Small-Town Cataclysm

The scenes of great scientific discipline fiction novels can be classed in two categories: the alien and the mundane.

The alien scene is where the writer directs or plonks the reader right in the thick of another human race or the far future of our world. The everyday scene is where the author depicts the familiar human race we know, and how something unusual or foreign impinges on it - whether by agency of disaster, invasion or other of import change.

The two scenes do different demands on the writer (and reader). For the alien scene to be effective, the writer must do an full world, make it sufficiently convincing to transport the load of the plot, and yet guarantee that its values or emotions are linked adequate to our ain nature that we reserve our involvement in the fictional characters and their fates.

For the everyday or humdrum scene to be effective, the writer must realistically depict enough of our normal familiar world, to let the development of that sense of awe and suspense at the encroachment of the unusual on the familiar, which is the particular trademark of this type of scientific discipline fiction. In other words, what you must brand is: first make the reader comfortable, then convey in the intimations and the suspense, leading to some stupendous, cataclysmic revelation.

The disclosure may or may not dwell of some immense disaster. In Wyndham's The Day of the Triffids, it does, whereas in the same author's Chocky, the disclosure is confined to one household (plus a tampering psychologist).

The ambiance of a little town is particularly suitable for the everyday or humdrum scenario. Obviously it is tailor-made for providing a rich direct contrast between the ordinary and the special. Clifford Simak makes it splendidly in All Flesh is Grass, Ring Around the Sun and They Walked Like Men. One reads these novels not only for the scientific discipline fiction but for the little town life.

The same is true for some of the novels of Sir Leslie Stephen King, such as as Dreamcatcher, The Tommyknockers and Firestarter. King is actually not capable of anything else apart from that sort of narrative which is grounded in the here and now. He is a maestro of the encroachment of the unusual on the familiar; he could not (like Frank Victor Herbert in Dune) maestro the encroachment of the unusual on the strange.

In my position there is nil like the particular appeal of a novel set in an ordinary town that pictures an ordinary fictional character who have to get by with an extraordinary happening or development. One of my front-runner Prince Philip Kelvin Dick novels is Time Out of Joint, where the turn come ups with the realisation that the small-town normality is a sham set up to lead on one man. But so well is it done that the reader develops an affectionateness for the fake, and this is why I include it in this essay. The ambiance is what counts.

I will complete by mentioning two great novels by Eric Frank Russell: Three To Suppress and With a Strange Device. In the former, the fictional character is admittedly not quite ordinary, in that he is a telepath. But the manner the narrative is handled, we experience Virginia Wade Harpist to be primarily a decent, likeable adult male who haps to have got a endowment he makes his best to hide. In the latter novel, the supporter is truly ordinary, a man of science who is the victim of an espionage secret plan involving the implanting of unreal memory. It was Russell's last book, published in 1964, and it is a joyousness to read. The plot, if you analyse it carefully, is not very believable; that however makes not matter. Again, the ambiance is what counts.