July 2008 Archives

The Einstein Intersection takes place on an indeterminately future Earth: humanity is long gone, replaced by a genetically troubled race of people, largely mutants and idiots, living within the ruins of human society, struggling to make sense of abandoned technologies and enacting the remnants of our culture through exaggerated myths about the ancient heroes of Earth, such as the Beatles, Jean Harlow, and Elvis.

For example:

"You remember the legend of The Beatles? You remember the Beatle Ringo left his love even though she treated him tender. He was the one Beatle who did not sing, so the earliest forms of the legend go. After a hard day's night he and the rest of the Beatles were torn apart by screaming girls, and he and the other Beatles returned, finally at one, with the great rock and the great roll."

Incredible. Anyway, the central character is a kind of alien Orpheus, who sets out across the bombed-out world, defeating lush monsters and hanging out with psychics and Vikings, in order to rescue his love (an equally alien Eurydice) from Death. It's a doomed mission from the start, and he unwittingly enacts, undoubtedly for the millionth time, the tragic archetypes of human mythology.

I've never read Samuel Delany before, although I've heard his work represents a substantial segment of the literary sci-fi canon. I can see why: The Einstein Intersection is lyrical, intricate, and peppered with self-consciously meta author's notes that say things like, "you are twenty-one years old, going on twenty-two: you are old too get by as a child prodigy, your accomplishments are more important at the age at which they were done, still, the images of youth plague me, Chatterton, Greenburg, Radiguet." And here, a book that is essentially a fantasy, about a musical troll trekking across a sumptuous planet on dragon-back, but the references -- to the myth of Orpheus, Isidore Ducasse, Machievelli, and Yeats -- are spot on, and you know that it's all a kind of tragic allegory about love and myth. It's Joyceain in its scope, and childlike in its approach to the redress of wrongs: tears, music, and disbelief in the face of evil.

This book is positioned strongly in a kind of academic, trans-genre critical position. It's about mutants, but also: it's not about mutants at all. Hence, this is my entrée into a new kind of science fiction. It seems to me that the ultimate enactment of the genre's purpose is as a kind of subterfuge for academic freaks; since science fiction is ostensibly for outcasts, and is generally unread by the literary establishment, there is a safety blanket there, some room to get weird and still get published. At the same time, the primary demographic of science fiction is of the action-figure collecting persuasion, so the reaction to a book like The Einstein Intersection from traditional male geeks (i.e. Larry Niven fans) is one of terrified, shocked betrayal -- of alienation from their own culture. Can you imagine? Coming across a science fiction book that looks like it's going to be about talking dragons and mutant babes, but then finding out that it's written by a gay, dyslexic black man with, like, a hand fetish and an obsession with classical mythology. Seriously, start browsing reviews online, and you will find pages and pages of virulent nerds damning Delany's work.

Too deep for nerds, too weird for the traditional canon: it's the real borderland.

Ray Davis, in a critical essay (Delany's Dirt) about Delany's later, slightly-pornographic books, writes, "...genres may assume reading protocols which are not those of a particular ideal of literature. But a given piece of fiction can fit more than one set of protocols, and the set of 'literary' protocols is notable for its flexibility." Which is to say that the genre -- science fiction, as it were -- has a set of strict conventions, to the point that fans will become deeply betrayed when they aren't adhered to, but genre-specific content like this can often tell us things that mainstream books, non-genre books, can't. And the mantle of "literature" (flexible as it is) can float down, too, to grace the shoulders of the most unlikely books.

It's kind of a Catch-22: to understand Delany, you have to be at least somewhat fannish, willing to let down your guard and accept that genre-specific content isn't a sign of weakness. At the same time, you can't be so committed to the genre that you would sell someone like Delany down the river for getting liberal with the rules.

NEXT BOOK: H.G. WELLS' THE INVISIBLE MAN.

Larry Niven's Ringworld is the first book of the project that I have not liked. In fact, I disliked it so much that it shook the very foundation of my belief in science fiction as the greatest of all genres. All of a sudden: I was embarrassed. As I explained the plot to my friend ("So the cat-monster and the puppeteer are traveling across the planet in their flying motorcycles...."), I had trouble justifying the book as anything more than a glorified fantasy novel, a sexist, boring tromp through an admittedly cool universe. And here's a book that won the golden accolades of the science fiction world: both the Hugo and Nebula awards!

To be fair, the titular Ringworld is a fantastic invention, although totally a Big Dumb Object: a massive wedge of Dyson sphere rotating around a distant star, made by a long-dead civilization with inconceivable energy needs and technological prowess. What remains of the society which built the Ring are pockets of hairy, tribal herds, who worship the massive Ring as a kind of holy arch, and remember nothing of the great engineers that are their ancestors, nor understand the sheer scale of their world. The future anterieur aspect of this is among my favorite SF tropes: the Ringwold's history, as we discover it, is rich with poetic "will have been" moments. The civilzation which, from our perspective, is bafflingly advanced, has already fallen, become obsolete, become the distant past -- a past not unlike our own present.

Still, a great science fiction novel can't just rest on the crutches of a scientifically engaging premise, especially if it wants to stand up as something particularly literary for posterity. Ringworld takes place in Niven's Known Space universe, a place where many alien civilizations have already made contact with humanity, and some of the novel's main characters are aliens, ostensibly struggling to understand human social quirks, which is a neat excuse, I suppose, for the otherwise inexcusably flaccid dialogue. The human characters, especially the women -- a clueless ingenue and a prostitute, respectively -- are the pits, practically offensive, and a solid reminder that science fiction has long been a boy's club. Maybe this is the root of my embarrassment regarding Ringworld: why would I waste my time with a book that is pointedly written for a subculture of male nerd-dom too deep for me to parse? This is literature for physics-obsessed young men who have never hung out with smart girls, or any girls for that matter, couldn't sniff sexism if it bit them on the nose, and would much rather tabulate the obscure technical specifications of a fictional space object.

A particularly dark diss on Niven from a similarly minded Amazon.com book reviewer:
"Niven seems to reveal himself to be a sad, sexist nerd who had one solitary good idea and just really lucked out."

In the end this is just Rendezvous With Rama-lite (although, yes, I know, Rama came later). Or, rather, this formula:

Rama + the Mos Eisley Cantina scene in Star Wars = Ringworld

NEXT BOOK: SAMUEL DELANY'S EINSTEIN INTERSECTION.

It's been telling me via Google text ads.

Impetuously, a space-living
Man, still young,
Plots his first and last journey to
Earth, for him, a
Return to his long-forgotten birthplace.
In the ship, he trains for
All those forgotten rituals, including:
Life with gravity.

Everything he finds, including the most anodyne of
Animals, seems mystical, meaningful, alien.
Returning to his home on the moon of
Titan, he is
Humbled.

NEXT BOOK: LARRY NIVEN'S RINGWORLD.

I can't imagine what it would have been like to read William Gibson's Neuromancer in 1984. It's so absurdly dense and riddled with cryptic terms which have since become commonplace, that it must have been virtually hieroglyphic at the time. Part of the experience of Neuromancer is this incredible recent-history disconnect: to know that the course of 24 years have brought us a substantial step closer to Gibson's world than we might have anticipated, that it would make concepts like "cyberspace" and "matrix" the stuff of pop-culture movies and general, undisputed understanding. Is that the ultimate litmus test of science fiction, that it starts to come true while it's still fresh in the memory of its readers? Or maybe it's because of Neuromancer that any of these things happened. Either way, it's almost shocking to see how heavy-handedly the novel's themes have been borrowed over the years: The Matrix took most of it and tossed in some plagiarized Baudrillard, Blade Runner took Chiba, took Case, the look of the book and its the self-loathing antihero.

Whatever, I suppose that's selling Gibson short: reading Neuromancer in the light of its descendants is hardly fair, and the book isn't about extrapolation or future-conjecture anyway. It lacks the earnest explanatory nature of many "hard" sci-fi books or even the Popular Mechanics-zeal of Arthur C. Clarke, who always seems to be tugging on your t-shirt and whispering, "It could happen, and I'm going to kind of bore you with the details!" Gibson is just...already there, and he has little intention of drawing a reassuring point from A to B. In a way, that's what advances him beyond the genre, and why it makes sense that he's writing regular fiction now: he has nothing to prove. The world is fucked up and he knows it.

It's hard to talk about how good it is without feeling like I'm two decades late to a party I forgot to go to.

Here is a really awesome Neuromancer-related art project, in the works, from Brody Condon, which is a really cyberpunk kind of name, if you ask me.

NEXT TOME: ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S IMPERIAL EARTH.