Journal Article

New Worlds Quartered; Or, 70s Britain Drawn

Williams, Mark P

2022

Overview

In Breakfast, Karl Glogauer, a variant on the time-travelling Glogauer of Behold the Man (1969), encounters a mysterious 'Nigerian' man who seduces him sexually and intellectually, triggering visions of alternate selves which the narrative hints, via this mysterious unnamed man, may actually exist in real alternate histories. Some characters are alienated, shy, struggling to cope socially or often isolated from each other, or living in cramped proximity, desperate to move out and leave home, and feeling trapped. Of one key relationship, between Shrimp and January, we see Shrimp's longing and social isolation through her own desperate introspection in her room, hidden from her family, contrasted with January's consultation with her own close circle, a small collective of mostly Black revolutionaries, who listen and probe her with sympathetic but psychosocial questions - it's an issue that Shrimp lives with her family because a core tenet of the group is a critique of the family unit as core of class society. The vignettes of Disch's novella are very domestic, but in their quiet concerns with money and everyday life, social housing and money for social support (and the consequences of it being withheld), they point toward a very clear sense of the wider world of the fiction.

• Publisher: Science Fiction Foundation
• Subject: Aesthetics / American literature / Families & family life / Fiction / Harrison, John M / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Modernity / Moorcock, Michael / Morality / Narrative techniques / National identity / Novellas / Plot (Narrative) / Spinrad, Norman