by IGMS
SCHWEITZER: It didn't notice the internet either. Not even ten years out. Did anybody write about the internet in 1980?
CLUTE: By then they were beginning to write about something like it, but they should have been writing about information in terms of miniaturization through the transistor long before that. John Brunner did a little bit, but having a John Brunner around is a bit like Chinese civilization. How many times do you have to invent gunpowder before gunpowder actually starts to actually blow up the enemy's forts? It took several times in Chinese civilization. It doesn't matter if there's an occasional example, touted by a contrarian. What never happened was that Brunner etc. made any real difference to the way stories were being written. You may get hints of an information explosion, but pretty tentative. To return to my own idee fixe: there is no hint of the transportation explosion, the catalytic explosion that occurred between 1900 and 2000 that we are still busy normalizing ourselves to, just in time for the oil to run out.
SCHWEITZER: I must have missed most of this on Fictionmags, because the most bizarre example I would have brought up would have been David H. Keller's "The Revolt of the Pedestrians," which, if you read it very carefully, comes off as a Gernsbackian technological story as written by Poppy Z. Brite. Do you know it?
CLUTE: I don't know the story.
SCHWEITZER: It's one of those great ex-classics. It used to be regarded as a major story in the field. It was published in 1928, and is set in a future in which the automobile has totally revolutionized everything, so that no one ever gets out of their cars. They spend their entire lives in little personal go-carts. Cities are transformed. There are no stairs anymore, only ramps. It's as if everybody was in handicapped carts, all the time. Their legs whither away. But there is one tribe of Pedestrians in the Ozarks somewhere, and they are the last walking people on Earth. It also turns out that all this civilization runs on broadcast power from one source. There are no backups. No one has any batteries. As the Pedestrians feel threatened, they ultimately shut off all the power and leave everyone to starve to death in the dark. It's one of those feel-good-about-genocide stories that you get in the early pulps. But it's even more bizarre than that. There is a young man of the Pedestrians who infiltrates the Automobilists. How he gets into one of those carts and hides his legs is difficult to imagine. How he goes to the bathroom, we won't ask.
CLUTE: Perhaps he would have told us if his editors had allowed him to. Keller was a piece of work. How long is this story?
SCHWEITZER: A longish short story. But the really bizarre part - this is the Poppy Brite part - is that when the lights go out and about 99% of the human race is doomed to die - that's seen as okay - the other secretary's erotic passion bursts out. The spy reveals himself to be male. That she could be a lesbian is not thinkable. Before she dies, she wants one last romantic embrace, which she gets, whereupon she ecstatically rips out his jugular with her teeth and wallows in his blood. This is a Gernsback story. I don't think anybody read it carefully at the time or understood it, but it is all about the transformative power of mass transportation.
CLUTE: No. I doubt that story was really well understood at the time. I am hearing it in retrospect clearly as a transportation story, but within the context of 1928 it is also very much a rather imaginative dystopian story, because a lot of the imagery seems to dramatise how you become robotic in a dystopia, with one power source, one voice telling you what to do, et cetera, et cetera, and rigid role divisions. So it looks to me, in listening to it, what you're saying, is that David Keller - who was a bad writer most of the time, but occasionally a very interesting writer - did some really interesting things there. But it would not have been read at that time as a transportation story - all the transportation things would be seen as exemplifications of totalitarian dystopianism, in a pulp way. He might have meant both, but he would not have been read as having much to do with transportation.
SCHWEITZER: Why do you think science fiction does such a bad job of understanding its own subject matter, or understanding the future? It can't be because the writers are lazy. Some of them are, but many are not.
CLUTE: No, as I said, I think it's because a lot of them are deniers. I think that over the last fifty years a lot of professional science fiction has been written by people who knew better in terms of the simplicities of outcome, in terms of the ability for technological fixes to work, in terms of the understanding of the forms of SF as actually useful and clever ways of not only entertaining folk - which is not a lie to do - but of telling the truth. I think a lot of them knew and know better. That doesn't cover the whole of the genre though history, because a lot of people believe what they say, and a lot of people don't write that kind of stuff anyway. As regards earlier decades, it's simplistic just to say we were all demented in 1940, but it's not simplistic to say that some SF writers, for historical or accidental reasons, in the States, got hitched to the engineering wheel.
SCHWEITZER: Was it that these writers were deniers, or that they were not allowed to tell the truth for marketing reasons? That is, if they told the truth, no one would buy their stories.
CLUTE: One needs to be kinder than that. That was an inflammatory thing to say.
SCHWEITZER: I mean that they were not allowed to be honest with their material, for marketing reasons.
CLUTE: I don't know, and I don't know whether they're deniers as we've come to know the term, but I do think that a lot of people over the last fifty years were persuaded to write stories they knew better than to believe in. Maybe they wanted to believe. It is like this gambler's refusal to give up on some scheme, even though the house always wins. SF gambled against the house in those years of its pomp, gambling that planning could fix things, at certain kinds of utopian thinking actually worked well enough to be followed, even though it kept on not working in reality (even though the cars did not dwindle away), and even though you had to ignore the world transforming under your feet like snakes and becoming more and more irreducibly complex to the perception. These stories, Analog still publishes them, these stories are still happening. There are still writers who do them. But they are shadow people. They are at the end of a particular era.
SCHWEITZER: In the tone of what you're saying, you're describing science fiction in the past tense, as if its glory years are over.
CLUTE: It has been addressed to me before that I have called SF dead. I don't think the real literature of the fantastic is dead. I think SF as a genre has been, as it were, colonized, overgrown, made irrelevant, made smaller, bigger, and become so complex and diffuse as a series of texts, not as a series of release-points. I have felt, while doing The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, that basically there are two encyclopedias. There is the one I am focusing on very hard right now to finish off, which is the intention to anatomize and deeply to honor the American SF, in particular, of the 20th century and to maintain and to rehabilitate where necessary not only the entries on the authors, but also the theme entries that attempt to map that twentieth century enterprise. The second Encyclopedia of SF is the encyclopedia that attempts to create a series of models of theme entries and author entries and entry structures in general that will serve as a series of lattice-works over the complexities of the badlands that we inhabit now. Though the new pattern of entries will meld imperceptibly, I hope, into the old, it is the new which will try to give openings into the kind of SF someone like China Mieville or Elizabeth Hand writes. For you cannot really retrofit them comfortably into the twentieth century. Not that SF was ever exactly fixed. Do you know the five-finger exploding palm device in Kill Bill?
SCHWEITZER: No.
CLUTE: You don't know the five-finger exploding palm device in Kill Bill!? Ah. It's this ultimate move in martial arts. You go . . . like that [makes a motion] . . . in a particular way and your assailant does not know what has happened, but after five full steps, he or she drops dead. I think science fiction as a coherent enterprise suffered that particular move in 1957 with Sputnik.
; SCHWEITZER: It doesn't know it's dead yet?
CLUTE: It is hard to define what a step is in the genre, but maybe the five steps have already been walked through and that particular thing is dead, and maybe we have another step to go, but basically the dragging of the space race, the dragging of the engineering dream of linear expansion back into the real world and dirtying it up with laundry, with all sorts of debris and real-life politics well, meant that that was the point where the blow had been struck. That was when it was killed.
SCHWEITZER: What does a young science fiction writer today - someone who is about twenty and just starting out - have to face? Do they try to reanimate a corpse?
CLUTE: If they are trying to write YA novels based on Heinlein, they are trying to revive corpses, yes. They may be great young adult novels, and Heinlein had elements of greatness as a writer, but I think there is something zombie about Heinlein YA Redivivus. But if you are a young writer and you are actually trying to write a serious story, you should just think of yourself as going out into the world and trying real hard to recognize something, and if we recognize something really well, some tiny evanescent flash of now we can make work as a meme, we'll be writing SF, as we understand it now, which no longer focuses on the particular half-century of pomp we love and mourn and bury.
SCHWEITZER: Thanks, John.
Letter From The Editor
Issue 25 - November 2011
by Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
* * *
Welcome to issue 25 of IGMS. There's so much to tell I hardly know where to begin, but let's start with the schedule, since this issue is 30 days later than expected. For a variety of reasons, we've permanently shifted our schedule, so from now on issues will be published for January, March, May, July, September, and November. Issue 25 being published as the November issue instead of the October issue is simply to reflect that new schedule and shouldn't affect your subscription in any way. In the unlikely event that it does, please let us know immediately and we will take care of it.
In addition to being the beginning of our new schedule, issue 25 also marks IGMS's 6th anniversary. Six years! Wow. That makes me optimistic that this whole internet publishing thing might be for real. What next? Electronic versions of whole entire books? (Kidding. We know THAT will never happen.)
Speaking of books, within the next few weeks we'll also be celebrating the release of the InterGalactic Awards Anthology - Vol. 1. It's a collection of the winners of the 2010 IGMS InterGalactic Awards Reader's Poll (both the stories and the artwork), plus popular stories from the years before the award was launched. Edited by Orson Scott Card and yours truly (Ed Schubert) and featuring an all new introduction by Peter S. Beagle, InterGalactic Awards Anthology - Vol. 1 will be available from Spotlight Publishing shortly after Thanksgiving.
Getting back to our 6th anniversary issue, we're pleased to bring you the following:
Cover story "Under the Surface" by Nina Kiriki Hoffman (which is also our audio story, read by IGMS regular, Tom Barker). "Under the Surface" tells the tale of a young girl from a family with powers tied to nature, and how a monumental natural disaster forces her to make choices and grow up faster than anyone could have predicted.
"Walks Before Greatness" by Kate Marshall is a fantasy tale about a young girl who struggles as she literally Walks-Before-Greatness (her older sister) and how this young girl comes to peace with her role in the world.
"Nanoparticle Jive" by Tomas Martin is a near-future sf story about a graduate student in the sciences who learns a few things about the power -- good and bad -- of social media.
"Counterclockwise" by Alethea Kontis (our resident princess and book-reviewer) is a timetwistedsteampunklovestory (yes, that's all supposed to be one word) that also turns out to be a yrostevolknupmaetsdetsiwtemit. (You could sit here and try to puzzle that out or you could just go enjoy the story.)
Part Two of "Whiteface" by Jared Adams concludes the novelette started in issue 24; it's about a father's quest to find a place in the world for his son, a son who repeatedly chooses the path of the outcast, first as an unknowing child, but also later in life with the full knowledge of not only the ramifications of his choices, but the full knowledge of his father's displeasure with those choices.
Darrell Schweitzer interviews John Clute, whose articles on speculative fiction have appeared in various publications since the 1970s. Clute is co-editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (with Peter Nicholls) and The Encyclopedia of Fantasy (with John Grant), as well as The Illustrated Encyclopedia Of Science Fiction, all of which won Hugo Awards for Best Non-Fiction.
Last, but by no means least, we bring you part two of our sneak-peek at Orson Scott Card's forthcoming novella Shadows In Flight, a direct sequel to his hugely popular novel, Shadow of the Giant. Shadows In Flight is due out from Tor in January of 2012, but IGMS is previewing it, presenting chapter one in the last issue, and chapter two in this issue.
And as we go into 2012, be on the lookout for more new features from IGMS. Details are still being finalized, but we are looking at a variety of ideas to bring you even more content in each and every issue, with no increase in the cost of a subscription. More great stories, more great articles, more great greatness -- all for the same low price. Stay tuned!
Edmund R. Schubert
Editor, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show
P.S. As usual, we've collected essays from the authors in this issue and will post them on our blog SideShowFreaks.blogspot.com. Feel free to drop by and catch The Story Behind The Stories, where the authors talk about the creation of their tales.
For more from Orson Scott Card's
InterGalactic Medicine Show visit:
http://www.InterGalacticMedicineShow.com
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