Chapter 12 - Surrealism and the Science Fiction Novel

Summary

This chapter focuses on the role of the surrealists and their friends in the reception of Anglo-American SF in France. It gives special attention to the opinions of the Parisian surrealists Gérard Legrand and Robert Benayoun, both of whom took a selective approach to the new writing by authors such as Raymond Bradbury, Fredric Brown, and Lewis Padgett. Two important novels, The Dreaming Jewels (1950) by Theodore Sturgeon and I Am Legend (1954) by Richard Matheson, illustrate the themes and issues explored by SF that held the attention of the surrealists. In the latter part of the chapter, I turn around the enquiry to look less at the surrealists’ interest in SF and more that held by SF writers in surrealism. J.G. Ballard’s fascination with surrealism from the 1960s has long been recognized and was acknowledged by the author himself. Ballard’s stories of that decade serve as a further case study to explore the survival or broadening of surrealist themes into SF and asks why a movement frequently associated with a Benjaminian notion of the ’outmoded’ could play such a significant role in a genre that pitched its content so emphatically in the future.