"I loathe science fiction," Vladimir Nabokov declared to a BBC interviewer in 1968, "with its gals and goons, suspense and suspensories."
Strange to say, Nabokov was putting the finishing touches on an ambitious science fiction novel even as he made this grand pronouncement. Ada, or Ardor was published eight months later, two weeks after Nabokov’s 70th birthday, to great acclaim. Alfred Appel, writing in the New York Times , declared that, with this work—the longest novel of Nabokov's career— the Russian émigré had established himself as the "peer of Kafka, Proust and Joyce."
Appel might have justifiably made comparisons with Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle , or Philip José Farmer's The Gate of Time , or Robert Silverberg's The Masks of Time —1960s works that anticipated the alternate history concept Nabokov develops at length in Ada . Most commentators preferred to downplay the sci-fi themes that underpin this novel, awkwardly searching for ways of defusing the intrusion of pulp fiction ideas into a literary masterwork. "This description makes Ada sound like science fiction," Appel admits, "and in part it is." But then he prefers to find another term, declaring that Nabokov is the author of "physics fiction"—a label that seems a bit more distinguished. Other critics insisted that Ada was a novel about language, or a love story, or a puzzle masquerading as a story, or a commentary on fiction.
"We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connections with the worlds we already know." Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Literature
Yet, from the very start, readers can tell that Nabokov is playing by different rules than Proust or Joyce. The book begins in the early 19th century, but characters repeatedly refer to anachronistic technologies—including airplanes and motion pictures. Yet they have no electricity, and apparently enforce a strict taboo against even mentioning it—the result of some ambiguous historical catastrophe referred to as "the L disaster." Since that time, electricity has become "too obscene spiritually" to speak about. Many of the technologies in Ada are run on water—people speak on the hydro-powered "dorophone" instead of using a telephone, and get light from a murmuring "dorocene" lamp (the prefix 'dor' ostensibly a corruption of 'hydro').
The novel takes place on a planet that is geographically similar to Earth, but called Demonia or Antiterra by the characters. Much of what we know as North America, especially parts of Canada, reveals a marked Russian cultural flavor—similar to the French influence on current-day Québécois culture. The United States proper, on Antiterra, extends down into South America. England is a monarchy ruled by King Victor, and many parts of the world—including France, India, South Africa and Scandinavia—are under British control.
The people on this planet have some awareness of our own Earth, which they call Terra, but it figures as part of their religious beliefs. Instead of God, they refer to Log , and some believe that they go to Terra, a kind of paradise, when they die. A few fanatics or occultists have visions or dreams of Terra while still alive, but their descriptions are ridiculed the way we might dismiss a purveyor of UFO conspiracy theories. Those who talk too much about Terra can even find themselves branded as lunatics.
Yes, this can only be described as science fiction. Nabokov layers against it a transgressive love story, evolving over eight decades, between Van Veen and his sister Ada. This affair between underaged siblings, presented in intimate detail, is far more unconventional than even Humbert Humbert's relationship with Lolita—and it is testimony to how much censorship enforcement had changed between 1955 (when Lolita was released) and 1969 (when Ada came out) that the later novel didn't result in arrests, book burnings and and public outcry. Yet the prominence of a love story in the plot does little to change the anomalies of the alternate universe in which it is set, peculiarities that are brought to the reader's attention on virtually every page.
So how can we reconcile the reality of this unrealistic novel with Nabokov's stated scorn for sci-fi?
Long before he began work on Ada , Nabokov expressed similar reservations about genre tales. In his 1952 short story "Lance," the narrator announces: "I utterly spurn and reject so-called 'science fiction.' I have looked into it and found it as boring as the mystery-story magazines—the same sort of dismally pedestrian writing with oodles of dialogue and loads of commutational humor. The clichés are, of course, disguised; essentially, they are the same throughout all cheap reading matter, whether it spans the universe of the living room."
Can we take Nabokov at face value? The very story that denounces sci-fi, "Lance," deals with space travel. His story "The Visit to the Museum" involves teleportation. His 1944 tale "Time and Ebb" is narrated by a scientist who reflects with nostalgia on the wonders of the past (but the reader's present). "The Vane Sisters" focuses on parapsychology, and the narrator of The Eye manages to continue his story after killing himself. These stories clearly borrow from sci-fi and fantasy, but the connection in other stories is just as noteworthy, if less obvious. For example, Nabokov often imagined strange mythical locales for his fiction, such as the kingdom of Zembla in Pale Fire or the city Padukgrad in Bend Sinister —these fanciful geographies are only a step away from the alternate universes of sci-fi authors, and in retrospect can be seen as paving the way for the Antiterra of Ada .
Needless to say, such examples reflect Nabokov's willingness to depart from the conventions of strict realism, and embrace far-fetched concepts, whether technological or metaphysical, when they fit his needs. Indeed, on the opening page of his posthumous Lectures on Literature , we encounter a statement that could easily represent the dominant ethos of the sci-fi writer: "We should always remember that the work of art is invariably the creation of a new world, so that the first thing we should do is to study that new world as closely as possible, approaching it as something brand new, having no obvious connections with the worlds we already know." That advice might apply to the reader of Nabokov's Ada or Pale Fire , but just as aptly to the audience for Dune or The Left Hand of Darkness .
And did Nabokov really despise science-driven storytelling by other authors? He expressed admiration for H.G. Wells. He assigned Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde to his students at Cornell. And Nabokov once noted that, during his youth, Jules Verne ranked among his favorite authors, although these books later, he was quick to add, "lost the glamour and thrill they held for me."
Yet Nabokov’s most revealing comment on sci-fi comes in the context of an remark to an interviewer about Shakespeare. "After all," he admits, "if we start sticking group labels, we’ll have to put The Tempest in the SF category, and of course thousands of other valuable works." Here we get to the crux of Nabokov's sci-fi problem: it's not the books that upset him, but the label, which brings with it expectations of the aforementioned "goons and gals."
By temperament and background, Nabokov was perfectly equipped to write sci-fi—indeed one might even see him as destined to do so. As a storyteller, he had only a half-hearted commitment to realism, and delighted in the improbable and fantastic as literary spices that could enhance a narrative's flavor. He was a scientist himself, and the curator of lepidoptera at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology. A scientific paper, published in 2011, drew on gene-sequencing technology to vindicate Nabokov's theory of butterfly evolution. "It's a fitting tribute to the great man," commented evolutionary biologist James Mallet, "to see that the most modern methods that technology can deliver now largely support his systematic arrangement."
This interest in science permeates Ada . Our protagonist Van Veen is a professor and renegade scholar, whose expertise encompasses literary techniques, philosophical musings, the debunking of psychology, and a bold reframing of the concepts of space and time. Veen frequently takes the reader on awkward detours from the story of his love life in order to present his defiant theories of physical reality. In truth, these are the most sluggish parts of Ada , and Nabokov seems to forget for long stretches that he is writing a novel, not competing with Bergson, Whitehead and Einstein. He clearly has the precedents of Proust and Mann in mind, two other novelists who incorporated reflections on time into their novels—and both referred to in the pages of Ad a. But their poetic reflections on la durée intérieure are more art than philosophy, while Nabokov abandons his own greatest virtue, namely his quirky and fanciful mode of expression, during these turgid sections of Ada , and adopts the severe tone of a tenured pedant. Even so, his willingness to disrupt his own carefully developed narrative with these dense theoretical passages reveals just how much he valued the conceptual elements underpinning his novel.
When he is not trying to improve on Einstein, Nabokov dazzles with all his trademarked bag of tricks: wit and wordplay, sex and cynicism, a precision bordering on parody, and a vocabulary and allusions that will send even lifelong lexicographers to their library. If you aren't willing to play this game by Nabokov's rules, you ought to seek out another book right now. Many things in Ada are deliberately obscure at first glance, but pleasingly explicated later in the book, while other remain submerged in mystery, or hover in the background half-explained. Okay, Nabokov offers his own footnotes, credited to a 'Vivian Darkbloom'—but that anagram should signal immediately that these points of clarification are simply another level of the same multilevel game of bluff and bluster. Yet if, like me, you are drawn to texts that offer secret riches to the persistent and perspicacious, Ada ought to be on your reading list.
And nowadays, when the concepts of sci-fi increasingly show up in highbrow fiction, we have another reason to admire Ada, or Ardor . Here is the proud forerunner of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union , Haruki Murakami's 1Q84 and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest . I'd like to believe that, if Nabokov had lived long enough to see this powerful merging of genre concepts and progressive literary techniques, he would have reconsidered his curt dismissals of science fiction—and maybe even have admitted that he had been writing it all along.
Ted Gioia's next book is Love Songs: The Hidden History , forthcoming from Oxford University Press.