Rapture Season

So.... we all take breaks from things, short vacations, sabbaticals are sometimes longer. Some of us go years without paying taxes. This post will be about time.

Where have I been? I've been on an apocalyptic bender. I almost wrote post-apocalyptic, but what I've really been into is right up before the crash. It has been rapture season, so I guess it all makes sense.
What kicked it off was a first edition copy of J.G. Ballard's early short story book The Four Dimensional Nightmare. It's basically a mix of stories about how the world is running out. I found it at a used book store for forty bucks. Well, I know who the number one audience is for that book and I wasn't willing to shell out forty bucks right away, so I made several trips to the store and read it over the course of several weeks. Actually, I didn't read all of it because someone bought it before I could knock out the back end. What kept happening was that I would read one of the stories and then get drawn into a barroom conversation with infinite glow EH who likes a drink and to talk some noise. (Anyways, turns out I had a copy of Voices of Time with dog bites in it that I got for three bucks, same stories mostly, and was able to finish the set.)

Ballard had the perspective that time was unwinding. The idea that entropy is eating us all in real time. I'd poked around a copy of Crystal World before, where crystalline structures slowly consume all life. On first touch, his writing felt like James Bond except mixed with pure doom: Foreign, elegant landscapes and tropical, slowly unfolding tableaus. Why would I read a march towards pure death?
Ursula Leguin wrote that science fiction is metaphor. I've heard this sentiment mirrored in other places, the idea that it's not predictive but rather that it's purely symbolic. This is something you don't normally trumpet as an SF writer because, well, a whole gang of readers say scientific innovation is the number one reason they read SF and writers don't want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Back to my question: why read Ballard's march towards pure death?
Well, yes his prose is beautiful: In the story Voices of Time where experimental animals exhibit special adaptations to prepare them to communicate with a greater source as time unravels, and human sleep patterns begin to change until people stop waking up, and alien races countdown the extinction of their stars ... I think it's gracious of Ballard not to toy with death but to reframe it, to make it the countdown in the song we're all singing, to present it in a story not as a fear motive to action, but the logical conclusion that will approach no matter how we look at it. Still, Voices seems to say, we choose how to look at it.
C.S. Lewis, you sonofabitch, I'm going to write about you, but I'll say this: Screwtape Letters rubbed me the wrong way. You are an excellent writer but an emotional man and your pen follows your heart.
This is an SF blog, not a philosophy blog, but I think here C.S. and J.G. share a similar line. The Abolition of Man argues that reducing meaning in action (via science/progress doctrine) to instinct, self-preservation, and reflex, denies man's deeper understanding of beauty.
For example, if society asks a man to die in war and gives the reason that it's for the preservation of the race. That's essentially saying, die to preserve me. (And the usual response to that is, "No, you go ahead, I'll hang out here.") The alternative C.S. gives is a father telling his son that it is noble to die in battle for a cause you believe in. Fighting in war is such an extreme example, but since this was written during WWII, you have a pretty specific crucible. Nonetheless, the idea is that meaning and beauty is something that must be taken as self-evident and should be passed down through generations. And, by the same token, meaning and beauty can excised from younger generations by older generations. There are beautiful and frightening directions to take this train of thought into, but I don't really want to do that here.

The reason I mention C.S., that sonofabitch, is I think it's beautiful that Ballard presents death as a logical build-up or exhaustion of resources. He doesn't allow fear of death to take meaning from life or from his stories. He doesn't extrapolate to an infinite future as many SF writers are wont to do. He presents the idea that man is limited and that we must value the time that we have and act with the meaning inherent in that belief.