he could use as another limb to balance on, tripod-style. His breast tapered seamlessly into a long neck, on which his head was positioned like a trophy. It came to three points: his long spearhead ears and his vulpine snout. His large eyes were perfectly round, positioned on the front of his face, which was covered in soft fur, like the rest of his body.
Amlis Vess has come to inspect his holdings, and at this point Isserley’s sad, predictable, harsh life goes into the offal bin. Vess is a crusader, a kind of PETA acolyte who believes that the “vodsels” (humans) are the same “under the skin” as Isserley and her cohorts. Vess’s visit and beliefs upset Isserley, eventually making her sloppy and undermining her orderly exile.
