J.G. Ballard's World Versus U.S. – Rafe McGregor

The Worlds of J.G. Ballard

J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. Very broadly, his career can be divided into two stages, science fiction and literature. The first began with the publication of ‘Escapement’ in New Worlds in 1956 and the second with the publication of Empire of the Sun, his eleventh novel, in 1984. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss (1925-2017), Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in New Worlds magazine in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard’s science fiction can itself be divided into two stages. His first four novels (or novellas, depending on one’s preferred definition) pioneered Anglophone climate fiction. The Wind from Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966) constitute an elemental quartet in which civilisation is threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth respectively. Ballard’s next six novels were much more experimental, putting his ideas about the relationship between the content of science fiction and formal innovation into practice, and include The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) and Crash (1973). The critical and commercial success of Empire of the Sun elevated Ballard to the literary canon and it was released as a Hollywood film directed by Steven Spielberg in 1987. Like his science fiction, Ballard’s literature can also be divided into two stages, with Cocaine Nights (1996) and his last three novels usually referred to as satire.

The last book Ballard published before his death from prostate cancer was Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (2008), an autobiography written after his terminal diagnosis. It’s not very often that anyone, let alone a great novelist, has the opportunity to write an autobiography that will include (almost) their entire life story, but I found it for the most part disappointing. Ballard always valued his privacy and the autobiography is strangely unenlightening. The Illuminated Man: Life, Death and the Worlds of J.G. Ballard (2026), a biography that was begun by Christopher Priest (1943-2024) and completed by his wife, Nina Allan, when he died of prostate cancer in 2024, is much more revealing. In his review of Priest and Allan’s book in The Guardian, Adam Sisman concurs with my criticism of Miracles of Life by calling it ‘curiously flat’. There are certainly no insights into Ballard’s creative process or literary practice, which was what I had most hoped to find. When I discovered that his archive had been acquired by the British Library in 2010 and was now available to the public, I thought I’d try there instead, but Ballard’s reticence extended to the private sphere and his habit was apparently to destroy his notes for his fiction as soon as it was published. While the archive contains multiple drafts of multiple novels, including those of three of his four early climate fictions, much of both his process and practice remains opaque.

The J.G. Ballard Papers

In the ‘Works’ section of the archive only three of the one hundred and sixty-two files are described as projects for a new novel or working notes. The first of these is a set of four text collages that were published in New Worlds in 1978, the second a set of five spiral-bound notepads (one of which has only two pages of notes) that were probably used from 2005 to 2008, and the third five typed A4 pages, also likely dated 2005 to 2008. One of the pages, Notepad A, most of Notepad B, and a few pages each in Notepads C and D are notes for a novel that was never written, provisionally titled An Immodest Proposal or How the World Declared War on America and abbreviated as ‘VUS’ ([World] versus US). Allan recounts her visit to the archive in 2024 and discusses these notes and other materials in The Illuminated Man and it was pure chance that I visited less than a month after reading it. Something that comes across very strongly in the biography and was very useful in providing a context for the notes was the extent to which Ballard was affected by the September 11 attacks and what is now known as GWOT, the Global War on Terror.

Ballard’s notes for VUS include everything one might expect to find, from the premise at its most basic to alternative ideas for plot and character, considerations of form and content, and reflections on whether and how he could meet its particular challenges. The proposed narrative is typical of Ballard in being located in an unspecified but imminent future, taking the present rather than the future as its subject, and providing commentary on current social mores and norms. The present with which he is concerned is the increase of the US’ military footprint in response to 9/11, specifically the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Ballard does not connect these to either Panama in 1989, Grenada in 1983, or the US’ military deployments during the Cold War and seems to have regarded GWOT as an unprecedented phenomenon. He is also well aware of the symbolic significance of 9/11 and the care with which both the targets and the date of the four coordinated attacks were planned. I’ll begin my discussion of the novel by setting out the fictional sequence of events on which the narrative would be based. Unlike more precise questions of form and content, on which Ballard is often undecided, the sequence is fairly comprehensive and consistent.

VUS

The setting of VUS is a world in which the US has established an empire reminiscent of the European colonies of an earlier age. America controls all of the Middle East, including Israel, and most of the world’s oil supply. Many countries across the globe are either occupied by the US, have puppet regimes, or are sympathetic to the US. In those countries that are occupied or have puppet regimes, ‘American values are relentless enforced.’ The same values are relentlessly promoted in the countries with sympathetic governments, such as the UK and Germany. The US exerts a global hegemony by the combination of military threat and economic pressure and insists on preferential trade agreements for all of its goods, including oil. France is one of the few countries to remain openly anti-American and tries to import oil from an alternative supplier (Venezuela is mentioned at least twice). In response, the US initiates a naval blockade, which causes skirmishes at sea and anti-American civil unrest globally. There is a naval battle between the US and France, which the US wins, and the United Nations Security Council authorises military action if the US fails to abandon both its preferential trade agreements and foreign military bases. Predictably, the US refuses and the world declares war on the US, led by either the rest of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation nations or by a combined NATO-Russia alliance.

The war that follows has three stages. In the first, which is a conventional, high-intensity conflict, the US achieves a rapid victory over NATO, using weapons of mass destruction to destroy military and civilian targets and occupying all the nations who have taken up arms against it. US global hegemony is transformed into a global empire. No Pax Americana materialises, however, as multiple insurgencies begin, starting in Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia and then spreading to other countries. This second, unconventional, stage culminates in a series of coordinated attacks aimed at destroying nine icons within the US homeland. The US responds in a similar manner to its response to the declaration of war, causing mass casualties among insurgents and civilians at home and abroad. In the homeland, Black and Muslim communities are targeted, which initiates the third and final stage. Black, Muslim, and other soldiers in the US Army mutiny, violence in the homeland spirals, and America descends into a second civil war. Ballard doesn’t describe the impact of this civil war on the empire, but the implication is that it crumbles and that the world is consequently victorious against the US.

The subject of the novel at its most basic is simply ‘US imperialism’, but Ballard’s concern extended beyond military expansion to America’s dominance of global popular culture, from Hollywood to McDonald’s to Elvis and so much else. He was especially interested in the way in which this cultural hegemony was causing people to see themselves through an American lens and how this succeeded in turning other nations into ‘subservient colonies’ (without the need for puppet regimes or invasion). Ballard has various ideas about how to turn this subject into a theme, the most consistent of which is that the US would be ‘treated as Nazi Germany in 1939-45’ with no characters in the novel permitted to adopt a neutral stance. He was more certain about the characters that would drive the narrative. His initial idea was to use three ‘principle [sic]’ characters and three ‘secondary’ characters. He later refers to these six as an ‘inner core’. The characters would all be of different nationalities and the protagonist, who would be British, and three others would be men. The protagonist is an English university lecturer who teaches American Studies at a university in the Middle East and has an American wife (which is significant because it will allow him to gain entry to the homeland later on). A second principal character, also a man, would be French. The nationalities of the others would be drawn from Japan, Russia, Australia, Germany, an unspecified Muslim country, and possibly Israel. Ballard then thought that one of the women should also be British, which may have been why he expanded his central characters to seven, four men and three women. The characters would either be in professions that would bring them into direct contact with the war, such as the military, media, or medicine, or foreign workers, such as those in oil, education, or diplomacy.

Ballard started to delineate the French protagonist, couldn’t think of anything interesting, and wrote: ‘All need to be thoughtful + of heroic potential.’ He was also convinced that all ‘should have suffrered [sic] in some way from the US — —’ and these two ideas taken together suggest that a major part of the narrative would be the planning, recruitment, and execution of the coordinated attacks on American icons, some or all of which would be suicidal. He wanted to break the stereotype for people that were prepared to sacrifice themselves in this way and noted that the insurgents should be ‘educated, intellectual, even unwilling.’ Whether or not the insurgency would be led by a Muslim cadre was unclear, although his sequence of events identifies it as beginning in Middle Eastern nations. Ballard made several lists of the insurgent targets, which included a wide range from the Empire State Building to the Capitol to Las Vegas and Disneyland. Each of these would be attacked or destroyed using a different tactic, although his list of options for these only ran to eight. At one point, he refers to these as ‘psycho-targets’, drawing attention to their symbolic significance to the US and to the psychological impact of their destruction. The novel would open outside the US embassy in Grosvenor Square in London during the heightened tensions of the naval blockade. After a protest turns violent, US troops open fire on the crowd, who scatter and destroy a nearby McDonald’s in retaliation. The event would either be described in the form of a news report (assuming Ballard’s original idea for his British protagonist) or in the first person by his (alternative) British protagonist. Ballard did not state when the novel would conclude and the options appear to be either the mutiny, the civil war, or the dissolution of the US empire.

Ballard seems to have had much less of a vision as to how he would tell the story of VUS than what the story was. He planned to switch point of view among his principal characters and mix these different points of view with reportage from different media channels. He was not, however, sure whether the novel would be narrated in the first person, by the different principal (or principal and secondary) characters, and whether these narrations would be presented as individual testimonies, oral histories, or diary entries. He also toyed with the idea of opening with an academic-style introduction to the collected testimonies and reports, rather than in medias res. Beyond that, he had very little to say about specific aspects of framework, function, structure, or symbolism. Notwithstanding, his reflections on the genre of the novel are fascinating: ‘Very important Must not allow this to become s-f. That would lower its credibility & impact.’ He was similarly worried that the novel doesn’t become ‘a familiar kind of s-f story.’ Ballard’s approach to science fiction was, as already mentioned, to prioritise the present over the future for the purpose of social commentary, which he often achieved by exploring the impact of either the broader public and political world or the immediate physical environment in which each person lives on their inner, psychological world. These New Wave commitments are completely compatible with what he was trying to achieve with and in VUS so it is curious that he was so determined to avoid the novel ‘becoming’ a work of science fiction. I wonder if the clue to this apparent anomaly isn’t the dating of the notebooks, some thirty years after the decline of the New Wave. What he probably means by ‘becoming’ is ‘being labelled/sold as’ science fiction, which had become a genre very much dominated by series and franchises by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. I think that what he didn’t want was VUS being sold and read as an alternative history or a dystopian or apocalyptic narrative and I’ll return to the question of genre in my conclusion.

The Illuminated Man

Ballard was both confident that his premise was strong and worried about his ability to do it justice. I find this particularly interesting coming from someone who practically invented climate fiction, had established himself as one of Britain’s greatest living authors, and already published eighteen novels and novellas. Although his belief in his ability to develop the premise into a rich and rewarding theme appeared to grow as he built up his body of notes, his modesty and diffidence are evident throughout. For example, he writes: ‘Need to add a specific spin of some kind?’; ‘Need a deeper dimension!’; ‘too depressing & reminiscent of 1984?’. More specifically, he was concerned that the novel would be too long (presumably because of its temporal and spatial scope) and with his competence in writing first person narratives from the point of view of characters from cultures distinct from his own, such as the proposed Middle Eastern, Japanese, and Russian principal or secondary characters. Both of these problems were related to the question of how to present a ‘global sense of the battle against the US?’ Ballard was also concerned about the credibly of what he called ‘The fight back’, i.e. the success of the insurgency: ‘But is it all credible if its [sic] realistically portrayed?’ I ruminated on this myself, the dichotomy between the ease with which the US wins a conventional war against the rest of the world and the speed with which the insurgency leads to the dissolution of the US empire. But I also have no doubt that Ballard would have solved this literary problem as skilfully as he had solved others in his previous novels, novellas, and short stories. He makes a quick reference to a potential solution when he writes: ‘Perhaps visualise it as a film script.’ The process of both writing the notes down and returning to read them later seem to have helped because although there is no way to be certain of the chronological order of either the notepads or notes within them, there is definitely a sense of progress, of the crystallisation of a constellation of ideas as a premise and a sequence of events become a theme and a narrative.

It’s impossible to say know whether Ballard would have proceeded with the project had he not been diagnosed with terminal cancer, but if I had to guess one way or the other I’d say yes, given the escalation of GWOT from 2005 to 2009 and beyond. VUS would definitely have been one of his most controversial novels, perhaps even more so than The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, and I imagine he would have been accused of both glorifying 9/11 and promoting political violence. I am fairly certain that VUS would have been banned in many US states. Assuming it had been released early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when Big Tech was achieving its own hegemony, I wonder if the publishers would have actively courted controversy to increase sales or insisted that the novel stay on the science fiction shelf. Like The Drowned World, The Drought, and many of Ballard’s other long and short stories, there is also a sense in which VUS is prescient. Mark Blacklock beat me to that point in his essay in The New Statesman, which refers to the regime change in Venezuela in January 2026 and what is currently being called the 2026 Iran war, although Ballard did not anticipate how divided the (rest of the) ‘world’ would be in the era of VUS. What I can perhaps add to Blacklock and where Ballard and I would disagree, is that this military muscle-flexing is nothing new, just part of an imperial imperative that stretches back to at least the US invasion of Grenada. That was in 1983, the year before Ballard was catapulted into the limelight with Empire of the Sun, a novel about a different empire. As the sun sets on one, it rises on another…

Notes on Ballard's Notes from Nowhere – Rafe McGregor

J(ames) G(raham) Ballard (1930-2009) was an English author of avant-garde fiction who published nineteen novels and novellas and one hundred short stories, many of which were controversial, prescient, or both. He started his career as a science fiction writer in 1956, was instrumental in the transformation of the genre, and was admitted to the literary canon after the publication of Empire of the Sun (1984), a critically and commercially successful fictionalisation of his childhood experiences in a Japanese internment camp. His first novella, The Wind from Nowhere (1962), was part of a quartet that saw civilisation threatened or destroyed by air, water, fire, and earth and inaugurated Anglophone climate fiction. Along with Michael Moorcock and Brian Aldiss, Ballard was one of the founders of the New Wave of science fiction, which originated in the mid-nineteen-sixties and reconstituted the genre as an extension of literary modernism that was focused on the psychological rather than physical impact of technology. Ballard typically locates his narratives in the present rather than the future, explores the impact of the outer world on the inner, and provides subtle but startling commentary on social mores and norms. Although it spread across the Atlantic, the New Wave was UK-based and primarily driven by the combination of Moorcock’s editing and Ballard’s writing in New Worlds, which began as a fanzine in 1946, was taken over by Moorcock in 1964, became an anthology series in 1971, reverted to a fanzine in 1978, reverted to an anthology series in 1991, and was most recently published by PS in 2021.

The October 1966 issue of the magazine includes a short article from Ballard, ‘Notes From Nowhere: Comments on Work in Progress’, a numbered list of twenty-four notes ranging from a few words to a few sentences each. Moorcock introduced them as follows: ‘Reader interest in J.G. Ballard’s work has been high. We invited Mr Ballard to produce these notes explaining some of his current ideas.’ The level of explanation is, as one might expect from Ballard, limited, but other authors and anyone who is passionate about the creative process or science fiction as a genre is likely to find them as interesting as I did. I was lucky enough to read them in their original form, thanks to Dr Tom Dillon at the University of Liverpool’s Science Fiction Hub, which is the only dedicated science fiction archive in the UK, Europe’s largest catalogued collection of science fiction, and boasts a complete run of Theaker’s Quarterly Fiction courtesy of an anonymous donor. Tom is also the author of a cultural history of New Worlds and has an enviably rich knowledge of magazines, fanzines, and speculative fiction more broadly.

I’m not going to reproduce Ballard’s full list, which you can find on a Canadian archive of his work here, or comment on each point he makes (or sometimes fails to make), but offer five notes of my own instead. His first and longest (along with #16) is about the form of science fiction. Ballard introduces the genre with a delineation of its concern with ‘the immediate present in terms of the future rather than the past’ and claims that because of this thematic content, the standard narrative form of beginning and end, cause and effect, and exposition and resolution is inappropriate. Science fiction should be an arena for formal innovation and he comments on his attempts to play with sequentiality in The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966), apparently ambivalent about the extent to which he succeeded in replacing temporality with spatiality in each case. This formal experimentation would come to fruition with and in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which included the contentious short story, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968).

The tenth note is something of a counterpart to the first, expanding his description of science fiction’s thematic content. Ballard identifies three ‘planes’: the broader public or political world, the immediate physical environment in which each person lives their life, and the inner, psychological world of each person as they live that life. He suggests that these three coordinates provide a starting point for the clarification of contemporary reality and given what he also writes about neurology, I suspect he is referring to clarification in terms of both thought and attempts to communicate thought to others through description or depiction. In combination, notes nine and fourteen establish a close but vague relation between fiction or narrative on the one hand and neurology and what is now called neuroscience on the other. I found this fascinating due to the prioritisation of narrative as a way of thinking over narrative as a mode of communication in recent research. Philosophers, literary theorists, and cognitive scientists such as Peter Goldie, Jonathan Gottschall, and Fritz Breithaupt seem to be showing that the behavioural sciences’ lack of success in evaluating the insights of literary studies is a failure of the former rather than the latter, which is surprisingly compatible with direct scrutiny of the brain’s neural networks.

Notes twenty to twenty-three are all about the failure of science fiction authors to shed light on the concept of outer space. At first glance, this may seem arrogant or flippant, but Ballard is referring to the kind of illumination he described in #10, writing about outer space in a meaningful manner, i.e. one in which the political, physical, and psychological intersect. He mentions a current work in progress about a ‘disaster in space’, which appears to be a reference to ‘The Death Module’, published in New Worlds in July 1967. The eighteenth note is a brief and obscure farewell to The Crystal World, which is probably my favourite Ballard novel and which I used as evidence for including him as a significant contributor to the tradition of weird fiction. The novel (or novella, depending on your preferred definition) was published five months before the publication of his notes, which implies that the notes themselves were submitted to Moorcock several months in advance. In summary, Ballard’s list is an excellent place to begin with his oeuvre and I’m very grateful to have had them drawn to my attention and to have been able to see them in their original form.

Weird Fiction Old, New, and In-Between II: Weirding the World We Know – Rafe McGregor

 The second of six blog posts exploring the literary and philosophical significance of the weird tale, the occult detective story, and the ecological weird. The series suggests that the three genres of weird fiction dramatize humanity’s cognitive and evolutionary insignificance by first exploring the limitations of language, then the inaccessibility of the world, and finally the alienation within ourselves. This post introduces the mismatch between conception and reality.

 

Weird Tales

I concluded part I by endorsing literary critic S.T. Joshi’s definition of the weird tale as essentially rather than superficially philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview and identifying the canon of weird fiction as the work of: Arthur Machen (1863-1947), Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951), William Hope Hodgson (1877-1918), Edward Plunkett (1878-1957, writing under his aristocratic title Lord Dunsany), and H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937). Joshi’s definition also restricts the weird tale to fiction published within a sixty-year period that begins in 1880 and ends in 1940 and he deals with subsequent publications in The Modern Weird Tale: A Critique of Horror Fiction. The ‘modern’ or ‘new’ weird and its relation to the ‘ecological’ weird will be discussed in part V. Benjamin Noys and Timothy Murphy concur with Joshi’s dating and identify the source of the name of the genre as the pulp magazine Weird Tales. Before introducing this magazine, I want to mention three of Lovecraft’s less-talented contemporaries. Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950, writing under the penname Norman Bean) is best known for Tarzan of the Apes (serialised in The All-Story in 1912), but also authored the John Carter series, which began with Under the Moons of Mars (serialised in The All-Story in 1911). Similarly, Robert E. Howard (1906-1936) is best known for Conan the Barbarian (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1932), but is also the creator of Solomon Kane (short stories published in Weird Tales from 1928). Finally, Fritz Leiber (1910-1992), is best known for Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser (short stories published in Unknown from 1939), but published some outstanding weird fiction, beginning with the collection Night’s Black Agents (1947).

Weird Tales was founded in 1922, during the peak of the pulp era and two years after its famous crime fiction counterpart, Black Mask (which launched the career of Raymond Chandler). Its first issue (pictured) was published in March 1923 and within a decade the magazine was publishing the Lovecraft Mythos, Solomon Kane, Conan, and Seabury Quinn’s Jules de Grandin, an occult detective series that would run to nearly one hundred instalments. The first Lovecraft Mythos story published was ‘The Hound’, in February 1924. Aside from the significance of the magazine in naming and consolidating the type of narrative we now refer to as the weird tale, it is also significant in indicating the need for a supplement to Joshi’s definition. Weird fiction not only explores, expresses, and experiments with the worldviews of its authors, but is also essentially rather than superficially hybrid in character, crossing, slipping, and bending between and among genres. The Carter, Kane, and Fafhrd and Mouser series are all weird fiction, but Fredric Jameson regards Carter as the origin of American science fiction, Fafhrd and the Mouser are (along with Conan) acknowledged as inaugurating fantasy fiction, and Kane is as much history as fantasy. The pulp era died a slow death after the Second World War, initiated by first a wartime paper shortage and then the rise of television as the dominant medium of light entertainment in the nineteen fifties. Weird Tales published its final issue in September 1954.

In-Between Old and New

The five decades between the folding of Weird Tales and the coining of the label ‘New Weird’ (by John M. Harrison in 2002 or 2003) are complex when it comes to the development of weird fiction and I make no pretence to insider knowledge or even of being able to produce convincing evidence of my take on this period. That take has two key features: the influence of August Derleth and a second division of the genre into US and UK traditions. Derleth was a pulp fiction author and correspondent of Lovecraft who, along with Donald Wandrei (another pulp fiction author and Lovecraft correspondent), founded Arkham House in 1939 in order to publish Lovecraft’s work posthumously and self-publish their own work. Joshi is particularly critical of Derleth, who invented the ‘Cthulhu Mythos’, and his misrepresentation of Lovecraft’s work and worldview. I am once again largely in agreement, but we must also accept that if Derleth had not appropriated Lovecraft’s legacy he would be as unknown now as, for example, Quinn is. While Lovecraft imitators thrived on both sides of the Atlantic following the Weird Tales era, I think it helpful to identify two traditions of canonical weird fiction, understood as having unquestionable literary merit (however one chooses to define that quality).

In the UK, a tradition influenced less by Lovecraft and more by Machen and Blackwood – as well as Walter de la Mare – emerged in the work of John William Wall (1910-1989, writing under the penname Sarban) and Robert Aickman (1914-1981). Wall published very little and is best known for his novella, The Sound of His Horn (1952). Aickman is best known for the forty-eight stories he referred to as ‘strange’ tales, the first three of which were published in We Are for the Dark: Six Ghost Stories (1951, the other three in the collection were by the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard). To these two, I shall add J.G. Ballard (1930-2009). Although Ballard, to whom I shall return in part V, is usually considered to be a literary rather than popular fiction author (a dichotomy I regard as not only erroneous, but malicious), he began his career as a science fiction writer, part of the ‘New Wave’ of experimental and political science fiction in the nineteen sixties and seventies. The novella The Wind from Nowhere (1961) and the collection The Terminal Beach (1964) are exemplary weird fiction. 

In the US, a tradition more obviously influenced by Lovecraft and either explicitly part of his mythos or self-consciously an extension or revision thereof emerged in the work of Thomas Ligotti (b.1953), Caitlín R. Kiernan (b.1964, pictured), and Victor LaValle (b.1972). Ligotti has published relatively little and I return to his work in the next section. In contrast, Kiernan has published a vast oeuvre since 1995, including more than ten novels and over two hundred and fifty works of shorter fiction. Their Tinfoil Dossier (2017-2020) trilogy of novellas is my favourite at the time of writing, but The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (2012) demonstrates an all-too-rare ability to extend the weird tale to novel length without stretching either quality or credibility. LaValle has published a dozen or so novels, novellas, graphic novels, and short story collections since 1999. His novella, The Ballad of Black Tom (2016), is a magnificent reimagining of Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’ (first published in Weird Tales in January 1927) and, in my opinion, far superior to Matt Ruff’s similarly-themed Lovecraft Country, published in the same year.

 

Conception and Reality

In my review of Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe (2016), I described Ligotti as exploring, expressing, and experimenting with a worldview that could be called deconstructive, after the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930-2004, pictured). There has been a great deal of nonsense written about (and some would say by) Derrida, who developed the approach in the nineteen sixties and was a global public intellectual by the time of his death, but the basic idea behind deconstruction is simple: human beings (subjective experience) can only gain access to the real world (objective reality) through concepts, which are articulated through language. The worry, which stems from curiosities such as the fact that languages not only use different words for the same concept, but have different concepts that cannot be translated in their entirety, is that no human language and therefore no human conception maps perfectly onto reality. There is obviously plenty of overlap – otherwise we would not be able to build bridges, cure diseases, invent the internet, and fly to the moon – but there is no identity relation between concept and reality. This insight about the limitations of language, the way in which words fail to make the concrete and abstract objects they identify present, originated with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Derrida’s innovation was to demonstrate that the system of signs constituting a particular language (such as Modern English) is unstable because that system is inconsistent over both space (such as the differences between contemporary UK and US English) and time (such as the difference between Shakespeare’s early Modern English and contemporary Modern English in the UK).

The upshot of this is that there is a difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it really is, where aspects of the latter remain permanently inaccessible to us. I shall have more to say about this inaccessibility in part IV. In consequence of language failing to provide direct access to reality, the world in which we live is co-constructed by human intelligibility and inaccessible reality, a dichotomy very roughly equivalent to the distinction between culture and nature. This space between the world we create for ourselves and the real world is both frightening and liberating. If much more of our reality than commonsense suggests is a question of culture rather than nature, then much more of our reality can be changed for the better. I emphasised this emancipatory potential in my own introduction to literary theory, but Ligotti focuses on the fear and disgust the mismatch between conception and reality evokes. He scrapes away at the difference between subjective perception and objective reality to make it larger and more frightening and this is the worldview that emerges in Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, My Work Is Not Yet Done: Three Tales of Corporate Horror (2002), Teatro Grottesco (2006), The Spectral Link (2014), and his other work. Ligotti’s short stories are not only the most disturbing I have ever read, but distil and hone something was present to a lesser extent in Machen, Blackwood, Hodgson, Plunkett, and Lovecraft. With Ligotti in mind, I propose a further amendment to define weird fiction as: philosophical in virtue of presenting or representing a fully-fledged and fleshed-out worldview, generically hybrid in character, and foregrounding the difference between the world as we think it is and the world as it actually is. This latter quality is precisely what the references to the uncanny or unhomely mentioned in part I are trying to convey, but ‘weird’ seems a much more accurate description to me.

 

Recommended Reading 

Fiction

Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco, Durtro Press (2006).

Caitlín R. Kiernan, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, Roc Books (2012).

J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World, Jonathan Cape (1966).

Nonfiction

H.P. Lovecraft, Notes on Writing Weird Fiction, Amateur Correspondent (1937).

Alan Moore, Preface, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, The Folio Society (2017).

Mark Bould & Steven Shaviro (eds.), This is Not a Science Fiction Textbook, Goldsmiths Press (2024).

The World-Ecology of Climate Change Cinema – Rafe McGregor

Climate Fiction

‘Cli-fi’ is an abbreviation of ‘climate fiction’, which was popularised in the last decade and refers to a category of genre or literary fiction that takes global warming or climate change as its subject. The prototype is probably Jules Verne’s Sans dessus dessous (1889, translated as The Purchase of the North Pole), an uncannily prescient novel involving a conspiracy to change the Earth’s climate to make more fossil fuel available to a corporation. Cli-fi includes novels, novellas and short stories featuring natural as well as anthropogenic climate change and J.G. Ballard’s early contribution, a quartet in which human civilisation was destroyed by all four of the classic elements, deployed both causes: The Wind from Nowhere (1961, air), The Drowned World (1962, water), The Burning World (1964, fire, later published as The Drought), and The Crystal World (1966, earth). Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) is an early example of cinematic cli-fi and although it was a commercial and critical failure at the time of its release, it was regarded with greater respect in the year in which it is set – 2022 – in consequence of its critique of the capitalist mode of production. Ballard’s quartet provides a convenient heuristic for selecting a characteristic sample of the cinematic genre as it emerged at the end of the 20th century: Kevin Reynolds’ Waterworld (1995, water), Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow (2004, air), George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road (2015, fire), and Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021, earth). Climate change is anthropogenic in all four cases, although the cause is implied in Waterworld and complicated in Don’t Look Up.

Cinematic World-Ecologies

Sociologist Jason Moore opens his magnum opus, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital (2015), by defining capitalism as a way of organising nature rather than an economic or social system. He warns against the separation of capitalism or modernity from nature or ecology because the two have been inextricably linked in a relation of life-making since the long sixteenth century. As such, Moore adopts a world-system approach he refers to as capitalist world-ecology. Capitalist world-ecology is not an interaction of world-economy and world-ecology: world-economies just are world-ecologies. He regards human exceptionalism, the view that human beings are independent of the spatiotemporal web of interspecies dependencies, as deeply misguided because human agency has always been a part of nature and his inquiry begins with the co-production of human and nonhuman animal life and the environments that maintain them. Capitalist world-ecology has been converting energy into capital in increasingly innovative and expansive ways since the coincidence of the Dutch agricultural revolution, Central European mining revolution, and Madeiran sugar-slave nexus in 1450. This year marks the beginning of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Age of Capital), in contrast with and in opposition to the ‘Anthropocene’ (Age of Man). The Anthropocene is used to describe the geological epoch during which humanity has had a significant impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and climate and is usually dated to either the Industrial Revolution (1760-1840) or the First Agricultural Revolution (10000 BCE). In Moore’s assessment, the current epoch is characterised by the impact of capitalist civilisation, which was inaugurated between the two revolutions, rather than by the impact of humanity as a species.

My elemental quartet of climate change cinema are the product of either the Hollywood film industry or Netflix’s streaming service and, as such, inextricably bound up with capitalist world-ecology, both constituting and mediating a market reliant on cheap labour and free nature to hundreds of millions of consumers across the globe. In each of the films, the narrative moves from an unstable inaugural condition to a retrospectively inevitable condition and the transition from inaugural to closural order both represents and evaluates an imagined world-ecology. The quartet and its genre can be subdivided on the basis of whether climate catastrophe is part of the story’s setting (Waterworld and Fury Road), exploring themes of adaptation and recovery, or a diegetic event (The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up), exploring themes of anticipation and mitigation.

Narrating Climate Change

Both Waterworld and Fury Road establish their respective postapocalyptic settings very quickly and very concisely, the former as a world with nothing but water and the latter as a world where everyday life has become a hunt for water. At exactly a minute into the opening sequence of Waterworld, the Universal Pictures logo disappears and the camera moves to a position above the north pole of the rotating Earth. As it zooms in, the ice cap melts, the sea levels rise, and a brief voiceover explains what the audience is seeing. The whole exposition takes less than forty seconds. The voiceover in Fury Road begins at eighteen seconds into the opening sequence, with Max (played by Tom Hardy) introducing himself and providing all the audience need to know about his world as consisting entirely of ‘fire and blood’. His voiceover, which is interrupted by the contributions of anonymous others, continues for another forty seconds, during which a great deal is explained quickly: the apocalypse was anthropic in cause, the Earth can no longer sustain human life, and the global ecological collapse is mirrored on the personal level by Max’s psychological breakdown.

In contrast, The Day After Tomorrow and Don’t Look Up open in a world that seems almost identical to our own. This signals that the catastrophic event has not yet happened and that either it or its threat will be one of the sequence of events that constitute the plot of the narratives. Both films begin with scientific teams, one on the Larsen B Ice Shelf in Antarctica and the other at an observatory at Michigan State University. In The Day After Tomorrow, the ice shelf cracks and breaks away, the significance of which is explained in the following scene when protagonist Professor Jack Hall (played by Dennis Quaid) tells the United Nations Conference on Global Warming in New Delhi that another Ice Age may be imminent. In Don’t Look Up, postgraduate student Kate Dibiasky (played by Jennifer Lawrence) discovers a new comet and she and her supervisor, Professor Randall Mindy (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), determine that it will strike the Earth in six months. This immediately sets the plot in motion as the two scientists try to communicate their discovery to those in a position to take action.

The plot of each of the four films moves through the unstable inaugural condition to a closural order that is unforeseeable but retrospectively inevitable. Each closural order represents a world-ecology that is politically, morally and aesthetically ‘right’ because it is consequent on the responses of the protagonists, antagonists and other characters to the inaugural condition. Don’t Look Up closes with the destruction of the Earth by the comet, which is an inevitable consequence of the power elite’s decision to abort a perfectly feasible plan to destroy the comet in favour of an incredibly high-risk plan to exploit its mineral resources for profit. Fury Road closes with the literal ascension of Imperator Furiosa (played by Charlize Theron) to power, following the overthrow of a male supremacist hierarchy by a revolution with a firm basis in economics – the communal distribution of the Citadel’s currency, water. The Day After Tomorrow closes with an inversion of power relations that reverses the polarity between the Global North and Global South, establishing a more just (but not obviously more sustainable) world-ecology. Waterworld closes with the Mariner (played by Kevin Costner) delivering a small group of people to Dryland, a Garden of Eden in which humanity can flourish and create a new world-ecology.

The world-ecology represented in the closural order is either represented as desirable (Waterworld, The Day After Tomorrow, and Fury Road) or undesirable (Don’t Look Up) and the audience’s desire is enlisted by a complex and manifold combination of narrative form, cinematic style, and thematic content. The desire that drives Waterworld is stimulated relatively late in the narrative as it is only after Helen (played by Jeanne Tripplehorn) makes a deal with the Mariner that the audience’s ambition becomes focused on the three of them reaching Dryland. The quest for Dryland is both reflected and complicated in Fury Road, where it takes a circular shape. The audience’s desire is for Max to assist Furiosa to achieve her goals, which change from taking the Five Wives to the Green Place to turning the tables on their pursuers, attacking the Citadel, and transforming its sexist and elitist political economy. The desire that drives The Day After Tomorrow is also stimulated relatively late, at the halfway point when Hall sets off to New York to rescue his son from the climate catastrophe in progress. From the very beginning of Don’t Look Up, the audience desire that the imminent catastrophe Dibiasky and Mindy have discovered be averted, which requires first that the scientists communicate their discovery to the authorities, then that the authorities believe the prediction they have made, and finally that the authorities take preventative action.

Shaping Desire

As already mentioned, Hollywood and Netflix are part of capitalist world-ecology, exploiting both labour and nature to make massive profits with their films, in spite of paying grotesque salaries to selected stars. All four of my quartet sustain this world-ecology by means of their contribution to the global world-system and promote that global world-system by providing audiences of millions of people with distraction, diversion, and dissipation. What I mean is that time spent watching the films is time spent not doing anything about climate catastrophe and perhaps – given how enjoyable they are all – taking a perverse pleasure in the greatest (more accurately, ultimate) mass harm humanity has ever inflicted on itself. The quartet can, once again, be subdivided, into those that are complicit in capitalist world-ecology (Waterworld and The Day After Tomorrow) and those that are both complicit in and resistant to capitalist world-ecology (Fury Road and Don’t Look Up).

Waterworld’s driving desire is simply for the status quo, finding that last remaining piece of Earth – Dryland – that has not yet been exploited to ruin and can sustain what is left of humanity (before we inevitably destroy it too). The Day After Tomorrow subsumes the desire for a world-ecology that is not devastated by climate catastrophe into a personal quest – Hall’s rescue of his son (and his son’s rescue of his love interest) – prioritising the individual and the family above the collective and failing to integrate the private with the public. The same two criticisms can be made of Ballard’s original quartet, with The Wind from Nowhere aspiring to the status quo and The Drowned World, The Burning World, and The Crystal World subsuming the political under the psychological. Fury Road is more successful, establishing a convincing link between more equitable modes of production and more just social structures and Max’s intervention succeeds where the Mariner’s fails – in transforming the existing world-ecology into something better. Don’t Look Up is even more successful, achieving its impact in a different way, with a downbeat rather than uplifting ending. While the Earth is destroyed, it is destroyed by human greed rather than the deus ex machina of the comet.

Changing world-ecology requires a reconstruction of the global economy and indeed Moore predicts that capitalist world-ecology is reaching its own closural order, although he is not optimistic about what the replacement will be. A reconstruction of the global economy will not, however, be achieved by top-down measures alone – if it all. One only needs to recall the very recent memory of resistance to relatively minor impositions like social distancing, mask-wearing and lockdowns to see how reluctant human beings are to give up any freedoms whatsoever, even when there is overwhelming scientific evidence in its favour. If world-ecology is to be changed completely, it must be from the bottom-up, which will require a reconfiguration of human consciousness to desire different things, such as sustainability over consumption. Culture shapes desire and cinematic narratives are a sizeable and significant part of our culture. Climate change cinema thus has an important role to play and films like Don’t Look Up and Fury Road have demonstrated the shape that role might take.—Rafe McGregor

---

Published online ahead of its appearance in Theaker's Quarterly Fiction #75, due in June 2023.