by Laura Miller
KURT VONNEGUT
SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969)
Considered Vonnegut’s most popular work, and inspired by his own experience of the Dresden firebombings, the story follows the time-traveling adventures of Billy Pilgrim, a soldier who becomes “unstuck in time.”
On the night of February 13, 1945, three months before the end of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007) was a prisoner of war, sheltering in an underground abattoir during the devastating firebombing of Dresden. “Slaughterhouse-Five” (Schlachthof-fünf) was, ironically, shelter from the slaughter. The next morning, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners of war were set to work excavating blackened bodies for cremation on open piles.
In the novel, Billy Pilgrim, the unheroic hero, is a POW in the same shelter as Vonnegut during the devastating firebombing. He, too, survives, but he goes crazy: he cannot make sense of the event.
Fiction, like history, has been generally silent about Dresden. As Hitler said, “The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.” Vonnegut himself had almost insuperable difficulty writing his “Dresden novel.” He had to forge an entirely new “schizophrenic” technique, weaving realism, sci-fi schlock (little one-eyed green men from Tralfamadore, resembling toilet plungers), and slapstick social comedy into a startlingly innovative pattern.
The novel’s composition accompanied a catastrophic crisis in the author’s family life. His marriage broke up, his son developed schizophrenia, and Vonnegut himself was afflicted with depression. Slaughterhouse-Five was finally published, out of this crisis, to huge acclaim in 1969. It shot to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, and has since been awarded a place in the canon of American classic fiction.
The thesis of Slaughterhouse-Five is essentially that humankind cannot bear too much reality. Life is so horrible that only fiction can deal with it, and, crucially, the more horrible the life experience, the more fantastic the fiction. After Auschwitz, Theodore Adorno famously declared, poetry was impossible. One of the underlying contentions of Slaughterhouse-Five is that after Dresden, fiction, or at least realist fiction, is impossible.
A way out of this impasse was science fiction. Billy Pilgrim, a time and intergalactic traveler (or, more likely, merely nuts) ends his post-Dresden pilgrimage incarcerated no longer by Nazi Germany, but by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore.
Billy’s prison is a geodesic dome (a style favored by hippy communes in the 1960s); it is made tolerable by furniture from Sears, Roebuck (less favored by hippies), and the presence of starlet Montana Wildhack, who is similarly transported across space to be Billy’s “mate.” They will be earthling specimens in the Tralfamadorian national zoo.
The Tralfamadorians, like the RAF, are dangerous bombers. Billy asks his little green mentor whether earthlings will go on to destroy the universe, since they are so good at destroying their own planet? Their philosophy in the face of this inevitable doom? “We spend eternity looking at pleasant moments—like today at the zoo.” Earthlings should learn to do the same. Forget Dresden. Enjoy Disneyland.
When Vonnegut was asked about his decision to process the horror of historical events through slapstick, black comedy, and science fiction, he noted these tropes were just like the clowns in a Shakespearean tragedy: “Trips to other planets, science fiction of an obviously kidding sort, is equivalent to bringing on the clowns every so often to lighten things up.” Yet, the novel clearly has more serious intentions. Vonnegut, in writing Slaughterhouse-Five, was influenced, the author acknowledged, by Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961). War in Catch-22 is conceived as a madhouse. The hero, Yossarian, can only escape the madness by being diagnosed mad himself. But to report his madness to the medical services would be to prove himself sane. This double bind is the Catch-22 by which the military machine works. It is absurdity institutionalized, and only comedy can effectively handle it.
The other likely, but unacknowledged influence on Slaughterhouse-Five was Stanley Kubrick’s comedy film about nuclear annihilation, Dr. Strangelove (1963). It’s so deadly serious, you have to laugh.
LARRY NIVEN
RINGWORLD (1970)
Members of three galactic species explore an ancient artificial “world,” a vast flattened ring encircling its sun, to see if it is a threat or an opportunity, or both.
Ringworld stands as the climax to the first volumes of Larry Niven’s “Tales of Known Space” sequence. The narrative unfolds on two interacting levels. Before arriving at the Ringworld itself, readers are given back-story from earlier tales to make the complicated relationships among its cast understandable. This cast comprises two humans, the restless 200-year-old Louis Wu and the twenty-year-old Teela Brown, who has been genetically engineered to impose her good luck on events; a warrior Kzin who is deemed a coward by his civilization for consorting with other races peaceably; and a Pearson’s puppeteer, a two-headed tripodal figure described as insanely brave because of his ability to consort with dangerous alien species without fleeing from such contact. If these characterizations seem mechanical, that is, in a sense, Niven’s intention. Through his long career, he has created many species defined in terms of their high level of adaptability to niche habitats, which renders them highly potent when they are in their comfort zones, but vulnerable when threatened with change. Humans—less martially formidable than Kzins and stupider than puppeteers—are relatively free of niche constraints; indeed, Teela adapts both the voyage and the Ringworld itself to her needs.
The Ringworld itself is explored through sequences heightened by, and comprehended through, interactions among the three species, each event moving the story forward while simultaneously broadening the reader’s vision of the great ring, 600 million miles around and one million miles wide, with a habitable inner surface. The lifeless outer surface is a virtually impermeable material, designed to hold the structure together, and to defend against collisions with asteroids or even planetary bodies; from beyond the ring, observers can detect in reverse the contours of the inner land: oceans cause bulges, while mountains create vast dimples gazing into the void. To contain atmosphere, the walls of the rim are one thousand miles high, and contoured in the form of mountains and ridges. Great opaque rectangular sheets between the Ringworld and its small sun slide longitudinally over the surface, which they darken into night. The habitable surface of the Ringworld is the equivalent of three million Earths.
It would have been impossible for one novel to provide a close-up conspectus of a landscape too large to comprehend, and Niven does not risk attempting to do so. The puppeteer starship the crew has traveled in is soon, therefore, incapacitated and crashes to the surface, leaving the four to navigate in one-person, extra-vehicular scouts. All but Teela are immediately overwhelmed, and threatened, by the sheer scale of what they are, even disabled, capable of perceiving. There is no visible curvature, no horizon: all perspectives end, dizzyingly, in vanishing points. The arch of the ring is visible in the sky: if you had a million years you could walk there. Fauna is initially absent from view; nearby flora is subtly unlike Earth’s, but similar enough to understand.
When the crew discover humanoid beings, they find them to have suffered a catastrophic loss of civilization, almost certainly due to a failure in the overall power system. (There are no natural resources except for rimrock; the inhabitants of the Ringworld face the same lack of resources that would make recovery so difficult were civilization to fall on Earth.) The novel ends in the discovery of an archaic tyranny or two. The original Ringworld engineers are nowhere to be seen, and their creation is seemingly on its last legs. The reasons for Ringworld’s creation are supposititious. All we know is that a playground for trillions of people should last forever.
ITALO CALVINO
INVISIBLE CITIES (1972)
The merchant Marco Polo recounts impressions of fifty-five fabulous cities he has visited, or claimed to have visited, to the emperor of the Tartars, Kublai Khan.
If the protagonist of Le città invisibili (published
in 1972; translated into English in 1974 and entitled Invisible Cities) is Italo Calvino’s (1923–85) post-modern version of the real historical traveler Marco Polo, it is, as the title suggests, the places the Venetian merchant visits that are key. Calvino, a veteran of the Italian Resistance in World War ii, rejected his family’s Catholicism, becoming a member of the Italian Communist Party, later withdrawing from active political engagement. By nature a city dweller, he lived in Turin, Florence, Milan, Paris, Rome, and once wrote, “I always felt a New Yorker. My city is New York.”
Though the book has its roots in The Travels of Marco Polo (1300, the merchant’s adventures as told to Rustichello da Pisa while both men were imprisoned in Genoa), Calvino’s work is neither travelogue nor biography. Rather, it is a fabulous directory, preserving for posterity this fictional Marco Polo’s highly unreliable accounts of distant cities as told to Kublai Khan during his sojourns in the imperial palace.
Marco’s accounts are divided into nine chapters, while the metropolises themselves are, ambiguously or ironically, sorted by eleven criteria: Thin, Hidden, Continuous, and Trading Cities, and Cities devoted to the Sky, Memory, Eyes, Signs, Desire, and the Dead.
While the chapters themselves are presented as straightforward, beautifully written accounts, it soon becomes clear that, in our world at least, these places do not, often could not, exist. Either the world of the novel is not our world, but a world of fantasy, or Calvino’s Polo is a vastly accomplished fabulist, conjuring illusions to beguile, entertain, amuse, or otherwise deceive the emperor for his own purposes. Indeed, the first words of the novel are:
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions…
An additional dimension of complexity is lent to the novel by the passages inserted between chapters, which recount the meetings between Polo and Kublai Khan. These sections are composed in a different voice, which appears to belong to a later emperor, one who understands the “sense of emptiness which comes over us at evening,” reflecting on Khan’s realization of “the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formal ruin.” Or the author could, perhaps, be Khan himself, observing in the third person, seeking detachment, recording his memories of the elusive, elliptical dispatches of Marco Polo with as much objectivity as he can muster.
On one level Invisible Cities can be taken as a sly critique of the inherent untrustworthiness of travel writing, and by extension, all texts; at the literal center point of the book Khan himself makes a rare visit, traveling to Kin-sai, a city of canals very much like Venice. Polo says, “I should never have imagined a city like this could exist.” A little later, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”
This is the heart of Invisible Cities, that imaginative visions can offer deeper truths than unvarnished facts. Calvino’s cities are akin to Jorge Luis Borges’s labyrinths and libraries. The thirteenth-century merchant reports of motor-cycles, skyscrapers, and radar. Marco lands in the city of Trude by plane. The city covers the world. Only the name of the airport changes.
Invisible Cities is a book with a strong hetero-normative, male perspective. Women appear almost entirely as beautiful, usually unobtainable, objects of desire. Glimpsed fleetingly, they haunt the traveler’s imagination, inspire him, but ultimately evade or disappoint. The cities themselves are often graced with feminine names, being called variously Cecelia, Clarice, Esmeralda, or Phyllis, and seem to embody the impossibility of fully knowing and possessing. Polo is always in pursuit, arriving only to leave, to travel ever onward to the next invisible city.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN
THE PRINCESS BRIDE (1973)
Goldman’s metatextual comedy envisions a world within a world, filled with swordplay, Rodents of Unusual Size and, most of all, romance.
The adventure of The Princess Bride is set primarily within the fictional European nations of Florin and Guilder, located between “where Sweden and Germany would eventually settle.” In a tale later made popular by the classic film, the titular princess, Buttercup, is betrothed to the land’s conniving prince, Humperdinck. Her childhood lover, Westley, aided by a band of talented rogues, returns from overseas in an attempt to save her from Humperdinck’s clutches. Hijinks ensue.
The Princess Bride’s events take place at time in history that not only doesn’t exist, but is deliberately and provocatively impossible. “A time before Europe but after Paris” is only one of the many self-contradictory explanations provided by William Goldman (b.1931). The book freely references locations such as Spain, Turkey, and Scotland, but invariably and meticulously mentions that these places, and the activities therein, may or may not have existed, thus creating a sense of historicity that is, at best, utterly chaotic.
The world within the book is deliberately maddening, rife with anachronism and self-contradiction. In one breath, Goldman will note that everything in it is historically accurate, and challenge the reader to check the source against any Florinese history. Yet, at the same time, The Princess Bride gleefully references fire swamps, miracle men, King Bats, Blood Eagles, Sucking Squid, and the immortal Rodents of Unusual Size. Florin, with its castles, forests, fleets, and European neighbors is a prototypically generic Western fantasyland, littered with impossibilities.
Adding to the chaos of The Princess Bride, the book itself is a fictional construction. The central text comes complete with a lengthy introduction—and many interruptions—by Goldman, who sets up his version of The Princess Bride as an abridgment of the original by “S. Morgenstern.” This meta-textual wrapping comes complete with a fictionalized version of Goldman’s own family and re-imagination of his childhood. This allows Goldman to comment on the book’s themes even as he presents them, including frequent and pithy interjections from his youthful and adult selves.
Goldman states in one open aside that “life isn’t fair,” and this theme is reflected through the people and the locations described in the book. Buttercup is objectively the most beautiful; the mighty Fezzik the strongest. Terrible things happen to deserving people, most prominently in the case of Westley’s mid-book demise. Westley is faced with one unequal challenge after another: he is forced to out-brawl a giant, out-fight a “Wizard” swordsman, out-think a genius, hide from a master huntsman, and keep secrets from an uncanny interrogator. Even the geography of Florin and Guilder conspires against our heroes, ordeals range from trudging through fire swamps to falling down snow sand, to climbing the Cliffs of Insanity.
When the heroes aren’t menaced by some sort of external force (from King Bats to Humperdinck), they go out of their way to create their own problems. The evening that Buttercup and Westley declare their love for one another is immediately followed by Westley’s decision to depart and seek his fortune: A choice they both agree is unquestionably right. This moment is bookended by the story’s conclusion, when the traditional statement of “and they lived happily after ever” is immediately decried by Goldman’s childhood self as inherently dissatisfying.
While the land in The Princess Bride isn’t real, Goldman’s conceit is that it should be. This is why he created a fictional and very dull history: so he could abridge it into an inspiring adventure. Similarly, the land of The Princess Bride is intentionally unfair—it is the triumph over the impossible that creates the romance and adventure that we require. The setting is an elaborate, improbable mechanism that exists to produce thrilling stories.
SAMUEL R. DELANY
DHALGREN (1975)
A surprise best seller, Dhalgren presents an apocalyptic city outside of time, Bellona. What is Bellona? Each reader must decide.
Samuel R. Delany’s (b.1942) Dhalgren begins with the end of a sentence: “to wound the autumnal city.” The phrase repeats throughout as a line in a mysterious notebook, puzzled over and relished. The beginning of the sentence is the final sentence of the book: “Waiting here, away from t
he terrifying weaponry, out of the halls of vapor and light, beyond holland and into the hills, I have come to.” We encounter a variation on the complete sentence earlier in the book’s long last section: “I have come to wound the autumnal city: the other side of the question is a mixed metaphor if I ever heard one.” The repeated, stuttered to is a latch or a skip or a jump. Is the to of “to wound the autumnal city” the same as the one in “I have come to”? Should we link them, should we not? Choose your own adventure.
Delany wrote Dhalgren from January 1969 to September 1973 between various cities. He was already an award-winning science-fiction writer by this time, having published his first work of fiction aged just twenty, and titles such as Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, and Nova would be among the most celebrated works of science fiction of the 1960s. After Nova was published to much acclaim in 1968, the world waited with great anticipation for Delany’s next novel, which would not be published until almost seven years later, and would be unlike anything anyone expected. Dhalgren was huge, strange, and sexually explicit. On its publication in 1975, the Los Angeles Times critic Harlan Ellison denounced it as “sorry compendium of pointless ramblings,” while in Galaxy magazine, Theodore Sturgeon declared it “the very best to come out of the science-fiction field” and compared Delany to Homer, Shakespeare, and Nabokov. It became Delany’s best-selling work, embraced by adventurous readers who were entranced by the city of Bellona.