Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  I thought for a while that I was feeling possessive about Pink. I know I had done so a little at first. Pink was my special friend, the one who had helped me out from the first, who for several days was the only one I could talk to. It was her hands that had taught me handtalk. I know I felt stirrings of territoriality the first time she lay in my lap while another man made love to her. But if there was any signal the Kellerites were adept at reading, it was that one. It went off like an alarm bell in Pink, the man, and the women and men around me. They soothed me, coddled me, told me in every language that it was all right, not to feel ashamed. Then the man in question began loving me. Not Pink, but the man. An observational anthropologist would have had subject matter for a whole thesis. Have you seen the films of baboons’ social behavior? Dogs do it, too. Many male mammals do it. When males get into dominance battles, the weaker can defuse the aggression by submitting, by turning tail and surrendering. I have never felt so defused as when that man surrendered the object of our clash of wills—Pink—and turned his attention to me. What could I do? What I did was laugh, and he laughed, and soon we were all laughing, and that was the end of territoriality.

  That’s the essence of how they solved most “human nature” problems at Keller. Sort of like an oriental martial art; you yield, roll with the blow so that your attacker takes a pratfall with the force of the aggression. You do that until the attacker sees that the initial push wasn’t worth the effort, that it was a pretty silly thing to do when no one was resisting you. Pretty soon he’s not Tarzan of the Apes, but Charlie Chaplin. And he’s laughing.

  So it wasn’t Pink and her lovely body and my realization that she could never be all mine to lock away in my cave and defend with a gnawed-off thighbone. If I’d persisted in that frame of mind she would have found me about as attractive as an Amazonian leech, and that was a great incentive to confound the behaviorists and overcome it.

  So I was back to those people who had visited and left, and what did they see that I didn’t see?

  Well, there was something pretty glaring. I was not part of the organism, no matter how nice the organism was to me. I had no hopes of ever becoming a part, either. Pink had said it in the first week. She felt it herself, to a lesser degree. She could not ***, though that fact was not going to drive her away from Keller. She had told me that many times in shorthand and confirmed it in bodytalk. If I left, it would be without her.

  Trying to stand outside and look at it, I felt pretty miserable. What was I trying to do, anyway? Was my goal in life really to become a part of a deaf-blind commune? I was feeling so low by that time that I actually thought of that as denigrating, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary. I should be out in the real world where the real people lived; not these freakish cripples.

  I backed off from that thought very quickly. I was not totally out of my mind, just on the lunatic edges. These people were the best friends I’d ever had, maybe the only ones. That I was confused enough to think that of them even for a second worried me more than anything else. It’s possible that it’s what pushed me finally into a decision. I saw a future of growing disillusion and unfulfilled hopes. Unless I was willing to put out my eyes and ears, I would always be on the outside. I would be the blind and deaf one. I would be the freak. I didn’t want to be a freak.

  * * * *

  They knew I had decided to leave before I did. My last few days turned into a long goodbye, with a loving farewell implicit in every word touched to me. I was not really sad, and neither were they. It was nice, like everything they did. They said goodbye with just the right mix of wistfulness and life-must-go-on, and hope-to-touch-you-again.

  Awareness of Touch scratched on the edges of my mind. It was not bad, just as Pink had said. In a year or two I could have mastered it.

  But I was set now. I was back in the life groove that I had followed for so long. Why is it that once having decided what I must do, I’m afraid to reexamine my decision? Maybe because the original decision cost me so much that I didn’t want to go through it again.

  I left quietly in the night for the highway and California. They were out in the fields, standing in that circle again. Their fingertips were farther apart than ever before. The dogs and children hung around the edges like beggars at a banquet. It was hard to tell which looked more hungry and puzzled.

  * * * *

  The experiences at Keller did not fail to leave their mark on me. I was unable to live as I had before. For a while I thought I could not live at all, but I did. I was too used to living to take the decisive stop of ending my life. I would wait. Life had brought one pleasant thing to me; maybe it would bring another.

  I became a writer. I found I now had a better gift for communicating than I had before. Or maybe I had it now for the first time. At any rate, my writing came together and I sold. I wrote what I wanted to write, and was not afraid of going hungry. I took things as they came.

  I weathered the non-depression of ’97, when unemployment reached twenty percent and the government once more ignored it as a temporary downturn. It eventually upturned, leaving the jobless rate slightly higher than it had been the time before, and the time before that. Another million useless persons had been created with nothing better to do than shamble through the streets looking for beatings in progress, car smashups, heart attacks, murders, shootings, arson, bombings, and riots: the endlessly inventive street theater. It never got dull.

  I didn’t become rich, but I was usually comfortable. That is a social disease, the symptoms of which are the ability to ignore the fact that your society is developing weeping pustules and having its brains eaten out by radioactive maggots. I had a nice apartment in Matin County, out of sight of the machine-gun turrets. I had a car, at a time when they were beginning to be luxuries.

  I had concluded that my life was not destined to be all I would like it to be. We all make some sort of compromise, I reasoned, and if you set your expectations too high you are doomed to disappointment. It did occur to me that I was settling for something far from “high,” but I didn’t know what to do about it. I carried on with a mixture of cynicism and optimism that seemed about the right mix for me. It kept my motor running, anyway.

  I even made it to Japan, as I had intended in the first place.

  I didn’t find someone to share my life. There was only Pink for that, Pink and all her family, and we were separated by a gulf I didn’t dare cross. I didn’t even dare think about her too much. It would have been very dangerous to my equilibrium. I lived with it, and told myself that it was the way I was. Lonely.

  The years rolled on like a caterpillar tractor at Dachau, up to the penultimate day of the millennium.

  San Francisco was having a big bash to celebrate the year 2000. Who gives a shit that the city is slowly falling apart, that civilization is disintegrating into hysteria? Let’s have a party!

  I stood on the Golden Gate Dam on the last day of 1999 The sun was setting in the Pacific, on Japan, which had turned out to be more of the same but squared and cubed with neo-samurai. Behind me the first bombshells of a firework celebration of holocaust tricked up to look like festivity competed with the flare of burning buildings as the social and economic basket cases celebrated the occasion in their own way. The city quivered under the weight of misery, anxious to slide off along the fracture lines of some sub-cortical San Andrews Fault. Orbiting atomic bombs twinkled in my mind, up there somewhere, ready to plant mushrooms when we’d exhausted all the other possibilities.

  I thought of Pink.

  I found myself speeding through the Nevada desert, sweating, gripping the steering wheel. I was crying aloud but without sound, as I had learned to do at Keller.

  Can you go back?

  * * * *

  I slammed the citicar over the potholes in the dirt road. The car was falling apart. It was not built for this kind of travel. The sky was getting light in the east. It was the dawn of a new millennium. I stepped harder on the gas pedal and the car bucked
savagely. I didn’t care. I was not driving back down that road, not ever. One way or another, I was here to stay.

  I reached the wall and sobbed my relief. The last hundred miles had been a nightmare of wondering if it had been a dream. I touched the cold reality of the wall and it calmed me. Light snow had drifted over everything, grey in the early dawn.

  I saw them in the distance. All of them, out in the field where I had left them. No, I was wrong. It was only the children. Why had it seemed like so many at first?

  Pink was there. I knew her immediately, though I had never seen her in winter clothes. She was taller, filled out. She would be nineteen years old. There was a small child playing in the snow at her feet, and she cradled an infant in her arms. I went to her and talked to her hand.

  She turned to me, her face radiant with welcome, her eyes staring in a way I had never seen. Her hands flitted over me and her eyes did not move.

  “I touch you, I welcome you,” her hands said. “I wish you could have been here just a few minutes ago. Why did you go away, darling? Why did you stay away so long?” Her eyes were stones in her head. She was blind. She was deaf.

  All the children were. No, Pink’s child sitting at my feet looked up at me with a smile.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked when I got my breath. “Scar? Baldy? Green-eyes? And what’s happened? What’s happened to you?” I was tottering on the edge of a heart attack or nervous collapse or something. My reality felt in danger of dissolving.

  “They’ve gone,” she said. The word eluded me, but the context put it with the Mary Celeste and Roanoke, Virginia. It was complex, the way she used the word gone. It was like something she had said before: unattainable, a source of frustration like the one that had sent me running from Keller. But now her word told of something that was not hers yet, but was within her grasp. There was no sadness in it.

  “Gone?”

  “Yes. I don’t know where. They’re happy. They ***ed. It was glorious. We could only touch a part of it.”

  I felt my heart hammering to the sound of the last train pulling away from the station. My feet were pounding along the ties as it faded into the fog. Where are the Brigadoons of yesterday? I’ve never yet heard of a fairy tale where you can go back to the land of enchantment. You wake up, you find that your chance is gone. You threw it away. Fool! You only get one chance; that’s the moral, isn’t it?

  Pink’s hands laughed along my face.

  “Hold this part-of-me-who-speaks-mouth-to-nipple,” she said, and handed me her infant daughter. “I will give you a gift.”

  She reached up and lightly touched my ears with her cold fingers. The sound of the wind was shut out, and when her hands came away it never came back. She touched my eyes, shut out all the light, and I saw no more.

  We live in the lovely quiet and dark.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 1978 by Mercury Press, Inc.

  NEWS MAGAZINES OF THE SCIENCE FICTION FIELD, by Ian Randal Strock

  Industry news, trade journals, inside information: every field of endeavor and business has its own, and speculative fiction is no different. But where speculative fiction may differ from the rest is in the sense of community it engenders, both in its practitioners and its fans.

  So, while Variety focuses exclusively on the business of film, leaving the gossip and personal news to the general circulation magazines like Entertainment Weekly, in SF, our news sources combine both aspects.

  The SF community made its first appearance in the letter columns of the early SF pulp magazines, where discussions of the stories lead to the formation of in-person fan clubs. And soon thereafter came the first fanzine (fan-published magazine), called The Comet, which, according to Bob Tucker’s The Neo-Fan’s Guide (1955) was published during the birth of fandom in 1930. Soon after that came the first newszines, which were small and fairly frequent fanzines containing news of SF and fandom.

  Newszines broke out of their fanzine home, becoming full-fledged news magazines, starting in the 1960s, with Algol and Locus.

  Andrew I. Porter published Algol: The Magazine About Science Fiction from 1963 to 1984 (he changed its name to Starship in 1979).

  In 1968, to support the 1971 Boston WorldCon bid, a group of fans started Locus. The magazine outlived its initial raison d’etre, and one of the co-founders, Charles N. Brown, took over the whole operation, publishing it as “The Magazine of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Field” until his death in 2009, when Liza Groen Trombi took over as publisher. Though production methods have evolved, the magazine’s content has remained fairly consistent: some brief news articles about the SF fields, a few longer pieces, one or two interviews, and a lot of book reviews. The magazine is published monthly.

  In 1979, Porter started Science Fiction Chronicle, which grew to emulate Locus, though with a greater proportion of news to reviews. The main difference between the two was the much larger staff running Locus, keeping it a professional (though low-circulation) publication, while Porter’s nearly one-man operation eventually fell victim to the vicissitudes of his personal life, having difficulty keeping to its supposed monthly schedule. In 2000, he sold it to DNA Publications, and parted ways with the magazine and company two years later. SFC continued until 2006, when it was shut down, along with most of DNA’s other projects.

  Also in 1979, British fan David Langford started publishing Ansible. It ran until 1987, and then Langford relaunched in 1991. This monthly newszine also appears online, with all of its back issues also freely available from its website, http://news.ansible.co.uk/Ansible.html.

  In 1997, Locus launched its online version, www.locusmag.com, which at first mimicked the print magazine’s news format. But publishing the news for free endangered the print magazine’s viability, and the amount of news appearing on the site dropped off. Both the print and electronic versions continue today.

  While Locus may have damaged the market for print SF news magazines with its online appearance, it also paved the way for other online newszines. For instance, I was the last News Editor of Science Fiction Chronicle, and after the magazine’s demise, I took my news gathering and dissemination efforts on-line with SFScope (www.SFScope.com), reasoning that a monthly print magazine has a lead-time of two months (fine for fiction), while an electronic magazine has a lead-time of two hours (much better for news). One of the web’s prime purposes is the role of an instant newspaper, whether general interest or specific.

  There are currently several respected, long-running SF newszines online, some set up as websites and others as blogs. In addition to Locus, Ansible, and SFScope, Steven H Silver is the editor and reporter for SFSite’s news page (www.SFSite.com/News). John DeNardo and JP Frantz (with a large and growing list of “Irregulars”) produce SFSignal (www.SFSignal.com). Stephen Hunt’s SFCrowsnest (www.SFCrowsNest.com) is a British-based monthly that started life in print, though editor Geoff Willmetts now says the site’s most popular section is its search engine.

  Every publisher (both the majors and the small presses) has its own website and blog, talking about their productions. Some of them are trying to expand beyond the confines of their own houses. Most notably, Tor Books (www.Tor.com), which was launched as a “community”, but also carries news.

  Finally, as it is the age of mass two-way communication on the internet, just about every author has his own web site or blog as well. A quick web search will take you to the correct page, assuming you haven’t already found it in the author’s latest book.

  Where the newszines and sites excel is in giving an overview of the industry. For the beginning writer, they offer market reports, lists of books sold (frequently with the agents’ and editors’ names, to give the beginning writer some pointers for their own marketing efforts), news of writing contests, awards, the bookselling business, and more. For the reader, there’s news of your favorite author’s latest plans, personal news they care to share with the public, and more. Most of the zines and sites also offer some media (film and te
levision) news, and all of them have reviews (books, films, television, comics, and more).

  SF news magazines:

  Locus Magazine ($34 for six monthly issues, $60 for twelve; P.O. Box 13305, Oakland CA 94661). Monthly magazine (70-100) pages, a typical issue contains two interviews with authors and/or artists, a feature article, four pages of brief news items, four pages of longer news stories, lists of books and magazines received, obituaries, and ten review columns covering about forty books.

  Locus Magazine Online (www.LocusMag.com). Posts three–five news stories per week (updates almost daily), reprints review, opinion, and listing pieces from the print magazine, offers links to other sites. Maintains online databases of awards and the Locus Index to Science Fiction.

  SFScope (www.SFScope.com). Posts 15–40 news stories and reviews per week (updates daily), archives all old pieces (searchable). Focus on written fiction, with news on book sales, publisher and author activities, obituaries, listings, reviews of books, films, and television programs, and more.

  SF Site (www.SFSite.com/news). SF Site is a monthly electronic review zine (news updates almost daily). It hosts a news column which posts 10–15 news stories per week, including book sales, obituaries, awards news, and more.