Strange Attractors (1985)

by Damien Broderick

  r

  I

  r

 

  T h is collection © 1985 by D am ien Broderick.

  C opyright resides in authors in respect o f th eir own

  contributions.

  T h is book is copyright. A p art from any fair dealing

  for the purposes o f study, research, criticism ,

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  should be m ade to the publisher.

  Typeset, printed & bound by

  Southw ood Press Pty Lim ited

  80-92 C hapel Street, M arrickville, NSW

  F or the publisher

  H ale G flrem onger P ty Lim ited

  GPO Box 2552, Sydney, NSW

  National Library of Australia Catalogue Card no. and

  ISBN 0 86806 208 1 (casebound)

  ISBN 0 86806 209 X (paperbound)

  Publication of this book has been assisted by the

  L iteratu re B oard of the A ustralia C ouncil, the

  Federal G overnm ent’s arts funding and advisory

  body.

  For

  U rs u la Le G u in

  a n d G e n e Wolfe:

  H o n o u re d

  G uests

  Contents

  Introduction

  7

  Damien Broderick

  T he L ipton Village Society

  14

  Lucy Sussex

  T im e and flowers

  29

  Anthony Peacey

  A step in any direction

  43

  Timothy Dell

  T he way she smiles, the things she says

  Greg Egan

  M r Lockwood’s narrative

  62

  Yvonne Rousseau

  Glass Reptile Breakout

  75

  Russell Blackford

  After the Beowulf expedition

  92

  Norman Lalbot

  Precious Bane

  103

  Gerald Murnane

  T he ballad of Hilo Hill

  112

  Cherry Wilder

  T he elixir operon

  132

  David Foster

  T he sanctuary tree

  151

  John Playford

  O n the nursery floor

  164

  George Turner

  C aveA m antem

  193

  Carmel Bird

  Jagging

  198

  Anthony Peacey

  T he Interior

  226

  Damien Broderick

  Notes on contributors

  235

  Introduction

  ©

  DAMIEN BRODERICK

  Here is an odd fact. I encourage you to marvel at it:

  Not until twenty years ago (when I was only slightly younger

  than I am today) was the first mass-market sf collection by an Australian published in Australia.

  Why is this surprising? Well, after all, science fiction was hardly

  brand-new, in the world at large, twenty years ago. H. G. Wells, its

  major innovator, had been dead since 1946. Hiroshima and

  Nagasaki, by 1965, were already ash two decades past. So was the

  fabled American Golden Age of sf.

  Indeed, at that very moment the New Wave of rebellion against

  Golden Age science fiction was beginning to roil in Britain. Brian

  Aldiss and Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R, Delany and Tom

  Disch were recasting the nature of the genre. And we in Australia

  were . . . what? Sending out our first collection to sniff the air. (As

  it chanced, this novelty was a small pulpy gathering of my own

  small inept stories.)

  Since the late fifties, of course, other fledgling professionals —

  John Baxter, David Boutland, Stephen Cook, Lee H arding and

  Wynne Whiteford — had placed sf stories abroad. An adopted son,

  Captain A. Bertram Chandler, had been active in the dreaded

  Golden Age itself. Still earlier we’d had Erie Cox’s Out of the Silence

  and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow (recently

  republished uncut). But sf was thin on our native ground.

  By 1968 and 1971, John Baxter was still hardly overwhelmed in

  7

  Introduction

  his choices as he collected stories for his Pacific Books of SF.

  Abruptly then, about a decade back, everything changed.

  People date the change from AussieCon I in 1975, the first World

  Science Fiction Convention held in the Antipodes (snatched from

  its traditional custodians, I said grandly at the time in my anthology The Zeitgeist Machine, like the America’s Cup — as, years later, the America’s Cup was indeed to be snatched).

  AussieCon was catalytic. It fetched here (with the aid of the

  Literature Board of the Australia Council) Ursula Le Guin, Guest

  of Honour, the world’s best sf writer. It built around her a most

  remarkable writing workshop. Was some switch thrown at that

  moment? Probably this is an illusion. Still, within a few years we

  saw book after book of short stories (H arding’s 1978 Rooms of Paradise combining without embarrassment work from here and abroad), major novels of speculative fiction by George Turner, Lee

  Harding, Gerald M urnane, Cherry Wilder and others, and the

  emergence of several small specialist publishers (notably Norstrilia

  Press and, more recently. Ebony Books) whose dedication has been

  to get this work out into the light of day, not always without cost to

  themselves.

  (Non-genre speculative fiction has also appeared, happily, from

  Glenda Adams, M urray Bail, Peter Carey, David Foster, David

  Ireland, Victor Kelleher and others besides.)

  W hat’s more, much of the important genre sf has been seen outside Australia. Turner is published by Faber in the U K , I by Pocket Books and Avon in the USA, David Lake by DAW, W ilder by

  Atheneum, H arding by H arper & Row, all of us, as well, in multi-

  tongued translation . . . Often our books have been funded generously in their creation by the Literature Board (funding which has paid off amply in the world-class work produced under its

  patronage).

  In 1985, with this book and AussieCon II — the second international sf Convention to be held in Australia — talents old and new are tearing up out of the ground even as we watch.

  Newcomers like Greg Egan, Yvonne Rousseau, Tim Dell,

  Norman Talbot and Tony Peacey craft lovely, various tales quite as

  if they had been doing so for decades. Turner extends his range

  with each story. M urnane meditates on the very nature of books,

  and the brain, and the memories held (to ransom?) by both. Lucy

  Sussex and Carmel Bird prove once more how badly sf maimed itself by excluding women writers in their own voice from the centre

  Introduction

  9

  of its canon, Foster, Blackford, W ilder and Playford are distinctive,

  telling, fierce. We have a rich harvest.

  But before we turn to the stories themselves, let us pause to

  meditate on the Strange Attractor, on Chaos, and Order, and the

  Void . . .

  W hat we fear and desire is Chaos, wild craziness, anarchy
and joy.

  When guns flash and thump from broken apartments, our flesh

  thrills, it creeps. That is why advertisers sponsor news programs

  full of blood. That is why men and women kill instead of sharing

  their poor short lives. For a little while, in the midst of it, brandishing bone-smashing weapons, the joy is all. Finally it is wearying and ruinous. Only psychopaths love endless cruelty and uncertainty, and are sullen at turbulence’s end.

  W hat we crave and distrust is Order, sweet harmony, progression and smooth flow, predictability, dullness. The tanks rolling along the main street bring this sweetness and put Chaos in a

  barred cell. Men without stubble apply electricity to soft places. O f

  course, schoolchildren sing happily, playing ball games with their

  friends.

  W hat we cannot abide, what we dread and will not face, what

  despite our terror we sense under turbulence and flow, is the Void.

  Fifteen thousand million years ago, the Void erupted. It spat out

  the universe. All was Chaos, all was Ordered. Bright pinpoint

  traces of that violence roar in the sky, moving on paths ordained

  across gulfs of time we cannot begin to comprehend.

  Is there a link to be found here? Can Chaos and O rder both be

  birthed from the Void? Might num ber and geometry yield up the

  shapes of anarchy? Might Nothingness expel Being from its empty

  centre?

  This is sacred, terrible, hilarious ground we tread, ground suitable for mathematicians and jesters; for — surely — science fiction writers.

  The mathematicians brooded on the face of the waters and what

  they saw there finally was the ghostly imprint of the Strange

  Attractor. W hat is it? Why, a phenomenon where a given point can

  be made to jum p about in mathematical ‘phase space’ in a perfectly

  random fashion . . . under the direction of a simple, determining

  rule.

  Think about it. It’s very strange; almost as strange as it would be

  10

  Introduction

  if 2 + 2 equalled a different num ber each time you worked it out.

  Douglas Hofstadter speaks of this wondrous numerical entity

  creating a ‘delicate filigree’ as its equation graphs it out. David

  Ruelle wrote that ‘these systems of curves, these clouds of points,

  sometimes evoke galaxies or fireworks, other times quite weird and

  disturbing blossomings’. Pythagoras in his dreams of a crystalline

  order to the universe never saw such loveliness as the dance of the

  lacy Strange Attractor, the principle of Chaos bringing forth

  Order.

  I find myself strangely attracted to this image as a figure for the

  creation of science fiction.

  Here we have grown men and women reaching into the Void of

  their hearts and minds and plucking forth — what? Chaos, ordered

  strangely. Creatures unknown, worlds unseen, emotions combined

  with images in w'ays that strike us behind the ear and leave us flat

  on the ground struggling for breath.

  If we are lucky, that is. Happily, I can guarantee that the stories

  in this collection, all by Australians, will not disappoint you. At this

  end of the earth, slowly breaking free of the thumb of empires old

  and new, the imagination orbits in its unpredictable filigree.

  Too often, of course, science fiction fails in its promise and can

  then, even more than drab conventional ‘realistic’ writing, become

  Strangely Repellent.

  Let us, briefly, look into why this should be so.

  Fiction is not life — a point which everyone (from David Lodge in

  Britain to Umberto Eco in Italy, Kathy Acker in the USA to Peter

  Carey in Australia) is shouting aloud. All the fabulists worth their

  salt are hard at the Active word-face, beavering away, disrupting

  narrative surfaces, nipping in and out of the plot, snatching away

  the props of illusion.

  Down with mimicry! Art is not comfortable dream, seductive

  consolation, labored allegory. It’s sport, free creation, construct. ‘All

  art is in a sense symbolic,’ as Vladimir Nabokov told his Cornell

  University students, ‘but we say “stop, thief’ to the critic who

  deliberately transforms an artist’s subtle symbol into a pedant’s

  stale allegory.’ Indeed.

  There are some who rebel against this fairly unsurprising discovery. O f course, even for these diehards it comes as no surprise to find that science fiction is not life. But then, unless they are Kingsley

  Introduction

  11

  Amis, they almost certainly know in their bones that science fiction

  is not fiction, either. Or, at any rate, not literary fiction.

  By contrast, during the last decade or so science fiction has become one of the darlings of the formalist branch of literary criticism (those schools which emphasise the reader’s own creation and deconstruction of each work) precisely because it is (or is meant to

  be) innately uncomfortable, disruptive, hair-raising, hackles-

  raising, alienating, oddball.

  The Russian Viktor Shklovsky, long before Brecht shredded the

  safe distance between audience and players, told us 60 years ago

  that the primary function of art is ostranenie: estrangement, that

  wrenching of our necks which shows us the familiar in a fresh and

  challenging aspect.

  As you can see, science fiction is the ideal candidate. There are

  few bed-sitters, adulterous stock-brokers, race tracks, talkback

  radio pundits, karate-trained sirens or crooked cops on the take.

  W ith sf, it’s all ghastly clangour and shock, just what Shklovsky

  ordered. Looming aliens without eyes, flapples to travel in, doors

  that answer back, machines with hearts of gold.

  The reality, as every sf enthusiast knows with remorse, is

  otherwise.

  The salutary jolt of the strange soon loses its force. Like bored

  rats which seek out a mild aversive electric tingle, sf readers return

  contentedly to the paperback shelves for a buzz of what we might

  term cosy ostranenie.

  Knowing this only too well, some critics locate the last true sf in

  the embattled wastelands of the Soviet Union, where its function

  retains (in the writing of such fabulists as the Strugatski Brothers in

  Russia, Oles Berdnyk in the Ukraine, Stanislaw Lem in Poland)

  some genuine existential spritzig — though often in lumbering

  prose and heavy parables which might well be outrageously

  pointed in Leningrad and Krakow but fall awfully flat to the rest of

  us.

  This line of investigation supposes, of course, that all fictions

  together comprise a definable set which we might term ‘literature’.

  Perhaps this is not valid.

  Is putting a humpy together out of scrap tin and old lino the

  same hum an activity as building a Mies van der Rohe skyscraper?

  Are they both ‘architecture’? Do identical standards of excellence

  apply?

  O r is the humpy — a structure on a hum an scale and with a

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  Introduction

  moral heart — automatically superior?

  We may fairly pose such questions about forms of writing:

  ‘genres’ versus ‘literature’, for example. Looking at the peculiar

  objects emitted by Ian Watson or Jerry Pournelle (to leave aside


  works at the margin of sf by, say, Ted Mooney or Angela C arter or

  Salman Rushdie), I often wonder if science fiction and fantasy are,

  after all, simply different in kind from the sort of writing exemplified

  by H en ry jam es andjam es Joyce and Joyce Cary.

  Consider that possibility with care. It could be, you see, that

  Isaac Asimov’s science fiction (detestable in literary terms, often

  epoch-making in its own) is quite legitimately nearer in effect (and,

  for that matter, intention) to his two hundred instructive, poly-

  mathic books on science and technology than they could ever be to

  Proust or John Irving.

  This is an alarming prospect to the sf critic, one of whom (the

  Australian George Turner) has made his critical mark by repeated

  and subtle attacks on any ‘double standard’ which allows genre

  work its own special criteria of examination and worth. I allow

  myself to believe it on even-numbered days of the month, reserving

  the rem ainder to a high-toned monism. (Even with leap years, this

  tactic favours the pure view.)

  You will not find yourself provoked to anguish at that paradox by

  these stories. Each is a striking work of speculative fiction. Nor do

  they fail to please in their literary dexterity, heart and address. The

  several Golden Ages of sf magazines (Astounding, Galaxy, F&SF, New

  Worlds) are long, long gone, and will not come again. So what we

  have here are stories which these days require an original-fiction

  anthology for their setting.

  None of them, needless to say, would have been completely at

  home in those lost Golden Ages. But the sf impulse has not by any

  means been tamed or conscripted by those of delicate sensibilities

  who are piqued by the unusual only so long as it comes with a

  Spanish name attached: Borges, Garcia M arquez, Vargas Llosa. A

  decade ago, the prodigiously inventive Brian Aldiss made

  prophetic utterance on this score, speaking o f‘the area of life where

  art and science meet nature’:

  One becomes more and more preoccupied with the idea that art