According to another of Dick’s eventual theories, the world as we perceive it is a Black Iron Prison. Arnold writes, “The Black Iron Prison is not localized to our time period or even ancient Rome, Dick says. It exists in all times and places, cutting through the laminated layers of reality . . . The Black Iron Prison casts a disguise over itself, placing life forms in an illusory bubble of a reality that conceals its true nature. We journey through our lives perceiving the world as ordinary and normal, when in fact the ordinary world is merely a facade papered over the iron bars of the Black Iron Prison.”
Cityscape inspired by Philip K. Dick’s Ubik. Illustration by Aleksandr Dochkin.
Referencing such conceptions, philosopher Simon Critchley in the New York Times gets to the heart of what links the Exegesis with Philip K. Dick’s fiction, and so much of the SF genre it indelibly shaped: “This is the idea that reality is a pernicious illusion, a repressive and authoritarian matrix generated in a dream factory we need to tear down in order to see things aright and have access to the truth.” It’s impossible to deny how thoroughly this idea pervaded the next three decades of science fiction.
Of course, Dick himself contributed with the VALIS trilogy, an autobiographical series of novels based on both the experience and his interpretations of it. In an analysis on his conceptual fiction site, writer Ted Gioia notes, “Sci-fi novels are rarely autobiographical, but VALIS is not your typical sci-fi book. Indeed, it is the strangest work of genre fiction I’ve ever read. Even if you’re familiar with Dick’s other major books, nothing in them prepares you for this one.”
The Exegesis continued as long as Dick was alive to write it. It fed into itself, an ouroboros of meaning, interpretation, reinterpretation. Dick often summed up everything he’d theorized so far, came to a conclusion of a sorts, and then was off and running in an entirely new direction.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, Dick wrote: “What I have shown . . . is that our entire world view is false; but, unlike Einstein, I can provide no new theory that will replace it. However, viewed this way, what I have done is extraordinarily valuable, if you can endure the strain of not knowing, and knowing you do not know.” Though not speculative fiction itself—though certainly speculative—the Exegesis taps into some of speculative fiction’s truest pleasures and terrors: both the strain of not knowing, and the certainty of the universe as infinitely unknowable.
NICK MAMATAS
The Empress of the Sensual: Kathy Acker
Kathy Acker (1944–1997) did not write science fiction; she was science fiction. Acker was fantasy as well. Specifically, she was a cyberpunk, a cyborg, and one of the Endless. If speculative fiction is an exploration of unknown worlds, of places beyond the borderlands, Kathy Acker is that tempting, forbidden space we cannot yet comprehend.
Acker’s own work—mostly fiction for lack of a better word, but also essays and other pieces—was intensely personal and formally rigorous. Even before she was a published writer, her great subject was her own self. She and scholar/musician/artist Alan Sondheim made a pornographic video of sorts with early half-inch black-and-white reel-to-reel videotape in 1974. Blue Tape features the least sexy blowjob ever, and in-depth power struggles as the pair chat, write one another letters, and contend with power, memory, the limitations of the brand-new personal medium, and one another. Blue Tape calls to mind Victorian-era epistolary romances, while presaging the amateur porn boom of the 1980s. Blue Tape wasn’t a work of science fiction so much as it was an act of science fiction, with new technology overdetermining human relationships.
With her prose, Acker combined the memoirist’s focus on the agonies of the family with the postmodern technique of appropriation, i.e., she wrote about her tempestuous childhood and sexual hang-ups, and “stole” stuff from other writers ranging from Dickens to William Gibson. As Acker’s primary subject was herself; unusually for novelists, her own face appeared on the front covers of many of her books. But if you have not seen them, don’t worry, just recall Delirium from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic. Acker, with her buzz cut, huge eyes, and ferocious makeup, was Gaiman’s model, and Acker’s work is often as delirious as the character—“Cynthia lays down on the street and sticks razor blades vertically up her arm. The bums ask her if she needs a drink” is a typical line from her novel Great Expectations. Incidentally, that book begins in a familiar way: “My father’s name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Phillip, my infant tongue . . .”
Acker was a fairly obscure author in the United States, where she was more often assigned in college classrooms than read for pleasure, but in the 1980s she was huge in the United Kingdom. There, Acker appeared on television, performed alongside industrial artist-provocateur Genesis P-Or-ridge, had her work reviewed in music magazines, and ran with a crowd that included Gaiman and Alan Moore. Literary critic Roz Kaveney, who knew Acker during this period, said of the author in an extensive remembrance on her old LiveJournal account (of all things): “Kathy was never all that interested in science fiction, but she saw in William Gibson’s work a corpus of techno-myth it would be fun to draw on. Falling in with a bunch of people who talked about cyberpunk and its roots with familiarity was as handy as being given a canary when you are planning to visit a coalmine.”
What Acker was interested in were manipulations—of her flesh (tattoos, bodybuilding), the flesh of others (she was pansexual and prolific), and texts. Her time in London was cut short when one of her manipulated texts, Young Lust, was “found” to contain a two thousand-word passage from novelist Harold Robbins’s The Pirate. The resulting public kerfuffle and legal wrangle sent Acker back to the U.S. She was forced to sign an apology to Robbins, but also wrote a defiant summary of events called “Dead Doll Humility.” It reads, in part:
CAPITOL MADE A DOLL WHO LOOKED EXACTLY LIKE HERSELF.
IF YOU PRESSED A BUTTON ON ONE OF THE DOLL’S CUNT LIPS
THE DOLL SAID, “I AM A GOOD GIRL AND DO
EXACTLY AS I AM TOLD TO DO.
One of the more remarkable of Acker’s plagiarisms, as she called them, can be found in her 1988 novel The Empire of the Senseless. Entwined like a helix with dizzying and occasionally horrifying sexual adventures of pirates is an extended riff on William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Gibson had first borrowed a line of Acker’s for Mona Lisa Overdrive; Acker returned the favor by liberating a significant hunk of Gibson’s plot, Wintermute (now Winter), and the Panther Moderns (now the Moderns). Unlike Acker’s more obvious, straightforward appropriations of sentences and paragraphs, Acker kidnapped Neuromancer’s DNA, separated it out from the literal “cyberspace,” and created a transgressive pulp thriller about the reclamation of the self, herself, Kathy.
Empire of the Senseless reads like what cyberpunk would be, divorced from the conventions of traditional publishing and instead married to Black Mountain poetry and pornography. “Round revolving cars emitted sonar waves. Certain sonar vibrations blinded those not in the cars; other levels numbing effectively chopped off limbs; other levels caused blood to spurt out of the mouths nostrils and eyes. The buildings were pink. Preferring mutilation the families who lived in bed-sits ran out into the streets,” is a scene of middling intensity. Later, a chapter is entitled “Me Equals Dead Cunt.”
One will not find the pleasures associated with cyberpunk, even at its most noir-inflected, in Empire of the Senseless. The book is instead about the results of cyberpunk—mash-ups of autobiography, fiction, and well-founded political paranoia; the persistence of malevolent authority in supposedly value-free artifacts of rational society (i.e., computer programs); and sensualized body horrors. There’s no three-act structure, no moral victory at the book’s climax, and no traditionally well-rounded characters or even characters with coherent motivations.
Acker wasn’t just messing about with what was popular at the time. She read deeply and widely, and was familiar with the antecedents of cyberpunk, as can be seen from her introduction to the Wesleyan University Press edition of Samuel R. D
elany’s Trouble on Triton. In it, she frames Delany as an Ackeresque—albeit more humanistic—figure, which is reasonable enough as Acker was clearly influenced by Delany. She says of him, and by extension herself: “For the poet, the world is word. Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each other.”
And that was Acker—fucking the world with words, and being fucked by it.
NEIL GAIMAN
On Viriconium: Some Notes Toward an Introduction
Neil Gaiman is one of the most influential figures in contemporary fantasy. His books include Neverwhere (1995), Stardust (1999), the Hugo and Nebula Award–winning American Gods (2001), Anansi Boys (2005), and Good Omens (with Terry Pratchett, 1990), as well as the short story collections Smoke and Mirrors (1998) and Fragile Things (2006). He’s also celebrated for his innovative work on comics and graphic novels, including the groundbreaking series Sandman. His honors include four Hugos, two Nebulas, one World Fantasy Award, four Bram Stoker Awards, six Locus Awards, two British SF Awards, one British Fantasy Award, three Geffens, one International Horror Guild Award, and two Mythopoeic Awards. In the essay below, Gaiman offers an appreciation of the Viriconium cycle by M. John Harrison.
People are always pupating their own disillusion, decay, age. How is it they never suspect what they are going to become, when their faces already contain the faces they will have twenty years from now?
—“A YOUNG MAN’S JOURNEY TOWARD VIRICONIUM”
And I look at the Viriconium cycle (1971-1985) of M. John Harrison and wonder whether The Pastel City knew it was pupating In Viriconium or the heartbreak of “A Young Man’s Journey Towards Viriconium” inside its pages, whether it knew what it was going to become.
Some weeks ago and halfway around the world, I found myself in the center of Bologna, that sunset-colored medieval towered city which waits in the center of a modern Italian city of the same name, in a small used bookshop, where I was given a copy of the the Codex Seraphinianus to inspect. The book, created by the artist Luigi Serafini, is, in all probability, an art object: there is text, but the alphabet resembles an alien code, and the illustrations (which cover such aspects of life as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths) bear only a passing resemblance to those we know in this world at this time: in one picture a couple making love becomes a crocodile, which crawls away; while the animals, plants, and ideas are strange enough that one can fancy the book something that has come to us from a long time from now, or from an extremely long way away. It is, lacking another explanation, art. And leaving that small shop, walking out into the colonnaded shaded streets of Bologna, holding my book of impossibilities, I fancied myself in Viriconium. And this was odd, only because until then I had explicitly equated Viriconium with England.
Viriconium, M. John Harrison’s creation, the Pastel City in the Afternoon of the world; two cities in one, in which nothing is consistent, tale to tale, save a scattering of place-names, although I am never certain that the names describe the same place from story to story. Is the Bistro Californium a constant? Is Henrietta Street?
M. John Harrison, who is Mike to his friends, is a puckish person of medium height, given to enthusiasms and intensity. He is, at first glance, slightly built, although a second glance suggests he has been constructed from whips and springs and good, tough leather, and it comes as no surprise to find that Mike is a rock climber, for one can without difficulty imagine him clinging to a rock face on a cold, wet day, finding purchase in almost invisible nooks and pulling himself continually up, man against stone. I have known Mike for over twenty years: in the time I have known him his hair has lightened to a magisterial silver, and he seems to have grown somehow continually younger. I have always liked him, just as I have always been more than just a little intimidated by his writing. When he talks about writing he moves from puckish to possessed: I remember Mike in conversation at the Institute for Contemporary Art trying to explain the nature of fantastic fiction to an audience: he described someone standing in a windy lane, looking at the reflection of the world in the window of a shop, and seeing, sudden and unexplained, a shower of sparks in the glass. It is an image that raised the hairs on the back of my neck, that has remained with me, and which I would find impossible to explain. It would be like trying to explain Harrison’s fiction, something I am attempting to do in this introduction, and, in all probability, failing.
There are writers’ writers, of course, and M. John Harrison is one of those. He moves elegantly, passionately, from genre to genre, his prose lucent and wise, his stories published as SF or as fantasy, as horror or as mainstream fiction. In each playing field, he wins awards, and makes it look so easy. His prose is deceptively simple, each word considered and placed where it can sink deepest and do the most damage.
The Viriconium stories, which inherit a set of names and a sense of unease from a long-forgotten English Roman City—English antiquaries have preferred Uriconium, foreign scholars Viroconium or Viriconium, and Vriconium has also been suggested. The evidence of our ancient sources is somewhat confused, a historical website informs us—are fantasies, three novels and a handful of stories which examine the nature of art and magic, language and power.
There is, as I have already mentioned, and as you will discover, no consistency to Viriconium. Each time we return to it, it has changed, or we have. The nature of reality shifts and changes. The Viriconium stories are palimpsests, and other stories and other cities can be seen beneath the surface. Stories adumbrate other stories. Themes and characters reappear, like Tarot cards being shuffled and redealt.
The Pastel City states Harrison’s themes simply, in comparison to the tales that follow, like a complex musical theme first heard played by a marching brass band: it’s far future SF at the point where SF transmutes into fantasy, and the tale reads like the script of a magnificent movie, complete with betrayals and battles, all the pulp ingredients carefully deployed. (It reminds me on rereading a little of Michael Moorcock and, in its end of time ambience and weariness, of Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith.) Lord tegeus-Cromis (who fancied himself a better poet than swordsman) reassembles what remains of the legendary Methven to protect Viriconium and its girl-queen from invaders to the North. Here we have a dwarf and a hero, a princess, an inventor and a city under threat. Still, there is a bittersweetness to the story that one would not normally expect from such a novel.
A Storm of Wings takes a phrase from the first book as its title and is both a sequel to the first novel and a bridge to the stories and novel that follow and surround it: the voice of this book is, I suspect, less accessible than the first book, the prose rich and baroque. It reminds me at times of Mervyn Peake, but it also feels like it is the novel of someone who is stretching and testing what he can do with words, with sentences, with story.
Neil Gaiman, photo by Kyle Cassidy. [ABOVE] M. John Harrison, photo by Hugo Glendinning.
And then, no longer baroque, M. John Harrison’s prose became transparent, but it was a treacherous transparency. Like its predecessors, In Viriconium is a novel about a hero attempting to rescue his princess, a tale of a dwarf, an inventor, and a threatened city, but now the huge canvas of the first book has become a small and personal tale of heartbreak and of secrets and of memory. The gods of the novel are loutish and unknowable, our hero barely understands the nature of the story he finds himself in. It feels like it has come closer to home than the previous stories—the disillusion and decay that was pupating in the earlier stories has now emerged in full, like a butterfly, or a metal bird, freed from its chrysalis.
The short stories which weave around the three novels are stories about escapes, normally failed escapes. They are about power and politics, about language and the underlying structure of reality, and they are about art. They are as hard to hold as water, as evanescent as a shower of sparks, as permanent and as natural as rock formations.
The Viriconium stories and novels cover such aspects of li
fe as gardening, anatomy, mathematics, and geometry, card games, flying contraptions, and labyrinths. Also, they talk about art.
Harrison has gone on to create several masterpieces since leaving Viriconium, in and out of genre: Climbers, his amazing novel of rock climbers and escapism takes the themes of “A Young Man’s Journey to Viriconium” into mainstream fiction; The Course of the Heart takes them into fantasy, perhaps even horror; Light, his transcendent twining SF novel, is another novel about failed escapes—from ourselves, from our worlds, from our limitations.
For me, the first experience of reading Viriconium Nights and In Viriconium was a revelation. I was a young man when I first encountered them, half a lifetime ago, and I remember the first experience of Harrison’s prose, as clear as mountain-water and as cold. The stories tangle in my head with the time that I first read them—the Thatcher Years in England seem already to be retreating into myth. They were larger-than-life times when we were living them, and there’s more than a tang of the London I remember informing the city in these tales, and something of the decaying brassiness of Thatcher herself in the rotting malevolence of Mammy Vooley (indeed, when Harrison retold the story of “The Luck in the Head” in graphic novel form, illustrated by Ian Miller, Mammy Vooley was explicitly drawn as an avatar of Margaret Thatcher).
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