Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  I come from a distant planet, from Earth, that Earth on which, by a whim of nature that has still to be explained, it is men who are the repositories of wisdom and reason.… It is man who settled my planet and changed its face, man in fact who established a civilization so refined that in many respects, O Monkeys, it resembles your own.

  By this time, the novel has demonstrated that words such as “wisdom,” “reason,” and “refined” are deeply ironic. The apparent similarity of the environment is a constant implied reproach as Boulle highlights the barbarity with which animals are treated both on Soror and on Earth.

  When Boulle wrote La Planète des Singes in 1963, he had already achieved worldwide success with his other best-seller, The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952). Both books became successful films. The Bridge over the River Kwai drew directly on his time in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, and critics also see echoes of these experiences in the cruel domination of humans by the ruling apes on Soror.

  The original 1968 film of The Planet of the Apes, loosely based on the novel, was directed by Franklin J. Schaffner, and has been followed by several sequels, a television series, comic books, and various profitable merchandising deals. A remake in 2001 was also successful, and since then there have been Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). War of the Planet of the Apes is due for release in 2017.

  Boulle, who died in 1994, criticized the original film. It lacked the subtlety and ironic bite of the novel, which ends with a surprise twist making clear that the similarities between Earth and Soror might prove to be even closer than the story has suggested. Where Franklin J. Schaffner was directing an action movie, Boulle had written a finely judged satire that deserves to be judged in the tradition of Voltaire.

  GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

  ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE (1967)

  Seven generations of the Buendía family are traced in the magical and surreal location of Macondo known as “the city of mirrors,” in the South American countryside.

  Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014) grew up in rural Colombia and, whenever critics suggested he had imagined the fantastical and implausible elements in his writing, he always insisted “there’s not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality.” He began work as a journalist, moving onto writing novels when the newspaper he worked on was shut down by the Colombian authorities, but it was One Hundred Years of Solitude that established him as one of the most important writers in the world.

  In one sense Márquez’s immensely subtle and complex novel is quite straightforward: the “patriarch” José Arcadio Buendía, leaves Riohacha, Colombia, with his wife in search of a better life. One night, camping beside a river, he has a prophetic dream about a city made of mirrors. He decides to found this city and to call it Macondo. The novel then tells the stories of Buendía’s many descendants.

  There is little, however, by way of conventional narrative, beyond a list of the strange things that happen in the town, and the rise and fall of the doomed Buendía clan. Seven generations, each of which contains many individuals, makes for a crowded dramatis personae, but although it is possible to trace the family tree underpinning the story’s many episodes, this may not be the best way of reading the text. Márquez’s achievement lies in the atmosphere he creates, and the many evocative, even poetic moments of narrative intensity. Part of that atmosphere has to do with a certain intricacy, of busyness, of texture, which in turn speaks to a vision of life as rich, and complex, and involved, and endlessly surprising.

  An example is the character of Colonel Aureliano Buendía, the founder’s second son. The novel’s famous opening sentence introduces him: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” In addition to being a soldier, Aureliano is a poet, and the maker of beautifully crafted golden fish. He has fathered seventeen illegitimate sons, all named Aureliano, by seventeen different women. All seventeen come to his house on the same day. Four of them decide to settle in the town, but all of them, whether they stay or go, are murdered by mysterious assassins before they reach the age of thirty-five.

  Such things are unlikely, but possible. Other aspects of the novel partake of a dream logic. Remedios the Beauty is a girl so beautiful that men break down and die at the sight of her. Apparently mentally vacant, she eventually floats off into the sky. A character called Melquíades travels to Singapore and dies, although he later returns to Macondo, declaring that he “could not endure the solitude of death.” He then dies a second time, and is buried. All these things are treated by Márquez as if they were perfectly normal.

  This last point is important, because the experience of reading the novel is not in the least whimsical, random, or bizarre. On the contrary, the world Márquez creates feels exceptionally grounded and real. The textures of everyday life are precisely evoked: the weather and the landscape, infestations of red ants in the houses, the physical intensity of sexual desire. The surreal elements of the story do not contradict the realist elements; the two complement one another, just as the town contains both a character who is an aviator, and who plans to establish an airmail service, and a functioning alchemical laboratory in the main Buendía house.

  In the end, a hurricane destroys Macondo, a fitting end for this place of South American heat and intensity, prone to floods and tempests. Márquez re-imagines his homeland as a place worked into strange shapes by the forces of individual desire and despair, by love and lust, by pride and willpower and family ties. Because those forces are so central to human life, we instinctively understand the magical logic of his City of Mirrors. One Hundred Years of Solitude is a foundational novel in the literary tradition known as “magical realism” and remains to this day one of the most influential examples of this mode.

  URSULA K. LE GUIN

  A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA (1968)

  This classic heroic journey features a young man who has to confront a frightening shadow he has released into the world in order to accept that this darkness is a part of him and to grow into his power.

  A Wizard of Earthsea has all the vital aspects of a heroic journey, and the world in which it is set has magic as a part of daily life—it is “a land where sorcerers come thick.” Magic is respected, its users trained to be a vital part of society, be it as healers of the sick or engineers of safe boats and ships. Earthsea has its own creation myth; it has a political system; there is an economy; a social hierarchy even where the “wizard born” consider themselves superior; there is disease, piracy, and war-mongering that endangers lives; a shipping trade; smiths who work in bronze and iron; livestock and farming. There are also dragons to fear, huge ancient magical beasts that sound like an avalanche when they speak and “have their own wisdom [and] they are an older race than man.” Earthsea is a classic example of Le Guin’s (b.1929) strong world building, which is rock-solid yet never heavy-handed.

  The journey of central character Ged begins in a way that is now standard for a hero’s epic fantasy journey. He is a lonely young goatherd who doesn’t have much, lives in a poor village, is motherless but has magical abilities greater than he can perceive. He is partly trained by his aunt who is a witch, but her skills are far less than his, and she has only a superficial understanding of the craft. Ged eventually reaches a school for wizards, where he finds himself among other young men with similar abilities. In attempting to impress them with his power, he sets free an evil that nearly kills him, one that he then has to struggle to find and face among the islands of Earthsea.

  Earthsea is a large archipelago; three of the islands are named for Le Guin’s children’s pets, the others named in ways that sounded “right” to her. Earthsea’s civilization is pre-industrial but literate, with an inbuilt, accepted system of magic as part of its history and culture. The magic system is such that knowing the true name of something or someone in “Old Speech” gives you power ov
er it or them. It is not possible to lie in true speech, so to speak a truth is to make it happen, though of course only those with powerful abilities can force such transformations, and each have repercussions. Earthsea’s magic isn’t without its checks and balances.

  Language is important in Earthsea, and the idea of words as power and that of true names can be traced back to many real-world tribal societies and to Le Guin’s interest in anthropology. The people of Earthsea are genuinely multiracial and multicultural, without any implication that the few who are of lighter skin are superior in any way. Le Guin has openly criticized the common assumption that sets much Western fantasy in a Eurocentric version of the Middle Ages. Earthsea is, in a way, the anti-Middle-earth. It’s an archipelago, it is home to many people of color, and, in it, Le Guin is more focused on the personal development of its individual residents than large-scale wars. Ged isn’t in a constant battle with a large army—his battle is with his shadow self and, along the way, he must complete tasks that fade in comparison to his ultimate quest.

  Magic may be a part of Earthsea’s culture, but so is spirituality. Le Guin has based the spiritual systems of her world more on psychology and anthropology than on a monotheistic religious model. Through in the entire series, there is a very strong element of Taoism, especially in regard to the magical balances required. In Wizard of Earthsea, Ged’s battle with his shadow self is clearly Jungian, though he, too, believes in the Taoist idea of Dynamic Balance. As he is taught, to light a candle is to throw a shadow.

  PHILIP K. DICK

  DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (1968)

  On a post-apocalyptic Earth, a bounty hunter questions his own humanity as he attempts to “retire” a group of renegade androids masquerading as human.

  A destroyed earth, ruined by a war for which no one can remember the reason; a planet irradiated and only just habitable; a population that has mostly migrated to off-world colonies in order to protect the genetic integrity of humanity, incentivized by the offer of an android servant, leaving a small remaining population of people on Earth to survive in the radioactive dust, living with corrupted genes and decreased intelligence; a broken, sad city filled with vacant apartment blocks—this is the anxious, depleted world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Richard Deckard is a bounty hunter who must track down and “retire” six Nexus-6 androids, a model that has come close to passing as entirely human. These particular androids violently escaped from Mars and are attempting to hide out on Earth, settling in amid the remaining human population, who are doomed to eke out a life in clustered settlements in what were previously bustling cities. Deckard must ensure the humanoid body he kills is an android before he retires it. The only way to differentiate androids from humans is by the “Voight-Kampff ” test, which gauges the instinctual, empathic response to questions asked primarily about animals. The test isn’t entirely accurate—schizophrenic humans may well fail it, too. But in a world where the care for now-endangered creatures is sacrosanct, a lack of empathy toward animals is enough to separate humans from other biological organisms created by them, no matter how lifelike they may be, or the range of emotions they display.

  Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is about what it means to be human, which is even more important in a post-apocalyptic world with a bleak future. The androids Deckard hunts want more than they have been allowed, and have chosen some form of independence on a ravaged planet over subservience to humans elsewhere. The humans left on Earth, on the other hand, are losing sense of their emotions, often depending on artificial mood enhancers to guide their daily behavior. Dick’s love for absurdity has to be appreciated, even in the broad, effective strokes with which he creates the world of this book—he’s never without humor, even when he’s writing about the steady disintegration of society and individuality.

  The world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a believable, not too far away future, albeit one with hovercrafts and the colonization of other planets. But this vision doesn’t feel dated. Dick’s future of vidphones and mood controllers is, in many ways, very much our present too. His San Francisco is a strange but believable construct—a city shrouded in dust that is slowly killing its inhabitants, residents who will do anything to own and care for live animals, almost all of which are endangered after the plagues following World War Terminus. The city is half-empty and full of vacant apartments where sinister junk known as “kipple” collects and seems to breed overnight.

  And yet the show goes on—Deckard finds one of the androids performing as an opera singer in The Magic Flute and museums still exist. So Dick’s world-building often feels a little incongruous, but it always works, not just because his characters carry the narrative, but because this is what humanity is: inconsistent, resilient, and always creating something more.

  In his 1978 essay How to Build a Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later, Dick wrote of how he enjoyed creating universes that fell apart, become unhinged, unglued and how he had a secret love of chaos. “Do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe,” he wrote, insisting “objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live.”

  During his search, Deckard finds himself face to face with Munch’s The Scream, and Dick’s description of the painting is one that perfectly describes not just the world as his reader may know it, but the taut, grim one he has created too: “The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundness scream. Twisted ripples of the creature’s torment, echoes of its cry, flooded out into the air surrounding it; the man or woman, whichever it was, had become contained by its own howl. It had covered its ears against its own sound.… The creature was in isolation. Cut off by—or despite—its outcry.”

  PETER S. BEAGLE

  THE LAST UNICORN (1968)

  Voted one of the “All-Time Best Fantasy Novels,” Beagle’s novel describes a series of fairy tales through which the last unicorn must pass in search of others of her kind.

  Peter S. Beagle’s (b.1939) The Last Unicorn follows the titular character as she embarks on a series of episodic adventures. The unicorn’s wanderings take her through a deliberately generic, if forlorn, fairyland, with indications and slight hints that it is—or is steadily becoming—the “real” world. Although her encounters have a distinctly medieval flavor, fragments of other times and places bleed through: a glimpse of the Midgard Serpent, a passing reference to “Anglo-Saxon folklore,” and a chattering butterfly that references song lyrics and the “A Train.”

  The unicorn begins her journey in a “lilac wood,” a beautiful and secluded forest that flourishes in part due to her magical presence. Yet, remote as it is, a pair of hunters visits the wood one day. Over the course of their conversation, they reveal their belief that there’s—at most—a single unicorn left in the world. In one of the book’s recurring themes, they compare previous generations to their own, describing the gradual loss of magic. The unicorn overhears them and decides to leave her home in search of her kin.

  The unicorn discovers a world where the existence of magic, including unicorns, is no longer taken for granted. Her wandering—along a long road that “hurried to nowhere and no end”—takes her over vast distances, through lands that are either unknowable or unrecognizable in the unicorn’s eyes. The feeling is mutual: As the unicorn passes through towns and villages, the residents merely see her as a white mare, if at all.

  Her journey is interrupted when she is captured by Mommy Fortuna’s Midnight Carnival, a bedraggled traveling show that promises “Creatures of night, brought to light.” The show is largely illusion, with two notable exceptions: the unicorn and a harpy. The world’s tentative relationship with the supernatural is on full display with the carnival. The thrill-seeking attendees simultaneously wish to glimpse “magic,” but are also reassured by the knowledge that the sh
ow is a fake. In parallel, Mommy Fortuna wrestles daily with the repercussions of having captured the uncapturable—she knows the harpy is bound to escape and that, with its departure, she will be destroyed.

  You’re in the story with the rest of us now, and you must go with it, whether you will or no. If you want to find your people, if you want to become a unicorn again, then you must follow the fairy tale to King Haggard’s castle, and wherever else it chooses to take you.

  The carnival is the first in a series of archetypal folkloric settings visited by the unicorn. In an outlaw-infested forest, she encounters a band of “Merry Men” so desperate for notoriety that they’ve begun composing their own ballads. In a cursed village, she finds a group of wealthy burghers who—like the inhabitants of Hamelin—have traded their children for a life of comfort. In all scenarios, the unicorn finds people trying to manipulate the world by interfering with the power of stories. Mommy Fortuna imprisons “legends” in her search for power. Captain Cully, leader of the outlaws, seeks immortality by creating his own myths. The burghers strive to prevent the resolution of a curse, knowing that having it lifted will impoverish them.

  It is at the crumbling castle of King Haggard, however, that the unicorn finds the truest intersection of the land’s geography and her own story. Haggard and his Red Bull are behind the disappearance of the unicorns, and the unicorn’s journey to find them takes her to the very heart of his dismal kingdom. Haggard’s castle is a bleak location, teetering on the edge of the sea, abandoned by servants and courtiers alike.

  At this point, the unicorn is transformed into a human girl. Yet, even in mortal form, she still inspires change in her surroundings. The grim atmosphere of the castle is not enough to stifle the love of the King’s son for the mysterious newcomer and, despite their ominous surroundings, the remaining guardsmen and the unicorn’s friends make the castle into a cozy home. Everywhere she goes, the unicorn acts as an agent of change and, despite King Haggard’s best efforts, his keep is no exception.