Epochs drifted. Giant waves, infinitely slow and enveloping, broke and fell across the sunless beaches of the time-sea, washing him helplessly in its shallows. He drifted from one pool to another, in the limbos of eternity, a thousand images of himself reflected in the inverted mirrors of the surface.

To share Ballard with someone is to bridge unconscious minds. To describe his books is impossible. On the surface, The Drowned World is a post-apocalyptic story about solar radiation, melted icecaps, and the great cities of the Western world submerged in brackish water. But this scientific conceit is a formality, something to explain away the deliberately surreal environment: high-rise towers rising from viscous lagoons, fata morganas of light on the throbbing horizon, gymnosperms and iguanas poised like gargoyles among the heat-warped ruins of civilization. It’s a shockingly languid, sensuous book, a romance to the Precambrian era. I read it mostly at night during a heatwave, but it doesn’t need that context to feel like a half-remembered fever dream.

Driven by heady dreams themselves, the characters in The Drowned World all share an inexplicable urge to move South, towards the equator and, metaphysically, into the sun. Which is where the pulp paperback qualities of this novel break down and The Drowned World reveals what it really is: a tango between the motivations of a lost sacral brain and the higher power of symbol. There’s this idea that if we change our environment, we change our minds: as the Earth reverts to primordial stew, human consciousness seemingly falls deeper and deeper down the brainstem, into more primitive and inarticulate forms. Time slows to a glutinous wah; the sun becomes clock and master. Lizard brain, if you will. Ballard postulates a genetic memory of not only our own species, but the entire unbroken neurophysical history of life.

“As we move back through geophysical time so we re-enter the amniotic corridor and move back through spinal and archaeopsychic time, recollecting in our unconscious minds the landscapes of each epoch…this is no scenic railway, but a total re-orientation of the personality.”

With this fake science, Ballard speculates that cities order man, not vice-versa. Change the container and we ooze into premodern forms, content to gaze into the sun and occasionally dive below the water, to discover, say, a drowned planetarium, great symbol of the human past, recontextualized as a cosmic womb. This scene, incidentally, slays: deep underwater and within the uterine dome of a planetarium sky, our protagonist, Kerans, watches an unfamiliar zodiac form “before his eyes like the first vision of some pelagic Cortez emerging from the oceanic deeps to glimpse the immense Pacifics of the open sky.”

Our pelagic explorer has sunk deeply into the grey sweet mother of us all, and in this moment recalls Socrates’ metaphor, in Plato’s Phaedo, of a fish who gazes up at the sea and believes it to be the sky. Like sea-creatures who believe the void of corroding brine to be the limit of all there is, “we are dwelling in a hollow of the earth,” he says, “and fancy that we are on the surface; and the air we call the heaven, and in this we imagine that the stars move.” For Plato, this is a way of thinking in scales, of remembering that the sky begins at our feet; for Ballard, it represents a gradual, but welcome, contraction of perception back into a pre-evolutionary blip.

Simon O’Carrigan, Study for “Lagoon,” from The Drowned World, 2008.

The asphyxiating lagoon that was London is, at one point in the novel, briefly drained. The buildings and streets slowly emerge from their amniotic beds, dripping with brine and foul algae. Kerans roams the ruins at night, disembodied and completely unable to come to terms with the sudden return of what this once-ordered city represented: chronological time, form, society, and geographical specificity. The global cataclysm that triggered the floods has, by then, erased the notion of urbanity from human consciousness–made it feel as unnatural as it always-already was. It’s a relief when the levee breaks and the warm oozing tides of oblivion descend once more upon the stage.

Simon O’Carrigan, another Study for “Lagoon,” from The Drowned World, 2008.

The reborn sun dominates: one character goes blind navigating through the jungle to follow it. All of Ballard’s books feel like great unmade films. They are so visual, sensory. We, as readers, are all gazing into the same heat-warped lagoon, but the symbols which jump into our minds arrange themselves differently for each of us. Ballard is deft and unapologetic about his predilection for largely symbolic narratives. For many cultures that use magic, symbols are seen as a type of technology.

The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde is a 1970 collection of short stories by Norman Spinrad — syndicalist, anarchist, and active Internet user.

I had the same feeling reading The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde as I did when I read Bradbury as a kid, breathlessly tearing towards each story’s conclusion, eager to discover the clincher. At the outset, Spinrad seemed to combine the lucid dreaming of New-Wave science fiction with a more classical magazine-writing approach to story structure, something like Frederik Pohl explaining an LSD trip. Is it high art? Who cares? I just want to find out what’s inside the mysterious alien dome! After some meditation, however, I’ve found Spinrad to be a New Waver as hard-core as they come.

The most mind-expanding story in the collection is “Neutral Ground,” which manages to confound inner and outer space into a single unexplored entity. The story is about “Voyagers,” lab rats in a series of clinical studies testing a mysterious new drug called Psychion-36. Psychion-36 takes users to a place — a real Place. Though their bodies lie prone on psychiatric couches, the Voyagers most certainly travel to complex and detailed landscapes which seem like other worlds. Furthermore, multiple Voyagers visit the same places:

While their bodies lay in trances lasting for about an hour, their minds wandered through fantastic landscapes. And what was different about these hallucinations, what had made Project Voyage imperative, was that, although no Voyager had yet visited the same Place twice, there was strong evidence that different Voyagers had been to the same Places.

The Voyagers eventually encounter a non-human intelligence in their travels through the Places, and it proves to be a very different kind of “First Contact” than anyone could have expected. A great premise. Unfortunately, Spinrad, in this collection, is almost as much about what he doesn’t do with these perfect scenarios as what he does; “Neutral Ground” is a great story, but it’s not what, say, Le Guin or Tiptree might have done with it.

Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Sheckley mugging at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 1982.

Many of the stories in Last Hurrah play with this nuance between inner and outer space, and the physicality of the mind. In the opening story, “Carcinoma Angels,” a man uses a potent cocktail of consciousness-expanding drugs to travel inside of his own body, Fantastic Voyage-style, and battle off his own illness. In “Subjectivity,” a crew of long-distance space travelers dosed with an experimental psychedelic to stave off the loneliness of their sixteen-year intergalactic journey manage to externalize and maintain their hallucinations deftly enough to live inside of them. In “A Child of Mind,” marooned astronauts encounter an organism that can make real their most specific fantasy of a mate. The mind, in Spinrad’s work, is the ultimate science-fiction apparatus. Not the engineer’s mind, the kind of mind that (as Bruce Sterling writes) is “interested in the transcendent poetics of a device per se,” in sublimation through the conduit of an external machine. There are objects of human ingenuity in these stories — spacecraft, faster-than-light drives — but they are cold, dead things. They’re furniture. The real fire is metaphysical; the mind that Spinrad evokes is the mind of the mystic, the hovering yogi, the telepath, the meta-programmable mind of John C. Lilly — the mind without limits.

It’s an interesting — maybe I’m reading too much into this — externalization of the act of science fiction. In Spinrad’s 70s heyday, the only machine used to make fiction was a typewriter. And the typewriter has as much to do with the final work as a hammer does to a nail: which is to say, it’s necessary, it can color the work inasmuch as the heaviness of a hammer might affect the force of a carpenter’s thrust, but it’s not like a nail won’t go into the wall if you slam it with a rock. Ideas come from the writer, not from his or her tools. So why would a piece of fiction play by different rules?

You could define the “Golden Age” of science fiction as being primarily phallo-centric, machine-lusting, tool literature: steam-powered metal men, Tom Swift and his Photo-Telescope, etcetera. This is just the DNA of the genre: pulp magazines were written to adolescent boys, and with Hugo Gernsback publishing the first “scientifiction” serials in Modern Electrics, science fiction literally emerged from a culture of machismo mechanical tinkering. The New Wave of the 1960s (of which Spinrad was at the heart) aimed to move beyond that stigma, and so a radical break from object fetishism played a large part.

Spinrad’s stories, so concerned with the science-fictional power of the mind, speak to the metaphysics of writer and type-writer, hammer and nail. Every time a character in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde employs a Golden-Age “how does this doo-hickey work?” mentality, they are soundly rebuked. Spinrad clearly finds this way of thinking perverse and dated — he is for the transubstantiation of ideas into things, not of things into ideas. Success and failure, utopia and dystopia, all issue forth directly from the mind. In a great story called “Rules of the Road,” a character learns that space travel is a mental pursuit:

He felt a strangeness in his mind, a complexity beyond complexity, a revelation of new and unexpected textures in his psyche. Time was flux, space was flux, eternity was a variable…He did something with his mind, and the surface of the planet vanished like mist.

And then he stood up from the typewriter, and the ideas went with him.

In my opinion, the 1960s were the best time to be a sci-fi buff. Everything was new: the unfolding space race was not only beginning to justify decades of literary speculation about space travel, but it was also ratcheting astronauts and engineers up to rock-star status, making science cool for (maybe) the first time. Meanwhile, science fiction, being an outsider genre, was necessarily aligning itself with the burgeoning counterculture and psychedelic spirit of the time. Some hazy confluence of these factors led to the radical period known as the “New Wave” of sci-fi, spearheaded by the generation’s great antiestablishment auteurs: Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. LeGuin, to name a few. In this nascent era, the scene was small enough that conventions and science fiction clubs were intimate, convivial affairs, and…well, mostly, it seems like the clothes were pretty cool.

Click on photos to enlarge!

Images culled from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) photo archives, and feature period heads like Harlan Ellison, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Ray Bradbury, Philip Jose Farmer, John Campbell, Fritz Leiber, and Lester del Rey hanging out with a radical company of fans, including legends like Forrest J. Ackerman and Bjo Trimble.