Photos: De Profundis Ad Astra

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

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In my opinion, the 1960s were the best time to be a sci-fi buff. Everything was new: the unfolding space race was not only beginning to justify decades of literary speculation about space travel, but it was also ratcheting astronauts and engineers up to rock-star status, making science cool for (maybe) the first time. Meanwhile, science fiction, being an outsider genre, was necessarily aligning itself with the burgeoning counterculture and psychedelic spirit of the time. Some hazy confluence of these factors led to the radical period known as the “New Wave” of sci-fi, spearheaded by the generation’s great antiestablishment auteurs: Harlan Ellison, J.G. Ballard, Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Samuel Delany, Joanna Russ, and Ursula K. LeGuin, to name a few. In this nascent era, the scene was small enough that conventions and science fiction clubs were intimate, convivial affairs, and…well, mostly, it seems like the clothes were pretty cool.

Click on photos to enlarge!

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Images culled from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) photo archives, and feature period heads like Harlan Ellison, George Takei, Walter Koenig, Ray Bradbury, Philip Jose Farmer, John Campbell, Fritz Leiber, and Lester del Rey hanging out with a radical company of fans, including legends like Forrest J. Ackerman and Bjo Trimble.

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Dying Inside

Posted on January 6, 2010 by Claire L. Evans

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Dying Inside is one of science fiction’s great genre classics, although hopefully the edition currently in handsome reprinting will hip the mainstream to the fact that it’s also a great American novel. The story of an aging telepath gradually losing his power, it was written by Robert Silverberg during his creative peak in the early 1970s (a time where he was, in his words, “accustomed to working miracles”). It moved from idea to finished novel in less than nine weeks. After Dying Inside, Silverberg never wrote a book as quickly again, and I like to think that a little bit of his power died with the novel, which is as neat an allegory about the creative process as I’ve ever read.

There is a great thematic elegance to Dying Inside. The novel’s protagonist, David Selig, was born with a gift, the ability to read minds clearly, to get both the surface chatter of New York’s collective unconscious and the profound depths of an individual soul. His gift is acute. From his childhood onward, he can read the mind of a bee flying through a meadow a few miles away, and he can experience the pleasure or suffering of any other person he chooses. Unsurprisingly, his faith in the veracity and emotional warmth of humanity as a whole verges on the nonexistent, and hence he is a recluse, too sensitive for functional relationships. At the same time, he takes great, rapturous, voyeuristic ecstasy in his ability to delve deeply into the souls of others, in probing their deepest secrets and anticipating — nay, exploiting — their vulnerability. The guilt he feels about this is palpable, as is his crushing emotional isolation. After all, who can sympathize with a telepath? Who is comfortable enough with the dark corners of their mind to allow a psychic into their lives?

There are those who see a lot of Silverberg in Selig, who is also a writer, a Columbia grad, a Manhattanite, and a man in the midst of losing his golden touch. But there is of course the crucial difference — Silverberg cannot read minds, and Selig can. Not that it particularly matters, as the telepathy serves primarily as an artistic conceit, what the great structuralist sci-fi critic Robert Scholes calls the “radical discontinuity” between a novel’s events and life as we know it. In some sci-fi, the radical discontinuity consists of wild and far-reaching premises, of spacefaring and alien encounters, many of which have a profoundly romantic effect on the reader, who is beguiled by fabulism, speculation, and a larger cosmic worldview. In Dying Inside, the discontinuity is minimal, not far beyond the scope of possibility, and functions rather as a fleshed-out thought experiment — a “what if?” Because of the relatively worldly premise, the questions brought to bear are philosophical, political, and social as opposed to cosmic, mythical, or particularly (oh, that dirty word!) “escapist.” The death of Selig’s peculiar gift evokes sympathy, even pity, because of the universality of loss — his telepathy could just as easily be replaced by a creative gift, a long-running lucky streak, or an impressive golf game.

We can all relate to Selig when he laments, “Powers decay. Time leaches the colors from the best of visions. The world becomes grayer. Entropy beats us down. Everything fades. Everything goes. Everything dies.” Dying Inside is a poem to the moment in life when we realize that the best years may be behind us, that we have unknowingly passed the point from which everything is, perhaps, downhill. Selig’s telepathic wane comes as a surprise, just as old age creeps up on us, and he finds himself warring against an entropic chaos of uncertainty — just as we all initially buck against the reality of death. Selig doesn’t have the comfort of communal experience, however, and that is the real tragedy of his position.

Human beings aren’t normally isolated systems; we work together to create a kind of anti-entropic equilibrium, taking in and sharing information, building intellectual monuments against the passing of time. But what of Selig, an isolated man? One able only to peer, one-way, into the rest of humanity’s attempts to curtail degradation by the crafting of meaningful relationships, by communication and control? Alone, the forces of entropy might destroy him. Cut off from the rest of us, he might die inside. Don’t we all fear that?

As a piece of literature, Dying Inside offers us vicarious triumph against these fears. By giving them a radically discontinuous form — Selig’s telepathy — it sublimates them, allowing us to see the breadth and the complexity of loss, as well as shocking us into recognizing the value of interpersonal communication. It ends with a tender solace. As his powers ebb and eventually disappear, Selig is born again into the world. Yes, he wakes up into a new silence, but he also realizes that his guilt, anxiety, and isolation will fade along with his power. The cacophony of New York’s private thoughts disappear. The unwanted knowledge of women’s opinions of him vanish. The slips in and out of the innermost dread of strangers melt away. He thinks, suddenly, “Living, we fret. Dying, we live…Until I die again, hello, hello, hello, hello.”

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The World of Null-A

Posted on December 22, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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Actual Reading Notes: Whoa, this book is deceptively complex: a wildly convoluted and impossible story told very plainly, with an almost maddening lack of detail — lacking the atmospheric fuzz and hypertext of more contemporary sci-fi — we’re told very little of how the “World” Null-A looks, feels, and functions, only of the drama that unfolds within it — a real economy of words, almost Hemingway-esque — Somewhat strange for its era (1945) is the total lack of rocket-techno-nerdery: people ride in rocket ships long distances between planets, but the ships and how they work are never discussed, not even in passing, there are aliens whose physiology is hardly mentioned, and a giant city-sized computer whose dimensions are barely touched upon — this lack of information has a kind of claustrophobic effect that leaves the reader in a state of harried confusion not unlike that being experienced by the main character, Gilbert Gosseyn — who is an amnesiac and without specific personal identity, maybe even a clone, a kind of archetype, and whose situation requires a complete and singular focus on survival, on moving forward — Gosseyn has no time to notice the world, only to travel towards a seemingly unavoidable destiny, much like the reader of this book inevitably reaches its end!

Related Concepts: General Semantics, the Singularity, Aristotelian Logic, Decision-Tree Reasoning, Alfred Korzybski, Logic, Intuition, Time-Binding, Clone Ethics, Eugenics, non-Aristotelian Logic, World War II, Totalitarianism, Authority, Meta-Systems, Colonialism, Utopia.

One Professional Opinion: “Van Vogt knew precisely what he was doing in all areas of his fiction writing. There’s hardly a wasted word in his stories…His plots are marvels of interlocking pieces, often ending in real surprises and shocks, genuine paradigm shifts, which are among the hardest conceptions to depict. And the intellectual material of his fictions, the conceits and tossed-off observations on culture and human and alien behavior, reflect a probing mind…Each tale contains a new angle, a unique slant, that makes it stand out.” — Paul Di Filippo

Excellent Representative Passage: “There was a pause. Then the Machine spoke again and there was a curious sadness in its words. ‘I am only an immobile brain, but dimly aware of what is transpiring in remote parts of Earth. What plans are brewing I can only guess. You will be surprised and disappointed to learn that I can tell you nothing more about that.’
‘What can you tell me?’ asked Gosseyn.
‘That you are very deeply involved…'”

Special Thanks: to Tor/Forge for the book! More reviews (err, “reviews”) of books from the Forge canon of Golden Age SF reissues will appear in the months to come.

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Mercury Station

Posted on December 3, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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I first met Mark von Schlegell in 2004, an eternity ago, on a blurry, neon-tonic night in Los Angeles, probably one of the banner nights for my endless (and this, I admit, is personal) migratory-birdlike longing for a return to California. It was a deeply improbable place and time: a wild, feathered, cavernous warehouse art installation somewhere in Historic Phillipinotown, the creator of which magically died a year later. Von Schlegell was there, a real brother in arms, in Los Angeles for a sci-fi convention. He told me that night something which I’ve seriously taken to heart in the intervening years, which is that no matter how accomplished a man is (like he, ostensibly, an art-critic-cum-SF-writer with an international pedigree and a girlfriend in Cologne), he can never be as cool as a smart young woman. Simply, in the scheme of relative enviousness, nothing beats a cool girl.

I remember, in the parking lot that night, I told Mark I wrote a science column.

“Of course you do,” he said.

And this is my senseless Harlan Ellison-esque introduction to Mark’s latest opus, Mercury Station. I rarely visit with contemporary sci-fi because, frankly, the cover art is bad. But von Schlegell is a great exception, in almost every conceivable sense: someone whose work, by virtue of its willful madness, will probably never explode into the consciousness of today’s piously aggro-nerdy SF scene, and someone who defies genre not out of bravado, but necessity. I deeply love his work. It seems tailored specifically to suit my pleasure receptors. It has the literary fuck-all of Samuel Delany, the hard-nosed attention to detail of Philip K. Dick, and a healthy dose of indeterminate psychedelia permeating everything from his patchwork structure to the plot points themselves, which treat time-travel and noospheric surfing like they’re frying eggs for breakfast.

Mercury Station is about Eddard Ryan, a genetically-enhanced Irish liberation soldier living in an isolated prison camp on Mercury, under the supervision of a condescending computer program called the qompURE MERKUR. Like his counterparts, he’s been unjustly imprisoned on Mercury since he was an adolescent, having long since served out his sentence (it’s unclear, however, if this is part of a larger scheme of “Control,” the shadow organization behind his political effort). One day, an unspecified Event transpires, and Ryan wakes up alone on Mercury with one arm missing and the other holding a mysterious medieval book about an androgynous demon. The novel ping-pongs back and forth between Mercury, where holographic computer avatars modeled on classical philosophers (HYPATIA, PLATO, ZENO, ARISTOTLE) are trying desperately to prod Ryan into decoding the situation, and 14th-century Prussia, where the demon creature romps around killing Teutons and seeking his/her true love. The medieval sections are written in what I would call a “period style,” a grandiloquent, kinda magic(k)al slop of euphemism that Von Schlegell clearly enjoyed writing, while the Mercurial bits take the form of maddening dialogues between Ryan and the increasingly wonky computer system.

That’s part one. Ryan is also in love with a fellow dissident, an agitprop artist named Koré Macallister, who abandoned him during the Event. She, like Ryan and several other key characters, is obsessed with “chrononautics,” a form of time travel which involves detaching the self from the body (psychic, perhaps physical death) and throwing it backwards through non-Einsteinian time via psychedelic conduits, “time’s sex organs,” a fine conceptual invention. So the tale goes this way: did Koré escape the lonely planet’s borstal through time-travel? If so, did she leave him behind for a reason? And where did everybody go?

The whole thing is, for lack of a better word, bodacious: the drunk Ryan goading computer avatars, the gall of killing off a sci-fi baddie with the Black Plague, the unabashed medieval cloak-and-dagger, and, of course, the great von-Schlegell-ian gesture of kaleidoscopic narrative devolution, which occurs somewhere near the end of the book and leaves you (well, me) panting with the dim feeling that if the same passages were re-read a second time, they might lead elsewhere (the latter a pleasure I intend to save for later, when the subconscious detritus of Mercury Station‘s more future-addled stream-of-consciousness chapters fully settles in the noggin). Of course, this is not to say that it’s an easy, or even necessarily enjoyable at times, book to read. A pleasure-seeker, a sci-fi recreationalist, might find von Schlegell’s style, particularly his tendency to include unthinkable wormholes of texts within texts, exasperating — even Freize called it “textual delirium,” although I think the adjective “mercurial,” aptly, suffices. My advice is to enjoy it, and to take a cue from the book itself, which occasionally offers veiled encouragement, as in this passage in which a computer avatar muses on the subject Eddard Ryan’s mysterious medieval book:

ZENO: “We cannot speculate with any useful certainty until you present to us the work itself as a whole, Eddie Ryan. You yourself enjoy digital memory capability; you should appreciate the situation. Until read in its entirety a book is importantly indefinable. A narrative works by change, redefining itself constantly, letter by letter, word by word until the final Finis. Show all of it to us, now, and we’ll be happy to comment on the work as a whole.”

To which Ryan replies, “I don’t do Brit Lit.”

Buy Mercury Station from Amazon here.

Read my interview with Mark Von Schlegell on the Strange Horizons site.

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The Handmaid’s Tale

Posted on October 15, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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Is The Handmaid’s Tale sci-fi?

It’s not marketed as such, nor does the book cover pronounce it to be so, but that’s how it was sold to me. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel like the question might be irrelevant. If The Handmaid’s Tale wanted to be science fiction, no one could contest it: despite a blatant absence of the obvious signifiers (robots, rockets, et al.), it’s squarely dystopian in a way that places it well inside sci-fi boundaries delineated by writers like Samuel Delany and Joanna Russ.

However, it clearly doesn’t have any interest in labeling itself, least of all as a sci-fi novel (incidentally, is it okay that I prefer the shortened “sci-fi” to the more commonly-used “SF”?). So…do my external judgements in this particular case matter? What does it bring to the table in terms of a discussion of an already canonized novel to call it “sci-fi”?

Atwood herself makes a pragmatic distinction between science fiction and the broader, more inclusive notion of speculative fiction, noting in her essay collection, Moving Targets, that “the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can’t yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.” (Less generously, she once told the BBC that science fiction was “talking squids in outer space.”) Those are reasonable criteria, but it seems to miss the point (and heart) of sci-fi, and I can’t help but think Atwood is just attempting to evade being prodded onto the dead-end road of genre fiction. As Ursula K. Le Guin pointed out in a Guardian review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, “she doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.”

Bummer, right?

While it’s not quite talking squids in outer space, The Handmaid’s Tale is certainly futuristic. It takes place in a theocratic military dictatorship, enforced with the same kind of paranoid obliqueness as Orwell’s 1984 police state (“the Eyes might be watching!”). Born as a reaction to implied decades of agricultural degradation, widespread infertility, and social unrest, the new autocratic “Republic of Gilead” monitors its citizens (particularly women) with Biblical ferocity, condemning people to death for crimes as petty as homosexuality and reading. Here, the ideological control system revolves around fertility, or a lack thereof; our titular “Handmaid” is a kind of sex slave, begrudgingly valued for her fecundity, bound to a high-ranking officer and his wife to serve as a ritual chalice for their dwindling seed. If she conceives, the child is raised by the couple and she is guaranteed safety from “unwoman” status, i.e. death. Handmaids are denied free agency and education, exchanging their “freedom to” (do as they please) for a more dubious, institutionalized “freedom from” (danger, fear).

For what it’s worth, The Handmaid’s Tale might be a perfect example of Geoff Ryman’s controversial “Mundane SF.” There’s no interstellar trade, no quantum uncertainty, no faster-than-light travel or communication with alien intelligences. It’s the future alright, but it’s a future, as Ryman says, “in which we only have ourselves and this planet.” Comparing the Mundane SF manifesto to Atwood’s own particular critique of what constitutes science fiction is pretty revealing; clearly there’s some overlap between what Atwood understands as being merely “speculative” and what Ryman calls “mundane.” That is to say, both are based in extrapolation of current social and technological events — Atwood’s Gilead is a nightmarish imagination of a post-feminist backlash by the religious right, not an impossibility for a fervent mind in 1985, when it was written (or now, even). Both, furthermore, avoid using the panacea of “science” to fill in the gaps of a future society, relying rather on thoughtful mutations of contemporary social structures. All of which suggests that the hot-button subject of Mundane SF is really nothing new.

It seems to be a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down one; instead of beginning with a general futuristic premise (like “what if Aliens lived on Earth?”) and then building the particulars of story around it, Atwood suggests we begin with the very specific, day-to-day exigencies of society — the Handmaid wears red, she does the grocery shopping — in order to cobble together a larger (and sort of hazy) image of what has happened, in the future, on a large scale. It’s a pragmatic approach, but ultimately it’s not revolutionary — just literary.

Perhaps what really defines this speculative/Mundane style (which is both conjectural and literary) is that it clearly aims to be critical, not escapist. The Handmaid’s Tale is a critical novel: of fascism, misogyny, reactionary fundamentalism, and the masculine fear of contemporary feminism. It’s critical in the same way 1984 is, or Fahrenheit 451, or any of the other great science fiction books that the literary establishment has absolved of nerdiness by calling “classic.” Is this a fair parameter? That science fiction in the traditional sense aims to escape the current world by suggesting radical alternatives, while speculative fiction aims to criticize and interpret it? Either way the final goal is the same: to find something better, be it through utopian idealism or cautionary speculation.

In a way, The Handmaid’s Tale is both. The Gileadean state is someone’s utopian dream, one in which everyone has their role, working together in humility towards the restoration of society and for God. It’s Atwood’s awareness of this — that even the most fascist of states begin with a dream — which makes it such a canny cautionary tale. And, perhaps, a very smart piece of science fiction.

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Not What If: What If Not

Posted on September 6, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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This isn’t a novel, but the second volume of a contemporary annual design publication called the Task Newsletter, a project by Emmet Byrne, Alex DeArmond, and Jon Sueda. I include it here because Issue #2 is devoted to “Mundane Science Fiction,” a controversial recent sub-genre popularized and manifesto-ed by the writer Geoff Ryman. This blog (and its author) is so habitually ensconced in yellowing 60s sci-fi paperbacks that the issue of Mundane SF had somehow completed avoided its radar.

This issue of the Task Newsletter is radically designed and packed with fascinating material, including a great excerpt from the collaboratively-written new novel PHILIP (and an interview with one of its authors) as well as reprints of all the images from the Voyager Golden Record. However, it’s the first article, Mundane Science Fiction: Another Article About the Benefits of Exercise (link to full article online), by Kate McKinney Maddalena, that I’d like to take to task (so to speak).

In brief, Geoff Ryman sees canonical science fiction as being escapist, comparing it to an “adolescent desire to run away from our world.” This, in turn, provokes a dismissive mentality towards the home planet, which, coupled with fantasy for more fruitful worlds, “can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.” Unlike its spacefaring, forward-thinking counterpart, “mundane” sci-fi places its stories in the near future, and avoids unreasonable — or, in Ryman’s terms, “unlikely” — technology. Simply: no fantasy. The emphasis is, rather, on creatively developing solutions for the actual problems which face us on Earth. In the words of the much-attacked Mundane SF Manifesto, “the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.”

I agree that Ryman’s “mundane” appellation serves as a useful category for an already-existing genre of science fiction (that heady triad of postapocalyptic/utopian/dystopian, which, as Maddalena points out, already fulfills much of the tenets of Mundane SF). And I see a kind of tragic, humbling poetry in the “only us, on this planet” future. However, like many of my hard-nosed, territorial geek fellows, I buck against Ryman’s use of the word “unlikely.” According to Ryman, interstellar trade is unlikely. As is contact with extraterrestrial intelligences. And alternative universes. And faster-than-light travel (“wish fulfillment fantasies”).

Many, including Maddalena, have asked, “Unlikely to whom?”

I demand, rather: “Unlikely when?”

Are we so trapped in 2009-era Terran existence that we cannot see the longer scheme of things?

Flying in a plane is mundane — and yet it wouldn’t have seemed so to Jules Verne. Nor to H.G. Wells. On a recent flight, I gazed out the window at a magnificent vista of sky, surveying tiny points of light through a haze of sunset-silhouetted clouds. I didn’t find it difficult to imagine myself gazing out of the window of a spaceship, surveying a “mundane” landscape of planets and interstellar dust with the same impassive boredom as I reserve for the view from my window seat on Delta. The only difference between my moment and a distant future in which someone like me might be as blasé about space travel (or whatever) is simply time. A good point, raised here: if this Manifesto had existed 50 years ago, how accurate would its science fiction reflect today’s world? Often, it’s the wildest, least likely prognostications that come to pass — not that the point is to be predictive.

Science fiction’s great advantage is that it’s been the only genre to consistently work with massive time-scales. Even if a story takes place over only a few hours, the very leap from the here and now of reading and the there and when of the action can be humbling, perspective-shifting. Great thinkers like Stewart Brand encourage us to think of time as a “long now” as an ecological and social gesture in order to foster our involvement in the future, pitting our current “faster/cheaper” mindset against “slower/better” thinking; science fiction writers have been doing just that for over a century.

We feed the future with speculation just as we move towards it. And are we to assume that writers will not continue to speculate? Science fiction writers in the year 2050 will be imagining the year 3000, and so on. It’s a living, breathing tradition which interacts with the very culture it critiques just as the culture catches up with its prophecies. I can only assume that this will continue forever — if not for hundreds, maybe thousands of years, pending a complete paradigm shift in literature, which I find unlikely.

Geoff Ryman disrespects this tradition (and completely misses the point of it, I think) by only seeing a few points on the greater sci-fi timeline: the now, and the slightly later, still-corrigble now. What about the Long Now? The 10,000 years in the future in which humanity will continue to tinker with, damage, repair, and write about our planet? I like to think about myself as part of an unending chain of persons reaching millennia into the future (and the past); long-term speculation activates my role in this chain, helps me think of myself as part of the greater “We” that is humankind.

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Citizen of the Galaxy

Posted on September 3, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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Part of Bob Heinlein’s storied “Juvenile” series for Scribner’s, Citizen of the Galaxy is a Grade-A galactic bildungsroman. By virtue of it nominally being a book for kids, it skirts some of the more roguish Heinlein themes (fawning speculation over the motives of various ineffably buxom women, for example), but otherwise sticks to its libertarian bootstraps, promoting fierce individualism and self-determination in the face of inhuman bureaucracy, a great theme for kids if I ever heard one.

Its protagonist, Thorby, is a kid (somehow) abducted and sold into interstellar slavery, submitting to many masters before he is (somehow) sold to a beggar in a street market on a planet called Jabbul. It becomes quickly apparent that the beggar, “Pop,” is actually some kind of high-level spy, who teaches Thorby hypnotic memorization, relative outer-space geometry, physics, and six languages. Throughout the novel, Thorby repeatedly begins at rock-bottom (e.g. slavery) and quickly works his way up through complex hierarchies by virtue of his skill and earnestness. He lives on a multi-generational trader’s ship, in a highly rigid social structure comprised of arcane familial vocabulary and enforced social moieties. He enlists in the galactic military. He becomes the trust-fund-kid, then business tycoon, of a future-Earth hegemony. And all this on a backdrop of cosmic slave trade, politics, laser-battles, and a sincerely real moral code which is primarily concerned with taking down slavery, both conceptually and in practice.

The emphasis in Citizen of the Galaxy is on intergalactic, border-busting “good citizen-hood,” which, in Heinlein’s parlance, means the ability to overcome meaningless sociological hurdles in the interest of a greater self-betterment. Thorby is a kind of avatar for the well-developed man, and it’s clear that Heinlein would be happy with a nation of Thorbies: capable, sensitive, and driven to “do right.” In the end, much of the Heinlein canon is preoccupied with this singular issue, the ability of the individual to create him or herself. The enemy, logically, is the slavers (those who enslave); there is no greater evil than the arbitrary limitation of man’s potential for individual accomplishment. Perhaps because of its emphasis on self-creating, this novel is explicitly anti-slavery and implicitly pro-civil rights (significantly, the date on this: 1957).

Citizen of the Galaxy suggests three techniques for accomplishing personal greatness:

1. Unorthodox modes of education: self-education, total immersion, education with the intent to overthrow governments, Zen-like physical training, hypnosis, learning “something real.” Education and a willingness to learn against all odds (and despite a lack of expectation to do so) is presented, in Citizen of the Galaxy, as an unquestionable tenet of survival.

2. Profound emotional self-reliance. The ability to overcome tragic personal hardship with an eye to the future and to protecting the legacy of loved ones. Thorby moves forward to honor “Pop,” who taught him everything, even though he moves towards circumstances bleaker than the last.

3. General distrust of the establishment and all who might limit you, both physically and spiritually. Quite simply, no one who commands power can be entirely trusted.

Robert Heinlein is so great. Even this, a “lesser” novel by definition, is so heavy. I mean, consider these above techniques. They’re all the the keys to Thorby’s escape from his various imprisonments, but beyond being tools for overcoming outer-space hurdles, they are just as easily applicable to all our own lives. These ideas are real: Education, independence, and one wary eye on the man.

Can we take a page from Heinlein here and apply these techniques to our own lives? Onward and upward, readers!

NEXT BOOK: NOT WHAT IS/WHAT IS NOT

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The Reefs of Space

Posted on August 19, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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Not in the wildest stoner prognostications of Carl Sagan, nor the fetid dreams of any sci-fi writer ever before or since, has there been anything like the The Reefs of Space. Not the book, which is fairly standard, but the titular reefs themselves. In Frederik Pohl and Jack Williamson’s novel, the Universe is not a dead thing. It’s not a void, nor a vacuum. Rather, it’s a sea, rich in basic elements prepared to fuse together and create life over millennia of time. Just beyond the reaches of our solar system, there are the reefs of space: massive, planet-sized systems made of tiny creatures, all of which generate energy by fusing hydrogen atoms in the same facile way a plant might photosynthesize. Autonomous worlds of life, crawling with space animals capable of surviving in the abyss. And the larger creatures float through space like whales through the sea. And among the gnarled caves of crystal and metal, strange space fruit (edible) and glowing, pliable vines. Fairyland, in a word.

This thing is big. It means that the planets are not lonely oases in a dead desert of emptiness. It means that they are island in an infinite ocean of life — strange life, which we had never suspected.

The idea is so arcane that it’s almost avant-garde. This living Universe seems to come from a pre-science fiction mind, a mind steeped in magic and mythology — the same kind of mind that might see the world as flat and ending right at its edges, giving way to an abyss of unimaginable monsters. Certainly, it has a kind of logic to it, just as shooting men to the moon from a giant gun had a kind of logic to it in Jules Verne’s From Earth To The Moon, because that was the limit of imaginable technology in Verne’s time. The thing which is remarkable about The Reefs of Space is that it’s not particularly arcane (1963), nor limited by the technology of its time; rather, it comes from an era of real life whizz-bang rocket ships and global space-conquering dreams. Unlike most sixties science fiction, which is usually forward-thinking, optimistic, countercultural, and rich with technolust, The Reefs of Space takes a giant, dreamy step backwards. With its spaceborne creatures, its phosphorescent caves of floating minerals and cool green clouds of life, it’s a story displaced from its time, an ancient cosmology all its own.

Which reminds me why I love science fiction in the first place, because it privileges the idea over everything else. It’s one of the few genres where style, even story, is totally irrelevant to the value of a novel. A dishpan writer can be relatively, if not totally, successful on the value of their ideas alone — they need not be remotely good at what they do! The science fiction shelf is the permanent home of the hack writer, but it’s also where all the best ideas are. And those phenomena, in my opinion, are related.

Of course, I seek out and appreciate great writing, but if I’m stuck with staid dialogue and rasping monsters, it’s never a total loss. It’s science fiction’s openness to scores of half-brained, wild-fancied writers that allows it to be such a consistently provocative genre — and so abundant with the kinds of thought-images that end up in your dreams, and which perhaps exist independently of plot or style. I haven’t mentioned the plot of the Reefs of Space (and won’t), for example, because it doesn’t matter; the lovely vision of the reef itself suffices. This isn’t to say that Pohl and Williamson are hacks, but that they come from a long and distinguished tradition of hackery, and largely write to it. They know that for a kernel of idea to be implanted into the overmind of popular culture, a lowly paperback is the best mode of transmission.

For in my stack of paperbacks, between endless pages of stuffy exposition, I have androids, floating ecosystems in space, secret drugs, tyrannical computers, and body-snatchers. I have one million years of the future, sentient clouds, and talking newts. I have entire worlds of fatuous and romantic ideas, ideas which are as independent from the establishment — and sometimes, as in the case of Reefs, independent from their time — as they are unencumbered by its literary norms. And they are out, wild and free in the world, plugged into the minds of sixties schoolboys (and 2009-era science fiction bloggers) for perpetuity.

NEXT BOOK: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN’S CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY

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Again, Dangerous Visions

Posted on July 2, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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One thing that hasn’t been discussed yet on this blog is the major role that editors have historically played in the sci-fi scene. Since the genre was shaped by decades of magazine publishing, the editors of those magazines — rags like Amazing Stories, Galaxy, Analog Science Fiction, and New Worlds — have largely defined what we consider the “canon.” And, of course, each editor has their own peccadilloes and accompanying infamy. John W. Campbell, considered the most important editor in the history of science fiction, was a hawkish kook convinced that L. Ron Hubbard would win a Nobel Prize for Dianetics, but he also published the first Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon stories. Frederik Pohl’s “Pohl Selections” over at Bantam Books brought the world Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren (I’m still reading it…) and Joanna Russ’ The Female Man, arguably the two most genre-defying science fiction books of all time. And Damon Knight, when he was working as an editor for Chilton Books, tracked down Frank Herbert and convinced him to publish Dune after it had been refused by twenty other publishers. All of these people are as celebrated as the writers they edit, and are usually writers themselves.

Again, Dangerous Visions is book two in a series of essential anthologies edited by Harlan Ellison. Although not as influential as Campbell, Pohl, or Knight, Ellison is an important figure — he penned classic Star Trek episodes, won the Hugo Award eight and a half times, and wrote the original script to I, Robot. He was (and is) something of a pompous dilettante, a Mr. Hollywood type, and a young mover in the scene when the first Dangerous Visions tome was released in 1967. Although Ellison’s sexual politics were murky — he famously grabbed writer Connie Wilson’s breast at a Hugo Awards ceremony and said that feminist writer Joanna Russ looked “infinitely better in a bikini than any of the editors who rejected her novel” — he was nevertheless an early champion of women’s writing during science fiction’s New Wave in the late 60s. And he sealed his title as a legendary editor with the Dangerous Visions books.

“There are no rocket ships in my stories, there are no monsters, it’s not Flash Gordon.”

Apart from essentially being a who’s who of 1960s science fiction (my copy of Again includes stories from James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, Ursula K. LeGuin, Kurt Vonnegut, and Terry Carr, among a few dozen others), the Dangerous Visions books were unique in that almost every story came prefaced with a wordy introduction from Ellison — laying out the author’s biography, how they came to be in the anthology, their “deal,” essentially — and an afterword from the author. For a fan, this is VIP treatment, and with these kinds of contextualizing footnotes, mainstream readers could go straight from “who the hell is James Tiptree Jr.?” to having a solid sense of what they were dealing with. In this particular case, the first publication of “The Milk of Paradise,” a sensuous, boggy story about a man who wistfully half-remembers making love to a grey alien in the mud of a distant planet, one of Tiptree’s best.

Ellison solicited only unpublished works from writers he liked, ensuring that the anthology would never seem second-run, and would, rather, be the place to watch for work by interesting newcomers and old “masters” alike. To boot, he strong-armed them into pushing their boundaries, often sending stories back several times until they were perilous enough to be considered “dangerous.” The result is pretty explosive, even after almost 40 years. In Ellison’s own words, “Look: A,DV is something of a living entity. It is not merely a batch of stories cobbled up by a faceless dude trying to fill in the lag-time between his own books, with another group of faceless dudes submitting at random and hoping to make a buck. It is a great wild bunch of us sitting about and rapping till well into the wee hours.”

Ellison was a unique editor, by all accounts kind of an asshole, and a smashing example of the amazingly weird ghetto that is sci-fi. His breed of bellicose hands-on involvement would scarcely be tolerated in the straight literary establishment (although, to be fair, neither would stories about making love to grey aliens). His fierce muscling of pompous self-involvement — like a four-page introduction to a Kurt Vonnegut story that is essentially a long brag about how well Ellison knows him, or a preface to Ursula K. LeGuin that repeatedly mentions how Ellision and LeGuin won Nebula awards the same year — is anathema to the field of editorship, which is not usually reserved for strong personalities. A brief glance at these videos of Ellison on the interview couch will undoubtedly hammer in this point.

“I don’t take a piss without getting paid for it!”

And yet, science fiction has always been a halfway home for unhinged people, and it’s personalities like Ellison that can compel a disparate community of intellectual misfits to band together. It may come as a shock to people who are accustomed to a soft editorial touch, but the Dangerous Visions books are important largely because Ellison annihilated the divisions between the professional and the personal, reaching into writers’ lives and slapping them on the ass.

NEXT BOOK: FREDERICK POHL AND JACK WILLIAMSON’S THE REEFS OF SPACE

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Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

Posted on June 13, 2009 by Claire L. Evans

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Inventing a future reality is easy. Anyone can say, “in the year 10,000 AD humans will have evolved into telepathic knights,” but to populate that reality with the names of TV shows is much more difficult. I think the particular genius of Philip K. Dick is a combination of killer scenarios (“In the future…”) and exhaustively mundane details that give a potentially sterile future some grit, some room to hobble around and assert itself.

Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said could have easily been a predictably trompy caper through a 1984-style police state if it weren’t for PKD’s skill for environments, and those airy, imaginative specifics which lesser writers might hoard for other books. Like, NBC still exists, but it airs shows like “The Adventures of Scotty, Dog Extraordinary” and “The Phantom Baller Show.” Or, people still read the LA Times, but refer to all science-fiction movies as “captain kirks;” everyone drives flying cars, but a mug that says “Keep On Truckin'” sits quietly through a scene, an anachronistic detail that speaks volumes. These details are more extraordinary to me than the foundations of the future-premise, which is that America has become a vast police state following a post-Kent State Second Civil War between the counterculture and the “man.”

It all speaks to Dick’s primary concern — the question, “What is reality?” (His incomplete answer, in 1972: “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”) It’s more than a conceit, or a set of physical parameters that delineate a certain place and time. It’s also the living, breathing detritus of culture, all those ignorable layers of fluff we push aside day in, day out.

Everyone, as they go about their lives, exists in a slightly different dimension than everyone else; an ineffable, unprovable, alternate reality. That, in broad terms, is the central matter of most Dick novels, especially Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, whose main character, Jason Taverner, wakes up one morning in a world that has never heard of him. He navigates a Los Angeles veined with police barricades, unfavorable to unpersons like himself, the situation made worse by the fact that he happened to be a massive celebrity in his previous “real” life. Is this the real world? Was the other world, the world of his 9 PM Thursday night show on NBC, somehow a dream? How can an unperson define themselves? What happened? If this is another world, then why are all the TV shows the same?

Incidentally, Taverner’s former celebrity is a good foil for Dick’s perpetual discussion of identity/reality, since Jason Taverner the star relies on others to define him. Without fame, and the constant reassurance of selfhood which comes with it (both the most alluring and most dangerous aspect of celebrity, in my view), his completely unrealized sense of self — for all intents and purposes, his lack of a reality — becomes inescapable. Taverner is not only somebody, but somebody, defined in part by the bits of stuff he’s accumulated, the albums he’s released, his hit singles (including a song called “Nowhere Nuthin’ Fuck-Up); because he believes himself to be more important, more real than the people he encounters throughout the novel, his prison of anonymity is excruciating.

If you like Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, which I do, especially the more I think about it, you would do well to read Dick’s surreal companion essay, “How To Build A Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (link to full text). It starts out with some classically wry comments about Disneyland (the kind of Baudrillard-ian LA observations that seem par for the course from smart sci-fi people) before developing into a legitimately crazy theory about how all human existence is just a veiled reality created by the Devil in order to obfuscate our true and perpetual time and place, which is Judaea in 50 A.D.

It’s hard to know if and when, or ever, Dick is bullshitting — both in his life and his books. It’s tempting to believe that, for lack of a better solution, he accepts all possibilities, and wrote (much like the hapless android in one of his early stories) by punching new holes in the tape-reels of his robot chest, dictating the details of his reality as he went.

NEXT BOOK: STILL DHALGREN…

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