Josh Glenn writes a terrific column for the Boston Globe’s Ideas section. It is called “The Examined Life.” This week, he wrote “a long-form essay I’ve written for today’s Ideas: It’s about Fredric Jameson’s new book on the utopian possibilities of dystopian science fiction by the likes of Philip K. Dick…and Samuel R. Delany.”
Because of the Cold War emphasis on dystopias, Cold War writers like Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel R. Delany had to find radical new ways to express their inexpressible hopes about the future, claims Jameson. At this moment of neoliberal triumphalism, he suggests, we should take these writers seriously – even if their ideas are packaged inside lurid paperbacks.In Dick’s uncanny novels, the author demands of us that we decide for ourselves what’s real and what isn’t. ”Martian Time-Slip” (1964), for example, is partly told from the perspective of a 10-year-old schizophrenic colonist on Mars, where civilization is devolving into ”gubbish.” And ”The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch” (1965) is a psychedelic odyssey of hallucinations-within-hallucinations from which no reader emerges unscathed.
Delany, meanwhile, is best known for ”Trouble on Triton” (1976), a self-consciously post-structuralist novel that depicts a future where neither heterosexuality nor homosexuality is the norm. Le Guin, author of a fantasy series for children, ”The Earthsea Trilogy,” explores Taoist, anarchist, and feminist themes in novels like ”The Left Hand of Darkness” (1969) and ”The Dispossessed” (1974). Fans of Dick, Delany, and their ilk warn neophytes not to read too many of their books too quickly: Doing so, as this reader can attest, tends to result in pronounced feelings of irreality, paranoia, and angst.
Josh adds: PS:
I’m also working on essay for the forthcoming issue of the journal n+1; I published something on what I call invisible-prison theory in their first issue. Watch this space
If you’ve never seen my column, which takes the form of three short items every Sunday (that makes 156 items a year) they keep it here.
And what the heck, as long as I’m at it, here are the only other two essays I’ve written for Ideas, one on the poet Fanny Howe and one on the significance people have managed to attach to beekeeping through the ages.
Reader comment: adam says: “Josh’s column is called “The Examined Life”, not “Ideas.” It is part
of a weekly Globe section called “Ideas,” which the Globe introduced
last year some time (I think). The Ideas section is probably the
smartest regular content I’ve ever seen in a newspaper. They always
have interesting, provocative pieces that go way beyond what you
expect to find in a newspaper, or even in longer-form newspaper
features like the NYT Magazine and certainly the Globe’s own terrible
Sunday magazine.”