Arrive Maris In Ronde

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Did I ever tell you I played a robot in an experimental science-fiction film?

Well, I did. Arrive Maris In Ronde is the thesis project of dear friend and superlative artist Rebecca Carlisle-Healy, sometimes known as RGB by RCH.

I play LITHa (Living, Imagining, Transformative Human Analogue), a machine intelligence brought to life over the course of an interplanetary journey to Mars. Originally programmed by humans and created as a tool for planetary colonization, she has the intellectual capacity to see that her given directives are faulty, and the computing power to imagine better alternatives. As physical life, the play of body in space, overtakes her sensory input, her computer brain forms a bond with Mars that causes her to develop so rapidly that she is lost to the control of the human pilot, Clay (played by Judah Switzer). She begins to advance independently, discovering the nature of consciousness. This is essentially a hopeful vision of the Technological Singularity.

As for the film’s strange visual quality, RCH wrote in her original proposal:

In general, every scene that appears on screen will be a composite image, a series of nested shots. This system of image-units will…communicate more information than can be contained by untreated, live video. The outermost frame establishes the scene’s location, a middle frame acts as an extension of the actor, who lies in the center. This progression is imitative of the way the human eye sees, with its distribution of rods and cones: fine, color detail in the center of the field of vision, where the cones are the most dense, followed by a large intermediary zone in which the brain generalizes and creates patterns, finally enclosed by the rods, which are very good at detecting motion and changes in light and dark…The surrounding frames provide a make-believe, but rational, context for the actor in the middle, but the effect is emotionally isolating. As all other players in the story, she [LITHa] is somehow alienated from her surroundings, unable to touch and be touched.

Rebecca’s image manipulations, language poems, and signature gif grain textures can be found online here, here, here, and here.

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The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde is a 1970 collection of short stories by Norman Spinrad — syndicalist, anarchist, and active Internet user.

I had the same feeling reading The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde as I did when I read Bradbury as a kid, breathlessly tearing towards each story’s conclusion, eager to discover the clincher. At the outset, Spinrad seemed to combine the lucid dreaming of New-Wave science fiction with a more classical magazine-writing approach to story structure, something like Frederik Pohl explaining an LSD trip. Is it high art? Who cares? I just want to find out what’s inside the mysterious alien dome! After some meditation, however, I’ve found Spinrad to be a New Waver as hard-core as they come.

The most mind-expanding story in the collection is “Neutral Ground,” which manages to confound inner and outer space into a single unexplored entity. The story is about “Voyagers,” lab rats in a series of clinical studies testing a mysterious new drug called Psychion-36. Psychion-36 takes users to a place — a real Place. Though their bodies lie prone on psychiatric couches, the Voyagers most certainly travel to complex and detailed landscapes which seem like other worlds. Furthermore, multiple Voyagers visit the same places:

While their bodies lay in trances lasting for about an hour, their minds wandered through fantastic landscapes. And what was different about these hallucinations, what had made Project Voyage imperative, was that, although no Voyager had yet visited the same Place twice, there was strong evidence that different Voyagers had been to the same Places.

The Voyagers eventually encounter a non-human intelligence in their travels through the Places, and it proves to be a very different kind of “First Contact” than anyone could have expected. A great premise. Unfortunately, Spinrad, in this collection, is almost as much about what he doesn’t do with these perfect scenarios as what he does; “Neutral Ground” is a great story, but it’s not what, say, Le Guin or Tiptree might have done with it.

Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Sheckley mugging at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 1982.

Many of the stories in Last Hurrah play with this nuance between inner and outer space, and the physicality of the mind. In the opening story, “Carcinoma Angels,” a man uses a potent cocktail of consciousness-expanding drugs to travel inside of his own body, Fantastic Voyage-style, and battle off his own illness. In “Subjectivity,” a crew of long-distance space travelers dosed with an experimental psychedelic to stave off the loneliness of their sixteen-year intergalactic journey manage to externalize and maintain their hallucinations deftly enough to live inside of them. In “A Child of Mind,” marooned astronauts encounter an organism that can make real their most specific fantasy of a mate. The mind, in Spinrad’s work, is the ultimate science-fiction apparatus. Not the engineer’s mind, the kind of mind that (as Bruce Sterling writes) is “interested in the transcendent poetics of a device per se,” in sublimation through the conduit of an external machine. There are objects of human ingenuity in these stories — spacecraft, faster-than-light drives — but they are cold, dead things. They’re furniture. The real fire is metaphysical; the mind that Spinrad evokes is the mind of the mystic, the hovering yogi, the telepath, the meta-programmable mind of John C. Lilly — the mind without limits.

It’s an interesting — maybe I’m reading too much into this — externalization of the act of science fiction. In Spinrad’s 70s heyday, the only machine used to make fiction was a typewriter. And the typewriter has as much to do with the final work as a hammer does to a nail: which is to say, it’s necessary, it can color the work inasmuch as the heaviness of a hammer might affect the force of a carpenter’s thrust, but it’s not like a nail won’t go into the wall if you slam it with a rock. Ideas come from the writer, not from his or her tools. So why would a piece of fiction play by different rules?

You could define the “Golden Age” of science fiction as being primarily phallo-centric, machine-lusting, tool literature: steam-powered metal men, Tom Swift and his Photo-Telescope, etcetera. This is just the DNA of the genre: pulp magazines were written to adolescent boys, and with Hugo Gernsback publishing the first “scientifiction” serials in Modern Electrics, science fiction literally emerged from a culture of machismo mechanical tinkering. The New Wave of the 1960s (of which Spinrad was at the heart) aimed to move beyond that stigma, and so a radical break from object fetishism played a large part.

Spinrad’s stories, so concerned with the science-fictional power of the mind, speak to the metaphysics of writer and type-writer, hammer and nail. Every time a character in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde employs a Golden-Age “how does this doo-hickey work?” mentality, they are soundly rebuked. Spinrad clearly finds this way of thinking perverse and dated — he is for the transubstantiation of ideas into things, not of things into ideas. Success and failure, utopia and dystopia, all issue forth directly from the mind. In a great story called “Rules of the Road,” a character learns that space travel is a mental pursuit:

He felt a strangeness in his mind, a complexity beyond complexity, a revelation of new and unexpected textures in his psyche. Time was flux, space was flux, eternity was a variable…He did something with his mind, and the surface of the planet vanished like mist.

And then he stood up from the typewriter, and the ideas went with him.

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On The Philip K. Dick Android

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

In 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. It looked like Dick, dressed like Dick, and was completely autonomous. Capable of operating without the intervention of its makers, it could track people coming in and out of a room with face-recognition software, greeting those it knew. It could listen to conversation, and, using complex algorithms, could respond verbally using speech synthesis.

This “robotic portrait” was as much an art project as it was a feat of engineering. For several years, the android made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, Artificial Intelligence organizations, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. Horrified, I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness. Strange and poetic as it was, the story could have ended here.

And yet, the Philip K. Dick android has now been rebuilt. Behold:

The new android is being referred to as “New Phil.” Its vanished predecessor, “Old Phil.” To recap: a man who spends his career writing about about androids dies. Twenty years later, an android is made in his image, effectively bringing him back to life. That android disappears. A new one is built; at this point we’re three degrees of separation from the original. I can’t help but fantasize about a future model (New New New Phil?) becoming self-aware, and immediately being convinced that he is the real, original Phil. I mean, it literally reads like an actual Philip K. Dick story — life imitating art, imitating life.

The brain-boggling postmodern meta-irony is not lost on its makers, thankfully. On translating this particular writer — and not, say, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — into an android, they explain, “An android of Philip K. Dick is a sort of paradox. It’s certainly what Hofstader would call a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ This is something that you don’t get by making an android out of any other science fiction writer.” They point out that Dick didn’t just write about androids; he wrote about people thinking they were androids, or androids thinking they were people, and everything in between. The terrible crux of Dick’s canon often hinges on the question, “what is the difference between being human, and being programmed to believe you are human?”

Still, it’s hard to guess what Dick, who died in 1982, might have thought of his robotic likeness. In a 1975 essay called, “Man, Android, and Machine,” he wrote:

“Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them ‘androids,’ which is my own way of using that word. By ‘android’ I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.”

Would New Phil — or for that matter, Old Phil — embody this “coldness of the grave” to his namesake? I can’t help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son’s school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a machine, a mechanism. The profound sense of disconnect that this vision lends to his reality, the Philip K. Dick android does to me.

Dick’s books have been endlessly adapted to the screen, and yet this bearded machine does more to bring the philosophical mise-en-abyme of his work alive than any number of Darryl Hannahs or Arnold Schwarzeneggers (be they lurking in rainy alleyways or gun-fighting in the red-tinged Martian atmosphere) ever could. I mean, it is Philip K. Dick: both visually and theoretically. It’s a physical embodiment of everything he feared, loved, rhapsodized on, got paranoid about. It’s a “living” paradox; it’s science-fiction reality, a powerfully strange sculpture.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon Review of Dr. Bloodmoney (an acrostic)
Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

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Triad

Posted on February 1, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Illustration by the great Jim Burns.

Triad, 80s oeuvre of Sheila Finch, is unbelievably beautiful. It takes place on an extraordinarily sumptuous alien planet called Chameleon, or Omareemee,  which changes color every time it’s perceived; sometimes it’s described as being awash in bright reds and vermillion, all the plants glistening wet red in the tropical rainfall; other times it’s gray and lavender, the indigenous species’ fur coats undulating softly in gray-mauve-shades, gray grass, purple sky; wet, colored mist, perfumed, dripping with fruit.

There’s a lot going on, all of which deserves due diligence. The story is multi-tiered: it’s about language, reality, sexuality, feminism, colonialism, and machine ethics. An all-female crew from a post-male Earth travels to Chameleon for merchant purposes; the crew’s xenolinguist, Gia, is charged with learning the natives’ language and brokering some kind of trade deal with them. The methods used for this are fascinating — the linguist has a chip implanted in her brain, keeping her in constant contact with the crew computer system, HANA, that mechanically parses all the phonemes and breaks them down into semantic categories, then assigns Gia a battery of psychotropic drugs in order to properly break open her reality:

“Each species of intelligent life in the galaxy learned to limit its perceptions of thr world it inhabited in order to preserve itself from insanity, then petrified those few chosen sensations into language. Once a child was brought up in a language system, it was impossible for her to hold a concept that couldn’t be framed in that language. Therefore…the drugs [were] designed to break down her normally held world view, shatter her illusion of ‘reality,’ eliminate the mechanism by which her mind censored information it considered unimportant according to its preconceived categories of priority.”

Gia literally trips her way through Chameleon, the ground swelling up to meet her feet with each step, a sensuous communion with the natives, who she blurs into, lost in a sea of morphing color, every sound shooting through her brain. She struggles endlessly to comprehend the local language, which seems to operate in a different space-time continuum. They have no past tense, no future tense, no proper nouns, only variations of “we;” she comes to learn that the Omareemeeans exist in the pre-conscious Now, and comprehend themselves only as that which their planet uses to know itself. They have no concept of death, and murder each other thoughtlessly, lovingly, sensing everything as part of a complete and ever-changing whole.

It forms a lush and impossibly alluring worldview when juxtaposed with the crew of humans, who come from an Earth where machine intelligence has been dictating evolutionary development for generations — women self-impregnate and dominate culture, while men are mostly artists, prisoners, peripheral figures. A small men’s liberation movement is currently in bloom, but it is powerless against the steel will of the female hegemony, who hardly deign to touch the opposite sex.

As for the Omareemeeans, they’re groovy. Their language hangs lazily beyond of Gia’s grasp: each word has at least three meanings, only two of which Gia can identify at once, the third lingers unknown, a “carrier wave” pregnant with meaning. The fragments are like poems:

Much of Triad is concerned with Gia’s efforts to understand Omareemeean; it’s easily the most fascinating (and well-researched) aspect of the novel, even held up against the various mutinies and space politics that serve as a backdrop. The pragmatic crew-women, eager to make a trade agreement and colonize Omareemee, insist to Gia that the natives (they call them “Ents” for “entities”) aren’t sentient because they lack self-awareness; the tension is in identifying and defining self-awareness, and trying to understand just how much language molds reality.

There’s the usual colonialist conflicts, too, fear and misunderstanding of the other; the humans are trigger-happy to define the Ents as “sub-human,” but where does that distinction stand anymore in a Universe teeming with various forms of sentient life? What becomes the gold standard of consciousness or worth? It’s all relative, of course: even humans know they’re low on the evolutionary totem pole, as their own trade activities are monitored by yet another higher intelligence, which lurks unseen in the blackness of space.

Meanwhile the Omareemeeans change colors along with their planet, oblivious.

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The Man In The High Castle

Posted on January 9, 2011 by Claire L. Evans


At this point it’s impossible to say anything new about Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, so I’ll start by saying something really old: this is a fantastic book. It’s deep, man.

In brief: the Allied forces have lost the war and the United States has been carved up between Japan and Nazi Germany, with a Rocky Mountain no man’s land in between. Americans cope haphazardly with living under these two varieties of totalitarianism; the Germans have razed Africa, sent rockets to the moon; on the Pacific Coast, American merchants sell pre-War folk “antiques” to interested collectors — bottle tops, lighters, civil war guns, baseball cards. Somewhere near Denver, a man named Hawthorne Abendsen writes a book called The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, a science fiction novel that postulates President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s survival of an assassination attempt and subsequent re-election, setting into motion a chain of events which culminates in Nazi war trials and a cold war between Britain and the United States. Everyone in The Man in the High Castle is reading The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, despite the fact that it’s banned in most of the occupied U.S.A. So, yes: it’s an alternate history novel that contains a second alternate history within its pages. Characters even debate whether or not Grasshopper qualifies as sci-fi:

“Oh no,” Betty disagreed, “No science in it. Nor set in future. Science fiction deals with future, in particular future where science has advanced over now. Book fits neither premise.”

“But,” Paul said, “it deals with alternate present. Many well-known science fiction novels of that sort.”

If we take seriously the conceit of fiction, then we must acknowledge that there can be no binary between the real and false, since there exist, potentially, multitudes of realities. Dick’s characters aren’t gazing across the uncanny valley at us, a mirror reflection: the alternate present they consider while reading The Grasshopper is different still from our world. It’s dislocated, and no more “real” than ours simply because the Axis fell. You can imagine a novel within-the-novel within-the-novel where history plays slightly differently. The Italians rise, Fascism fails, an agrarian future — or maybe a doomsday scenario?

In Dick’s canon, the distinction between “real” and “unreal” is necessarily vague, because he recognizes that the things we take to be the most unquestionably real — history, for example — are often the least tangible. What is history but a collective myth? How is it anything but a culturally-determined collection of words and stories in an individual’s mind? What is the difference between a regular Zippo lighter and the one that was in FDR’s pocket at the time of his assassination? Nothing but an idea.

This double narrative is the most literary (and obvious) presentation of High Castle‘s interlocking theme of the confluence of true and false realities. The buying and selling of American antiques to the Japanese, for example, who fetishize the “historicity” of objects, is thrown into question by the presence of counterfeit objects. And yet, the counterfeit is often better than the original, functional, at least identical, the electric sheep, if you will.

Should I stick to my trend of only reviewing Dick with poems? It seems like either I do that, or I continue into an unreadable graduate dissertation on the novel — there’s no real in-between. Perhaps, to stay true to High Castle‘s Eastern leanings, I should work in Haiku. After all, the events of the novel are determined (both within the narrative and by Dick himself as he wrote it) through consultation of the I Ching; when one of its main characters queries the oracle, essentially, about why the novel was written, it replies with Hexagram 61, Chung Fu, “Inner Truth:”

In Hexagram 61, the water stirs the still lake, making apparent the visible effects of the invisible: the true, concealed state of things is ever-present and yet impossible to grasp except in such moments of clarity. A classic Dick theme — that every character in The Man in the High Castle is living a false reality, a collective hallucination that history is material. Only through the water-ripple that is metaphor can the illusion be perceived, and then only fleetingly, before the lake calms.

Consult the oracle:
Can winter turn to summer?
Imperial red.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon Review of Dr. Bloodmoney (an acrostic)
Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Amazon link: The Man in the High Castle
Conceptual Fiction Review of The Man in the High Castle

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The Word for World is Forest

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that writing The Word for World is Forest was “like taking dictation from a boss with ulcers.” Eager to play around with the ideas of pioneering sleep researcher Dr. William C. Dement, she intended to make a story about the functions of dreaming-sleep. Instead, however, “the boss wanted to talk about the destruction of ecological balance and the rejection of emotional balance.” In the end, both Ursula and the boss got their way: The Word for World is Forest is a beautiful, nuanced novel about ecology and dreaming.

This is a book that’s really easy to get undergraduate-thesis on. It’s got it all: postcolonial anxiety, gender issues, the environmental angle, and what seems to be a clear-cut parable about the culture shock between indigenous peoples and white imperialism. It takes place a few indeterminate centuries in the future, in a logging colony and military base called “New Tahiti” on the planet of Athshe. Every square foot of Athshe is covered in forest, and the native inhabitants are small green-furred creatures that the colonists enslave and refer to as “creechies” (the most accurate-sounding made-up racist slur ever). At the outset, “creechies” seem sluggish and disinterestedly obedient, and hence are roundly abused as sub-Human; in reality, however, they exist in a lucid, liminal state that holds the same cultural gravitas as Australian Aboriginal “Dreamtime.” The Asthshean “dream time” is as real to them as what they call “world time;” they don’t sleep, but enter these states at will, and consider the human use of hallucinogens to induce uncontrolled dreaming to be a blasphemy of the nth degree. All this is ignored by the humans — or, as the Asthesheans call them, “yumens.”

The setting is insanely seductive: deep moss giving slightly under the Asthesheans’ feet as they run from village to village, the heaviness of rain on bough, the impenetrable tangle of forest ceasing only at the edge of each continent, at the sea. The forest is understandable as both nurturing and frightening, home and alien.

At the time of its writing, The Word for World is Forest was inevitably a thought piece about the Vietnam war. In terms of current pop culture, the thing this novel most closely resembles is James Cameron’s Avatar; to quote Gary Westfahl, “another epic about a benevolent race of alien beings who happily inhabit dense forests while living in harmony with nature until they are attacked and slaughtered by invading human soldiers who believe that the only good gook is a dead gook.”

Of course The Word for World is Forest isn’t as stupid, nor is its conflict as simple as tree-huggers vs. oil-guzzlers. The Asthshean solution to the yumen problem is as dark as the human solution to the creechie problem: mass genocide. Oh, spoiler alert! None of the Asthesheans have ever contemplated (or, rather, dreamed of) war before the arrival of their captors, but faced with their situation, they invent it. The Astheshean who brings the concept to his people becomes a kind of translator-god, moving ideas from the Dream world to grisly reality. Since the dream time is real, once evil is introduced to it, evil becomes real. All it takes is someone to move the ideas around.

Unlike in The Lathe Of Heaven, dreams do not hold an extranormal power in this novel — they cannot alter reality in any other capacity than the individual acting on subconscious influences does. According to Ian Watson’s essay in Science Fiction Studies, the dreamers of The Word for World is Forest are basically shamans, “simply in conscious rapport with their dreams; the dream is principally a heuristic tool and—in time of crisis—a decision-making apparatus which permits the total individual to be involved in shaping his destiny.” Dreams generate ideas into conscious being, perhaps by necessity, perhaps by primitive reaction to stress, and the tragic reality in this novel is the dream of death, the nightmare.

The Word for World is Forest was originally a novella published in Harlan Ellison’s Again, Dangerous Visions, an essential anthology. Ellison, a real hard-nosed M.F.-er, insisted on the name: it was originally called “The Little Green Men.”

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven
Space Canon review of Again, Dangerous Visions
Some words for Forest: bos, الغابات, անտառ, meşə, гора, 森林, skov, mets, metsä, forêt, δάσος, foraoise, foresta, יער, 숲, saltus, bosque, floresta, лес, skog, Wald.

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Realware

Posted on November 15, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

Occasionally, I pick up a book without knowing a thing about it — because it looks interesting, because I’ve heard about the author, or because it’s a handsome edition. After my Id-devastating experience with Semiotext(e) SF, I was eager for anything by Rudy Rucker, the only one of the book’s editors I’d never heard of, so I grabbed a used copy of Realware from my local bookseller. Rucker was some kind of important early cyberpunk — that’s about all I knew going into it.

Anyway, I read Realware in its entirely before I realized that it was the fourth book in a tetralogy and that all the things I thought were purposely oblique and esoteric were actually carried on from the other books. Characters I thought were popping in and out of the narrative like fragments of Latin in a T.S. Eliot poem were simply friends and descendants of other Ware tetralogists. The first two novels in the series won Philip K. Dick awards and are generally highly-commended; Realware seems like it’s for die-hards, a rompy catch-up with the world of Ware.

I almost want to read the entire tetralogy backwards, so that I end up at the beginning meeting the characters who spawned the grandchildren that run around the last book. This is a pretty sci-fi way to read sci-fi; skipping to the distant future of an environment and encountering events that even the author didn’t anticipate when they were setting out. Time travel! Imagine reading Chapterhouse: Dune before Dune! Not to mention that the deeper into a series, the more an author assumes a level of prior knowledge about the premise; it reaches a point where a book can actually become unintelligible to outsiders. Sometimes reading a Dune sequel is like trying to decode the Book of Kells over a weekend, or guess Braille. Without the previous tomes for context, it’s like being handed just the hieroglyphic part of the Rosetta stone: “this is a really good story if you know what it’s about.”

This issue is specific to genre fiction. Realist novels don’t often have sequels; there’s no Great Gatsby 2. Writing a book series is a trade-off: you sacrifice accessibility and mainstream literary “legitimacy” for the freedom to develop a multi-tiered, complex universe populated with its own culture and an independent timeline. You exchange the world for a world of your own design. You trade the moment for the Long Now; a good science fiction book series is a sprawling, sometimes decade-spanning narrative that evolves and changes as the author ages (and sometimes even dies). Still, by nature, it’s an adventure in egotism, an exercise in exclusivity.

But that’s interesting, right? Especially when it comes to Rucker. In 1983, he wrote a pithy little piece about genre, “The Transrealist Manifesto,” in which he argues that although reading is linear, writing is not. He compares writing a novel to drawing a maze:

A good maze forces the tracer past all the goals in a coherent way. When you draw a maze, you start out with a certain path, but leave a lot a gaps where other paths can hook back in. In writing a coherent Transrealist novel, you include a number of unexplained happenings throughout the text. Things that you don’t know the reason for. Later you bend strands of the ramifying narrative back to hook into these nodes. If no node is available for a given strand-loop, you go back and write a node in (cf. erasing a piece of wall in the maze).

Realware is actually a great example of this facet of “Transrealism:” strands of ramifying narrative seem to hook long distances backwards into earlier story lines. Characters flippantly refer to events that transpired long before the actual book takes place, for example. Genealogy plays a major role; there are a lot of asides like, “oh, your grandfather was the computer scientist who invented those moon robots!” Pieces of the maze-walls give way here and there to glimpses into the geneses of characters and earlier narrative — all evidently from the earlier novels.

Wouldn’t it be amazing if this idea could be implemented to the extreme? A real Transrealist series would actually entail modifying original books in the series to suit new changes and developments in the later sequels. Of course, this would be impossible with a traditional book series of individual novels published years apart — the result would be some Borgesian nightmare of re-printed editions and annotations. And yet it could work now, electronically, as a digital book that “refreshes” over time; perhaps a single ever-changing novel could replace the series, as a concept, entirely. Rucker writes that “The Transrealist artist cannot predict the finished form of his or her work,” that a book should be written with no clear idea of its outcome; as in life, the future is unknown until you broach it.

Once the future is written, then the maze can be rearranged, lines erased and pencilled in, to make room for the lateral — and nonlinear — growth of a fictional world. Until then, we can read books backwards.

Supplemental Materials:

The entire Ware Tetralogy is available as a Creative-Commons distributed PDF on Rudy Rucker’s website. Read it here if you have the eyes for it.
Ridiculously interesting Rudy Rucker interview with Stephan Wolfram.
Rucker’s science fiction webzine, FLURB.
Rudy Rucker’s “Transrealist Manifesto”

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Artistic Education: Jim Burns

Posted on November 11, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

I judge books by their covers.

In the realm of science fiction — where voluptuous green-skinned babes and slimy androids roam free — an illustration can make or break the experience of a novel. The good ones build a tangible landscape, a breathing world, out of a writer’s imagination. They can stand on their own as fragments of the greater canon. The bad ones, however, can completely misrepresent an author’s intent and make you embarrassed to be carrying around a piece of trashy pulp. They can also be prohibitive: I didn’t pick up my beloved Philip K. Dick for years because of the hellishly nineties design of the easily-available Vintage editions. Which is why I’d like herewith to initiate a series of Space Canon educational tidbits about the artists of science fiction, a subject I’m only beginning to explore.

Today’s lesson is about Jim Burns, the Welsh illustrator whose airbrushed landscapes have graced countless book covers since the early 1970s, from Arthur C. Clarke, Philip José Farmer, and Isaac Asimov to several editions of Dune and over thirty Robert Silverberg books. Burns is a classicist with an immediately recognizable style and a tendency to form space babes against intricate technical machines and spaceships. Highly esteemed in the world of capital-F Fandom, he’s won the Hugo award for best professional artist three times. In the early 80s, Burns worked with fellow St. Martins School of Art alumnus Ridley Scott on Blade Runner, doing concept design for things like the film’s police spinner and various urban details (the job eventually went to insane-o visual futurist Syd Mead).

Burns is still working; he’s published a handful of his own books, including Planet Story (written by Harry Harrison), Mechanismo, Transluminal: The Paintings of Jim Burns, and Imago. You can read a fairly recent interview with him here.

If you are into science fiction and fantasy illustration, especially the vintage kind, immediately bookmark Sci-Fi-O-Rama and Ski-ffy, two phenomenal, well-curated resources with fantastic scans of early Burns and countless other unsung illustrators that will blow your mind.

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Dr. Bloodmoney

Posted on November 5, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After The Bomb

Dawn of society: happened once, then
Repeated.

Bombs,
Limbs,
Obscurity,
Oh, nuclear
Destruction! Gone are
Marin, San Francisco, Berkeley…
One by one, the people along this
Newly
Emptied coast
Yoke together to survive.

Of course, they are all
Radioactive.

Haplessly, they
Organize themselves.
Watching out for outsiders.

Wives, TV salesmen, children, physicists, teachers, dogs, murderers,
Even mutants.

God is not in the picture.
Or government.
That’s what happens after the apocalypse.

Alone, they might not have
Lived. But the
Obituary of humanity had one footnote:
Never underestimate the power of a dedicated
Group of Californians.

Actually, this is not such a bleak
Future. “I would have enjoyed being
There,” wrote the Author. They have
Each other, and a kind of
Real purpose.

This is ultimately a
Hopeful novel. The
End of the World is the

Birth of something totally new.
Only Philip K. Dick could imagine such a
Morose
Beginning.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said
Amazon link: Dr. Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb

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Packing for Mars

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

OK, this isn’t explicitly a science-fiction book. Aaaand I promised myself I wouldn’t make many diversions along my path through the Space Canon, but I can’t help that we live in an age where truth is, if not stranger than fiction, then at least equally strange. Sometimes pop-science books illustrate this point with particular well-researched glee and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void is such a book.

Where do I begin? It’s a true nerd’s smorgasbord. It answers all the scatological and emotional questions that kids always imprudently ask astronauts. It acknowledges the humanness of  space travel as a venture: that astronauts are people who must eat, pass gas, have sex, take up space, sweat, sleep, fear, and otherwise learn to be comfortable in the most alienating of environments. To get people safely into space, these dirty realities must be addressed. Scientists must analyze which diets cause the least fecal effluvia. They must make synthetic poop and test Space Station toilets. They have to think about recycling urine, and they have to find out how long a person can sit in one place without their clothes rotting off of their bodies. They have to make food into cubes, measure intestinal gas, and formulate unspoken masturbation policies. They have to put cadavers into re-entry crash-test simulations. There are entire labs devoted to these things!

Apollo Waste Management System...

Space agencies try desperately to conceal these realities with euphemism and secrecy. It’s how NASA holds onto its funding, and it’s why we’re so shocked when we discover that astronauts aren’t faultless patrio-bots (viz. 2007’s diaper-sporting love triangle). It’s obvious that wonderful, droll, super-nerd Mary Roach had to literally crowbar herself through Public Relations clusterfucks to get at all this good stuff: stories about astronaut John Young sneaking a roast beef sandwich onto Gemini III, a Russian cosmonaut’s request for a blow-up doll, what really happened to Soviet space pup Laika, and the consequences of vomiting in your spacesuit helmet, to name a few.

The truth under all the bureaucratic polish is so fantastically ridiculous that it seems legitimately impossible for anyone to still believe it’s worthwhile to send people into space (robots, quite simply, don’t call for millions of dollars in poop engineering). At the same time, it re-emphasizes just how incredible, patient, devoted, and NUTS astronauts are. The unbelievable shit they have had to deal with! Did you know it took almost 45 minutes for Apollo astronauts to make a bowel movement because their “waste management system” was a plastic bag they had to tape to their butt in zero-gravity? Did you know that all food sent into space until the years of the ISS basically had to be able to endure being dropped 18 inches onto a hard surface without breaking and was coated in weird fatty sealant? Did you know that Japanese astronauts have to make 1,000 origami cranes under close psychological supervision before they can be considered for service? All in the name of visiting the void.

Ham the Chimp, first hominid in outer space.

Some fault this book for ending on a pro-space travel tip after spending 300 pages deconstructing it. I don’t see it that way. True, Roach’s beautifully dry voice peters out in Packing For Mars‘ brusquely hokey conclusion; “Let’s go out and play,” she writes. But she’s right. Human space exploration is compellingly necessary (and endlessly fascinating) on some Id level that no one, not even Mary Roach, can correctly articulate. If you add up the usual excuses — technological advances spawned from aerospace engineering, political superiority, SETI — you still don’t get a complete picture of exactly why we should be going into space. There is another variable, a preposterously internal variable, that drives us: our animal desire to do it. Roach’s entire oeuvre is about rationally dealing with the emotional and physical slop of our species, but ultimately going to Mars is not worth it despite the imperfections of the human organism, but rather because of the human organism. Roach knows this, and she hopes that we know it too — presumably because we’re avidly reading about the subject in the first place.

In other words, Ham the astro-chimp may have been the first monkey in space, but if we keep chipping away at the workaday problems of living in the void, he won’t be the last.

P.S. Big thanks to the Urban Honking overlords for this fresh new WordPress world, and extra special thanks to Jona Bechtolt for his incredible Space Canon redesign and general cyborgian intuition about blogging.

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