Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 98

by Matthew Kressel

  He frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “He guessed correctly,” I said. “About your connections.”

  “Oh yes. But leave it at that.” He waved a hand, and began to refill his pipe. “It’s not important.”

  “Why did he send a possible enemy agent, and a charlatan like Lysenko? Why not one of his atomic scientists, like Sakharov?”

  “Sakharov and his colleagues were otherwise engaged,” Walker said. “As for sending me and Lysenko . . . I’ve often wondered about that myself. I suspect he sent me because he wanted the British to know. Perhaps he wanted us worried about worse threats than any that might come from him, and at the same time worried that his scientists could exploit the strange device. Lysenko—well, he was reliable, in his way, and expendable, unlike the real scientists.”

  “Why did you write what you did, about Lysenko?”

  “One.” Walker used his pipe as a gavel on the desk. “I felt some gratitude to him. Two.” He tapped again. “I appreciated the damage he was doing.”

  “To Soviet science?”

  “Yes, and to science generally.” He grinned. “I was what they would call an enemy of progress. I still am. Progress is progress towards the future I saw in that thing. Let it be delayed as long as possible.”

  “But you’ve contributed so much!”

  Walker glanced around at his laden shelves. “To paleontology. A delightfully useless science. But you may be right. Even the struggle against progress is futile. Natural selection eliminates it. It eliminated Lysenkoism, and it will eliminate my efforts. The process is ineluctable. Don’t you see, Cameron? It is not the failure of progress, the setbacks, that are to be feared. It is progress itself. The most efficient system will win in the end. The most advanced machines. And the machines, when they come into their own, will face the struggle against the other machines that are already out there in the universe. And in that struggle, anything that does not contribute to the struggle—all beauty, all knowledge, all scruple—will be discarded or eliminated. There will be nothing left but the bare will, the will to win, and the means to that end.” He sighed. “In his own mad way, Lysenko understood that. There was a sort of quixotic nobility in his struggle against the logic of evolution, in his belief that man could humanize nature. No. Man is a brief interlude between the prehuman and the posthuman. To protract that interlude is the most we can hope for.”

  He said nothing more, except to tell me that he had recommended my essay for an A++.

  The gesture was kind, considering how I had provoked him, but it did me little good. I failed that year’s examinations. In the summer I worked as a laborer in a nearby botanic garden, and studied hard in the evenings. In this way I made up for lost time in the areas of zoology in which I had been negligent, and re-sat the examination with success. But I maintained my interest in those theoretical areas which I’d always found most fascinating, and specialized in my final year in evolutionary genetics, to eventually graduate with First Class Honors.

  I told no one of Walker’s story. I did not believe it at the time, and I do not believe it now. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, many new facts have been revealed. No nuclear test ever took place at Vorkuta. There was no uranium mine at the place whose location can be deduced from Walker’s account. There is no evidence that Lysenko made any unexplained trips, however brief, to the region. No rumors about a mysterious object found near a labor camp circulate even in that rumor-ridden land. As for Walker himself, his Lysenkoism was indeed about as genuine (“let us say,” as Stalin might have put it) as his Marxism. There is evidence, from other and even more obscure articles of his, and from certain published and unpublished memoirs and reminiscences that I have come across over the years, that he was a Communist between 1948 and 1956. Just how this is connected with his inclusion in the New Year Honors List for 1983 (“For services to knowledge”) I leave for others to speculate. The man is dead.

  I owe to him, however, the interest which I developed in the relationship between, if you like, Darwinian and Lamarckian forms of inheritance. This exists, of course, not in biology but in artificial constructions. More particularly, the possibility of combining genetic algorithms with learned behavior in neural networks suggested to me some immensely fertile possibilities. Rather to the surprise of my colleagues, I chose for my postgraduate research the then newly established field of computer science. There I found my niche, and eventually obtained a lectureship at the University of E——–, in the Department of Artificial Intelligence.

  The work is slow, with many setbacks and false starts, but we’re making progress.

  First published in The New and Perfect Man (Postscripts #24/25),

  edited by Peter Crowther and Nick Gevers.

  About the Author

  Ken MacLeod graduated with a B.Sc. in Zoology from Glasgow University in 1976. Following research in bio-mechanics at Brunel University, he worked as a computer analyst/programmer in Edinburgh. He’s now a full-time writer, and widely considered to be one of the most exciting new SF writers to emerge in the ’90s, his work featuring an emphasis on politics and economics rare in the New Space Opera, while still maintaining all the widescreen, high-bit-rate, action-packed qualities typical of the form. His first two novels, The Star Fraction and The Stone Canal, each won the Prometheus Award. His other books include the novels, The Sky Road, The Cassini Division, Cosmonaut Keep, Dark Light, Engine City, Newton’s Wake, Learning the World, The Restoration Game, and Intrusion, plus a novella chapbook, The Human Front, and a collection, Strange Lizards from Another Galaxy. His most recent book is a new novel, Descent. He lives in West Lothian, Scotland, with his wife and children.

  “We’re All Dreaming,” Arctor Said:

  Drugs in Science Fiction, from the 1960s to the Present

  Alvaro Zinos-Amaro

  Open any of the best-known science fiction books from about 1965 to 1975 and the odds are that you’ll find some reference to drugs. This isn’t surprising. The 1960s, after all, were rife with upheavals. Escalating involvement in the Vietnam War, the threat of nuclear apocalypse with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963, the moon landing of 1969, and the civil rights, youth and counterculture movements—just to name a few—represent some of the decade’s many instances of social and political dislocation.

  In the counterculture, the use of drugs such as marijuana, LSD, peyote, psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics blossomed. Partially as a result of the same restless impulse to experiment, to seek new forms of awareness and self-expression, that fueled the counterculture, science fiction’s popularity grew.

  This interest attracted new writers, many of them well versed in contemporary literature and theory, into the field. Science fiction entered a transformative phase known as the New Wave. During the New Wave, genre writers relied primarily on modernist prose techniques to explore subjects like sex, overpopulation, non-Western religions, ecology, environmentalism, entropy, and “inner space,” often trying to break taboos along the way.

  As a literature that extrapolates technological change but also tends to reflect the times in which it’s written, it was perhaps inevitable that much New Wave science fiction would feature drugs.

  Consider a few examples. Perhaps the most powerful plot device in Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) is the spice “melange,” literally the most valuable commodity in the universe1. Herbert’s subsequent The Santaroga Barrier (1968) posits an alternate society built around the consumption of the fictional psychedelic “Jaspers.”

  Brian Aldiss’ Barefoot in the Head (1969) uses Joycean language to chronicle the new, permanently tripped out society that arises from the ashes of the old as a result of an “acid-head war.” Philip K. Dick’s2The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965) and Now Wait for Last Year (1966) deal with various layers of reality and disembodied consciousnesses moving through time. Early stories by Norman Spinrad, such as “Carcinoma Angels” (1967), “No Direction H
ome” (1972) and “The Weed of Time” (1973), as well as novels like The Men in the Jungle (1967) and Bug Jack Barron (1969), all entail drug use.

  In Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth (1970) the protagonist is able to achieve ecstatic communion with the alien planet’s elephant-like beings via hallucinogens; and in Silverberg’s A Time of Changes (1971) a culture which proscribes the sharing of the self is confronted with a telepathy-facilitating drug.

  In John Brunner’s The Stone That Never Came Down (1973), the drug “VC” (viral coefficient) boosts intelligence and memory, leading to an overall saner world3. The notion of a dystopia in which drugs are used by the state to control the population, an old idea4, was explored in George Lucas’ film THX 1138 (1971).

  And in the grim future of Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), which adapted a novella by Anthony Burgess, “Milkbars” dispensed the drug-laced “milk-plus.”

  During this period, then, the relationship between drugs in society and drugs in SF appears relatively straightforward: their explosion in the former was recorded in the latter.

  But what has happened between 1973 and today?

  After the Wave Crashed

  During the 1970s, drug use in the US (expressed as a percentage of its population) reached a peak. By 1979, 14.1% of those aged twelve or older were reporting illicit consumption of marijuana, cocaine, hallucinogens, inhalants, heroin, or nonmedical use of sedatives, tranquilizers, stimulants, or analgesics during the last month5. Despite the fact that President Nixon began a “war on drugs” in 1971, public perception of drugs as a societal problem was low throughout the decade.

  The Gallup poll, which asks a population sample, “What do you think is the most important problem facing this country today?”, reported that only 20% of those asked named drugs as part of their answer in 1973, and by late 1979, there was barely mention of drugs in survey responses6. So while drug usage was elevated, drugs were no longer a topic of intense social discourse.

  In broad terms, 1970s science fiction reflects this. The New Wave came to an end, but its crash left many writers’ and readers’ expectations reconfigured. Andrew Butler uses the term “amphicatastrophe” to describe 1970s narratives: they avoid the happy, often redemptive endings typical of what J. R. R. Tolkien dubbed “eucatastrophes,” but also the catharsis that derives from the protagonists’ failure in what Tolkien named “dyscatastrophes.”7

  1970s science fiction consistently questions assumptions about heterosexuality, patriarchy and capitalism, and other “invisible enemies”8. Drugs may enable these conversations, but aren’t necessarily part of the discussions themselves, as in, for example, Thomas M. Disch’s 334 (1972), Ian Watson’s The Embedding (1973) or Joanna Russ’ We Who Are About To .. . (1977).

  This does not mean that all, or even, most key texts of the 1970s trade in drugs, even as a conduit to other issues. In fact, many artists and readers went flocking in the opposite direction, seeking the more familiar comforts of adventure-driven fiction: the decade saw a swell of sword-and-planetary romances, Tolkien imitators and fantasy role-playing games, as well as big-budget films and series like Star Wars (1977), Superman (1978), Battlestar Galactica (1978-1979) and Flash Gordon (1980). These works don’t reflect any sense of crisis or preoccupation with drugs9.

  Somewhere between those trying to break the mold and those seeking solace within its confines, were veteran writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak and Leigh Brackett. Their 1970s output is often not in direct dialogue with contemporary trends, and is best understood in the context of those writers’ individual and idiosyncratic careers.

  “Say Hello to My Little Friend!”

  In the 1980s, illicit drug consumption decreased, falling from the previously stated 14.1% to 12.1% by 198510. However, the perception of drug abuse as a major societal ill began to increase, from 2-3% in the mid 1980s up to 64% in 198911. If drug usage decreased significantly (down to 7.7% by 1988, just one year before that survey), why did public awareness of it skyrocket?

  The answer is the cocaine/crack cocaine “epidemic” of the 1980s12. The phenomenon received intense media coverage, and imprinted itself strongly on the national consciousness. Non-genre films like Scarface (1983), Less than Zero (1987), Clean and Sober (1988), Bright Lights, Big City (1988) and even B-grade action vehicles like Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) and Delta Force 2: The Colombian Connection (1990) portrayed the epidemic on all scales, from the personal to the international.

  Within science fiction films, cocaine itself is less evident. Ken Russell’s Altered States (1980), with its psychedelics, was in sense a throwback to the New Wave; David Cronenberg’s Scanners (1981) featured “ephemerol,” a drug that both created telepaths and was able to dampen their abilities; Gerald Potterton’s Heavy Metal (1981) offered viewers “plutonian nyborg,” which looked like cocaine but produced marijuana-like effects; David Lynch’s adaptation of Dune (1984) brought melange to the big screen; Mark L. Lester’s film version of Stephen King’s Firestarter (1984) linked the hallucinogen “LOT-6” with telepathy and pyrokinesis; Graham Baker’s Alien Nation (1988) introduced “Jabroka,” which could control the film’s alien Newcomers without harming humans.

  Perhaps only Irvin Kershner’s RoboCop 2 (1990) featured a stand-in for crack cocaine, in the form of the highly addictive, aggression-causing narcotic “Nuke.”

  Histories of written science fiction typically identify the 1980s with cyberpunk, which regularly featured drug use. Reflecting this, Kim Stanley Robinson once provided a “recipe” for cyberpunk, and one of the ingredients was “a half gram of Dexadrine.”13

  The novel most often identified with cyberpunk is William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), whose main characters all use “Pills,” “Derms,” or other needle-injected substances. John Shirley’s Eclipse or A Song Called Youth trilogy (1985-1990) depicts the trade and use of “sink,” or synthetic cocaine, as well as other more baroque forms of intoxication.

  Later cyberpunk descendants, like Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), whose “snow crash” doubles as both computer virus and central nervous system viral disease, were more explicitly innovative as relates to drugs, by blending the technological with the biological.

  We should also remember that while cyberpunk was an important movement during this decade, drugs continued to appear in non-cyberpunk science fiction as well. The acclaimed early short stories from this period by Lucius Shepard, for instance, regularly depict characters in the throes of drug addiction14.

  And of course, as in the 1970s, many writers were working in non-cyberpunk modes that didn’t make much use of drugs: Gregory Benford’s Timescape (1980), Joan D. Vinge’s The Snow Queen (1980), Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985), Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia Trilogy (1982-1985) and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1989) are a few examples.

  Strange Days Indeed

  In the 1990s illicit drug usage continued to decline, averaging about 6.2%. Cocaine use saw a stark reduction from 1980s levels. Reported lifetime heroin use, however, began to increase: in 1990 it was 0.8%, and, despite fluctuations, by 1999 it had reached 1.4%. During this decade, use of ecstasy (MDMA), often linked with the rave and club scenes, also increased.

  The history of science fiction during the 1990s is complex, and has been less critically examined than previous decades. At least three different trends have been identified, though: a resurgence of space opera (technological globalization in part replacing cyberpunk’s imagined global slum), a preponderance of apocalyptic and singularity-oriented narratives, and increased porosity in perceived genre boundaries15.

  We begin to see, then, a considerable fragmentation of an already-divided genre. Drugs are still a crucial element of some of the decade’s important books: the “feathers” in Jeff Noon’s Vurt (1993), for example, were not only hallucinogens, but provided a gateway to a shared alternate reality, while the immunosuppressant drugs (and cosmetic surgeries) routinely administer
ed to the natives of a colony planet in Paul Park’s Coelestis (1993) allowed these aliens to be remolded into human shape.

  But many of the decade’s significant works—such as Greg Bear’s Queens of Angels (1990), John Varley’s Steel Beach (1992), Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy (1993-1996), Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Connie Willis’ Doomsday Book (1992), Nancy Kress’ Beggars in Spain (1993) and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)—make little more than occasional drug references.

  The science fiction television landscape, however, tells another story: perhaps by now it was starting to catch up with the drug tropes that had been explored on the page in previous decades. Alien Nation’s (1989-1990) “digitalin,” TekWar’s (1994-1996) eponymous “tek,” Babylon 5’s (1993-1998) “dust,” “Sleepers” and “stims,” and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’s (1993-1999) “Ketracel-white” were all vital parts of these shows’ ongoing stories, rather than the subject of one-off episodes. In film, Brett Leonard’s The Lawnmower Man (1992) treated VR as drug-like, and Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) similarly viewed personal memories as a drug: both films were inspired by 1980s cyberpunk sensibilities.

  As we might expect, things become even fuzzier during the next decade and a half.

  2001 and Beyond

  Illicit drug consumption increased from 6.3% in 2000 to 9.2% in 2012. Heroin usage was certainly a driving factor16; marijuana too. Though marijuana remains illegal under federal law, state ballots legalized it in 2012 in Colorado and Washington. In adolescents aged twelve-to-seventeen, there has been a concomitant decline in the perception of marijuana as harmful, which may indicate increased future usage17. And yet, to really get a sense of the last decade and a half, I believe we should widen the scope of our discussion and think not only about illegal drugs but, more broadly, addiction.

  Increasingly, diverse activities seem to reflect growing obsessive/compulsive behavior among us, if not outright addiction. Illustrative of this possible macro-trend are consumption rates for prescription drugs18, rising obesity from what some call “food addiction,”19unprecedented levels of television consumption20, and a massive increase in cosmetic procedures21. More difficult to quantify or prove, but nonetheless frequently discussed, are sex addiction and pornography consumption rates.