Books: Future Imperatives

BREAKFAST IN THE RUINS by MICHAEL MOORCOCK 174 pages. Random House. $5.95.

FRANKENSTEIN UNBOUND by BRIAN W. ALDISS 212 pages. Random House. $5.95.

THE DISPOSSESSED by URSULA K. LEGUIN 341 pages. Harper & Row. $7.95.

Whether one subscribes to the big-bang or the steady-state theory of science fiction, there is no doubt that the genre continues to flourish, worlds without end. Here are three writers of what is now preferably called "speculative fiction" who are doing particularly well.

Britain's Michael Moorcock is both bizarrely inventive and highly disciplined as he rockets from blood-and-thunder histrionics to wry social satire in his latest fantasy, Breakfast in the Ruins. In it, Karl Glogauer, a young Englishman, swaps physical and mental identities with a strange African with whom he has a homosexual encounter.

Tune and place are also cut loose; interwoven with the story of Karl's transformation are 18 historical sketches covering more than 100 years of European history. Moorcock shows Karl as an orphan who sees his mother murdered in the Paris Commune of 1871. From a London sweatshop in 1906 he is drawn into revolutionary violence. Later he plays the violin in Auschwitz. The book is by turns puzzling, funny and shocking. By 1990, with Karl sitting in the ruins of London, Moorcock has brilliantly demonstrated his point—that man's imagination has always driven him deep Into inhumanity.

Brian Aldiss jumps a few years ahead to 2020 to describe a world not only in ruins but also mutated in the most frightening way. The entire structure of tune and space has been disrupted by a nuclear war so that past and present, here and there, exist simultaneously. One never knows from day to day if he will awake in medieval times or the age of the Pharaohs.

Aldiss's hero is Texan Joe Bodenland, who, in a variation on H.G. Wells' Time Machine, adventurously drives his car smack into the flux and arrives in 1816 at the edge of Lake Geneva. Joe stumbles upon a villa containing Byron, Shelley and Mary Shelley, who is writing Frankenstein. His subsequent relationship with Mary is dominated by the presence of Dr. Frankenstein and friends, who are quite as "real" as Mary, their creator. Joe comes to see Frankenstein's pursuit of pure scientific truth without social responsibility as the root of modern technological society, where "the head had triumphed over the heart."

Aldiss has always written with gusto. This book is not just an exciting, macabre story. Using a verbal counterpoint —19th century literary style against the curt phrases of the 21st—the author has brought off a convincing interpretation of Frankenstein for today.

Ursula le Guin also deals with the intellect run amuck in The Dispossessed.