Literary Wonderlands

by Laura Miller

  Butler’s aim was to make readers feel the reality of slavery, not as mere observers of a long-ago past, but more personally, through identification with a modern character forced to live in a world as alien to her as to them—a world that, although strange to us, was at once undeniably, physically real and inescapable.

  DOUGLAS ADAMS

  THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY (1979)

  Adams’s classic series begins with the demolition of Earth to make way for a galactic freeway. Everyman Arthur Dent is saved by the freewheeling alien Ford Prefect, and so begins a hilarious and wild ride through time and space.

  As a student at Cambridge University, Douglas Adams (1952–2001) became involved in the university’s famous Footlights comedy club; and straight after university he wrote for the British TV shows Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Doctor Who. It was while hitchhiking around Europe on a low-budget vacation in the 1970s that he got the idea of combining the surreal comedy of the Pythons with the science fiction of Dr. Who.

  The result was the deeply funny space-opera fantasia The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which appeared in many different forms. Indeed, it might be easier to list the formats in which it didn’t appear: it was first heard as a radio drama on BBC Radio 4 in 1978—six half-hour episodes, broadcast late at night. Despite this low-key launch the show quickly acquired a cult following. A second six-part radio series followed in 1980, and Adams wrote two novelizations, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). A television adaptation followed in 1981, and a video-game version in 1984. There was a movie (2005), three further radio series, more novelizations, a stage adaptation, comic books, and a general dissemination into fan culture. Even the title keeps changing, with The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy all used by different forms. Whatever else all this tells us, it shows how popular Adams’s world was, and how adaptable.

  That adaptability was key not only to its success but also to its own logic. As the Hitchhiker’s Guide grew, its storyline proliferated in ingenious, absurd, and hilarious directions, but at its heart remains a simple fish-out-of-water story of an ordinary human being named Arthur Dent. Earth is scheduled to be demolished by an unpleasant alien species called the Vogons in order to make way for a galactic hyperspace bypass. Dent—still wearing his pajamas and dressing gown—is the only human to survive this catastrophe, having been rescued by his best friend Ford Prefect. Dent had assumed that Ford was from the English town of Guildford; in fact he was from the star Betelgeuse and had been living on Earth to research an entry on the planet for the titular encyclopedia-style guidebook.

  From this bravura opening—it really does require chutzpah to begin a story with the end of the world—Dent and Ford embark on a peripatetic series of interstellar adventures, meeting the splendidly egotistical two-headed Zaphod Beeblebrox, onetime president of the Galaxy and now outlaw and barfly; Marvin, a hugely intelligent but chronically depressed robot (“Marvin the Paranoid Android”); Trillian, a human woman who happened to flee Earth a few years before its end; and various others. Their adventures take them back and forth through space and time, with increasingly complicated ramifications. They visit planets teeming with life and planets abandoned to spooky ruins; they visit the headquarters of the Guide’s publishers only for the entire building to be ripped from the ground and flown through space by kidnapping robots; they travel forward to the end of time itself and backward to the epoch of cavemen. At all points they actualize a very English type of inventively deadpan humor: premises are logically extrapolated into absurdity, the arbitrary cruelty of the cosmos is illustrated from the largest scale—such as the abrupt destruction of the whole of Earth and all its people—down to the smallest (Dent finds it frustratingly hard to find that beverage most essential to the English, a nice cup of tea), but disaster is always treated in a drily comic manner. There is little slapstick, no vulgarity or obscenity, and often the jokes entail quite profound metaphysical consequences. This perhaps makes Adams sound like a forbiddingly intellectual humorist, which he wasn’t at all. The funniest moments in Hitchhiker’s depend upon character and situation, and the philosophy never treads upon the jokes.

  As Dent and Ford’s adventures continue, they discover that Earth was not actually a regular planet, but rather a gigantic computer that had been running a program for millions of years designed to solve one of the great cosmic mysteries. This mystery is not the meaning of life, which had long ago been determined—it is “42”—but instead the meaning of the meaning of life. It is designed to determine, in other words, what the ultimate question could be that might lead to the ultimate answer “42.” And by the end of the second series of the radio show, we discover what the ultimate question is; but without wishing to spoil that reveal, we can say that Adams’s “42” works both as a neatly absurdist gag, and as a profound intervention into the metaphysics of meaning. What can the universe “mean,” if its meaning could be summed up as a two-digit number?

  The appeal of Hitchhiker’s depends upon more than its comedy, endearing though that is. The imagined world Adams creates is fascinating, varied, and, above all, hospitable where fan engagement is concerned. The universe is full of the bumbling and the wisecracking but rarely with pure evil or cruelty: even the horrid Vogons compose poetry (although it is poetry so bad that reciting it is a mode of torture). Everywhere you go in Adams’s imaginary cosmos there are ingenious and hilarious vignettes. Enterprising restaurateurs have created a temporal “bubble” that sits at the very end of all time, so that diners can enjoy a sumptuous meal while watching the ultimate apocalypse in the “Restaurant at the End of the Universe”; one planet’s population has evolved into birds to avoid the need to walk on the ground, since shoes had become so expensive; humans are revealed to be the third most important lifeform on Earth, after dolphins and white mice. Before their first trip through hyperspace, Ford warns Arthur Dent that the experience will be “unpleasantly like being drunk.” “What’s so unpleasant about being drunk?” Arthur asks, to which Ford replies: “Ask a glass of water.” Another spaceship travels interstellar distances not via hyperspace but through an “infinite improbability drive”—a brilliant science-fictional conceit that works both as the premise for much surreal humor (since the drive leaves in its wake all manner of bizarre and ill-sorted apparitions) as well as an engagement with the deep logic of space and time, where probability plays as large as part as determinism.

  It is surely the case that Hitchhiker’s works best as a radio drama or novel, for here the imagination can engage in the least-fettered way with Adams’s expertly suggestive vistas and tartly engaging characters. It has a great deal to do with the comedy of the work, a tricky matter to discuss since—as everybody knows—a joke explained is no longer funny. In fact, that’s not the half of it. To excerpt examples of humor from Hitchhiker’s does nothing to convey the caliber of the humor of Adams’s world, since that humor depends so largely on the spacious, ingenious context in which it occurs. The solvent is charm, a genuinely rare quality in literature, rarer in science fiction, and impossible to fake; but a quality Douglas Adams possessed in large quantities, and with which he infuses the worlds of his creation.

  1981–PRESENT

  5 THE COMPUTER AGE

  As Cold War fears subsided and technology brought us closer to the stars, created worlds became ever more elaborate and the postmodern playfulness of the 1970s gave birth to the fantastical and parodic creations of writers such as Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett.

  STEPHEN KING

  THE DARK TOWER SERIES (1982–2012)

  In King’s “Dark Tower” universe lies one of the largest fantasy worlds ever created, and incorporates a wide variety of genres, from fantasy and science fiction to horror and the Western.

  The Dark Tower series is a collection of seven novels written by Stephen King (b.1947)—an undisp
uted master of horror, suspense, science fiction, and fantasy—and published between 1982 and 2012. The series artfully blends the traditional themes of fantasy writing with tropes of the Western. The first, and most famous, title in the series is The Gunslinger (1982). It nods toward the strange—set in a mysterious place called Mid-world with a desert full of demons—but for the most part, the novel is a mythical version of a classical Western narrative. There’s a gunslinger, Roland Deschain, and he’s going to kill somebody who is described as “the man in black,” who we’ll later discover is Randall Flagg.

  It is Flagg who holds the key to King’s world building in the Dark Tower series, and indeed across his entire oeuvre. While The Gunslinger itself is a fairly straightforward book, those that followed over a thirty year period get increasingly longer and more complicated, with massive numbers of characters, a huge world to cover, different creatures and concepts presented, and even a lexicon of terms that needs to be remembered for the story to resonate properly.

  Mid-world ostensibly resembles our own world. Or, rather, it’s an altered facsimile of it, taking into account both King’s and a wider fictional history. A town is destroyed by Captain Tripps, the virus that destroyed the world in The Stand; a character comes to Mid-world via Salem’s Lot; a major set piece of the series takes place in The Wizard of Oz’s Emerald City. It’s a strange and disjointed place, which, it would seem, takes in much of other literature. You get the impression that, were he able, King would have gone further with the concept of intertextuality, but much of it has to remain vague. However, some enemies (the Wolves of the Calla) are described in a way that makes it clear they’re based on Marvel’s Doctor Doom, and they’re defeated by throwing Harry Potter’s Snitches—or, in this text, sneetches—at them. The man in black is Johnny Cash, but the series’ main antagonist is actually The Crimson King, one of King’s favorite bands. Of course, the name of the series itself comes from Tolkien’s Barad-dûr; individual books in the series take their names from T. S. Eliot and Lewis Carroll.

  When, in the series’ final books, the characters travel out of Mid-world and into our own reality—meeting with King himself, in a masterful piece of playful metafiction—it becomes clear that the world of the Dark Tower is everything that ever influenced King. All the fiction, cinema, music, and art he sees as an influence is dragged into play, turned into an aspect of the narrative. It’s not always smoothly integrated, and it’s not always as clear as you’d hope—the intellectual property rights alone ensure that—but it’s there. The world is a brain map of King’s creativity, and thus both entirely like and unlike anything else ever written.

  The rest of King’s bibliography is touched by the same influences. Randall Flagg appears in a number of King’s novels, often under different names but representing the same individual; many of the characters of the Dark Tower have also appeared in other books, right from the start of King’s career. It’s a game, sometimes: to be reading a King novel, and trying to find out exactly how he’s tied it to his masterplan. And it’s something that, in Nos4atu, the latest novel published by his son, Joe Hill, has spread: The book features a section that suggests that Hill’s own literary universe is implicitly tied into his father’s.

  TERRY PRATCHETT

  THE DISCWORLD SERIES (1983–2015)

  Pratchett’s wildly popular Discworld looks, sounds, and smells very much like our own, except that it is carried though space on the back of a giant turtle and populated by a host of colorful characters including bumbling heroes, Death, empowered witches, and self-carrying luggage.

  When Terry Pratchett’s (1948–2015) first Discworld novel, The Color of Magic, appeared in 1983, it employed a setting he used in an earlier science-fiction novel, Strata (1981). The flat, disc-shaped world was intended to parody Larry Niven’s Ringworld (1970, here), but the idea stuck in his mind and he reused it as the setting for a parody of heroic fantasy. It was to prove so effective and so popular that it would serve as the world in which nearly all of his subsequent novels took place. Discworld became important as a setting that enabled Pratchett to hold a comically distorted mirror to our familiar world, allowing us to laugh while encountering often profound issues. By the time of his death in 2015, Sir Terry, as he became, was one of the most popular authors in the world, largely because the Discworld and its characters had lodged so enduringly in the minds of his readers.

  From the start of the first novel we are told that the Discworld rides through space supported on the backs of four elephants who are themselves standing upon the back of a giant turtle, A’Tuin. This hints at ideas found in eastern mythologies, but it is intended to detach the Discworld from our notions of realism and to emphasize that it is a ludicrous place. Here, the turtle and elephants suggest, anything may happen because this is a realm untouched by reality. Nonetheless, while magic is the principal force on the Discworld, it operates in a similar way to the elemental forces in our own world, and is similarly theorized.

  Across more than forty novels, a large cast of recurring characters appear. Rincewind, the hopeless magician, was introduced in The Color of Magic (1983); Granny Weatherwax and the Witches in Equal Rites (1987); Death in Mort (1987); Vimes and the City Watch in Guards! Guards! (1989); and Tiffany Aching, the young witch in an off-shoot of the Discworld series aimed at a young adult audience, in The Wee Free Men (2003). The novels follow a roughly chronological sequence, so that across the books we see characters develop (Vimes is promoted, Granny Weatherwax dies) and new technologies become established (steam trains are introduced in Raising Steam [2013]). Thus, it is a dynamic setting.

  The recurring locations, the Unseen University, the capital city of Ankh-Morpork, the pub that is variously known as The Drum, The Broken Drum, and The Mended Drum, all suggest a solidly realized and consistent landscape. Indeed, there is even a “Mapp” of the city in The Streets of Ankh-Morpork (1993). Yet it would be a mistake to imagine that the chronology of the novels and the consistency of the settings imply that Discworld is always the same place.

  In fact, as Pratchett said, the point of the Discworld series was always to “have fun with the clichés,” and each novel sets out to parody some aspect of popular culture, such as cinema (Moving Pictures, 1990), rock music (Soul Music, 1994), or journalism (The Truth, 2000); attitudes toward other places (Australia in The Last Continent, 1998); or features of modern life (the postal service in Going Postal, 2004). When writing about Egyptian gods in Pyramids (1989), Pratchett’s purpose was not to thoroughly research the mythology or to get details of the belief system absolutely right, but to reflect what the person in the street might commonly assume about the subject with all the inconsistencies and absurdities that might imply. It was always necessary that the familiar should be recognizable within the books, whether global politics in Jingo (1997), economics in Making Money (2007), or conservatism in Monstrous Regiment (2003). Therefore, Pratchett had no hesitation in making radical changes to his setting just to suit the story being told or, more accurately, the topic being parodied. Whether it is a new island emerging in Jingo or a new social culture in Pyramids, Discworld was always and deliberately a fluid setting.

  WILLIAM GIBSON

  NEUROMANCER (1984)

  Gibson’s prescient cyberpunk novel predicts a world where technology is omnipresent and morality nowhere to be found.

  Neuromancer was published in 1984 and opens with a bleak, if atmospheric, description. “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Evocative and strangely haunting, this introductory line describes the world’s atmosphere in a single breath—a crumbling infrastructure, overwhelmed technology; beautiful and unsettling—all packaged in Gibson’s taut, neo-noir prose.

  Structurally, William Gibson’s (b.1948) seminal cyberpunk work flows like a particularly conspiratorial heist novel. The nominal hero, Case, is a burned out “cowboy,” a former hacker who’s been stripped of his access to cyberspace after he tried to scam a former employe
r. He’s recruited by Molly, a physically augmented “street samurai,” and Armitage, an unstable former black-ops solider, to perform a series of raids. At first, these capers—which take place across real and virtual worlds—seem disconnected, but as the book unfolds, Case and Molly piece together not only the ultimate goal of their actions, but also the true identity—and motivation—of their employer.

  Neuromancer begins at Case’s lowest point—in a seedy bar in Chiba City, where he’s operating, badly, as a petty criminal. A place of flickering lights and dangerous inhabitants—seemingly all back-alleys and dive bars—Chiba City is “like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” Case hustles desperately to stay alive, flitting between one errand and another, buying and selling drugs, guns, information, and even organs.

  The inescapable grisliness of “Night City” is intentional—it serves as a “deliberately unsupervised playground for technology.” Case is drawn in to the City seeking a chance to repair his ruined nervous system so he can become a hacker again. But with his money and his credit gone, he’s now merely another replaceable part in its criminal ecosystem, and he’s accelerating rapidly toward self-destruction.

  Molly and Armitage save Case from his fate and repair his shattered system so he can hack again. But nothing in Neuromancer comes without a price, and now Case is beholden to his enigmatic employer. The team, now assembled, heads to Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis—the Sprawl. Although more salubrious than Night City, this series of interlinked, domed North American megacities is still far from paradise. If Chiba City is social Darwinism, the Sprawl is capitalism gone mad. The soaring towers of the all-consuming megacorporations tower over the rest of the city, a permanent reminder of who holds the power. As with Chiba City, the Sprawl is a constant hustle, but here the prize is pure profit. Both slickly suited businessmen and the surrealist street gangs target the ordinary people of the Sprawl. All have access to impressive technology, and most are addicted to the fast-paced entertainment of SimStims—exotic virtual reality that lets people share the sensations experienced by their celebrity idols.