Jayaprakash Satyamurthy
Knivesout no more
Here's something different - first, my own views on this classic New Wave SF novel (334 by Thomas M Disch), an excerpt from sff author M John Harrison's introduction to the book, the author himself talking about the book in an interview and then a couple of last thoughts by yours truly. Hah!!
I've just finished '334' by Thomas M Disch. A collection of connected stories, rather than a straight-out novel, it tells us about various people who live in an apartment building (the 334 of the title) in New York, sometime in the 2020s.
They live in a programmed, mediated world of consumerism, eugenics and mass-media, a world oddly like our own in tone if not in specifics. Rather than bringing this whole over-extended, over-populated dytopia to a crisis, Disch takes us through the mini-crises of individuals who are looking for the things their world hasn't given them - dignity, love, meaning, purpose - ultimately, when everything else is denied, just death.
It's a social realist novel set in a future that is already here in all the important, soul-crushing ways. Unlike a lot of major works of dystopian fiction, it doesn't offer us big, convenient theories about what went wrong. It's also something of an experiment in form, and not always an easy read. In my opinion, it's worth the effort.
M. John Harrison on 334:
'All that can be said about it in the end - and this is precisely where its status is most easily visible - is that it is about people. This is a novel about us and our precarious relationship with the real, narrated as a series of collisions between what the world is and what we would like it to be, between the kind of life we have now and the kind of life it may lead to.'
Thomas M. Disch on 334:
'In the six stories in the "334" series I tried to accomplish the same thing in another way - by underlining the ways in which that future is only a paraphrase of the late 60s. The basic themes of the book and the problems that its characters come up against derive what force they have from their present urgency. Indeed, if you think about it, this has always been the source of any writer's appeal to his contemporaries.
Why science fiction then? Because it works better. I think sf actually accomplishes what Zola hoped for - naturalism: that it is "experimental" in the scientific sense. It is a method of isolating key elements from the hurly-burly of the tumultuous present and dealing with them in a chemically pure state. In other words, extrapolation. Extrapolations may be very simple, or very complex. I think Damon Knight was the first one to point out, in a review of Charles Harness, that the beauty of a complex, many-stranded extrapolation is that all its elements should interconnect. How that interconnection can be accomplished, however, takes me to the brink of incoherence. At that point theory leaves off and practice must take over.
You'll notice that I've said nothing new. But let me still repeat myself.
Take "Angouleme" specifically. The central notion - of a gang of grade-school kids - was the subject of an article in New York magazine. Such gangs already exist in New York. Kids less than ten years old cooperate in muggings and holdups. Upon reflection, such precocity isn't to be wondered at. Television is a great accelerator and despoiler of that part of innocence that consists simply in ignorance. Conservatives very wisely insist that teevee should commerce only in those lies that preserve a healthful state of ignorance in the body politic, and liberals are seldom willing to admit that the destruction of those lies is apt also to destroy the social fabric. An argument as old, at least, as Ibsen. Well, "Anglouleme" is set in a future in which even ten-year-olds have the sophistication of a member of SDS today. In ways this is a specious sophistication, as the story points out, but not in every way. I couldn't write the "334" stories in a contemporary setting, because too many of their elements are "shocking" or "controversial" as things stand now. And this gives them a false glamor.'
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I think that's an important and interesting point: that a novel like 334 is set in the future not because it is extrapolative in nature, but to distance itself from the obscuring flurry of sensationalism and controversy that would greet setting its contents in a contemporary setting.
SF isn't just a way to imagine the a future - it's a genre that lets us hold a mirror up to the present. Or something like that.
I've just finished '334' by Thomas M Disch. A collection of connected stories, rather than a straight-out novel, it tells us about various people who live in an apartment building (the 334 of the title) in New York, sometime in the 2020s.
They live in a programmed, mediated world of consumerism, eugenics and mass-media, a world oddly like our own in tone if not in specifics. Rather than bringing this whole over-extended, over-populated dytopia to a crisis, Disch takes us through the mini-crises of individuals who are looking for the things their world hasn't given them - dignity, love, meaning, purpose - ultimately, when everything else is denied, just death.
It's a social realist novel set in a future that is already here in all the important, soul-crushing ways. Unlike a lot of major works of dystopian fiction, it doesn't offer us big, convenient theories about what went wrong. It's also something of an experiment in form, and not always an easy read. In my opinion, it's worth the effort.
M. John Harrison on 334:
'All that can be said about it in the end - and this is precisely where its status is most easily visible - is that it is about people. This is a novel about us and our precarious relationship with the real, narrated as a series of collisions between what the world is and what we would like it to be, between the kind of life we have now and the kind of life it may lead to.'
Thomas M. Disch on 334:
'In the six stories in the "334" series I tried to accomplish the same thing in another way - by underlining the ways in which that future is only a paraphrase of the late 60s. The basic themes of the book and the problems that its characters come up against derive what force they have from their present urgency. Indeed, if you think about it, this has always been the source of any writer's appeal to his contemporaries.
Why science fiction then? Because it works better. I think sf actually accomplishes what Zola hoped for - naturalism: that it is "experimental" in the scientific sense. It is a method of isolating key elements from the hurly-burly of the tumultuous present and dealing with them in a chemically pure state. In other words, extrapolation. Extrapolations may be very simple, or very complex. I think Damon Knight was the first one to point out, in a review of Charles Harness, that the beauty of a complex, many-stranded extrapolation is that all its elements should interconnect. How that interconnection can be accomplished, however, takes me to the brink of incoherence. At that point theory leaves off and practice must take over.
You'll notice that I've said nothing new. But let me still repeat myself.
Take "Angouleme" specifically. The central notion - of a gang of grade-school kids - was the subject of an article in New York magazine. Such gangs already exist in New York. Kids less than ten years old cooperate in muggings and holdups. Upon reflection, such precocity isn't to be wondered at. Television is a great accelerator and despoiler of that part of innocence that consists simply in ignorance. Conservatives very wisely insist that teevee should commerce only in those lies that preserve a healthful state of ignorance in the body politic, and liberals are seldom willing to admit that the destruction of those lies is apt also to destroy the social fabric. An argument as old, at least, as Ibsen. Well, "Anglouleme" is set in a future in which even ten-year-olds have the sophistication of a member of SDS today. In ways this is a specious sophistication, as the story points out, but not in every way. I couldn't write the "334" stories in a contemporary setting, because too many of their elements are "shocking" or "controversial" as things stand now. And this gives them a false glamor.'
------------
I think that's an important and interesting point: that a novel like 334 is set in the future not because it is extrapolative in nature, but to distance itself from the obscuring flurry of sensationalism and controversy that would greet setting its contents in a contemporary setting.
SF isn't just a way to imagine the a future - it's a genre that lets us hold a mirror up to the present. Or something like that.
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