IGMS - Issue 25

by IGMS

  "She can't help that," said Carlotta. "She's dead."

  "The others got to know her, they lived with her, she talked to them every day," said Sergeant. "We have the Giant."

  Bean lay back and stared at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes because he couldn't see the ceiling anyway. Closing his eyes squeezed out the tears that had filled them.

  "It was a terrible choice," said Bean softly. "No matter what we did it would be wrong. We didn't talk to you about it because you didn't have enough experience of life to make an intelligent choice. You three were doomed to die by age twenty or so. We thought we'd find a cure quickly -- ten years, twenty -- and you could come back to Earth while you were still young enough to have your whole lives ahead of you."

  "The genetic problem is very complicated," said Ender.

  "If we'd stayed on Earth, you'd all be long since dead. Your normal sibs lived to be what, a hundred and ten?"

  "Two of them," said Ender. "All got at least a century."

  "And you three would have been a sad little memory -- long-ago siblings who had a tragic genetic defect and died with only one-fifth of a life."

  "One-fifth of a life is better than this," whispered Sergeant.

  "No it's not," said Bean. "I've had that one-fifth of a life, and it's not enough."

  "You changed the world," said Ender. "You saved the world twice."

  "But I'll never live to see you get married and have children," said Bean.

  "Don't worry," said Carlotta. "If Ender and you don't find a cure for this, I'm never having children. I'm not passing this thing on to anybody."

  "That's my point," said Bean. "When Petra and I conceived you, it was because we believed there was a scientist who could sort things out. He was the one who turned Anton's Key in me in the first place. The one who killed all my fellow experiments. We never meant to do this to you. But it was done, and all we could think to do was whatever it took to give you a real life."

  "Your life is real," said Ender. "I'd be content with a life like yours."

  "I'm living in a box that I can never leave," said Bean, clenching his fists. He had never meant to say anything like this to them. The humiliation of his own self-pity was unbearable to him, but they had to understand that he was right to do whatever it took to keep them from getting cheated the way he had been. "If you spend the first five or ten years of your life in space like this, so what? As long as it gives you the next ninety years -- and children who will have their century, and grandchildren. I'll never see any such thing -- but you will."

  "No we won't," whispered Sergeant. "There is no cure. We're a new species that has a life span of twenty-two years, apparently, as long as we spend our last five years at ten percent gravity."

  "So why do you want to kill me?" asked Bean. "Isn't my life short enough for you?"

  In answer, Sergeant clung to Bean's sleeve and cried. As he did, Ender and Carlotta held each other's hands and watched. What they were feeling, Bean didn't know. He wasn't even sure what Sergeant was crying for. He didn't understand anybody and he never had. He was no Ender Wiggin.

  Bean tracked him now and then, checking in with the computer nets through the ansible, and as far as he could tell, Ender Wiggin wasn't having much of a life, either. Unmarried, childless, flying from world to world, staying nowhere very long, and then getting back to lightspeed so he stayed young while the human race aged.

  Just like me. Ender Wiggin and I have made the same choice, to stay aloof from humanity.

  Why Ender Wiggin was hiding from life, Bean could not guess. Bean had had his brief sweet marriage with Petra. Bean had these miserable, beautiful, impossible children and Ender Wiggin had nothing.

  It's a good life, thought Bean, and I don't want it to end. I'm afraid of what will happen to these children when I'm gone. I can't leave them now and I have no choice. I love them more than I can bear and I can't save them. They're unhappy and I can't fix it. That's why I'm crying.

  InterGalactic Interview With John Clute

  by Darrell Schweitzer

  John Clute has written science fiction, most notably the novel Appleseed (1999), but he is best known as the field's pre-eminent critic. His work as co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nichols) and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant) has been particularly influential in influencing how we think about and describe fantastic literature. He has coined a good deal of what is now becoming the standard critical vocabulary. Books of his reviews and essays include Strokes, Look at the Evidence, Scores, Canary Fever and Pardon This Intrusion: Fantastika in the World Storm, the latter containing essays. He is currently working on a revision of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, a deliberately incomplete beta version of which was launched in early October in conjunction with Orion/Gollancz.

  SCHWEITZER: Let's start with your general background, how you got into the science fiction field and how you became a professional critic.

  CLUTE: By accident. In 1960 or so I began reviewing semi-professionally, and in the '60s when I was reviewing amateurishly and professionally - both at the same time. So there was no beginning point for me. And it never became a day job, even though it took all day . . .

  SCHWEITZER: So what were you doing before that?

  CLUTE: I was too young to be doing anything of interest to anybody except myself. I was nineteen when I wrote my first review, early twenties when I wrote my first SF review. I did the usual various odd jobs that most people did back in the '50s and '60s. I worked for six months on a coast freighter. I was a fork-truck driver, supply teacher, research associate for Professor Taduesz Grygier, whom I disappointed grievously I think . . . things of that sort. Really fascinating to recount. [He speaks with obvious irony.]

  SCHWEITZER: Was it always your ambition to be a critic, or were you one of those people who started out writing stories and then found yourself writing more and more about fiction?

  CLUTE: Yes, I was first a short-story writer and an exceedingly bad poet. I wrote a few stories that were published here and there. Not very many of them. I am not a fiction writer by instinct or compulsive drive. I did publish two stories, or three, in New Worlds in the mid-'60s. A few others since. And I wrote a very inevitable first novel that was completed in 1964 and which Michael Moorcock purchased in 1965 for Compact Books. It was an astonishingly fortunate fall for me that Compact Books went immediately bankrupt, because it was not a good novel. Michael was doing what Mike always did, but he didn't say what he was doing then and I didn't quite catch on. Mike's publishing policy embodied, as it were, the dictate "Do what thou wilt. And pay for it." Later on this became extremely useful as I began to write seriously explorative non-fiction pieces for New Worlds, which any traditional editor would have blue-penciled into oblivion. (Maybe rightly.) But the only other novels I've written are The Disinheriting Party, which was published in 1977, although it had been finished quite a while earlier, and Appleseed which was published in 2001, a genuine SF novel. That's basically it. So in reality I've been a non-fiction writer from the beginning.

  SCHWEITZER: It is a complete different talent, isn't it? In non-fiction you'rewriting about ideas, and in fiction you are writing about experiences. There is a kind of narrative in non-fiction, but it's not the same, is it?

  CLUTE: No, the narratives are different but I find they're closer together for me than for a lot of people. I think, to be honest, there is a lot of moat-defensive nonsense talked about the distinction between creative and non-creative writing.

  SCHWEITZER: Then again, I heard from any number of professors when I was in college that the essay is a creative form too. They felt they were just as creative as the fiction writers.

  CLUTE: Frankly I think that writing a novel at the peak of one's skill, which is certainly what Appleseed took, which is every jot and tittle of my skill, and writing a book like The Darkening Garden, which is subtitled A Short Lexicon of Horror, which came out in 2006, are both books that required very similar intens
ity from me. It felt to me like a creative intensity.

  SCHWEITZER: When you wrote Appleseed after so many years of writing criticism, did this give you a different perspective on writing fiction? Surely you have thought more about what fiction is and how it works than most regular practitioners of fiction.

  CLUTE: Maybe 'thought,' maybe mused in a corner: but certainly listened. I think Appleseed shows the non-fiction writer, the writer about SF, shows us not so much cognitions about the field (although obviously I have thought about things). It shows a sensitized ear to the sound of SF being told, what other stories underlie it, what kind of echoes can be heard in the aisles of the story. It is in that way that Appleseed is multiplex, multi-layered. It is full of echoes. We know something is happening, and at its deeply epigonal level, Appleseed is a novel where you should feel more comfortable with things not clear at a glance than you can quite work out why.

  SCHWEITZER: I should think this would give you a great sense of deliberation. You've thought so much about theory that nothing would happen in that book by accident.

  CLUTE: In my non-fiction, there is a deliberate refusal of monadic theme criticism, and in fiction that refusal is inherent to the way fiction should be written. You close as many doors as you can, or you can never start. But then you start and those closed doors or those half-opened doors turn out to be your material. They're not the locks. They're your material. They are the lock, you are the key. They're how you begin to tell, as Stravinsky said in the early 20th century that, within limits, every constraint is a freedom. He was most free to do exactly what he wanted to when he was following rules.

  SCHWEITZER: If you are saying how science fiction should be written according to your theory, then surely some creative type will come along and ignore you completely.

  CLUTE: Oh yeah, if it were the case that I was in a position of saying that I think SF should be written in a particular way. But I don't think I have ever suggested that X is the way to do Y, as though any formal description of SF were a haiku that would cover the whole of the reality of the thing examined. I have certainly made suggestions, of course, like anyone. I was on a panel about urban fantasy, and my way of understanding of urban fantasy proved quite different than that of most relatively young writers. But when I said urban fantasy was a way of narrating a modal understanding of how we live immersed in the world cities of our time, I wasn't suggesting that the only way to write it was in conscious adherence to that. Urban fantasy in the hands of 2011 is a narrative vaguer and far more profound [Clute says in an ironic tone] than that.

  SCHWEITZER: What I have in mind is the relationship between the definition and the actual creative act. If you set out to write sword & sorcery, for example, and you're writing to the definition, then you are probably defining the story form by its clichés. It's defined as having these elements, and if you take them away it's not sword & sorcery. I should think that the thing for the writer to do is ignore theory and ignore the prescribed model, and just write.

  CLUTE: You sound like a fish that has managed to escape the aquarium and thinks it can continue to breathe without some really good advice about oxygen. I don't see anybody can write as someone who doesn't know or pays no attention to any of the rules. I think we are always paying attention to the rules. I think this does not mean that we are rigidly adhering to a written down set of maxims. But we're paying attention to the rules all the time, especially in the fields that we work in.

  SCHWEITZER: Do you think that there are simply certain universal traits of narrative which work and really don't change? I think so myself. If you read, say, Apuleius's The Golden Ass, which is almost two thousand years old, it reads remarkably like a modern fantasy novel, a Terry Pratchett novel, at least until the last chapter.

  CLUTE: This seems to be absolutely clear, when you see it at that level and it's hugely difficult to put into words. I keep on trying, myself, to work out ways to lay down a few things. I have certainly laid down for my own satisfaction a variety of ways of trying to get at - to use a term that apparently I invented, though I was not aware of inventing it because it just seemed to be a word - what makes material storyable. To discover what is storyable and how it becomes storyable out of discourse and what is the particular, intense, magical affinity between a story and the way the human psyche works, that's sort of beyond me to capture, but I don't know if it isn't beyond a lot of people. All we know is that it's there. We begin to intuit that the more purely visible the story is when you're telling it, the more the story is like magic. We are story creatures. We live in story-shaped worlds. We tell story-shaped stories. "And then, and then, and then." Then is miraculous.

  SCHWEITZER: What do you make of various writers who attempt to dispense with narrative? How far can you cut away narrative forms and still have something of interest?

  CLUTE: For me, not very far. I am very glad to know that certain extremisms do exist. It's like knowing that there is a lighthouse, warning you not to go in a particular direction. The light shines brightly. It's a benefice, but it's also a warning. But I find most forms of that kind of experimental writing - and in music too, experimental music that has pushed the various acoustic and mathematical non-narrative potentials to the uttermost - seem to be a kind of cultural moment: not a discovery that is the road forward but a marker of our extremity and confession of nearly fatal self-consciousness; but also a clearing of the communal throat. The adventurers of the twentieth century didn't like to think of themselves as clearing the throat, but although we write now with greater knowledge of all of the discoveries made, we do not adhere to those discoveries.

  SCHWEITZER: This suggests an idea which has caused some controversy at times, which is that experimental fiction is actually a very familiar path. That is, once in a generation someone says, "We will get rid of all that narrative stuff." Then they try, and the audience goes away, and the writers who survive are the ones who learn to write narrative. Then another twenty years or so goes by, and it happens again.

  CLUTE: I think this had been legitimately been going on since the end of the 19th century, in waves, but not exactly repetitive. The twentieth century required, I think, that we recognize that to describe things had become suddenly more difficult. Our world is difficult. So therefore there are all sorts of modernist redoubts, fictional redoubts, like Finnegans Wake, or many other difficult books which are meant to be difficult, because difficulty is the nature of the Thing Itself, once exposed. That I find interesting, but obviously SF (this is another topic) is anything but modernist. I do think that the greater texts of fantastika, from Franz Kafta to Gene Wolfe, are intrinsicate with a modernist understanding that the world is shite, and the world cannot be understood, and that we lack a matter and we lack a history and that we are in the badlands. But the difficulty they force upon us is making us see.

  SCHWEITZER: I think we can safely say that any serious story comes out of the writer's vision and the writer's life, not a matter of being self-consciously experimental, but more of "I'm going to write this story and this is what this particular story requires. To hell with the rules."

  CLUTE: Yeah. Okay. I did think for a second there that you were moving toward a critical fallacy, conspicuous over the past 100 years or so, which basically states that the writer cannot write about what the writer does not know or has not experienced. This weird presumption drives most of the idiot theories about Shakespeare not being Shakespeare, and is enabled through a deep misapprehension of what it is a writer does: because although a writer can theoretically reflect direct knowledge in some direct way, most writers never really try to climb that asymptote: the closer you get to a recovered truth, the more abyssal the gap between you and telling it. Shakespeare did not have to see the seacoast of Bohemia to write about the seacoast of Bohemia.

  SCHWEITZER: I suspect that the reason the nut-cases go after Shakespeare is the same reason the science cranks go after Einstein. They always pick the biggest target. If you debunk an obscure figure, no on
e will care.

  CLUTE: It reminds you of people with recovered memories. Always Cleopatra or Caesar.

  SCHWEITZER: Yes, it is never the kitchen maid. Well . . . so, how do you think they'll misunderstand science fiction in a couple of centuries?

  CLUTE: I think SF will be misunderstood, certainly American science fiction of the pomp years from '25 to '75 will be misunderstood if it is thought to be a fair representation of - how to put it politely? - if it is thought that somehow the people who wrote engineering science fiction in the 20th century were doing so in entirely good faith. I think almost all of them are denying something. I think their works whiff of denial. I think they know damn well that the futures they were advocating were not only pretty monstrous, but also impossible to achieve. In the real world, engineering solutions are drowned by side effects. You can't create utopia by pre-planning. You can't prophesy the field of the future very well if you're an engineering mind, because engineers solve problems. They don't anticipate side effects, which is to say they don't get the world. That's not their job.

  I think SF will be properly understood in its great years as the most astonishingly incompetent attempt to understand its subject-matter that any self-articulated genre has ever managed to present. Science fiction writers did an astonishingly bad job of prophesying the field of the future. I brought this up in a talk I gave a few weeks ago in Norway about Clifford D. Simak. The "City" stories that were published in the mid-'40s in Astounding, in which it was made clear that Simak thought and that Campbell thought and that his readers thought and that the episteme thought that it was fair to say that cars would start dwindling away about 1960 because they were no longer necessary and people became bored with them; that human beings would begin to abandon the great cities of the world - the "huddling places," which is what Simak had the effrontery to call them from - into what seem to later readers to be nothing more than McMansions with trout streams, decorously spread across rural regions, dislocating the farmers who aren't needed anymore because we had yummy hydroponics now; that loyal robots would replace the nine tenths of the world population who still (even in 2011) starve so that our golf courses can be irrigated; and that this was not only a plausible representation of the changing world from 1944 on, but one that any rational American properly longed for. In 1944 Americans in particular were demented. They thought that their future was going to work without side-effects. Science fiction, the genre that was going to shape our dreams so that we could shape the future did not notice the interstate system. It did not notice Walmart. It didn't notice. Didn't notice.