Glimpses of the Unthinkable: Anamorphic Images of World War III in Philip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, and J.G. Ballard

Abstract

The representation of modern warfare has always been problematic, but depicting nuclear war seems to be an almost impossible task for writers, inasmuch as a real nuclear conflict has never taken place, so that there is no “real” model that writers may refer to. And yet in the Cold War years the threat of WWIII was such an important and urgent issue that fiction writers repeatedly attempted to stage the unreal war, and think the unthinkable. Some of them adopted a mix of the extrapolative strategies of science-fiction and conventional, “realistic” narrative protocols; others, such as Thomas Pynchon, Philip K. Dick, and J.G. Ballard, though also using science-fictional extrapolations, opted for more unconventional narrative strategies, drawing from modernism or devising new devices. This article attempts to survey what the consequences of these different approaches have been.