Thomas M. Disch: The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of

Simon and Schuster

$29.95

Review: Gilbert Wong*

That this weekend's comic book and science fiction convention in Auckland is called Armageddon would make Thomas M. Disch smile.

Science fiction has long claimed the biblical term for its own and as terrible as the reality would be, for the truest fans of science fiction Armageddon, the event rather than the convention, could be called their dearest, darkest wish.

For only in a post-nuclear world could science fiction's imaginings take real shape - from mutant humans to intelligent apes; from starships fleeing a blasted Earth in search of new Edens to Mad Max chomping on canned dog food before entering the gladiatorial arena of the Thunderdome.

As director Stanley Kubrick put it in the full title to one of his finest films, we have to become like Dr Strangelove and learn to stop worrying and love the Bomb.

Disch's analysis of the pulp genre that lies embedded in the pop culture of our century is right on the button.

He is the best of guides because he is one of those he writes of. Disch is a celebrated science fiction author himself, part of the much-vaunted "new wave" of writers whose work appeared in British writer Michael Moorcock's influential New World anthologies in the 70s. His novels Camp Concentration, The Brave Little Toaster and 334 remain respected in the genre, but Disch's analysis owes nothing to the literary pretension of the New Wave. The science fiction he's talking about is the stuff that seduces you when you're 12, an impressionable age that he mockingly suggests too many Americans remain locked at, not discounting himself.

He is an insider who knows its pulp and pop origins intimately. Disch has shared a joint with author and editor Terry Carr, been invited to join Theodore Sturgeon and wife in a threesome; and watched the legendary Alfred Bester turn into the scared, lonely author who when he died willed his estate to his bartender. He's been stuck in a room with a manic William Burroughs and caught the suburban train to Shepperton to visit J.G. Ballard.

His witty premise is that science fiction and Western culture have morphed into a hybrid beast where the entanglements are so embedded that one could no longer survive without the other. By our science fiction, ye shall know us.

One of the clearest links Disch writes of is the appropriation by military strategists of the term "Star Wars," shorthand for the Strategist Defense Initiative of the Reagan years.

Disch refers to the book Mutual Assured Survival by Jerry Pournelle and Dean Ing, endorsed by President Reagan in the early 80s. The tract urged the development by 1990 of satellite-based kinetic weapons, ground-based lasers, beam technologies powered by nuclear explosion and a missile defence shield.

From 1983, early computer animation clips showed on American television how the systems would work.

Disch does not pretend the authors dreamed up military strategy, but argues that the mindset of America and its military strategists could easily accept what many scientists regarded as impossible because of the way science fiction had permeated the culture.

That a plank of President George "Dubya" Bush's policy is a missile defence shield only shows that Star Wars is back.

But Disch is not one for promoting conspiracy theories. His arguments run on the subtle influences that run between pop culture and reality and how each shapes the other. He states: "America is a nation of liars, and for that reason science fiction has a special claim to be our national literature, as the art form best adapted to telling the lies we like to hear and pretend to believe."

Disch sees America as a nation "drenched in make-believe," where everyone is a would-be actor. He cites the listing of Whitley Streiber's Communion, a supposed true story of Streiber's abduction by aliens, on the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list. That Communion could become a bestseller, and Streiber's stark, confessional accounts of "rape" by alien rectal probing, are evidence, says Disch, of the need for and acceptance of make-believe.

From Streiber, Disch draws a smoking gun pointing to the way the confessions of adultery, infidelity and lust are legitimised on the Jerry Springer Show and its ilk. Referring to the moments when politicians "mis-speak," Disch writes that "Unverifiability is for ufologists what deniability was for Nixon."

Despite the above it would be wrong to think that Disch is a prophet of doom, or even gloomy. His tone throughout is light and amused, no better than in the chapter, The Future of an Illusion.

Here he deconstructs that most successful of science fiction creations, Star Trek. To suggest the future, the creators put everyone in pyjamas, he writes. But where do we see their environment, "so brightly and blankly geometric and uniformly lighted"? Put everyone in a suit instead of Starfleet uniform and we have the office disguised as the future.

What's the underlying message of each show? Success through team effort as they sell their archetypal American dream.

Star Trek isn't the future; it's the office of the multinational down the road. The future is already with us.

* Gilbert Wong is the Herald's books editor.