Not Quite A Review of The Illuminated Man by Christopher Priest and Nina Allan

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I am not sure what to say about The Illuminated Man: Life, Death, and the Worlds of J. G. Ballard, which I've just finished reading. It's as if a book had escaped from the real of dreams--one which starts as one particular thing and then, as you read, becomes something else before returning to its original purpose and then warping into yet something entirely different.

Okay, let me explain.

David Pringle, over the course of many years, amassed and organized in a chronology some 400,000 words of biographical facts and quotes about the life and works of J. G. Ballard. Christopher Priest, who admired Ballard greatly, urged him to turn those notes into a biography.

Pringle, unhappily, had health issues that prevented him from taking on such a task. He suggested that Priest write the book instead. Priest's partner and later wife, Nina Allan, urged him to do so.

Putting aside the novel he had been working on, Priest began writing a critical biography, one he explicitly hoped would force the British literary establishment to include Ballard in the Canon. He was in good health at the onset of the project, but a fast-acting cancer felled him before he could complete the task, though by then he had written a great deal of the book.

Shortly before his death, Ms. Allan took over. 

Here, the book takes a swerve, because Allan, seeing parallels between Ballard's life and works and those of her late husband's, inserted Priest into the narrative as a kind of "twin" to Ballard. Her primary emphasis, however, was on Ballard's works, where, it has to be said, she did a good job. The seams only show where she inserted the first-person pronoun into the text so the reader would know exactly whose experiences and opinions were being presented.

But there is also Allan's detailed account of Priest's illness, decline, and death. Which segues into her analysis of her own grief. She was clearly working her way through the pain and toward acceptance.

Then back to Ballard.

So there are, by my analysis, six major strands to the work: Ballard's life, Priest's analysis of his works, Priest's literary life, his illness and death, Allan's working-through of her still-raw sorrow and (at the end) a meditation on biography and on the book itself. It is a miracle that this isn't a complete botch. For which, full credit must go to Tina Allan and whatever editor she must surely have worked with.

But when it comes to passing judgment on The Illuminated Man, I am completely out of my depth. Does it achieve any of its goals from forcing Ballard into the Canon to easing a widow's grief? I have no idea. I can only say that it kept my interest throughout. Also, that there will surely always be readers for a work so uniquely structured.

I can think of no book remotely like it.

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CHECK FACTS!!!

John Crowley (1942-2026)

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A quarter-century ago, I carried a light portable tape recorder to a convention that my wife, Marianne Porter, could not attend. My intention was to record a few ephemeral moments of the con to amuse her later. In the bar, I struck up a conversation with John Crowley.

Crowley was then universally acknowledged to be one of the best and brightest writers working in genre He was also midway through his ambitious hermetic fantasy, the Aegypt Sequence. The first book, Aegypt, appeared in 1987 and the second, Love & Sleep in 1994. Daemonomania was forthcoming and the final book, Endless Things, would not appear until 2007, twenty years after the first.

With John's permission, I turned on the recorder and asked him why he was engaged in such a large and time-consuming single work. His answer was as follows:

God knows. God help me. For having ever started this. When we are young we think that life will go on forever. When we grow older, we realize that life has shapes. It's time, it seems to me, to find out that the largest stretch of my creative years is going to be taken up with a project that will probably be the major thing that I do in life. That's scary. That's a terrifying thought. You try to preserve possibilities. You try to have a life that continues to open out, even though you know it doesn't. And the idea that it doesn't, and that life has shapes, is borne in on me as I work on this book. It's not like I will go on and write dozens of books. I don't know what they are. No, I know what they are, and I am already in the middle of writing one of them. I don't know why. I wish I knew.

Which answer I found so engaging that I later published it in The New York Review of Science Fiction as the first of a series of “singular interviews.”

John Crowley lived another twenty years after completing that great work. But no author is immortal, though some of his works (Little Big is my favorite of his fantasies and Engine Summer of his science fiction) may be. He passed away on August 8, 2026. 

John led a life that constantly opened out. Now, alas, it has closed.

 

 

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Sara Paul, 1948 - 2026

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Funerals are like tears. They rarely happen one at a time. Marianne and I were in Amherst for a memorial service when we got a phone call from Gene Olmsted to let us know that his wife, Sara Paul, had died. We drove home Monday and attended her funeral Tuesday.

Sara was one of those people who keep the world running. She worked for over thirty years for the Philadelphia School District as a librarian in city schools and "on loan" at Overbrook School for the Blind. Seeing an inadequate number of books for the children there, she translated books by hand into Braille for them. 

In private life, Sara was a passionate fan of science fiction. She was an active member of the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society and helped run Philcon every year until her health failed her. 

She and Gene threw enormous parties for a hundred people or more, with some of the most eccentric spreads of food I've ever seen at such events.

In brief, she spent her life making things better for people.

Death draws a line beneath the endless rows of figures that are our days. All the numbers are added up, the zeroes fall off, and you're left with the final reckoning: a life well spent, or not. Sara was never rich or famous and I doubt she ever aspired to be either. But she continually improved the lives of the people around her. 

You could do a lot worse. You could hardly do a whit better.

Vaya con Dios, Sara. I hope that Heaven has one hell of a science fiction library. But if it doesn't, I'm sure you'll soon put it to rights.

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A Memorial For Jane Yolen--With Heartfelt Memories And Dancing Bears

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A memorial was held for Jane Yolen in Amherst at the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art. Which was appropriate, given that she wrote over 450 books, most of them for children. Marianne and I were there, along with roughly 200 other of her friends, family which, and colleagues. The event was streamed live online, so thousands more witnessed it along with us.

 

I noticed several people from the science fiction community in attendance—Susan Shwartz, Geri Sullivan, and Esther Friesner among them—and her good friend Bruce Coville was one of the speakers. But most came from her other worlds: children's literature, poetry, and teaching prominent among them. Over the years, I've had to explain to several SF people that while they thought of her as being merely a prominent figure in our world (she was a president of SFWA and won two Nebula Awards), she was a giant elsewhere.

 One thing I learned at the memorial was that Jane had taught her children and grandchildren well. The event was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. and started on the minute. And her offspring were among the clearest and most articulate public speakers I've ever heard.

 There were heartfelt memories retold, poems read, and music played. I don't think I'll ever again hear "Waltzing With Bears" without misting up.

And then, with a bagpiper leading the way, the family led the way out of the building, between two lines of attendees (we were told this was a Jewish custom--the lines, not the bagpiper) and the formal event was over. I went into the gift shop and bought a copy of Owl Moon, probably Jane's single most famous work, because I wanted something she'd written which had been physically present during the memorial.

 

And what does one do after such an event . . . ? 

 I can't speak for anyone else, but Marianne and I went to a book sale. It was run by the League of Women Voters and we bought two bags of books for a total of ten dollars. I was looking for something by Jane to put in our wee free library, and did. But it was a pristine copy of her collection Sister Emily's Lightship and the association with Jane and Emily Dickinson in Amherst, where Dickinson lived and is buried, roused my possessive instincts. So I'm keeping it.

I'll go to the bookstore and find something else to put in the library.

 

Oh, and . . .

In case you missed it, you can find what Jane Yolen said when I told her I admired how prolific she was here.  

 

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CORDWAINER SMITH!!!

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Less than two hours before the day melts into the past, I've learned that this is Paul Linebarger's birthday. Linebarger was a military expert on psychological warfare. During World War Two, he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations there and became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek. A CIA official called him "perhaps the leading practitioner of 'black' and 'gray' propaganda in the Western world."  Linebarger was posthumously inducted as a Distinguished Member of the Psychological Operations Regiment by the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School

But that was just his day job.

In his real life, he was a science fiction writer. And not just any science fiction writer, but an inimitable one. He wrote under the name of Cordwainer Smith. And his tales of the Instrumentality of Mankind were... strange, wonderful, gemlike, and inimitable

Not that we didn't try. You could fill a very fat anthology with pastiche stories that failed to capture the essence of Cordwainer Smith's fiction. For a very long time, every ambitious writer there was tried. (Including me. Smith wrote a story called "The Clown of Deadlady Town," and early in my career, I wrote "The Dead Lady of Clown Town. A story that has rightfully never been reprinted. So I am not setting myself above anybody here.)

Our failures were like flowers laid before his grave.

And what, you may well ask, were his stories like? Stange, wonderful, etc., etc. I couldn't do them justice at anything less than book length. 

If you know, you know. If you don't, it may take a little effort to find his stories. But i recommend you do. They're worth it. I recommend you do. Unless the prices are ridiculous. "Fifty fucks for a sixties paperback? Are you nuts?"   In which case, be patient. Hold the fort. You'll find his work eventually.

And you'll love it.

And, okay, yes . . .

Linebarger may possibly have been as nutty as a fruitcake. In 1954, a psychologist dedicated a chapter of The Fifty-Minute Hour to a science fiction writer who believed he was an alien getting instruction from the Dog Star and scholars have pointed the finger at the bard of the Instrumentality. The hallucination, if such it was, lacks the hard-headedness of his Cold Warrior status and the subtlety of his science fiction. But maybe so.

Whatever the truth may be, his fiction remains one of the wellsprings of science fiction. 

Going To Visit The Locomotive

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Last Sunday, Marianne and Sean and I went to see Big Boy, which has been receiving enormous attention and tremendous crowds at every stop of its coast-to-coast trip.

It would take great verbal labor to do justice to this gorgeous machine. So let's just say big and beautiful.

The locomotive was on display at the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and I have to say: Kudos to everyone involved in handling traffic. An enormous number of people showed up to see it. So many, I couldn't help thinking of Don  DiLillo's dictat that "The future belongs to crowds." Yet they kept the flow going smoothly and without complication.

The interesting thing about the crowd was how amiable everybody was. They were all, it seems, in the mood to do something fun and celebrational that was attached to no particular political stance.

Also, and I realize that Philadelphia being a deep-blue union kind of town was a factor here, but it still surprised me... There was not a MAGA hat to be seen. Not one.

And while I was there, I learned . . .

The Big Boy locomotive was built in Schenectady, NY. Like me!

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"Like Getting Attacked By A Swarm Of Bees"

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This is wild. My story, "The Very Pulse of the Machine," (or at least the Love, Death, & Robots adaptation of it) was a triggering influence on the latest album by Glassmouth, a Singapore mathcore and chaotic hardcore group. 

Their music has been described as "unhinged polyrhythmic noise," ranging from “unhinged abrasiveness akin to a freight train plowing through a forest” and “the serenity of a dormant volcano.” (The last two are their own self-characterizations.) Their imprint describes the result as “a jagged, polyrhythmic assault” and “more like getting attacked by a swarm of bees.”

So how on earth did I get involved in this? Shorthand version: They had a vision of the horror of cosmic distances inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and were at work on the album when they saw the anime version of my story and it imploded their vision into an exploration of inner space. "The vast, infinite alien planet was no longer just a setting; it became a mirror for isolation, grief, and the devastating weight of survival,” one of the musicians said.

One, incidentally, that has an upbeat ending, rather than the cold and literal loop the group had originally envisioned.

You can read the entire and involving (for me, at least, and not just because of my peripheral involvement) account here.

And for those of us who enjoy the deep geek . . .

The structure of "The Very Pulse of the Machine" was modeled after Geoff Landis's Hugo Award-winning short story, "A Walk in the Sun." Which just goes to show how complicated the lines of artistic influence can be.

Above: Headline and image copied from IDIOTEQ. I was quite impressed by their article.

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