This new series by Palgrave, Science Fiction and Fantasy: A New Canon, aims to provide, as per its prospectus, “short introductions to key works of science fiction and fantasy speaking to why a text, trilogy, or series matters to SFF as a genre as well as to readers, scholars, and fans.” Here are two books from the series, each focusing on one novel. Neither author is an academic (although Paul March-Russell used to be one, at the University of Kent) but both are well known to the SF world, Kincaid as an award-winning independent critic and reviewer and March-Russell as editor of Foundation and co-founder of Gold SF, a press dedicated to new intersectional feminist science fiction. Their books are short: less than 30,000 words. They are direct engagements with their primary texts and written in clear, jargon-free prose. The “canon” in the series title is part of the brief: “[T]he goal of the series is not to be the arbiters of canonical importance, but to show how sustained critical analysis of these texts might bring about a new canon.”
March-Russell asks, “to what canon could Crash possibly belong? What canon would admit this novel?”
Or put another way, to which canon could this novel submit itself? Images of submission, acquiescence, power and its necessary corollary, violence, are rapidly invoked when we try to conceive how this novel could ever possibly be canonised. Crash’s taboo content; its flat, affectless prose; its very resistance to being read pose glaring questions about ideas of the canon, canonicity and canonisation … Neither mass product nor highbrow fiction, Crash unsettles the criteria upon which a project of re-canonisation can even be imagined. And this is what makes Crash significant for this series—and for the reader’s understanding of science fiction’s relationship to other forms of art and literature.
This is to take for granted that Crash (1973) is science fiction, a description with which not everyone would agree. It’s a novel that does, certainly, address questions of technology, although contemporary technology, not extrapolated or imaginary stuff. There is a vibe to the book, an alienation of content and affect, and in that sense we could take it as a text about aliens, which is science-fictiony. Ballard’s own summary of the book, “sex times technology equals the future,” positions its diagnostic as in some sense futurist.
The canon question, too, is certainly interesting: Crash is a well-known novel, still in print, widely discussed, made into a major movie, the inspiration for a range of art and music (March-Russell covers all this); and yet it remains an outsider novel, still shocking, radically unlikeable. It’s not clubbable, we could say. Ballard’s own account of what happened when he submitted the novel to Jonathan Cape is famous: “[O]ne of the publisher’s readers was … the wife of a psychiatrist, and she wrote the most damning and vituperative reader’s report they’d ever received. It included the statement: ‘the author is beyond psychiatric help.’” Ballard declared himself “quite pleased by the report, because it represents, in a sense, total artistic success. The book had worked if somebody could respond like that to it.” March-Russell questions the veracity of this story—the reader was Catherine Peters, wife of Anthony Storr, but her report, if it ever contained this phrase, no longer exists. Of course, Crash has been controversial among many. March-Russell takes us through contemporary reviews (overwhelmingly negative, sometimes hysterical) and the critical debates, with particular attention first to Baudrillard’s essay on the novel as postmodern hyperreality that “has abolished both fiction and reality” and then to Roger Luckhurst’s “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (1997)—still the best critical monograph on Ballard.
March-Russell provides a lot of detail about the origins and writing of the novel, Ballard’s influences—he claims that Wyndham Lewis was important, which is a novel argument—and the cultural context out of which the book was produced, namely New Wave science fiction and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s: Ballard’s friendship with Michael Moorcock; experimental shorts published in New Worlds and Ambit; writing that dealt with technology, cars, crashes, death, eroticism; inserting friends and celebrities into his fiction.
March-Russell’s thesis is that Crash should not be read as a single novel “but as an event composed of multiple iterations … a process rather than a product.” Indeed, this book itself follows through on this process past the publication of the novel, noting, for example, that in The Kindness of Women (1991), Ballard’s fictionalised memoir of his life, elements from Crash and its creation are reworked. March-Russell thinks Ballard’s sense of what he called “terminal irony” (Ballard’s own words) is best understood in connection to Lewis’s “moronic inferno,” which Lewis originally used to describe “‘the decadence … of insipidity and decay” he felt characterised the interwar years. In so situating the novel, one of the things this study is doing is teasing Crash out of the context of Baudrillardian postmodernism through which it has so often been read, and instead exploring the Modernist aspects of the piece. A brief reference to the Symbolist Alfred Jarry, and his parodic concept of pataphysics, suggests an additional and particularly illuminating context for what Ballard was doing, but this isn’t expanded upon. Chapter 4 instead goes down the surrealism route, citing Eduardo Paolozzi, the Independent Group, and “the British Surrealist movement”; but Liam McNamara’s argument is that Ballard is much more a Pataphysicist than a Surrealist, and I think there’s a lot to be said for that.
The book is persistently original and suggestive, however. Chapter 5, “Body Horrors: Cyborgs, Reptiles and Mongrels,” is less interested in human-car cyborg hybrids and more in the links between Ballard’s human characters and beasts, along with those living “bare lives” (such as prostitutes and migrants). March-Russell creatively juxtaposes Crash with Ballard’s earlier The Drowned World (1962) and identifies “three different conceptions of human behaviour, each rooted in evolutionary theory” in the work: those of Carl Jung, Arthur Koestler, and B.F. Skinner. The final chapter, “Moral Pornography: Sex, Power and Representation,” looks at Ballard’s representation of women, contesting David Pringle’s notion that Ballard only writes two kinds of female characters (“the self-absorbed or harridan wife, and the femme fatale”). Rather than accepting Alan McKee’s accusation of “a deep-seated sexual unease towards women” in Ballard, March-Russell uses Angela Carter’s concept of “moral pornography” to apprehend the sexual explicitness and transgressiveness of Ballard’s book:
In The Sadeian Woman (1979), Angela Carter argued that the writings of the Marquis de Sade could be turned against themselves as a device that unlocks the violence of patriarchy and makes space for female sexual desire. At one point, Carter (2001, 19–20) hypothesises what a moral pornography might look like: The moral pornographer would be an artist who uses pornographic material as part of the acceptance of the logic of a world of absolute sexual licence for all the genders, and projects a model of the way such a world might work. A moral pornographer might use pornography as a critique of current relations between the sexes. His business would be the total demystification of the flesh and the subsequent revelation, through the infinite modulations of the sexual act, of the real relations of man and his kind. Such a pornographer would not be the enemy of women, perhaps because he might begin to penetrate to the heart of the contempt for women that distorts our culture even as he entered the realms of true obscenity as he describes it.
There is perhaps an element of wishful thinking about this. Ballard was no de Sade, obviously, but Crash is a novel that objectifies women: its sex is not only automotive but phallic, male-view, penetrative. On the sex front, there is a sense in which the very clarity and comprehensiveness that March-Russell undertakes perhaps misses something crucial in Crash. Ballard’s novel is perverse, and not just in the sense that it details sexual fixations and activities that are extreme and fetishistic, but in the sense that Slavoj Žižek develops:
What, then, does the pervert miss, in his endeavour to absolutely separate the Truth from Lies? The answer is, of course: the Truth of the Lie itself, the truth that is delivered in and through the very act of lying. Paradoxically, the pervert’s falsity (lie) resides in his very unconditional attachment to truth, in his refusal to hear the truth resonating in a lie. It was Shakespeare whose plays, long ago, provided a breathtakingly refined insight into the entanglement of truth and lies. ... This brings us back to perversion: for Lacan, a pervert is not defined by the content of what he is doing (his weird sexual practices, etc.). Perversion, at its most fundamental, resides in the formal structure of how the subject relates to truth and speech. The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will. (Žižek, “The Fundamental Perversion: Lacan, Dostoyevsky, Bouyeri,” in Lacanian Ink 27)
This speaks to the novel’s use of real people, or at least real names, and real places in its fantastical technosexual extrapolations; and it provides a throughline into another kind of critical engagement, whereby Star Wars is read as a type of Crash.
There has been quite a lot of writing on Ballard, which means March-Russell has a lot of ground to cover with respect to the critical contexts, summarising what other scholars have said about the novel and making clear where he is developing his own original arguments. This he does well: the short book contains a lot of data—about Ballard’s life, his influences, critical reactions to him. Yet the reader never loses her way, or feels overwhelmed, and the book provides a very detailed and grounded account of Ballard’s novel and its impact.
Paul Kincaid is obliged take a different approach in his own book for the series, for Pavane (1968) has attracted relatively little academic critical interest: “[D]espite the admiration that his work continues to attract from his fellow writers,” Kincaid notes, “few if any of the histories of science fiction that have appeared in the nearly 40 years since Trillion Year Spree by Brian Aldiss with David Wingrove (1986) have even mentioned his name, and he is almost entirely absent from other surveys of the genre.” Kincaid doesn’t name me, but he might have done, for I have been delinquent in this regard: My History of Science Fiction (2nd ed, 2016) mentions no SF by any Robertses. Pavane is a great novel, so this lack of critical attention is puzzling, and Kincaid is not sure about its causes. He speculates that the novel falls between two stools, not quite “in the technological territory of science fiction,” but “beyond the pure wish-fulfilment of modern fantasy” (he is quoting Nina Allan here). He also wonders if Roberts’s own personality might have stymied attention, for he was a man almost “incapable of friendship, someone who distrusted everyone on principle, and fell out with everyone who became close to him.” Kincaid records a conversation with an unnamed SF publisher describing Roberts as “unpublishable … a way of saying that it was impossible for any publisher to work with Roberts.” Now, I never met Roberts, and despite our consonance of surname we are not related, so this latter theory can’t explain why Pavane isn’t covered in my History. I ought to be able to justify his absence, but I can’t.
What little criticism there is of Roberts does not, broadly, impress Kincaid—he considers Bruce Gillespie’s survey of Roberts’s work “peculiarly ill-judged” for instance. He does have time, however, for Jim Clarke’s Science Fiction and Catholicism: The Rise and Fall of the Robot Papacy (2019)—rightly, it’s excellent—and quotes a number of fellow authors who praise Roberts highly. And he quotes Roger Luckhurst’s association of Roberts with a sense of “melancholia articulated through English landscapes”:
This personification of landscape charged with mystical and historic resonance is a commonplace in much English science fiction. Luckhurst points in particular to the Wessex of Christopher Priest’s A Dream of Wessex (1977), and the ancient Herefordshire woodlands of Robert Holdstock’s Mythago Wood (1984).
But there is little else. The paucity of critical discussion leaves Kincaid free to develop his own take on Roberts’s novel. He does this in two stages. First, he lays out the biographical and historical contexts out of which Roberts wrote the stories that comprise Pavane. (Kincaid doesn’t use the term ”fix-up”, but that’s what this novel is. He prefers the term “mosaic novel,” which seems to me less apt—the maker of a mosaic, after all, knows what the overall pattern should look like as she goes to work; the logic of the “fix-up” is more happenstance, stories written and then retrofitted, sometimes awkwardly, into a notional wholeness.) Kincaid gives a detailed account of the structure of the novel, maps its worldbuilding (which was, he notes, arrived at aggregately, as new stories were written, not worked out systematically in advance), unpacks “the network of semaphore signal stations and the Fairies” in the novel, and then discusses the complex religious history. He has perceptive and fascinating things to say about Roberts’s use of specific English landscape, and what he calls “the character of the multigirl who would go on to be one of the most interesting and important characters in Roberts’s later work.”
Kincaid steers clear of a political or ideological reading of the novel—a gap, really, critically speaking—but is good on how much more complicated is the book’s representation of the the representation of the Church than simple English-Protestant anti-Catholic. For Kincaid, in fact, Roberts’s novel is not notably anti-Catholic, although the persistence of the Catholic Church has held back technological and scientific advances in its alt-history (or, as the coda to the novel makes clear, its cyclical history). After all, it has also meant no World Wars, no Holocaust, no industrial transformation of the countryside. The book styles Catholicism as an alien power in England, and it is around those terms that the characters’ resistance to Papal power is oriented. But Roberts does not regard the slowdown of industrial and technological advance as altogether a bad thing, and there is magic and wonder still in his world. It’s not what Philip Pullman does with the Church in His Dark Materials (1995-2000): Roberts himself said, “My great Church lunges and plunges, baffled; but it isn’t evil. I tried to make that plain.”
Chapter 4 focuses on the novel’s complex speculations about Catholicism and Protestantism. Kincaid is interested in these as social and cultural rather than theological quantities, because that’s where Roberts’s emphasis is. He cites Weber’s “Protestant Work Ethic,” although not Weber’s theses about the disenchantments of modernity, which are surely also relevant to the novel:
[…] ranged against the Church and the social and economic system it has created […] are other belief systems. The dissent that runs throughout the story cycle is intimately connected to an unlikely alliance of other belief systems. Anglicanism survives as an underground movement, but here it works in concert with folk beliefs, with the Fairies, and with a survival of Norse mythology.
When Kincaid says that “it is unlikely that the Protestant faith would have been entirely eliminated by the victory of the Catholic Church,” he is following Roberts, but ignoring the lineaments of actual history—the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France, the wars of Kappel in Switzerland, the Inquisition in Spain and Portugal. This, though, is true to the line taken by Roberts (the echt, the original Roberts).
Kincaid notes that Roberts is interested in technology, just not in “future technology” or technological extrapolation—which puts into question the book’s affiliation with science fiction. Rather, Kincaid shows Roberts fascinated by the machinery that that led to where we are now, that explains the modern world. “There is,” Kincaid drily notes, “an element of nostalgia about this.” Kincaid argues—rightly, I think—that Roberts uses his fiction to foreground his sense of subjectivity and identity as shaped by beliefs and events that are themselves rooted in specific locales, and his fifth chapter is a sensitive and persuasive account of the landscapes of Pavane and Corfe Castle in particular. I found Chapter 6—an account of one of Roberts’s favourite artists, Paul Nash, and Roberts’s own Das Ewig-Weibliche, “the figure dubbed the multigirl, who would represent the eternal and universal feminine in all of Roberts’s work”—a little less persuasive, however. The connection between these two topics is not altogether clear.
These are good books: well researched, informative, critically engaged. March-Russell addresses the question of the “canonicity” of his text directly; Kincaid doesn’t engage that question in the same way, but he foregrounds the importance and merit of Roberts’s novel in the teeth of its neglect. Another aspect of canonicity is the Palgrave brief that the books in this series will be “structured to facilitate classroom use.” Both the volumes here are so structured: eminently clear, with summaries at the head of each chapter, distinct talking points and discussion questions addressed. This, though, presupposes that these two novels will end up in the classroom. It would be a brave lecturer who puts Crash on their syllabus, and though there’s nothing objectionable or trigger-warning-requiring about Pavane, the marginal status of the book—which Kincaid himself discusses—makes it unlikely that a regular SF course will find room for it. I could be wrong, but I don’t know of any university English departments teaching either work. But Palgrave know very well that science fiction fans are more likely than other fans to be interested in, and to seek out, critical discussion and engagement of their preferred genre—and anyone interested in Ballard or Roberts would be well advised to pick up these two fine examples of contemporary SF criticism.