Similarities Between Their Works
Both
writers shared themes. That this is so,
however, is unsurprising, as Dick for much of his career had to write within
the constraints of American SF, while Ballard has admitted that, his first
short stories, including his first, ”Passport to Eternity" were:
“influenced by a story by Jack Vance, called
"Meet Miss Universe". It was the
best sort of that American science fiction.
"Passport to Eternity" was a summary of all the American SF
I'd been reading over the past year in Canada.
(......) I wanted to write for
the American magazines. It didn't occur
to me to write for British ones.....” (V/Search, 1984, p.118).
Thus the
use of the stock themes of the genre such as time travel, the influence of the
media on the lives of individuals, future dystopias and holocausts and so on by
these writers is understandable, and it is difficult to ascertain any strong
Anglo-American differences between them as Ballard has himself admitted that he
was influenced by American SF. Even the
theme of altered/fake realities which Dick made his own was another stock theme
of the genre. Aldiss told me:
“At the start of the Cold War, fake realities
were in vogue in science fiction.
Everyone wrote about them, but Dick took the theme over, partly because
he was living in a series of them. He
had an amazing inventiveness, but was also a great synthesiser of pre-existing SF things. At the back of it all, of course, was his
drug habit” (Interview with James Burr, 1996).
Thus the fact that both writers wrote time
travel or fake reality stories doesn’t say very much - virtually every SF
writer wrote stories using the same themes.
However, there are a number of stories where the basic plot of certain
stories are the same. Does the way
Ballard and Dick handle the discourse of these plots tell us anything?
In 1954 Dick wrote a story called “Small Town”
which appeared in Amazing in 1954.
In it he tells the story of a man who is hated by his wife who is having
an affair with his friend. He has a
terrible job and few friends his only real passion being the perfect model of
his town that he has been building in his basement. After losing his job, the man starts to alter
the town, removing enemies’ houses, making himself the Mayor of the new city
hall, and so on. On completing his
changes he disappears, his wife and her lover assuming that he has finally gone
into his own world. It is only when they
drive to the police station to report his disappearance that they notice that the
factory is gone replaced by a new city hall, and as they realise what has
happened they are pulled over by some cops from a new police station.
Dick wrote that:
“Here the frustrations of a defeated small
person - small in terms of power, - gradually become transformed into something
sinister: the force of death...... Be
careful as to how you misuse (the put-upon person); he may not secretly wish to
rule, he may wish to destroy.” (Dick, 1987, Second Variety, p493).
This is interestingly against many of the
conventions of 50s SF, as it was generally very much in favour of preserving
the status quo. Heroes were generally in
the military and/or scientists, and they were the people in power, the thinking
being that who would want to read about a bum meeting a Martian? Aldiss noted this difference between Dick and
his contemporaries:
“Dick didn't go in for the traditional American
optimism of writers such as Robert.A. Heinlein, and he seemed to possess a
superior creativity. There are often
little human touches in an inhuman world, which is something that sets him
apart from much of the American science-fiction of the time. He also saw no glorious future for
technology. For Dick technology was
little mechanical things scurrying around in the gutter” (Aldiss in Arena, 1996).
There are any number of reasons for this. Partly, as poverty-stricken SF writer, he was
denied not only the status and economic power that comes with wealth, but also
the prestige of the “serious” writer.
Secondly, his agoraphobia and other mental problems led to his life
being centred very much around his own home.
The impact he thus had on the world around him was limited. And thirdly, someone who is virtually
house-bound, has certain interests in the nature of and perception of reality,
and was living in Berkeley in the 1960s, only had a limited choice of passing
the time - taking drugs was almost an inevitability. Thus as part of the counterculture he was
almost certain to be opposed to the application of power by the select
few. Thus by writing a story about an
utterly impotent man who finally gains power over those who scoff at him, Dick
could have been writing a wish-fulfilment; where he had in many ways been
failed by the American Dream, he was writing a story where this established
order was brought down by the power of one man’s imagination - an idea that
would have been irresistible to Dick as he typed away late at night. (Indeed, Dick’s paranoia and pessimism in a
field which at the time was generally optimistic, can be seen in his attitude
to psi powers and superhuman mutants.
The prevailing attitude in SF in the 50s was that mutants were superior,
and so normal people should view them as our leaders. However, Dick’s view was
that:
“Maybe from their superevolved lofty level we
wouldn’t seem worth leading. Anyhow, even if they agreed to lead us, I felt
uneasy as to where we might end up going.
It might have something to do with buildings marked SHOWERS but which
really weren’t” (Dick, The Father-Thing, 1987, p474).
However, Ballard’s “small town” story is in some
ways different. In “The Last World of
Mr. Goddard” (1967) Ballard describes the life of an elderly man who lives
alone and works as a clerk in a department store. Every night he examines his model of the town
in which he lives - a town where tiny people go about their daily business
under his benevolent gaze. However,
Goddard has no desire to rule these people; he simply uses his observations to
create small-talk with his colleagues, to see which people look in need of
advice. However, one day his cat tips
the town over and the little people try to escape only to be eaten by the
cat. Again, as in Dick’s story, events
in the model town are repeated in the real one, Mr Goddard finally leaving his
house and finding himself alone on the deserted streets.
The reason for the very different ending to such
a similar story, is directly related to Ballard’s nationality. As an English writer who was interested in
the Surrealists’ work and the nature of the unconscious, Ballard could write a
story such as this, where he could project Goddard’s voyeuristic sociopathology
(after all, most of his “interaction” with his neighbours was by watching them
in the model) onto the outside world, without the restrictions of American
SF. Indeed, Ballard has said that, for
him, SF was a genre that enabled him to write the kind of non-naturalistic
fiction he wanted to write - but then again he made his name as part of the New
Wave. Dick, on the other hand, was restricted by the genre’s rules (i.e.
events must be scientifically possible, the story must be “idea-led” as opposed
to character-led etc).
Further proof for this reading can be found in
two other stories that share similar plot devices. Both Ballard’s “Time of Passage” (1967) and
Dick’s “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” (1966) describe the lives of the
characters as time flows backwards.
However, Ballard uses the premise as a way of exploring human reactions
to events (and how events are, or can be, related to human action), and has
great fun with such concepts as the main character receiving a gold watch at
the “start” of his career as a token of amiable good will. He also uses this simple idea to in a
pathetic way - for months he feels depressed, and doesn’t go to work, his
feelings increasing until it is time for him to go to the cemetery to collect
his wife. Dick’s story on the other hand
is a mish-mash of implausibility and half-baked ideas. Whereas Ballard offers no explanations as to
why time is going backwards, Dick is forced to create a pseudo-scientific
machine that makes time do this.
Similarly, he has semantic problems as to which tense to use when
writing a cause-and-effect plot-driven tale (characters say “Goodbye” when they
meet, for example, but then have a perfectly ordinary conversation before they
part, and say “hello”, for example.)
Other examples of two stories with a similar
premise are Ballard’s “Now Wakes the Sea” (1967) and Dick’s “Breakfast at
Twilight” (1954), both of which deal with “time-slips”. In the former a man sees a giant primeval sea
washing over his suburban town. One
night, he walks into the sea, sees a spectre-like woman, and accidentally falls
down a shaft. Two days later an
investigating policeman visits some archaeologists who are working in the
shaft, and have found two skeletons. The
archaeologist informs the policeman that the skeletons can’t be the missing man
as they were laid down during the Triassic era, and so are 200 million years
old. The man had obviously somehow
slipped back to the Triassic era, when his town was covered with water, and
died there.
In
Dick’s story, it is 1970, and a normal suburban family wake to have breakfast,
when their front door is kicked in by a group of soldiers. The soldiers are amazed to find a house in
the area as the entire neighbourhood has been bombed flat. The soldiers tell them that it is 1980 and
that the country is at War with the Soviets and is a disease-ridden
wasteland. The family are thus presented
with a choice; either try to make a new life in the hellish future, or wait for
the next bomb raid to perhaps push them back in time as the bomb raid the
previous night had brought them forwards.
Seeing the misery of the future, they crowd in the cellar, and their
destroyed house returns to 1970. But
they now know that it is only a matter of years until the War happens, but by
then there will be no slipping back.
Here again, as in the previous two stories, the
differences between the handling of two stories with the same “time-slip”
premise are ultimately Anglo-American.
Dick’s story, originally published in Amazing, was written within
the rigid confines of 50s American SF, and intended for sale in one of the pulp
magazines. Thus there is a strong
adventure-element - bombs, guns, soldiers describing the atomic wasteland etc,
and there is also a pseudo-scientific explanation for why the events of
the story happen. In this case, “the concentrated energy (of the bombing
raid), ......the destruction of matter, sucked the house into the future” (Dick,
Second Variety, 1987, p276).
Ballard on the other hand was not writing for
the pulp magazines, but already had a contract for a number of short story
collections with Berkeley Books. Also,
unlike Dick who was trying to support himself solely by his writing and thus wrote
over thirty short stories a year during the mid-fifties, Ballard had a
full-time job, thus could craft his stories in such a way that he was pleased
with them as literature, rather than just so they could be quickly sold. Also, Ballard was more interested in
exploring the unconscious of the protagonist through a surrealist symbolism
where his unconscious mind is somehow projected onto external reality. Here, as in “Time of Passage”, the “idea” of
time flowing backwards or of slipping in time (which was supposed to be the
core of SF stories), was not as important as the symbolism of returning to the
womb. Indeed, in “Now Wakes the Sea”,
the protagonist finds himself waist-deep in the sea, sinking “in the shoals of
luminous algae”, this primeval sea representing the biological soup from which
all life, not just an individual life as in the case of the womb, springs. When Ballard writes these “water stories” he
is exploring the protagonist’s desire to return to the past, to a time of
preconsciousness. It is important that
the protagonist is recovering from a nervous breakdown and describes the sea
as, “.....a sort of memory......” (Ballard, The Disaster Area, 1979, p86).
As has been already mentioned, both writers were
interested in representations of reality.
Ballard once tried to question the nature of reality by planning a
performance art “happening” where someone would try to rob a bank by holding up
a card with the word “Pistol” written on it, the inspiration coming from the
fact that a robbery using a toy gun is still considered as armed robbery in the
eyes of the law. This questioning of
representations of reality is very similar to the surrealist painter Magritte’s
painting La Trahisons des Images, where the viewer is reminded that the painting
of the pipe is not a pipe. Dick
actually wrote a novel based on this premise.
In Time Out Of Joint , the characters believe it is 1959, until
the hero "goes sane", and realises that it is really 1996. This 'finding of sanity' is ingeniously
described, in one 'episode' the hero is standing at a soft-drink stand, when it
disappears to be replaced by a piece of paper with the words “SOFT-DRINK STAND”
written on it.
Next week: The Differences between their works.
Reference List
Reference List
Aldiss, B.W. (1970) The Shape of Further Things, Faber and Faber, London.
Aldiss, B.W. (1973) Billion Year Spree: History of Science Fiction, Weidenfield and Nicholson, London.
Aldiss, B.W. (1996) Interview with James Burr.
Aldiss, B.W., Weldon, F. (1994) Arena, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).
Allen, R. (1991) "Empire, Imperialism and Literature" in Allen, R., Calder, A., Haveley, C.P., Martin, G. and Rossington, M. (eds) (1991) End Of Empire, The Open University, London.
Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Last World of Mr Goddard" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.
Ballard, J.G. (1967) "The Gentle Assassin" in The Day of Forever, Panther Books, London.
Ballard, J.G. (1979) "Now Wakes The Sea” in The Disaster Area, Panther Books, London.
Ballard, J.G. (1980) "Time of Passage" in The Venus Hunters HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Ballard, J.G. (1981) Hello America, Vintage, London.
Carter, P.A. (1977) The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction, Columbia University Press, New York.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Meddler" in Beyond Lies The Wub: Volume One Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Breakfast At Twilight" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Small Town" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Prominent Author" in Second Variety: Volume Two Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Sales Pitch" in The Father-Thing: Volume Three Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1987) "Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday" in We Can Remember It For You Wholesale: Volume Five Of The Collected Stories, HarperCollinsPublishers, London.
Dick, P.K. (1991) Ubik, Vintage Books, New York.
Dick, P.K. (1994) Horizon, BBC (originally broadcast in 1994).
Dick, P.K. (1996) Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, HarperCollins Publishers, London.
Galen, R. (1996) Interview with James Burr.
Priest, C, (1978) “New Wave” in Holdstock, R. (ed) Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, Cathay Books, London.
Sutin, L. (1991) Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, HarperCollins, London.
Sutin, L. (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, Vintage, New York.
V/Search, (1984) J.G. Ballard, Vale and Juno, San Francisco.
Weldon, F. (1996) Interview with James Burr.
Wilson, C. (1976) Strength To Dream, Sphere Books, London.
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