IGMS Issue 34

by IGMS

  SCHWEITZER: Do we have the historical perspective to say we are "Late Modern"? Did the people of the 4th century know "We're living in the Late Roman Empire"? That seems to imply that you know some big change is coming, which will sweep the current state of affairs away. Could this be the Singularity creeping up on us again?

  FLYNN:: No, but the people of the 5th may have had an inkling. Augustine certainly knew, and didn't really need the Vandals at the gates of Carthage to tell him. One can identify certain "twilight" attitudes among the writers of Late Antiquity. The turn-around in the 10th century may have crept in on stealthy cats'-feet, but there was also an awareness of an awakening spreading across Carolinigian Europe. Likewise, the 15th century, the "autumn of the Middle Ages," when they quite self-consciously called themselves the Renaissance. Starting in the 19th century, there was a rising historical consciousness due to the development of history from a branch of literature (and propaganda) into a profession. Starting in the 1950s, certain thinkers began to notice signs of a Zeitgeist shift, if I may call it that. Barzun, in The House of Intellect, Lukacs in The Passing of the Modern Age, Jacobs in Dark Age Ahead, and so on. It is much easier to recognize the change because we are on the far side of it now. I don't want to make too stark a thing of it -- there is always more evolution than revolution, especially on the time-scale of a single lifetime -- but the flip between 1870 to 1970 was certainly a sea change in the West. Sometimes it is only looking back that one realizes how different things have become. (Think of Augustine's comment that while at one time no one would be caught dead wearing anything but a toga, in his day the well-dressed man would wear nothing else but a dalmatic.) It was only by the late 19th century that the terms artist and scientist appeared in common use, and artist and artisan parted company and took distinct meanings. (This is why DaVinci was neither an artist nor a scientist in the Late Modern sense.) During the Modern Ages, progress changed from forward spatial motion to mean improvement over time, but it is now often used ironically or with scare quotes.

  One example: while art and literature in the Middle Ages was marked by allegory - by the 15th century it was "All Allegory, All the Time" - the Modern Ages were marked by realism. Art tried to depict things as they really were, not in a photographic sense, of course, but artists from the Renaissance to the Victorians tried to portray things realistically. There are some stunning ceiling frescoes at Melk Abbey or the Doge's Palace that, from a certain point in the room, are three-freaking-dimensional. Once the "Perspective Revolution" had achieved its perfection, artists could only do it again and again. By Victorian times they were still imitating Renaissance tropes. Eventually, this repetition becomes fatuous, and you just gotta try something different. So, surrealism, the Armory Show, impressionism, and (inaptly-named) "Modern" Art.

  Literature ran the same way. The success of natural science at depicting the natural world, led authors as well as artists to try to do the same. Thus the appeal to all five senses, the lush descriptions, details of clothing and meals, the omniscient narrator, and so on. Prior to the movies and TVs, authors had to describe things in detail because their readers had not likely seen them. But this sort of thing is harder to pull off with words than with images. Renaissance literature is well-nigh unreadable today. Quick, name three immortal Renaissance authors. As the visual media began to flourish, we discovered "show, don't tell," "describe the thumb well enough that the reader thinks he has seen the entire hand," and other retreats from a warts-and-all Total Realism. Science Fiction itself represents part of the retreat. It portrays worlds that are patently unreal. Classic SF art and writing remains realist, perhaps to compensate for surrealistic content. But writers have begun to experiment with non-linear styles, minimalism, and other such things. Perhaps the New Wave can also be imagined as a reactionary experiment. But recall that even in the sciences, most experiments are failures.

  We don't know what might come out the other end of the sausage machine: but someone sometime soon will create the Don Quixote of interactive fiction, a new kind of narrative art. Readers will become Users, and participants in the fiction. Setting will become more important that Plot or Character.

  The end of an age is not a good thing. Neither is it a bad thing. It is only a thing.

  SCHWEITZER: If we, Americans, have lost the can-do attitude and have become a service culture, does that mean the Moon and Mars will be colonized by the Chinese or the Indians? I do notice that their cultures are considerably older than ours.

  FLYNN:: Good question. The Spiral Arm series implicitly supposes that interstellar culture was dominated first by the Chinese, then by Indians. The lingua franca of the Commonwealth was for many centuries Tamil and people often have names like Krishna Murphy and Teodorq sunna Nagarajan. The old cultures that stifled China and India and prevented the rise of modern science there may yet reassert themselves and quash the future; but it may also be that they have been sufficiently Westernized -- which is to say "modernized" -- that there is no going back. A fire may die out in one locale but spring up in another. Both civilizations have begun making their marks in science. And they may see the future in the same way Western kids once did in the 30s and 50s. They are still "Gosh-Wow," and not yet "Whatever."

  SCHWEITZER: Would a renaissance of science fiction involve resurrecting the values of past science fiction, or creating new values which actually address the present culture and what we see coming?

  FLYNN:: Renaissances always involve resurrections. But just as there was science in the medieval period and will be in the after-modern period (whatever they will called it), it will not be Modern Science. That is, it will not be done in the same old Baconian-Cartesian way. Medieval science emphasized final causes and an understanding of how everything in the world worked together. Modern science emphasized efficient causes and a knowledge of how to build useful products and dominate the universe. Hence, medieval scientists were art critics and modern scientists were crypto-engineers. In the next age, they may well be PR flacks, in which Science (New Style) carries water for its Funding Source. Who knows?

  The same goes for science fiction. If people see science as putting on a white lab coat to push a social-political agenda, it may not capture their imaginations quite so thoroughly as going to the moon. Horace once asked what use are empty laws without traditions to animate them? The same applies to literature. Resurrecting past values is empty unless those values still have appeal. (And that applies equally well to rebellion and reaction against those values. Chesterton once challenged his readers to think blasphemous thoughts of Thor.) A civilization perishes with the type of person who brought it forth.

  SCHWEITZER: In light of this, what do you make of Steampunk? That seems to address the past, but not in a realistic way.

  FLYNN:: Yes, it is part of the retreat from realism. It goes along with the tendency in the movies where people can outrun explosions simply because it is visually exciting. Several other SF writers and I had an unnerving experience advising on a TV documentary that wanted to do an alien invasion "as it might really happen." But in each and every case they opted for an incorrect or absurd choice that had more visual punch.

  Even when modern fantasy evokes pseudo-Medieval patterns, it does so from a Modern perspective. You can no longer write a story set in the past, for example, in which women are not kick-ass "can-do" women who are their own person. The Late Modern reader simply can't process it, no matter how historically correct it might be. Unless it is set intentionally in contrast to Late Modern ideas. We've already seen Umberto Eco subvert the Modern detective novel with The Name of the Rose, in which all the sleuth's deductions are logical and achieve a correct result, but all the intermediate reasoning is utterly wrong. Similarly, science fiction in the future will view science without the admittedly rather rose-colored glasses of the Modern Ages.

  SCHWEITZER: If we no longer have young readers, is this necessarily a bad thing as long as people turn to reading science fiction in middle age? Years ago
I saw the results of a reader survey for the Davis magazines, Asimov's Analog, Ellery Queen's, and Alfred Hitchcock's. The average readers of the SF magazines were in their 30s. The average readers of the mystery magazines were in their 50s. Well there is no shortage of people turning 30, or 50, every day. The million dollar question is whether today's 20-year-olds who read manga and play videogames will turn to reading texts (maybe as e-books) when they get older.

  FLYNN:: There may be something to that. But was the average SF reader in his 30s during the 1930s? Or is it still largely the same cohorts that have always read SF aging in place. Of course, there are always new readers coming along, which is why the SF readership doesn't age at the rate of one year/year. But I recollect an explanation of why the "older generation" votes in higher percentages than the younger ones: and that was that that generation always voted in higher proportion, even when they were younger, and have simply continued to do so, whichever age bracket they occupied.

  Now to some extent I suppose I'm being deliberately contrarian. It goes with the Flynnish nature for us to take a different point of view. I am told that my great-grandfather's hobby was getting into arguments in bars, and it didn't matter to him which side he took. I don't know how apocryphal that was, but there is always something about consensus that makes me want to look at a thing from a different point of view. When all the bobble heads start bobbing the same way, it's time for another perspective.

  SCHWEITZER: I think what we've seen in SF over the past 40-some years is the Baby Boomer demographic moving through the market. When the Baby Boomers were kids, they bought paperbacks. Heinlein or Asimov books were not bestsellers, but they sold solidly in paperback, year in and year out. By the 1980s, this readership was in its thirties, and able to buy a new hardcover when it came out. I think what we've seen in SF over the past 40-some years is the Baby Boomer demographic moving through the market. When the Baby Boomers were kids, they bought paperbacks. Heinlein or Asimov books were not bestsellers, but they sold solidly in paperback, year in and year out. By the 1980s, this readership was in its thirties, and able to buy a new hardcover when it came out. So when Foundation's Edge came out in 1982 it was a bona fide bestseller. Books by Herbert, Heinlein, McCaffrey, etc., did the same. Suddenly science fiction books were not a generic product in which anything with a science fiction cover sold about as well as anything else with a science fiction cover, but actual bestsellers became possible. This changed the field forever. I think the question is what will happen when that Baby Boomer demographic is gone. What do you think? At the very least it seems Ender's Game and its sequels is being read by a younger-than-Baby-Boomer audience.

  FLYNN:: I think that may be what my rambling was getting toward. Like I said, it was mostly off the top of my head, and science fiction will likely survive the end of the Modern world. It's just that it might not be the same sort of science fiction, since future generations will not likely share the same bold, futuristic outlook. However, there will always be some percentage who do and in a large enough population, there may be enough to sustain the genre.

  SCHWEITZER: Let's talk about your latest work. (Product placement time here.) Tell us something about your new novel On the Razor's Edge. It is the conclusion of a trilogy, so also say something about the other two.

  FLYNN:: Actually, it's the fourth book in the Spiral Arm series, but the first book, The January Dancer, can be considered more of a prelude. The main body of that story concerns the efforts of a variety of players who obtain or seek to obtain possession of a valuable prehuman artifact, the eponymous Dancer. Some don't know what they have; others know exactly what they are trying to get their hands on -- including several characters who re-appear in the later books. The hunt/chase extends all across the United League of the Periphery and attracts the attention of agents of the rival Confederation of Central Worlds.

  The other three books are more directly connected and take place twenty years and more after the events of the Dancer.

  In Up Jim River, Bridget ban has gone missing. She is a Hound, an agent of the ULP, and had gone out on a quest without telling the Kennel where she was going -- she didn't know exactly, herself -- and so the Kennel has no idea where to look and have given up. Her daughter, Mearana, thinks she may have a clue and enlists the aid of the scarred man to help track her down. The scarred man, a Terran, was once an agent of the CCW, but his mind has been divvied up into multiple personalities that don't always get along with one another. Their search takes them to the rowdy planets of La Frontera, where they pick up further clues, and eventually into the Wild, planets beyond the ULP that have retrogressed into barbarian states. The problem is not whether the scarred man can work and play well with others, but whether he can work and play well with himself.

  In the Lion's Mouth concerns the vanishing of Donovan buigh. Ravn Olafsdottr, a Confederal Shadow -- the counterpart of the Hounds from the other side of the Rift -- enters the stronghold of a Hound who has been directing a search for Donovan and recounts how she kidnapped Donovan and took him across the Rift to assist in a civil war among the Shadows. (The Lion's Mouth is the name of the Kennel's counterpart. It's the academy and directorate for the Shadows.) The Shadow War is a clandestine one, and is waged "in the shadows" so neither the ruling Names nor the military "boots" are aware of it. Shadows don't like anyone getting in their business, even their own nominal bosses. Donovan supposedly knows some key information that will assist one of the sides. Unfortunately, he does not know that he knows it, and various Shadows attempt -- or threaten -- to stimulate his memory while the other side would be more than happy to assassinate him if they learn he is back in the CCW.

  The new book, On the Razor's Edge, picks up where Lion's Mouth leaves off. In fact, it was originally the second half of that novel. But thematically and narratively it marked a distinct break from the first half, so we decided to make it a separate book. In it, a pack of Hounds is dispatched into the CCW to rescue Mearana, the daughter of Bridget ban (and Donovan en passant) as well as to study certain artifacts which have come to their attention. The CCW's directorate for suppression of technology has custody of certain innovations that have been permitted only to the Names and selected Shadows, and the Kennel would very much like to know what's up. Ravn has taken Mearana to Terra, where Donovan is being held and all of them -- rebel and loyal Shadows, Donovan buigh, Mearana, the pack of Hounds, and the Names themselves -- are heading for a collision with their own histories. And everything you thought you knew is wrong.

  SCHWEITZER: And what are you working on now?

  FLYNN:: The trilogy of Up Jim River, In the Lion's Mouth, and On the Razor's Edge complete a character arc for Bridget ban, Donovan buigh, and Mearana. But there is still room for other stories in the Spiral Arm. I have some notes for a story titled "The Seven Widows"and I've been writing novelettes concerning Teodorq sunna Nagarajan, a wildman from Up Jim River who was hired as a bodyguard by Donovan and Mearana. The first story, "The Journeyman: On the Shortgrass Prairie" appeared in Analog, and two others are in the can or nearly so: "The Journeyman: In the Stone House" and "The Journeyman: Against the Green." There are several other stories planned in the cycle.

  There was also recently a collection Captive Dreams, which included three old stories and three new stories written especially for the collection. The conceit is that each story involves a different resident in the same neighborhood in a suburban New Jersey township. The roads form a ring around a woodland and their house lots encircle it. Characters from one story may show up tangentially in another; but each story is completely independent of the others. The new stories are entitled "Hopeful Monsters," "Buried Hopes," and "Places Where the Roads Don't Go." The latter involves a mathematician, a philosopher, and a computer scientist in the quest for transhumanism.

  As to current projects, in addition to the Journeyman stories, I have been writing a stand-alone novel, The Shipwrecks of Time. It concerns tantalizing hints found in Old Books, Old Film, and Old Bones,
in a story that runs from a scholar in 14th century Freiburg-im-Breisgau to historical researchers in 1960s Milwaukee, a documentary film maker in 1980s Denver, and a police detective in contemporary small town Pennsylvania. I am nearly finished with the section Old Books. The far future of the Spiral Arm, I can make up. But 1965-67 in Milwaukee was a real milieu, and I have to be careful of what movies were out, what music was popular, and what was or was not possible. No hand calculators or DNA testing, no Miranda warning, Selectric typewriters were new, and the Xerox photocopier was just coming on the market. There was in 1965 no term "male chauvinist," and every summer the ghettos burned. Finding the historical truth amidst centuries-old documents and books is not easy, even if you think you know what you're looking for. The artifacts of the past that have survived are the flotsam and jetsam of the shipwrecks of time. The historian has only a collection of dots, and it is up to him to connect them.

  Another possible project is -- wait for it -- a medieval fantasy, The Chieftain. It is set in 1224 in Connaught, the westernmost kingdom of Ireland, when two sets of O'Conner cousins fought for the white wand. The Annals say that among those who remained loyal to Hugh mac Cathal O'Conner were "Cormac McDermot, David O'Flynn, and the rest of his officers." It was David O'Flynn who caught my attention and he is the chieftain of the title. Many of the characters and events are attested in the Annals -- and even some of the fantastic elements. It was Ireland, after all.

  SCHWEITZER: Thanks, Michael.