Limbo

What to make of Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo? According to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “This large and extravagant satire is perhaps the finest sf novel of ideas to have been published during the 1950s.” David Pringle calls it the American version of Brave New World or 1984, referring to it as a masterpiece and “the most ambitious work of science fiction, and one of the most successful, ever to come out of America.” And yet most SF fans probably haven’t heard of it, and it clearly hasn’t gained enough traction to achieve classic status within the field, or even to be widely read, though it has managed to come back into print every so often, including a new edition last year from Westholme Publishing.

Given the hyperbole, why isn’t it better known? It’s certainly idiosyncratic. It’s long (was anyone else writing 400 page SF novels in the early ‘50s?), with much of the word count devoted to the protagonist’s musings on human psychology (in particular, the masochistic urge and other Freudian concepts), cybernetics, lobotomy, and philosophy (and the relationships among them). The story is told from the point of view of brain Dr. Martine, a brain surgeon whose thought process is quirky, but also humorous and ingenious, as he attempts understand the society he has returned to for the first time in eighteen years. His internal monologues consist of philosophical speculation in which he finds connections by way of free associative wordplay, a point of view that takes some getting used to, but which I found exhilarating. Martine’s musings take on added urgency as he tries to come to grips with the world of 1990—a world which he abandoned in 1972 when he deserted his post as a military doctor just before a nuclear attack during World War III. The East vs. West nuclear war, in which all military decisions on both sides have been turned over to cybernetic brains known as EMSIACs (descended from the ENIAC computer that began operation in 1946), ultimately resulted in the near destruction of both populations but, unbeknownst to Martine, his act of desertion (saying NO to the “steamroller,” as he describes it in his notebooks) set in motion a chain of events leading to the end of the war and the development of a new pacifistic philosophy on which to base a postwar civilization.

Upon his desertion, Martine ended up on an island off Madagascar (and not on any map) inhabited by the Mandunji, a people with a history of persecution and flight from aggressors, who are dedicated to maintaining peace by rooting out aggression, through the use of lobotomy if necessary. This treatment, known as Mandunga, is used on individuals showing signs of aggressive behavior. As an expert brain surgeon, Martine uses his surgical techniques to make this process more humane, despite his qualms about the morality of lobotomy, and settles with the Mandunji, soon marrying and fathering a son. In 1990, outsiders discover the island. They have cybernetic artificial limbs and wear clothing emblazoned with the letter “M,” and claim to be in training for the Olympic Games. Their appearance, for reasons he is not entirely clear about himself, creates in Martine a need to return to the world he left behind and find out what happened to society after the war. His experience with the Mandunga procedure will serve as a counterpoint to what he finds when he returns to “civilization.”

Martine returns to America, now a much smaller country known as the Inland Strip—both East and West Coasts have been obliterated. The second third of the novel is devoted mostly to exposition, as he pieces together the history of the preceding two decades based on observations, conversations, and research (including a chapter in which he attends a convenient series of lectures). Amazingly, he finds that he—presumed dead in 1972—is one of the inspirations of the pacifist movement that swept both the Inland Strip and the East Union (what’s left of the Soviet bloc). Prior to his desertion, Martine had been pouring his thoughts out into notebooks—thoughts and ideas that eventually led to his decision to refuse to continue to participate in the war. These notebooks were retrieved by his bunkmate and fellow doctor—Helder— who published and publicized them, using them as the source material for a new social philosophy that swept a war-weary world, creating a movement that led to Helder’s elevation to President of the Inland Strip.

In the notebook, Martine had railed against the fact that war is the ultimate “steamroller”—a force created by society but outside the control of the individual, but which results in the individual sacrifice of life and limb. In particular, as a doctor, Martine had been forced to amputate countless limbs. Jokingly, he suggested that, if mankind is so masochistic as to create this destructive force, would it not be better to forgo the war and satisfy our masochism by way of voluntary amputation? “Maybe you could work out a new way of fighting war in which there aren’t any victims at all, no steamrollers. In which all the casualties volunteered for their wounds… Neat! Marx corrected by Freud. To each according to his need—not his economic need but his masochistic need. Because some people have a special taste for suffering and should obviously be allowed to take the lion’s share of it… You could easily do that with a few well-chosen slogans, such as—oh, I don’t know, slogans to the effect that there’s no demobilization without immobilization, pacifism means passivity, arms or the man…” Upon publication, Martine’s satirical speculation (which he likens to Swift’s Modest Proposal) births the Immob ideology, within which the greatest honor is reserved to those who have the most limbs removed. This may sound unrealistic, but satire is based on exaggeration, and voluntary bodily mutilation is not uncommon in human society. Current subcultures focused on bodily piercings and tattooing are only the most recent examples.

A schism develops within Immob between anti-pros—those who think true Immob requires real immobilization, without resort to prosthetics—and pro-pros—those who hold that the real triumph of the human over the machine (thus reversing the dynamic of the EMSIAC war) occurs when the amputees install the advanced cybernetic limbs that make them better, faster, and stronger than before. Now the men dominate the machines, making technological war impossible. The pro-pros control the government, and replace war with the “moral equivalent” in the form of a revived Olympic Games, in which East battles West on the athletic field instead of the battlefield, and all unite to celebrate the principles of Immob. It was these Olympic athletes who had stumbled onto Martine’s island hideout, and the letter “M” emblazoned on their clothes stands for Martine, the father of Immob. As Martine comes to realize the real nature of the world he inadvertently helped create, he decides to act. Immob is no better than lobotomy—both destroy humanity by attempting to remove the “negative” side, but positive aspects are inevitably removed as well. (The various dualities inherent in humanity are another important theme.) Immob began as a joke, and created a world where people can’t take a joke… And Martine soon learns that Immob has not eliminated the East/West conflict after all…

In the fascinating “Author’s Notes and Warnings” included at the end of the novel, Wolfe writes: “Anybody who ‘paints a picture’ of some coming year is kidding—he’s only fancying up something in the present, not blueprinting the future. All such writing is essentially satiric (today-centered), not utopic (tomorrow-centered)… I am writing about the overtone and undertow of now—in the guise of 1990 because it would take decades for a year like 1950 to be milked of its implications. What 1990 will really look like I haven’t the slightest idea.” I wouldn’t go as far as Pringle in calling Limbo the most ambitious American SF novel (though I don’t know what I would choose instead), but I can probably go as far as the Encyclopedia in seeing it as “perhaps the finest sf novel of ideas to have been published during the 1950s.” Any book that mixes together Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, IBM’s ENIAC, Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, A. E. Van Vogts’s The World of Null-A (!), not to mention Mann, Dostoyevsky, neurosurgery, the beginnings of the sexual revolution, and the newly born concern about the potential for nuclear conflict, has the proverbial something for everyone. Most of these (and other) sources are mentioned in the novel, and are clear influences on Wolfe’s 1990 world. He references them directly in the afterward, where he states that the “book is a grab bag of ideas that were more or less around at the mid-century mark.” Arriving in 1952, Limbo strikes me now as a precursor to the New Wave SF of the ‘60s. J. G. Ballard cited it as a favorite, and Harlan Ellison invited Wolfe to write stories for Dangerous Visions. It may not have fit comfortably into the more pulpy SF world of 1952, but it’s an important piece in the development of the genre, and remains a fascinating read, and a wide open window into the mindset of a writer in the early ‘50s thinking about the implications of the technological and social changes that were occurring at breakneck pace in the post-World War II period. Wolfe remained an active writer, but wrote very little additional SF (just a few stories), which might be a reason the book is little known today, but it’s unlikely to be forgotten.