Dictionary of Literary Biography on John D(ann) MacDonald
Born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, John Dann MacDonald was educated at Syracuse University, where he took a B.S. in 1938, and at the Harvard Graduate School of Business, where he took an M.B.A. the following year. He has also studied at the University of Pennsylvania. During World War II he served in the U.S. Army, eventually leaving the service as a lieutenant colonel. His first published science-fiction story, "Cosmetics," appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction in 1948, and readers subsequently encountered his work in Thrilling Wonder Stories and Super Science Fiction. Although he has since become known as an immensely successful and prolific mystery writer (with more than sixty novels, six hundred short stories, and sales of seventy million copies to his credit), MacDonald did not allow his apprenticeship in science fiction to go to waste, for he has produced three highly regarded novels in the genre.
Wine of the Dreamers (1951) and Ballroom of the Skies (1952) date from the very beginning of MacDonald's career as a novelist. Wine of the Dreamers concerns the attempts of Dr. Bard Lane, a government administrator, and Dr. Sharon Inly, a staff psychiatrist, to understand what might otherwise be regarded as the merely random or meaningless waste and confusion that frustrate both the scientists and the bureaucrats at work on a government space project. This may appear a rather tame, or even dull, premise for a novel, but it leads the characters, and the reader, to an extraordinary exploration of those areas of perception and experience where all ordinary psychological, social, and scientific systems of explanation break down. MacDonald's writing ranges over vast tracts of space and history in the novel--from the minutest details of petty bureaucratic snafus on Earth to a grand historical survey of the ancient laws and traditions of the Watchers, a race of extraterrestrial beings who oversee Earth and meddle in its affairs. But the real drama of the novel takes place in the "inner space" of both the Watchers' and the Earthlings' all too human rage for understanding and control of experiences that defy their powers. The modern predicament, as MacDonald defines it here, is not that the contemporary chaos of feeling and experience cannot be understood by an individual, but rather that there is almost nothing that escapes our understanding or avoids being swallowed up by our systems of explanation. The contents of communications in each of these societies are always and everywhere contained. No experience, however surprising, strange, or outrageous, can avoid being packaged, processed, and programmed--can avoid being controlled, arranged, and ordered.
MacDonald's vision of the contact between the two civilizations is bleak. Does a revolution in consciousness take place when the Watchers and the Earthmen meet? Hardly. Advertising executives, the American Medical Association, the newspapers of the world, and the evening news shows all swing into action to market, explain, and package the "event"; another "new" religious movement is founded; and a Johnny Carson-like comedian works the Watchers into his evening monologue. But the effect on the reader is not quite comic.
In the largest sense all three of MacDonald's science-fiction novels are about the power and danger of contemporary technologies, if one accepts as MacDonald does, that modern communication and knowledge are as much rule-governed systems of technology as modern engineering. If the black comedy of Wine of the Dreamers presents MacDonald's nostalgia for a time when experience could break free of prefabricated systems of understanding and interpretation, Ballroom of the Skies, written a year later, reverses the argument of the previous novel and celebrates the intoxicating joy of larger and larger ways of understanding and interpreting everything. Ballroom of the Skies begins with what appears to be the stock romantic situation of one good man against the world as Dake Loren, rugged individualist, fights to publish the truth about an international conspiracy he believes he has witnessed. But as the reader is led through the astounding twists and turns of the novel's byzantine plot, MacDonald unfolds ever grander plots and conspiracies, each forcing Dake Loren to revise his own understanding of the events he has participated in, and altering the reader's own understanding of the whole novel. The result in the end is that we are left questioning the capacity of the individual to perceive or understand correctly anything at all as he experiences it. Though we begin the novel sympathizing with Dake Loren as he tries to understand the plot in which he has become entangled, by the time we end it Dake has all but disappeared from view, and we end up admiring the beauty and complexity of plots that make individuals seem unimportant and trivial in comparison.
Basically Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies are reflections of their era, filigrees on 1950s cults of paranoia. They are examples of just the sort of thinking that created the Communist Menace, the Freudian fads, and even the craze for mystery stories like MacDonald's. But while the reader scurries off on a paranoid pursuit of one hypothesis after another, only to be forced to discard each one in turn, MacDonald avoids entrapment by the various plots he creates. His writing depends on his ability to deploy and negotiate the intersecting technologies of law, bureaucracy, history, and memory more deftly and humanely than the best of his readers.
The positive value that remains in all these novels is nothing more complicated than a childish tenderness and affection for particular people and things. The values that MacDonald cherishes are simply the thoroughly human capacities to love, to play, to inquire, and to explore that resist any inhumane system that would contain or control them. Thus it is appropriate that the third of these novels, The Girl, The Gold Watch, and Everything (1962), should be a celebration of the power of sheer zaniness as two people avoid being caught by anyone or anything. The two central characters come into possession of a watch that lets them stop time, the fundamental organizer of all experience. But MacDonald realizes that the systems of cognition and feeling within us are at least as coercive as the systems of space and time outside us. Even with this amazing device in his hands, staid, serious Kirby Winter is unable to recognize its possibilities until his delightfully daft, hillbilly girl friend comes along. Bonnie Lee and Kirby need to unlearn their past in order to teach themselves how to be free. What follows is a tour de force of hilarious anarchy as Kirby and Bonnie disrupt all the work-day routines around them and elude the pursuit of private detectives, businessmen, corporate lawyers, and journalists. The fun of reading the novel is one's sense that MacDonald shares his two characters' delight in wildness, comedy, unpredictability, and improvisational possibilities.
As long as MacDonald and writers like him can keep showing their readers the secret depths of everyday life, the potential strangeness in even the most ordinary patterns of behavior, the unpredictability and insatiability of human desires, and the continuous inventiveness of their own irrepressible talents, there is ample reason to trust that human creativity will remain uncompromised by the technologies of literature, communication, and knowledge that hedge it round.
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