Dick, “Beyond Lies the Wub”; Vonnegut, “2BR02B”

Unit 5

The New Wave of SF, 1960–1980

Where the New Wave happened

The movement was made in magazines and anthologies rather than novels:

New Worlds under Michael Moorcock, from 1964 — the British engine of it
Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction in the United States
Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967), which we return to next week

Today’s authors

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922–2007)
Philip K. Dick (1928–1982)

Both spent the 1950s writing for cheap markets; both were read as literature only later, and Vonnegut spent decades denying he wrote SF at all.

Philip K. Dick

On the fundamental mood of Dick’s work

“Dick is most celebrated for the complexity and thoroughness with which he interrogates the notion that reality might not be what it appears. … Reality and selfhood depend upon perception, says Dick; and perception is radically unstable. … No reality has ultimate primacy in his restless imagination, nothing can be trusted. If this leads to a degree of paranoia, then that’s because Dick seems to have regarded paranoia as fundamentally appropriate, even healthy, for modern subjectivity.”

Adam Roberts, The History of Science Fiction, 346–47.

Reading notes: “Beyond Lies the Wub”

Dick’s fiction has proven endlessly adaptable in part because it touches so many topics germane to contemporary life: identity, who or what counts as human, the nature of reality and how technology can manipulate it.
This was Dick’s first published SF story, and it already contains many of the themes he became famous for.
Structurally it resembles Bradbury’s “September 2005: The Martian” in reverse. Bradbury gives an alien who first appears threatening and is revealed as vulnerable and victimized; Dick gives a seemingly harmless creature — the aptly named Wub — who turns out to be much more than he appears.
Like Bradbury, Dick avoids the moral oversimplifications of earlier SF in favor of harder questions about agency, motivation, and responsibility:
- Is the Wub defending itself, or is it truly malevolent?
- What hints does Dick drop that the Wub planned the encounter with Franco and his crew all along?
- In what ways is the Wub shown to be superior — and perhaps more likeable, even at the end — than the humans?
- Could the Wub be said to be more human (intelligent, cultured, sophisticated, hedonistic) than Franco?

Kurt Vonnegut

Reading notes: “2BR02B”

Vonnegut did not write many short stories, and this is a relatively early one, but it contains in seed form many of his abiding obsessions — especially with suicide and time.
Like Bradbury, Vonnegut is both a humanist and a pessimist: satirical in edge, while still presenting people largely sympathetically.
The title is a rebus of Hamlet’s famous line — read the “0” in the middle as “naught.” What is the effect of condensing so famous a phrase this way? How might it reflect the attitudes of the society Vonnegut imagines?
With its many euphemisms, the story is clearly influenced by Orwell’s dystopian vision of language warped and abused under Big Brother in 1984.
But what Vonnegut has written is not exactly a dystopia. It is an anti-utopia: a fiction that imagines a purposefully warped utopia in order to demonstrate that utopian thinking in general is wrong, even dangerous. This is clearest in the latter half, after two characters are introduced who apparently play large roles in the culture of death now ruling society.
Were you surprised by the abrupt ending? Shocked? Is there a terrible humor — or at least irony — in the finale?

For Thursday

“The Voices of Time” by J. G. Ballard (BBSF 403)

A demanding, fragmented story. Read it twice if you can, and do not worry about understanding it on the first pass.