IGMS Issue 39

by IGMS

  SCHWEITZER: No sense of Big Frog in Small Pond vs. Ordinary Sized Frog in Large Pond when you moved to America?

  BRODERICK: Maybe, but the ponds have merged. Sean Williams wrote, among more ambitious work, Star Wars novels that went to No. 1 on the NYT bestseller list. Sean McMullen is a solid favorite among Analog habitués and others. Garth Nix is a fantasy by-word. Greg Egan, at the extravagant end of the scale, is one of the most important sf innovators in the world. Aussie women writers such as the late Sara Douglass, Trudi Canavan, Kim Wilkins, Cecilia Dart-Thornton, Kate Forsyth, are known across the globe, mostly working within fantasy tropes.

  Granted, I moan that I feel invisible, and by comparison with the fantasy megasellers I am -- but I've also received the Distinguished Scholarship Award of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, been runner up several times in major US sf jury awards (Campbell Memorial, Sturgeon), collaborated on a novel (Beyond the Doors of Death) with Grand Master Robert Silverberg. I doubt that I'll ever be in the running for a Hugo, which these days seems to track social media visibility and bloc votes for popular series, but there are plenty of astonishingly good USians and especially Brits in the same boat.

  SCHWEITZER: You are accredited with discovering the Singularity before almost anyone. So, if the future is to be so transformed that it is incomprehensible by today's standards, how do you write about it?

  BRODERICK: In the mid-1980s I picked up on Vernor Vinge's insight into accelerating technological change as an inevitable tsunami that would alter everything, and wrote the first popular science treatment of the idea (The Spike) in 1996; it came out in Australia in 1997, with an updated edition in New York in 2001. But like quite a few other skiffy types, I'd been clued into it much earlier, reading Heinlein's account of the soaring curve of change published in Galaxy magazine way back in 1952, and other pundits making similar claims in the 1960s.

  Look, for anyone over 50, I'd guess the present is already incomprehensible, at least in patches that are opening out under our feet into chasms. You can deal with it as Australia's Greg Egan, does: flinging the reader into richly dense thought experiments probing the nature of consciousness under ruthless attack. Or with the brio of Britain's Charlie Stross in his marvelous Singularity fix-up novel Accelerando, with its multiplexing leaps into endless complexity and fun. Or, of course, with work-arounds like Vinge's own singularity fiction: stranding recognizable people in the aftermath of an Omega Point, or rejigging the galaxy into Zones with different laws. I did versions of the Omega solution in Transcension and (with my frequent co-author Rory Barnes) The Hunger of Time. But yes, it is a daunting narrative cliff hanging upward into the dazzling, eye-watering sky behind your word processor.

  SCHWEITZER: I notice that a lot of contemporary SF does indeed seem to shy away from actually writing about the future, ducking into alternate history or Steampunk instead. Threat or menace? Do you think readers are still actually interested in speculating about the future, or are they growing increasingly afraid of it?

  BRODERICK: I'm torn, Darrell. A wise old owl (my friend and sometime collaborator John Boston) tells us: "It's the penalty of success. Once, we thought that it was unjust that we were a ridiculed minority, and everybody should read SF. Then they did, and look what happened." Not that they read science fiction: they watched the stories from the 1930s and 1940s recycled in 45 minute simplified serialized segments on TV, and then in expensive movie screen special effects, and then in spectacular high kinetic shooters and other computer games. Pretty much every sophisticated narrative and challenging invention of the mode of sf was ignored, too difficult to convey in those dazzling adrenergic modes of storytelling. And even as everyone kept saying (apologetically, these days, rather than jeeringly), "Sorry, I don't read sci-fi myself," half or more of the most fabulously successful and expensive movies viewed by billions were exactly that -- "sci-fi" or fantasy, gaudy adventures, most of them, or Phil Dick's resonant, hilarious paranoid visions vulgarized into car chases and explosions.

  And somehow out of these seething cauldrons came . . . the revival of epic fantasy in 12-part trilogies, immensely immersive entertainments, some of them as rich in world-building as anything sf had ever created. Mostly I can live without them, but I see the attraction for the many, many readers whose favorites now fill up the library shelves inaccurately marked as SCI-FI.

  Is this turn a denial of change, a refusal to face a possible singularity future a century away, or much sooner? Maybe. But hey, fantastika has always been a broad church. John W. Campbell, genre-changing editor of Astounding a.k.a. Analog, was also the creator of Unknown, the delicious 1940s venue for fantasy that followed laws of magic as ruthless as the cold equations of his sf, often written by the same people. Campbell famously (and, to many readers, deplorably) also championed science fiction centered on psi powers and their quandaries -- telepathy, precognition, other wild talents. He argued, of course, that these topics were not fantastical. If anything, classic sf tropes such as time travel, hyperspace star voyages, superintelligence were far more fanciful. At any rate, psychic abilities persist these days as a staple of fantasy, so it might be asserted that the pleasures of Golden Age fantastika have been reborn in a form better adapted to a time of increasingly insecure and alarming (if exhilarating) technological change.

  I should add that one of the two big projects I've just finished is a co-edited original anthology of essays on mind uploading and machine intelligence by leading AI theorists and ethicists (Intelligence Unbound, with Russell Blackford). The other is a comprehensive introduction to the strongest empirical findings in parapsychology (Evidence for Psi, with Ben Goertzel). Meanwhile, my two latest fiction sales are fantasies: "-- And Your Little Dog, Too," co-written with Rory Barnes, in which twin brothers alternate between human and doggy form, and that's before things get weird, and "The Unheimlich Maneuver," where young Sigmund Freud in a Tesla-powered alternative history suffers the horror of E.T.A. Hoffmann's classic tale, "The Sandman." Strange real science on the cutting edge meets strange unreal fantasy inside my head, and then inside the reader's . . . Bon appétit!

  SCHWEITZER: Did you pick up your interest in psi from John W. Campbell?

  BRODERICK: Campbell deliberately adopted the role of sf gadfly, darting about, stinging readers out of their mid-century complacency with brilliant and shocking insights as well as quite stupid and sometimes offensive propositions. Reading his editorials in Astounding was a hazardous tonic. Inevitably, his contrarian strategy seized upon claims that ESP had been demonstrated at a Duke University lab by Dr. J.B. Rhine and his colleagues. Here was a notion that fed straight into the nerd wishes of his audience, captured in the slogan "Fans are Slans," taking A.E. van Vogt's 1940s telepathic superman story as a consoling and energizing parable of the spurned secret geniuses who read Astounding during their lunch breaks. Many of his stable of competent writers were happy to recycle this obsession into fiction, and that was fun, but I never took it literally, any more than I expected to grow slannish tendrils or become part of a galactic conspiracy of psychohistorians. The tragic side of Campbell's crankery was his endorsement of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, a bogus pseudo-engineering approach to what's now called "personal growth," that grew into a toxic scam. Other nutty ideas promoted by Campbell were the Dean Drive, an asymmetrical rotating gadget that allegedly lifted itself against gravity, and the Hieronymus Machine, which functioned with just a wiring diagram instead of electronic parts, proving that the world worked by Will and Idea, or something.

  Was I seduced by this barrage of entertaining lunacy into believing in psi powers? No, but it might have fertilized the soil (so to speak). What actually happened was rather the reverse. Sick at home one time when I was 13 or 14, I was galvanized to read a book my mother brought home for me from the local library: Rhine's The Reach of the Mind, about lab studies of psychokinesis ("mind over matter") and other purported psi abilities. What? These phenomena, which I'd always assumed were about as
plausible as genies offering three wishes or trees sprouting money instead of leaves, were real? Tested and confirmed in laboratories? I had to know more. I quickly learned that the anomalous effects were mostly tiny, and skittish. If there were any reliably psychic supermen, they hadn't made it to Dr. Rhine's office. After a few months playing with cards, and one truly startling result, I packed the whole thing away as a folly. It wasn't until I became friendly with a psychologist who'd done some research into psi that I got intrigued again -- and spent most of the 1970s trying to use signal detection theory to optimize this small, fleeting effect. My approach was impelled by a serious article on the topic in . . . Analog, November 1969. So really I can blame Campbell after all.

  SCHWEITZER: I note you have written serious science books about psi.

  BRODERICK: I have published two books on the topic (and co-edited a third). The Lotto Effect investigated whether there's any evidence for precognition in lottery results (where you might expect it to blaze up like a searchlight; it doesn't, bad luck). Outside the Gates of Science is a pop but accurate report on major research efforts by scientists, with special emphasis on the 20 year US government Star Gate psi program, long classified. I had the good fortune to become friends with the scientific director of Star Gate, Dr. Edwin May, and other experts such as Stephan Schwartz (who established that psi could mediate a message from a submarine, and helped develop rigorous remote viewing protocols), Dr. Dean Radin (who pioneered work in "presentiment," physiological forerunner responses detectable in advance of a random stimulus), Dr. Julia Mossbridge (whose work on presentiment is proving further evidence for this baffling phenomenon), and Joe McMoneagle (an impressively accurate remote viewer from the military operational program). The new anthology, Evidence for Psi, is intended as the first volume of The Science of Psi, with The Physics of Psi to follow.

  SCHWEITZER: David Pringle in his Science Fiction: The Hundred Best Novels, 1949-1984 (as you mentioned) said of The Dreaming Dragons, "This is the best Australian science fiction novel I know." If we take that sentence apart carefully, we wonder if the qualifier "Australian" makes part of a much smaller subset, or is he defining it in terms of novels which address specifically Australian content? This gets back to the big pond/little pond idea again. What do you think is virtue and use of national identity in a science fiction novel? The book is, after all, about something larger than nations.

  BRODERICK: Luckily for my self-esteem, David Pringle cited that comment in his Foreword to Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010, by Paul Di Filippo and me, and added: "that sounds belittling in retrospect -- the book was much more than that." Phew.

  Actually, I think David did refer to the restricted context of the quite small number of sf novels available from Aussies until about 30 years ago. On the other hand, the book (which I've renamed The Dreaming in recent editions, to remove any misunderstanding that it's about, you know, dragons) was published in the US as well as Australia, right there in the big pond. What's more, I was thunderstruck a few years later when Harry Harrison told me I'd have won the Campbell Memorial award except that one of the judges delayed getting his votes in. But it's probably just as well; winning would've made me very uncomfortable, not to mention attracting derision, had I beaten Greg Benford's remarkable and ambitious Timescape.

  Of course not much of The Dreaming is markedly Australian. Yes, two of the main characters are Aussies, one of them autistic, one a deracinated "stolen generation" Aborigine, and some of the events happen at a UN research station exploring an ancient alien site sacred to the indigenous people. But other major characters are British, American and Russian, and an entire major thread follows intelligent feathered dinosaurs in a generation time machine moving backward into our own prehistory. I don't think it would have been drastically more cosmopolitan had it been written instead by Phil Farmer or John Brunner or A.E. van Vogt or Bob Silverberg.

  SCHWEITZER: Relating to this, do you think you could eventually write a Texan science fiction novel?

  BRODERICK: Well, my return to short fiction in 2008 started with a Texan zombie story, the title story in my collection Uncle Bones. It's embedded in the parts of San Antonio I know. Let me tell you about my reaction to moving here.

  It's a curious town, this city of the Alamo: richly Spanish-Mexican, crowded with cutting-edge medical centers (the cliché "cutting-edge" has its appropriateness!) that bring pilgrims from the whole planet for radical new treatments, amid smashed sidewalks or none at all (so it's hard for the ardent walker to get in a daily stint of exercise without turning an ankle or being run over), zones of expensive and beautiful big old houses swiftly blurring, with Phil Dick queasiness, into neighborhoods when no house stands quite vertical, where flaking paint blows away in the hot breezes and chained dogs bark while kids run around happily and you have to drive quite fast along freeways for half an hour to buy the milk and (awful) bread and meat and veggies I used to find seven minutes' stroll away in Melbourne.

  Nobody really applauds this way of doing things, I suspect, but nobody can do anything about it, not any more. The Mall future is here: collapsing houses linked by concrete freeway pylons, chain stores and gasoline. But that is too grim a view. The sagging houses are being done up, some of them, and maybe I'm just being provincial. After all, I hardly hear the hooting any more.

  Let me tell you about the brain-jarring hooting of San Antonio.

  It's not the siren call of the future, America as Science Fiction. Or is it? It's America as the Past with the future plumped down willy-nilly on top of it, or grown around it like mold. The hooting is the sound of the lonesome Texan railroad lonesome no more; embedded, rather, in the very heart and gristle of the city like some dream of the late 19th century revived into a nightly nightmare suburban blaring that can smash your sleep, and your reason, until your brain gives up the fight and pretends it isn't happening.

  You might think the locals would have developed a tolerance for the noise, and it's true that they have, in large measure. (But the city council of nearby New Braunfels just established a "quiet zone" to silence the horns at night.) An ordinance requires trains to sound a warning at every street crossing, so one gets the impression that the engineer leans on the hooter from one end of town to the other. For some reason, many people drive themselves straight under the wheels of an on-coming train if they're not deterred by an awful racket. Yet it would cost $50,000 per crossing to put in gates, and who's going to pay for that? Or for repair of the sidewalks, or of the many streets that are flooded every time it rains? Get real, this is the future, no big deal. It's not as though it's a catastrophe.

  In the late sixties, when science fiction matured, the brash British editor Mike Moorcock asked, on the cover of New Worlds: "What is the Nature of the Catastrophe?" Moorcock figured entropy was to blame. Running down, burning out, giving up. Perhaps it was a premonition of the dreadful Thatcher years, when Britain did just that. But Moorcock himself didn't give up, certainly not. When New Worlds and its surrealist community of New Wavers gave up the ghost, finally, after heroic battles with marginality, weariness and public indifference, that archetypal Londoner got off his ass and moved to . . . well, to Texas, of course. A little town called Bastrop, an hour and a half up the freeway from where I'm sitting just now. His wife and mine met years ago after starting a women's shelters in central Texas, trying to deal with victims of the catastrophe. Small world. Fantasy as America.

  SCHWEITZER: So, tell me about some of your critical work. What impact does it have on you to be both a theorist and practitioner at the same time?

  BRODERICK: All writers are both at the same time, and so too, in a slightly different way, are all readers. But not everyone brings that theorizing to awareness. In fact, most of our theorizing is necessarily unconscious, and some of it seems to be models of the world and other people we inherit in our genome. As infants we learn to crawl and totter and walk by imitating others, prompted by urgings within our muscles and brains that really do a
mount to theories about how this world of buzzing, blooming confusion operates. And as cog-psy shows, we social critters function via a shared "theory of mind," an implicit and almost invisible model of other people's reactions and surmised motives that are in part projections of our own, as well as rules and explanations we learn from parents, other adults, other kids.

  All of this is a vast tangled network of theories within which we "read" the "text" of the world and ourselves. The stories we tell ourselves, and those we read, are therefore theorized at the root, just as our first understanding of physics is embedded in the way we walk, pick things up, throw them, judge distances by what we see and hear, the heat of the stove, the vulnerability of the flesh. Science happens when we start to investigate those unarticulated or unchallenged folk theories, replacing them with more coherent and powerful models. You could say that science rewrites the world as it reads the regularities all about us.

  I woke up to this kind of perspective about half my life ago, not at first by studying Barthes or Derrida or Foucault or Jameson but woven inside the sf of Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, and other bright, embattled practitioners. Chip Delany in particular brought much of this to the surface of his novels, as well as in numerous essays and interviews. He embodied his critical thinking in the very structure of his characters and their worlds. But of course once you see that, you notice that every writer does the same thing, although often without being sharply aware of it. You start to unpick the surfaces and see how the toy universe and its toy inhabitants work. And that feeds back into your own creative process. Not as a dull set of ideological instructions and prohibitions, but as a lively and, yes, proto-scientific exploration of the fictional and semiotic spaces and forces moving your sf characters and their fantastical worlds, so unlike ours in some ways, so utterly like ours in most of the dimensions we don't even see because they and we are wrapped up and enfolded around each other. And just as scientists hope to advance their understanding of reality with the most stringent models they can think up after looking as closely as possible at the evidence, we writers do the same -- if we're doing anything more elaborate and artistic than tossing burgers into the buns for undemanding consumers of McSci-fi.