The Ice People
is a lesser-known French science fiction novel by René Barjavel. In French, it is known by the more nuanced title, La Nuit Des Temps (the Night of Time). I chose it primarily because I was bewitched by the cover design and the promise of its Frenchness.
Incidentally, I really like the quiet nationalism of science fiction books penned by authors from smaller countries. In the work of Karel Capek, Czechoslovakia is a major player on the global scene; in Fred Hoyle and early Arthur C. Clarke, the British control the military-industrial complex; in Berjavel, the French helm massive scientific expeditions, and scientists, frustrated by the lag in their simultaneous translation devices, resort to a global tongue, French, in their most passionate moments. Of course, when you can invent ancient Lost Worlds and English-speaking Newts, why not throw in a little fantasy about national politics? One for the home team? After all, isn't that what science fiction is all about? Boosting the ultimate home team -- Earth?
Unsurprisingly, then, this novel has an impressive cult following in France: people sport tattoos of mystic mathematical symbols from The Ice People and collect insciptions and autographs from the author -- there are even Berjavel Days in his hometown of Nyons.
I found out after reading The Ice People that René Berjavel was the first author to ponder the grandfather paradox of time travel. There is nothing altogether surprising about this, as The Ice People tells two parallel stories: of a lost civilization, some 9,000 years old, and of the present-day world, struggling to deal with this recently-discovered past. Here's the lowdown: a posse of Antarctic scientists discover the ruins of an inconceivably ancient city below the ice. When they journey to exhume it, they find it's pretty much disintegrated over time; however, they do unearth a massive golden sphere beneath the city, packed in a pocket of sand and rock, which seems to have been built to last. The sphere and the city are 9,000 years old, and indicate a complex, technologically sophisticated human society at its peak during a time that modern scientists thought was the province of monkeys, not men. Everyone struggles with the notion.
Inside the sphere are two people, cryogenically frozen, ready to be resuscitated. A man and a woman, obviously; the scientists decide to wake the woman first. She wakes up believing she has only slept a night, only to discover that eons have passed, everyone she loves is dead, and no one speaks her language. In this sense the novel is as much a belletristic love story cloaked with Romeo and Juliet-level tragedy as it is a thought experiment in science fiction. There is a part of me that privileges the thought experiment over the romance, perhaps as an overcompensation for being a female reader of a traditionally male genre, but I cannot deny the compelling dimension of this element of the story. Everything and everyone in the lost, 9,000 year-old human world was annihilated by world war, the planet destroyed beyond recognition, and this woman was forced against her will to represent the species in a future time! And her love, her man, made her do it so that she could live, even though he would die! And now she's naked, hungry, in a makeshift hospital in the Antarctic surrounded by jabbering men who want her to explain the prodigious scientific achievements of her people! And nothing has really changed in the human psyche, after all, as the world greedily clambers for war over the "Ice People!"
And what can we expect to happen next, really, but another nuclear war?
We're expected to learn from this; or rather, we are expected to shamefully hang our heads and think, "we will never learn." We are also supposed to be empowered by the selflessness of true love. These two hackneyed messages, about the eternal fuckedupness of the human race and the power of eternal love, are so mainstream (and contradictory) as to be actually surprising.
Which makes The Ice People radically boring, or boringly radical.
NEXT BOOK: FRANK HERBERT'S THE SANTAROGA BARRIER]]>
This is the deal: it's impossible for me to separate Phililp K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
from its film adaptation, Blade Runner
.
This is because I've seen Blade Runner approximately 4,000 times, and because my science fiction-obsessed college professors would always build elaborate paper castles of syllabi, heavy on the words "dystopia" and "postmodern," just so that they could teach Dick, but ultimately it was always Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?, so everyone I knew just relied on their knowledge of Blade Runner rather than do the reading. And so did I, apparently; hence, all my discussions of the book have really just been about half-remembered things from Blade Runner.
The aforementioned problem almost ruined the book for me. The whole experience of reading it was fraught with attempts to conjure up equivalent scenes from the film. Darryl Hannah with her crazy legs akimbo, Harrison Ford eating ramen noodles in the rain, the dark L.A. pyramids of the Rosen corporation. At a certain point I no longer remembered what had happened in the film, and what happened in the book, or vice-versa. Which is fitting, I suppose, for a story revolving around the distinctions between human and android, the latter of which is so sophisticated as to be almost indistinguishable from humanity, and the moral position of a hunter (a "retirer") of rogue androids.
Also, when I picked up my copy of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? at the library, a dollar bill fell out.
I found this appropriate because the novel is fundamentally about the failure of human systems to serve as arbiters of value. What is the difference, for example, between an artificial thing and a "real" one if they serve the exact same purpose, have the same market value? Androids are designed to be servants, and they only have a market value as workers, a value that is depreciated if they liberate themselves and choose to live a life of servitude -- not to a master, but to their own needs. But still, they are beings which take up space in the world, which breathe and exhaust resources, which have a desire to integrate in human society. And so their value is similar to ours, if not identical.
Ultimately, it's perception that defines everything: whether you are human or a sophisticated android that just looks human, the importance of your life, insofar as everyone else is concerned, is the same. It's no one's purview to murder you just because you're incapable of empathy. Or so we are led to believe. As Marilyn Gwaltney notes in her essay, Androids as a Device for Reflection on Personhood, which can be found in the excellent compendium Retrofitting Blade Runner
, "the androids are clearly human beings, but are they persons? Do they have 'selves?' We cannot answer that question until we define what a self is, and what it means to be a person." The idea, then, is that our understanding of selfhood is so nuanced, so flawed (attributes which, incidentally, elude androidkind) that we are left with nothing, with which to judge nothing.
Blade Runner looks like Dick's novel in the same way that androids look like humans; in a way, it's exactly the same. The habitual guidelines do not stand: as the story is about originals and copies, we are left with the realization that it's impossible to judge a copy, for we may be copies ourselves.
NEXT BOOK: JAMES TIPTREE JR.'S BRIGHTNESS FALLS FROM THE AIR]]>
Frank Herbert is one of my heroes, for a number of reasons: his incredible commitment to portraying the whole ecology of a fictional environment, his sly allusions to philosophy, the overwhelming headiness of his work, his Northwest roots. This devotion, however, is entirely based on the commanding Dune
series, which, as it has for many people, radically changed my approach to this genre; The Santaroga Barrier
is the first non-Dune Herbert novel I've ever read.
The Santaroga Barrier is a Heideggerian trip steeped in a deep tradition of Pod People, Puppet Master, Freudian "uncanny," Wicker Man, and Body Snatcher story archetypes: in a small town, everything seems normal, but something is undeniably off, otherworldly. In this case, it's Santaroga, a Northern California valley town that resists outside influence with maddeningly self-satisfied intensity. Market researchers refer to it as the "Santaroga Barrier;" enter Gilbert Dasein, a psychologist sent to expose the real reason why outside businesses fail in the region and Santarogans never leave their valley. On arrival, Dasein finds out that he is only the most recent in a series of investigators, all of whom have died in bizarre, but explainable accidents. The vibe is tense, weird, and hyper-normal. People resist his inquiries at every turn. He finds himself acting irrationally, climbing onto the roof of his hotel and sneaking through factories in the dead of night, fueled by a creeping sensation of something wrongness. Quickly, he discovers "Jaspers," an additive in all Santarogan food; Jaspers is a consciousness-enhancing drug, fungal in nature, which makes all Santarogans creepily alert and fosters some kind of subconscious group mind. Dasein begins to narrowly avoid fatal accidents, one after another, and finds that his presence as an outsider has offended the group mind, the communal id, of Santaroga: he must integrate, or be killed unwittingly.
Santaroga itself is an enticing community ("we take care of our own," everyone says) and integration presents a significant dilemma. Would Dasein be happy to tune in and drop out forever, lulled by the Jaspers into a communal small-town life, or can he hold out long enough to return to "reality," a world of pronounced individualism? As the novel progresses, we begin to lose steam, forget the benefits of the real outside world -- I don't think I would have lasted a day in the Santaroga valley.
The notion of a consciousness-enhancing drug is evidently an obsession of Frank Herbert's, and it's not difficult to see traces of Dune's "The Spice" in the "Jaspers" of the Santaroga valley. Here is a society entirely controlled by a single rare and dangerous psychoactive. The question for me is, was Frank Herbert exploiting a late-60s fascination with psychedelia in order to sell books which were essentially about Being and transcendence, ecology and human evolution; or was he just really into acid?
My bet is on the former. The drug, be it Jaspers, Spice, or LSD, seems to be just a physical justification -- a tool -- for philosophical inquiry; Herbert named the Santaroga drug after Karl Jaspers, a German psychiatrist who wrote that all individual authenticity required a joining with the "transcendent other," traditionally God, but which, in The Santaroga Barrier, is something else entirely, the communal identity, the Being.
The distinction between the outside world and the world of Santaroga is one of beings and Being. In Gilbert Dasein's outside life, he is one of many beings, with individual needs and desires; in Santaroga, however, he tastes the Jaspers and begins to understand himself as part of something larger, as part of Being itself, the "transcendent other," of Karl Jaspers. To boot, Gilbert Dasein himself is named after a term from Heidigger's Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), in which we find a very Santarogan definition of existence: "'Being' is not something like a being... Being is what determines beings as beings, that in terms of which beings are already understood."
NEXT BOOK: PHILIP K. DICK'S DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?]]>
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As far as science fiction anthologies go, Quark #1
is weird. Co-edited in the early 70s by the poet Marilyn Hacker and Samuel Delany (who were married at the time, but have long since separated and both self-identified as homosexual), it purports to be an quarterly of "speculative fiction," an all-encompassing buzzword for outsider literature that was particularly in vogue at the time. Perhaps as a result, the first book in the series (of four) is both utopian and vague, full of middle-ground short stories that either couldn't or wouldn't hack it as pure science fiction. Familiar names are there -- Ursula K. LeGuin, A.E. Van Vogt -- but they're all flubbing a little, trying out different styles. It's often funny, and certainly worth seeking out, but the real highlight of Quark #1
SpaceCanon: I wanted to talk to you about War with the Newts
Evan: Oh yea! I love that book
SpaceCanon: yeah man me too
Evan: In addition to many other things, I feel like it is the missing link between modern science fiction and like Frankenstein and Dracula
SpaceCanon: it's so tenuously "science fiction"
SpaceCanon: actually very little science
SpaceCanon: and it doesn't feel like fiction either
Evan: like, the epistolary structure
Evan: is that the right word?
SpaceCanon: I'm not sure
Evan: its letters
SpaceCanon: oh, you mean the fragented, modernist narration?
Evan: yup
SpaceCanon: it's like the Wasteland of sci fi books
Evan: but people remember it being this weird prophetic thing about nazism
Evan: and not much else
Evan: but i think it really is a major thing
SpaceCanon: I read that Karel Capek "died of a broken heart" shortly after he wrote it
SpaceCanon: when he realized how fucked czechoslovakia was going to be
Evan: that is crazy
NEXT BOOK: QUARK #1]]>
Hello readers, and welcome to a very significant redesign of this nascent blog.
For those of you who don't collect science magazines from the mid-80s, the new Space Canon design is a serious homage to OMNI, a seminal publication that ran from the late 1970s to the mid-90s. OMNI was a science magazine, but it didn't draw heavy lines in the dirt: it ran stories from the likes of William Gibson and Orson Scott Card, as well as gonzo interviews with visionary scientists and thinkers, and, in later, years, deep features on fringe science and the paranormal.
JEM
, a limerick:
There once was a planet named Jem,
Which seemed to accommodate men,
With Earth torn asunder,
By one nuclear blunder,
Humankind thought to try it again.
JEM, a haiku:
Dim red sun overhead,
Sad beasts of the sky and earth.
Humans, welcome home.
JEM, a sonnet:
In the air float sentient balloons,
Not unlike a wet dream of Carl Sagan's;
The mist blocks out the sight of the moons,
no God, all of us have turned pagan.
Sun flares, no day, no sign from home, alone,
In night, our small outpost, its cries fall mute
upon the sour and acrid hives of bone
and carapace and guns and combat boots.
Hopes were set forth for a crimson utopia.
Arrived on Jem we saw ourselves turn cruel,
our love for war became myopia.
What comedy to name this place a jewel.
Adventures of men will end in disaster,
in space, repeat chorus: to death, our old master.
NEXT BOOK: KAREL CAPEK, WAR WITH THE NEWTS]]>
The first and most egregious mistake I made when I sat down to determine the guidelines of this project was to forget about short stories. By populating my reading list exclusively with novels, I flouted the genre's most sacred form. The cultural heart of science fiction is in short-form pieces, due to its longstanding relationship with magazine publishing: stories, novellas, and serialized novels are the bread and butter of the magazines that have kept the community together for decades. Between the 1920s and 1950s, American science fiction magazines were basically the only place one could easily find written science fiction -- which, of course, means that some of the most important pieces in the history of the genre are short-format, and first saw the light of day in a mimeographed fanzine or a copy of Amazing Stories.
So, true to the flexible spirit of this project, I am amending the list: short stories are now fair game. Obviously.
Of course, since science fiction publications are frequent and many, and readers as varied in taste as you could imagine about a lot introspective escapists, there's wheat to separate from the chaff. Short story collections vary from the extraordinarily pulpy (a recent acquisition is proof: a paperback of SPACED OUT, the third in Michel Parry's series of drug-themed SF romps, warns its readers not to read it unless they're into "monstro freak-outs") to the literary and respectable, with every conceivable diversion in between. None is particularly privileged to the title of "real" science fiction, because they all represent different facets of a highly diverse culture, and I'll try to read as much paperback pulp as I do Nebula winners.
That said, my first short stories of this project are from a collection of 1968 Nebula award winners
, the fourth year of the award's existence. It represents a decent range of what was going on at the time -- an excerpt from Anne McCaffrey's Dragonrider, Richard Wilson's post-apocalyptic Mother To The World, and a Kate Wilhelm story called The Planners, about monkey researchers. It also includes a handful of shorter stories -- "as many runners-up as could be fitted in."
A confession: I gave up on Dragonrider three pages in, since it made little sense without the other parts of the story, and was so drenched in Fantasy-style neologisms ("Weyrleader," "F'lar," "Ruatha") that it made my head spin. I promise I will read the book, since it's on the list, but I do not have a good feeling about it.
All of the stories were good, or at least up to the standards one would imagine the SFWA upholds for the Nebula awards, especially this early the game, but my favorite was a runner-up, a really short piece by Terry Carr called The Dance of the Changer And The Three, which is a kind of sociological study of a mythic poem told by an alien race of energy beings barely classifiable as life-forms by our standards. It was wonderful because it expressed the blank horror of the truly alien, the total other; even though these beings are beautiful, and communicate through color, movement, and radiation of energy, their most important and venerable sagas seem mystifyingly irrelevant to the human psyche. The saga in question is a brilliant invention: Carr manages to come up with an alien epic that sounds fragile, strange, and brutishly translated. The man charged with communicating with these creatures, and perhaps the only man to manage to translate their movements into language, is baffled to the point of exasperation by their stories:
And these are the creatures with whom I had to deal and whose rights I was charged to protect. I was ambassador to a planetful of things that would tell me with a straight face that two and two are orange.
I don't want to give away the great ending, because I found The Dance of the Changer And The Three online, available to read for free right here. It's well worth the 25 minutes you'll spend reading it, which is, I suppose, one of the primary benefits of short stories -- they require very little of your time in relation to how much they can make you think.
NEXT BOOK: FREDERIK POHL'S JEM.]]>
Stranger in a Strange Land
is a classic of early 1960s American science fiction, and a game-changer for the genre's sexual politics, so long relegated to a weird ghetto of three-breasted Martian babes and earnest blondes defiled by tentacled monsters. It's hard to overestimate this book's influence: it was the catalyst for a neopagan religion, was adopted as a kind of manifesto for 60s counterculture, spawned a few neologisms, and accurately predicted the moral and religious trends of the decades to come, namely the birth of the evangelical corporate megachurch. It also, apparently, includes the first description of the waterbed, which did not yet exist in 1961.
As a side note, I've often read that Robert Heinlein is part of the holy trinity ("The Big Three") of popular sci-fi authors, along with Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asmiov, a commendation that I find, post-Foundation, to be absolutely ridiculous. Yes, he's as wry with his social commentary as any sci-fi great should be, but he's so obviously better, and patently sexier, than Asimov, who is a grand old bore, or Clarke, who has a nefarious tendency to keep the juicy stuff to his personal life. Of course, this is based on the reading of just one novel, one which made Heinlein an unlikely pied piper of hippie liberalism, when in reality his own views on the subject, although much-scrutinized, are definitely unclear, especially since he penned Starship Troopers, considered by many to be a fundamentally conservative novel, around the same time.
Anyway, the "stranger" of the title is actually a human man, and the "strange land" is Earth: not exactly an epic set-up for a book proclaimed to be, according to the cover of my edition, "the greatest science fiction fantasy of all time." However, the man in question is Valentine Michael Smith, an orphaned human raised on Mars, by Martians, and returned to Earth in his mid-20s with all the psychic wisdom of his Martian forebears and absolutely no clue about human society, language, or mores -- a kind of infant superman. Through the eyes of a creature who is biologically but not psychologically human, we see our most hallowed institutions -- religion, money, monogamy, and the fear of death -- as they perhaps really are, which is to say, absurd. His ignorance is almost psychedelic: he takes rapturous, baffled joy in swimming pools, considering the practice of bathing in water to be a religious experience of high merit. Mike is, culturally, a blank slate, but with his typically Martian sincerity, not to mention his abilities (telepathy, telekinesis, and the willing "discorporation" of self and enemies), he wields a strangely mystical authority, giving Heinlein a quasi-legitimate voice for guilt-free hippie grandstanding. With his combination of loving sincerity and transcendent force, the Martian named Smith "preaches" a universal message of spiritual polygamy, cosmic patience, non-mainstream family structures, and social libertarianism. Without the aura of outer space, he could just as easily be a religious messiah. In truth, he becomes one, and singlehandedly rewrites history.
Stranger is a lovely, powerful book, one which has no illusions about its intentions (broad, clever satire) nor a lick of self-consciousness: Heinlein, through the mouthpiece of Mike and other characters, namely Jubal Harshaw, a curmudgeonly bon-vivant with an appetite for long-winded speeches on everything from Rodin to cannibalism, lambasts his chosen targets without prudishness, and with commendable intellectual zeal. Sure, there's some arguable stuff, like a brief, confused foray into homophobia and old-fashioned sexist patronizing, but it mostly reflects the time and the hesitant puritanism of some of the novels' characters; surely, compared to most science fiction books dating from the early sixties, Heinlein is practically Betty Freidan.
On the whole, I found Stranger In A Strange Land both funny and thought-provoking, and in a way, reading it is like going back to the fountainhead of decades of liberal thought, making hippie counterculture seem fresh again -- it did more to revise my opinions on polyamory than the entire "free love" movement. Of course, I'm not about to run off and join the Church Of All Worlds yet, but we would certainly not be remiss in adopting the worldview of Valentine Michael Smith, at least occasionally. In fact, it could be a formidable exercise for us all to wake up in the morning and approach everything in the world as a powerful Martian might: with sincerity, fascination, and one finger solidly squared on the "annihilate" button.
NEXT BOOK: NEBULA AWARD STORIES FOUR.]]>
Foundation
is a trilogy of Isaac Asimov novels that was honored with a special Hugo award for "Best All-Time" series. It beat out some heavy hitters for the title, including Lord of the Rings. After reading the first book of the trilogy, I can understand the semantics that make this award relevant: it's, like, the Best series about All Time, not the Best Series of All Time.
That's a joke. See, Foundation takes place on a massive time scale, chronicling the rise of a civilization over the course of centuries. No characters are around for long, as the story outlives them all.
The premise: a great psycho-historian named Hari Seldon uses a mixture of statistics and sociology to predict the fall of the Galactic empire. To prevent the inevitable eons of barbarism between this drama and the rise of the next great civilization, he sets up a couple of insurance policies for humanity: two isolated planet-colonies stocked with all the available knowledge of art, science, and technology. The primary colony, Terminus, is destined to become the seat of the next empire, and Seldon plots out its entire political future on a long-distance time scale peppered with so-called Seldon Crises, moments at which necessary and unavoidable political actions change the course of history.
The first book in the ludicrously expansive Foundation series takes us from the time of Hari Seldon to about 200 years of Terminus' history, beginning with scientists and encyclopedists, and finishing with merchant-princes and traders. It heralds the beginning of its own empire, the profitable novel series, which spawned some nine sequels and prequels, not all penned by Asimov, over the course of half a century. The books are evidently much-beloved, and I would be loath to dismiss them, particularly as there isn't anything especially offensive about them. I generally love books that span such huge time scales; Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, obviously an influence here, and Frank Herbert's Dune, which probably cribs a little from Foundation, both come to mind. Still, there is something remiss about this one: Asimov's style is so dry and concise that it lacks, to me, the pathos of such a generational story. Knowing the premise, I expected the sweat and tears of an entire race to parade before me, to witness the triumph of knowledge over savagery, some really epic, opening-ceremony-of-the-Olympics sort of stuff. Instead, it's men making plans, men making deals with other men, just another oligarchy in outer space.
Am I the only person to be disappointed by this? Given the freeing lack of constraints presented by science fiction, I was surprised to find intergalactic rulers in a universe millennia in the future doing business as usual, screwing each other out of resources and comparing the sizes of their atomic weapons like it's the Cold War. I think Foundation is supposed to be uplifting -- humanity, so strong, rebuilding itself through science -- but it comes off as a dry extrapolation of the present on a bigger scale. It's a novel about political machinations that wouldn't be out of place in United Nations back rooms, but seem pedestrian and silly in the context of a galactic empire.
Hence this joke, an alternate title for Isaac Asimov's Foundation: White Men Make Up History.
NEXT BOOK: EITHER BOOK TWO OF FOUNDATION OR ROBERT A. HEINLEIN'S STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. ]]>
is a fine modern tragedy.
In it Griffin, a young optical physicist, in an ill-timed fit of desperation stemming from his hope for scientific recognition and his inability to cope with people, renders himself invisible. He does this by lowering the refractive index of his body, bleaching his blood, and undergoing a painful and undefined process. His invisibility is total, but it is also a product of science, not magic, and hence is incredibly literal. Undigested food remains visible in Griffin's body, appearing as a floating murk in the air. The snow and dirt settling on his shoulders make his outline visible again, and he can only be invisible while naked, as clothes cloak his form. The reality of his trick is brutal: naked, cold, terrified of leaving a trace anywhere, Griffin cowers in the streets of London, homeless and totally alone. He is driven mad by the irreversibility of his predicament.
While other writers of his time might have made The Invisible Man into an adventure story, a slapstick romp of illusion, H.G. Wells saw a life of invisibility as it really might be. To be invisible is to be completely cast away from the most fundamental, underlying commonalities between all people: being, onus, and self. Griffin is, by virtue of being unseen, no longer human. And, faced with the hysterical reaction of regular folk to his predicament, he certainly acts accordingly: stealing, verbally abusing people, using fear to overpower the weak, and, near the end, dreaming of a reign of terror, of murder.
In the preface to my edition, George P. Wells (H.G's son), details the scientifically burgeoning era of his father's writing. After all, the late 1880s saw the invention of the lightbulb, the radio, the automobile; people could light and heat their homes at the touch of a button, all things that might have seemed like magical fantasies a few decades previous, and things which probably retained a little aura of the magical for many people. There really was a sense of unabashed optimism about science, about technology's potential to unveil new comforts and wonders for the everyman. Still, Wells saw the darkness. His son writes, "the scientific worker strives continually to give man a greater power to shape his destiny; the individual finds more and more than he holds the power of life over death, only as a power of death over life." Yikes.
"Why," said Huxter suddenly, "that's not a man at all. It's just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm --"
It's exactly these kind of juxtapositions -- between the commoner and the physicist, the glowing promise of science and its hard-edged underbelly -- though, that makes The Invisible Man so potent. Like all of Wells' early novels, it's set in the most brass-tacks landscape possible: a provincial England, populated by innkeepers and constables, ordinary folk, gossiping amongst one another as they experience the extraordinary. Wells uses specific, dry language, and it's a particularity of his style that when he shows us the unbelievable, it's through the unbelieving eyes of a common bystander ("No 'ed, I tell ye!"), whose attempts to remain objective in the face of unimaginable horror make the events far more chilling. I can't help but think of Clarke's third law: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And magic has no being, like an invisible man.
NEXT BOOK: ISAAC ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION]]>
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.]]>