All today's science-fiction writers are deeply indebted to the dominant Fifties writers, Bob insists, to Bester and Sturgeon and Sheckley and Pohl and the rest, "for the fundamental body of ideas and technique with which they work today," a thesis well served by the nine novels selected here.
What may surprise is how well these novels hold up. Witnessing corporate artful dodger Mitch Courtenay prepare for battle—"As I dressed that morning I ran over in my mind the long list of statistics, evasions, and exaggerations that they would expect in my report"—it occurs to us that Pohl's and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants isn't showing its sixty years much at all. English 101's verisimilitude and Aristotle's recognitions right there on the page. And its teeth are still good.
The wondrous voice and language of Theodore Sturgeon gleam untarnished in More Than Human :
"The idiot lived in a black and gray world, punctuated by the white lightning of hunger and the flickering of fear. His clothes were old and many-windowed. Here peeped a shinbone, sharp as a cold chisel, and there in the torn coat were ribs like the fingers of a fist. He was tall and flat. His eyes were calm and his face was dead."
Leigh Brackett's bildungsroman still grabs you from the first sentence, The Long Tomorrow , a template by which we measure hundreds of tales of social repression and relapsed civilizations. Richard Matheson's The Shrinking Man , diminished to less than a pinpoint, gains vision of the world's true vastness and possibilities:
"He stood in speechless awe looking at the new world with its vivid splashes of vegetation, its scintillant hills, its towering trees, its sky of shifting hues…Scott Carey ran into his new world, searching."
The Chilean poet Vincente Huidobros wrote: Invent new worlds & be careful what you say.
Exactly.
And that's just the first volume. We move then from social satire, shrinking men, shriveled civilizations and inchoate superbeings, to dramatized theology, political intrigues, the nature of identity, and individuals suspended in wars so all-embracing as to be the only existence they can ever know.
Talking about books that changed one's life is right up there with "making a difference" and "giving something back" on my list of blathermouth cliches. But two of these novels proved of tremendous importance to me. More Than Human , along with much of Sturgeon's work, first stirred within me the urge to write, and first brought me to consider that such might be possible. When years later, an earnest poet, I turned back to the science fiction I'd loved as a child, it was this novel and Bester's The Stars My Destination that I read and read again. Breathing them in, getting them in my blood.
"Bester strips the dross from classic mechanisms of fiction," William Gibson writes on the LoA website. "It made most of the rest of its assumed genre look hick."
And of More Than Human , Kit Reed remarks:
"It's still risky, exciting and fresh.… He showed me how to open [my stories] up.… He uses timing, cadence, selection, everything at hand to shape his story so organically that there's no separating the story from the telling."
This is about imagination and story. We mature, we create ourselves as human, by mimicking those around us, form gradually becoming content. We attain civilization by identifying with other individuals of our group. And we compose our own individuality, our selves, by patching together the stories we find around us: structures upon which we will superimpose our lives.
The stories we choose, or allow to be chosen for us, are important.
And that does often seem a central theme in these novels. Father Ruiz of James Blish's A Case of Conscience struggles to reconcile the stories by which he's led his life with the new reality he sees around him. Bester's Gully Foyle rewrites the given narrative of his life. The problematic robot of Algis Budrys's Who? is patently a revision, perhaps a whole new edition, of Lucas Martino. Robert Heinlein's Double Star with its spitballing actor is about becoming what we pretend to be, as a person and as a society. In The Big Time , Fritz Leiber's characters try to see one another and selves in the fog of stories that seem all event, with no glue, no true narrative, to hold those events together.
Leigh Brackett's juvenile protagonist in The Long Tomorrow speaks for all of us forever reaching, hoping to lay hands on the story that will keep us afloat: "Oh God, you make the ones like Brother James who never question, and you make the ones like Esau who never believe, and why do you have to make the in-between ones like me?"
Not to say that, for all this collection's fine representation of the period and the excellence of the novels, there are no flaws or faultlines. The legs work great, but as with all of us so grandly aging, there's the occasional limp and stagger. And sometimes, for a sentence or two, we kinda, you know, forget what we were going to say?
So, yeah, The Space Merchants's loose-jointed structure may creak in the wind a bit and leave readers at times wanting. Stereotypical Fifties male attitudes therein may rankle others. Here and elsewhere, the humor is often broad and can fall flat. A pervasive Cold War presence tends to anchor the Budrys to the past, as do strains of Freudian psychology in Bester and Sturgeon, while, by contrast, the very un grounded nature of the war and of existence itself in Leiber's novel, along with the demands it makes on the reader, may frustrate. Admittedly, too, the language does upon occasion cluck and sputter. But for the most part—though they do occur—this literature is not about great prose and beautiful sentences. This is about story: stories that strive to find their way into recesses of mind that harbor our great myths, right up there alongside Jung's archetypes, and to remain.
Tim Powers says of Who? that "Algis Budrys was one of the handful of literary geniuses who have found that science fiction is the field most open to the exploration of their deepest personal convictions." These novels were written to sell, yes, and to be read; but there is to each a sense beyond the commercial, a sense of necessity, of an individual leaning close to tell us what matters .
I tell my students that science fiction, arealist fiction of every sort, puts a frame around mankind's existence, the same thing that all literature does, but then pulls back, well outside the frame, to have another look. In an unassuming, natural, story-based manner, science fiction can ask the big questions. What are we? Where do we come from, where will we go? What is identity and can we buy some? Must I live the life dealt me, or can I trade up? How do I learn? Is what I see real?
In one of my first published stories, disguised as an aged, world-weary poet, I wrote, "I suppose when I was a young man I cared nothing for history of any sort." All literature builds on what came before, of course, but not in a progressive manner. The arts never reach some pinnacle of activity and achievement; instead, they forever circle back, loop and reboot, repeat themselves, put on new hats, reinvent themselves. Every journey is as much from as it is to . I was fortunate enough to read these novels fresh off the tree, and eventually to meet several of the writers. Many of those writers are gone. The books remain. Perhaps it's important that today's readers and writers, cruising faultless interstates, glance in their rear view mirrors at the county roads we have so recently left?
Collections such as this from The Library of America bring us to consider anew what we've perhaps passed by too quickly, or what we've too long taken for granted. Connie Willis's comments on Double Star speaks to all these novels: "Heinlein's novels of the 1940s and '50s shaped every single science fiction writer of my generation and everyone currently writing science fiction."
Damon Knight said that as writers we're magpies, stealing shiny things from other nests. Lots of shine here. Gold we are still mining.
* * *
PLUMAGE FROM PEGASUS
By Paul Di Filippo | 1150 words
Kozmic Kickstarter
PROJECT 103,047
CROSS-BRANE CHORUS
PROJECT STATEMENT: Assemble, rehearse, and take on the road a chorus of identical individuals from several timelines.
PROJECT FUNDING: 3.9 5 megacoins.
PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Hi, Ki
ckstarters! My name is Hayden Planarian, and I'm a well-established singer, having performed at such venues as Trump Marsport, Hard Rock Café Puppis, and Bellagio Casino Ursa Major. My dream right now is to recruit approximately fifty of my doppelgängers from across various parallel branes to form a unique chorus of myselves, then conduct a galactic tour. I would not draw any salary from the Kickstarter funds, but instead subsist on whatever ticket sales accrue, divided equally among myself and my "sisters." My major expenses are 1) securing access to cross-brane portals (approximate power demands per minute of active usage is point zero five percent of standard annual solar output); and 2) hiring translators, bodyguards, and diplomats, as well as providing bribes, on those branes that deviate significantly and perhaps dangerously from my own.
REWARDS
PLEDGE 1 KILOCOIN OR MORE: live playback parrot with my latest suite of songs installed.
PLEDGE 1 10 KILOCOINS OR MORE: inclusion of donor in a role in my promotional Multiverse TV augmented reality software.
PLEDGE 1 MEGACOIN OR MORE: house concert for you and ten of your friends (methane-breathers excluded).
PLEDGE 1 10 MEGACOINS OR MORE: one-night stand with myself and any desired number of my counterparts.
PERCENT FUNDED: variable across multiple branes.
PROJECT 450,329
UPLIFT SLIMEMOLDS OF
UPSILON ANDROMEDAE VII
TO SENTIENCE
PROJECT STATEMENT: The Society for the Extension of Turing-ready Species wishes to confer sophont-hood on the highest lifeform of Upsilon Andromedae VII.
PROJECT FUNDING: 1.5 10 gigacoins.
PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: As the wavefront of SETS works its way across the galaxy, our dedicated missionaries have encountered many species that were just trembling on the verge of sentience, and needed little more than a stern lecture from one of our Monoliths or the introduction of a non-cannibalistic mating ritual to make the leap to true self-awareness. But with the slimemolds of Upsilon Andromedae VII, we are faced with a truly superhuman task. We cannot use genetic engineering to impose our own ineluctably biased standards of sentience on a species that can barely yet climb a simple ramp, but must instead rely on accelerated Darwinian evolution in situ . Although the chronofield generators are fairly inexpensive, this project will take eons, and we must budget for continuous Uatu-level monitoring during that period.
REWARDS
PLEDGE 1 MEGACOIN OR MORE: receive small terrarium full of rudimentary slimemold inhabitants.
PLEDGE 1 10 MEGACOINS OR MORE: determine which kind of economic system any particular slimemold nation will utilize.
PLEDGE 1 GIGACOIN OR MORE: be allowed to destroy one slimemold city of your choice, when city-building stage is reached.
PLEDGE 1 10 GIGACOINS OR MORE: become the supreme deity of one fully self-aware slimemold society, with all associated privileges.
PERCENT FUNDED: .9%
PROJECT 1,333,807
RECREATE ENTIRE 25-PART GEORGE LUCAS STAR WARS MYTHOS ON A 1:1 SCALE WITH REALITY
PROJECT STATEMENT: To emulate to a high degree of precison what will become, in effect, a live-role-playing simulation of the entire canon of ancient Star Wars "movies."
PROJECT FUNDING: 8.620 petacoins
PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Galactic civilization having finally reached a developmental stage that matches or surpasses that depicted in the High Chaotic Period entertainment franchise known as the Star Wars Mythos , it is now finally possible to "swede up," as the period slang would have it, a remake of the entire saga, a production that completely eschews special effects of any kind, thus providing a more authentic experience for the dedicated acolytes of this cult. (Small cosmetic enhancements and prosthetics will be allowed to bring contemporary characters into complete conformity with the originals.) We need to purchase many, many items in advance, such as several planets and Death Stars for destruction; to hire millions of extras; and to work out the last few bugs from the design of the double-bladed Lightsaber so that its users do not instantly kill themselves upon activation of the unwieldy weapon. After an internecine interplanetary civil war between rival factions of our team, we have cut down our original cost estimates by deciding to forego hiring any scriptwriters to improve the dialogue.
REWARDS
PLEDGE 1 TERACOIN OR MORE: date with either Han Solo, Chewbacca, or slave Leia.
PLEDGE 1 10 TERACOINS OR MORE: ten one-hour life-coach sessions with Yoda.
PLEDGE 1 PETACOIN OR MORE: allowed to kill Jar Jar Binks after LARP recreation is ended.
PLEDGE 1 10 PETACOINS OR MORE: Darth Vader will father your heir.
PERCENT FUNDED: "Do or do not…there is no try."
PROJECT 89,234,553
BUILD DYSON SPHERE AROUND 51 PEGASI
PROJECT STATEMENT: We intend to disassemble all planets in this system with the exception of exoEarth 51 Peg b for the construction of a totally sealed adamantium, energy-sequestering and causal-blockage globe around the primary.
PROJECT FUNDING: 5.825 zettacoins.
PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: The best stochastics for 51 Peg b indicate an imminent Singularity incident within the next three years, plus or minus 10%. The League to Preserve Baseline Humanity wants to shield the planet from contact with the rest of the galaxy—and vice versa—well before that time, while still allowing its residents maximum developmental freedom, under the terms of the United Planets charter (the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of computational density" clause). The well-being and stability of all systems inside a ten-thousand-light-year sphere with 51 Pegasi at its center is our primary concern.
REWARDS
PLEDGE 1 EXACOIN OR MORE: one (1) rivet to be manufactured with donor's DNA incorporated into its alloy.
PLEDGE 1 10 EXACOINS OR MORE: likeness of donor engraved on inner surface of the Dyson Sphere at astronomical magnitude.
PLEDGE 1 ZETTACOIN OR MORE: deed to one billion square kilometers of exterior shell surface. No liability for harm, mutation, or contagion intended.
PLEDGE 1 10 ZETTACOINS OR MORE: rights to address one question per solar year to the 51 Peg b Singularity Mind. No answer or utility of answer guaranteed.
PERCENT FUNDED: 115%
PROJECT 932,456,834,192,128
TURN E. L. JAMES IX FAN FICTION INTO BEST-SELLING URBAN FANTASY NOVEL
PROJECT STATEMENT: I have written over two thousand pages of fan fiction based on the novel Shades of Ultraviolet by E. L. James IX, and I need to revise it to feature supernatural elements.
PROJECT FUNDING: 10,000 zeptocoins.
PRESENTATION PRÉCIS: Although the franchise begun by the original E. L. James and continued by her dynastic successors owed its origin to the supernaturally replete Twilight series, all E. L. James, Inc., properties since that first repurposing have been rigorously stripped of any paranormal elements. I was inspired recently (by sales figures for paranormal romances) to conceive of restoring these occult plot and character tropes to my own clonal iteration of the sampling of the mashup of the slash homage. The small sum I am asking for will cover merely my caffeine consumption, interweb service fees, and purchase of inspirational fantasy trilogies during the revision process, much of which will be facilitated by market-based, reader-polled, artificially creative content- provider software packages.
REWARDS
PLEDGE 10 YOCTOCOINS OR MORE: one line drawing of my novel's heroine produced by my cousin, as featured on deviantART.
PLEDGE 100 YOCTOCOINS OR MORE: naming rights to one human character.
PLEDGE 10 ZEPTOCOINS OR MORE: naming rights to one sexy supernatural character.
PLEDGE 100 ZEPTOCOINS OR MORE: hologram of the author in a genuine thoatskin corset.
PERCENT FUNDED: -99%
* * *
FILMS: ALL MAN-EATERS GREAT AND SMALL
By Kathi Maio | 1964 words
WHEN NOT viewing films for this column, my tastes still gravitate toward horror movies—but not the zombie, monster, or slasher films you might
associate with the term. My preferences run more toward environmental and social documentaries. My online queue is full of them. They vary from the quirky and personal (example: Judith Helfand and Daniel B. Gold's 2002 Blue Vinyl , which considers the environmental and medical implications of ubiquitous PVC house siding) to the politely professorial (example: Al Gore's 2006 Oscar-winning climate change lecture, An Inconvenient Truth ) to those that are preachy yet oriented toward problem-solving (example: Peter Byck's 2010 feature, Carbon Nation ).
I'm not that choosy. The topic can be the death and disappearance of pollinators ( Vanishing of the Bees ), the health consequences of industrialized food ( King Corn, Food, Inc. , etc.) or Earth's mounting fresh water crisis ( Flow ). Whatever the topic, such nonfiction films have the power to scare the bejesus out of me in ways that Freddy Krueger's antics never did.
Fantasy & Science Fiction Mar-Apr 2013 Page 28