Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The barnacles have returned to Solitaire. Or rather, new colonies of barnacles have attached to the newly reunited station, not covering it completely, but dressing it up in patches. I have taken to walking among them, weeding them as Bill once did; I have become interested in them, curious as to how they perceived a ship coming from light years away, and I intend to carry some along with us on the voyage and make an attempt at a study. Yet what compels me to take these walks is less scientific curiosity than a kind of furious nostalgia, a desire to remember and hold the centre of those moments that have so changed the direction of our lives, to think about Bill and how it must have been for him, a frightened lump of a man with a clever voice in his ear, alone in all that daunting immensity, fixing his eyes on the bright clots of life at his feet. Just today Arlie joined me on such a walk, and it seemed we were passing along the rim of an infinite dark eye flecked with a trillion bits of colour, and that everything of our souls and of every other soul could be seen in that eye, that I could look down to Earth through the haze and scum of the ocean air and see Bill where he stood looking up and trying to find us in that mottled sky, and I felt all the eerie connections a man feels when he needs to believe in something more than what he knows is real, and I tried to tell myself he was all right, walking in his garden in Nova Sibersk, taking the air with an idiot woman so beautiful it nearly made him wise. But I could not sustain the fantasy. I could only mourn, and I had no right to mourn, having never loved him—or if I did, even in the puniest of ways, it was never his person I loved, but what I had from him, the things awakened in me by what had happened. Just the thought that I could have loved him, maybe that was all I owned of right.

  We were heading back toward the East Louie airlock, when Arlie stooped and plucked up a male barnacle. Dark green as an emerald, it was, except for its stubby appendage. Glowing like magic, alive with threads of colour like a potter’s glaze.

  “That’s a rare one,” I said. “Never saw one that colour before.”

  “Bill would ’ave fancied it,” she said.

  “Fancied, hell. He would have hung the damned thing about his neck.”

  She set it back down, and we watched as it began working its way across the surface of the barnacle patch, doing its slow, ungainly cartwheels, wobbling off-true, lurching in flight, nearly missing its landing, but somehow making it, somehow getting there. It landed in the shadow of some communications gear, stuck out its tongue and tried to feed. We watched it for a long, long while, with no more words spoken, but somehow there was a little truth hanging in the space between us, in the silence, a poor thing not worth naming, and maybe not even having a name, it was such an infinitesimal slice of what was, and we let it nourish us as much as it could, we took its lustre and added it to our own. We sucked it dry, we had its every flavour, and then we went back inside arm in arm, to rejoin the lie of the world.

  WHITE TRAINS, by Lucius Shepard

  First published in Night Cry, Spring 1987

  White trains with no tracks

  have been appearing on the outskirts

  of small anonymous towns,

  picket fence towns in Ohio, say,

  or Iowa, places rife with solid American values,

  populated by men with ruddy faces and weak hearts,

  and women whose thoughts slide

  like swaths of gingham through their minds.

  They materialize from vapor or a cloud,

  glide soundlessly to a halt in some proximate meadow,

  old-fashioned white trains with pot-bellied smokestacks,

  their coaches adorned with filigrees of palest ivory,

  packed with men in ice cream suits and bowlers,

  and lovely dark-haired women in lace gowns.

  The passengers disembark, form into rows,

  facing one another as if preparing for a cotillion,

  and the men undo their trouser buttons,

  their erections springing forth like lean white twigs,

  and they enter the embrace of the women,

  who lift their skirts to enfold them,

  hiding them completely, making it appear

  that strange lacy cocoons have dropped from the sky

  to tremble and whisper on the bright green grass.

  And when at last the women let fall their skirts,

  each of them bears a single speck of blood

  at the corner of their perfect mouths.

  As for the men, they have vanished

  like snow on a summer’s day.

  I myself was witness to one such apparition

  on the outskirts of Parma, New York,

  home to the Castle Monosodium Glutimate Works,

  a town whose more prominent sophisticates

  often drive to Buffalo for the weekend.

  I had just completed a thirty-day sentence

  for sullying the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

  (They all said she was a good girl

  but you could find her name on every bathroom wall

  between Nisack and Mitswego),

  and having no wish to extend my stay

  I headed for the city limits.

  It was early morning, the eastern sky

  still streaked with pink, mist threading

  the hedgerows, and upon a meadow bordering

  three convenience stores and a laundromat,

  I found a number of worthies gathered,

  watching the arrival of a white train.

  There was Ernest Cardwell, the minister

  of the Church of the Absolute Solstice,

  whose congregation alone of all the Empire State

  has written guarantee of salvation,

  and there were a couple of cops big as bears

  in blue suits, carrying standard issue golden guns,

  and there was a group of scientists huddled

  around the machines with which they were

  attempting to measure the phenomenon,

  and the mayor, too, was there, passing out

  his card and declaring that he had no hand

  in his unnatural business, and the scientists

  were murmuring, and Cardwell was shouting

  “Abomination,” at the handsome men

  and lovely women filing out of the coaches,

  and as for me, well, thirty days and the memory

  of the bail bondsman’s beautiful daughter

  had left me with a more pragmatic attitude,

  and ignoring the scientists’ cries of warning and

  Cardwell’s predictions of eternal hellfire,

  the mayor’s threats, and the cops’ growling,

  I went toward the nearest of the women

  and gave her male partner a shove and was amazed

  to see him vanish in a haze of sparkles

  as if he had been made of something insubstantial

  like Perrier or truth.

  The woman’s smile was cool and enigmatic

  and as I unzipped, her gown enfolded me

  in an aura of perfume and calm,

  and through the lacework the sun acquired

  a dim red value, and every sound was faraway,

  and I could not feel the ground beneath my feet,

  only the bright sensation of slipping inside her.

  Her mouth was such a simple curve, so pure

  a crimson, it looked to be a statement of principle,

  and her dark brown eyes had no pupils.

  Looking into them, I heard a sonorous music;

  heavy German stuff, with lots of trumpet fanfares

  and skirling crescendos, and the heaviness

  of the music transfigured my thoughts,

  so that it seemed what followed was a white act,

  that I had become a magical beast with golden eyes,

  coupling with an ephemera, a butterfly woman,

  a creature of lace and beat and silky muscle…

  though in retrospect I can say with assur
ance

  that I’ve had better in my time.

  I think I expected to vanish, to travel

  on a white train through some egoless dimension,

  taking the place of the poor soul I’d pushed aside,

  (although it may be he never existed, that only

  the women were real, or that from those blood drops

  dark and solid as rubies at the corners of their mouths,

  they bred new ranks of insubstantial partners),

  but I only stood there jelly-kneed watching

  the women board the train, still smiling.

  The scientists surrounded me, asking questions,

  offering great sums if I would allow them to do tests

  and follow-ups to determine whether or not

  I bad contracted some sort of astral social disease,

  and Cardwell was supplicating God to strike me down,

  and the mayor was bawling at the cops to take me

  in for questioning, but I was beyond the city limits

  and they had no rights in the matter, and I walked

  away from Parma, bearing signed contracts

  from the scientists, and another presented me

  by a publisher who, disguised as a tree stump,

  had watched the entire proceeding, and now

  owned the rights to the lie of my life story.

  My future, it seemed, was assured.

  White trains with no tracks

  continue to appear on the outskirts

  of small anonymous towns, places

  whose reasons have dried up, towns

  upon which dusk settles

  like a statement of intrinsic greyness,

  and some will tell you these trains

  signal an Apocalyptic doom, and

  others will say they are symptomatic

  of mass hysteria, the reduction of culture

  to a fearful and obscure whimsey, and

  others yet will claim that the vanishing men

  are emblematic of the realities of sexual politics

  in this muddled, weak-muscled age.

  But I believe they are expressions of a season

  that occurs once every millennium or so,

  a cosmic leap year, that they are merely

  a kind of weather, as unimportant and unique

  as a sun shower or a spell of warmth in mid-winter,

  a brief white interruption of the ordinary

  into which we may walk and emerge somewhat

  refreshed, but nothing more.

  I lecture frequently upon this subject

  in towns such as Parma, towns whose lights

  can be seen glittering in the dark folds of lost America

  like formless scatters of stars, ruined constellations

  whose mythic figure has abdicated to a better sky,

  and my purpose is neither to illuminate nor confound,

  but is rather to engage the interest of those women

  whose touch is generally accompanied by

  thirty days durance on cornbread and cold beans,

  a sentence against which I have been immunized

  by my elevated status, and perhaps my usage

  of the experience is a measure of its truth,

  or perhaps it is a measure of mine.

  Whatever the case, white trains move silent as thought

  through the empty fields, voyaging from nowhere

  to nowhere, taking on no passengers, violating

  no regulation other than the idea of order,

  and once they have passed we shake our heads,

  returning to the mild seasons of our lives,

  and perhaps for a while we cling more avidly

  to love and loves, realizing we inhabit a medium

  of small magical transformations that like overcoats

  can insulate us against the onset of heartbreak weather,

  hoping at best to end in a thunder of agony

  and prayer that will move us down through

  archipelagoes of silver light to a morbid fairy tale

  wherein we will labor like dwarves at the question

  of forever, and listen to a grumbling static from above

  that may or may not explain in some mystic tongue

  the passage of white trains.

  * * * *

  “Barnacle Bill the Spacer” copyright © 1992 by Davis Publications, Inc.

  “White Trains” copyright © 1987 by Lucius Shepard.

  GRAPHIC NOVELS AND SCIENCE FICTION, by Peter J. Ingrao

  Rod Serling’s prologue to The Twilight Zone directs our attention to a “signpost up ahead,” to a point of intersection vital to science fiction where parallel worlds intersect ours to offer social commentary, and beings such as robots explore the intersection of “human” and “artificial” and question the definition of both categories. It seems natural that the media of the graphic novel, itself an intersection and interdependence of prose and visual art, draws from and expresses so eloquently the intersecting stories and concerns of science fiction, as well as a related concern for legitimacy as a recognized artistic form.

  Richard Kyle mentions the term “graphic novel” in the 1964 newsletter for the Comic Amateur Press Alliance, but artist and writer Will Eisner’s 1978 “invention” of the same—due to the obscurity of Kyle’s usage it is well possible that Eisner was correct in his assessment of himself as fathering the term—speaks directly to anxiety surrounding the legitimacy of comics as more than tripe consumed by adolescents. In seeking a “serious” publisher for his Contract with God, Eisner pitched the book to Bantam as a “graphic novel.” Bantam passed on the project, but when Eisner’s honest and heartbreaking account of lower-class Brooklyn appeared later in 1978, the graphic novel moniker appeared on its cover.1

  Difficulty exists in distilling a singular definition of the graphic novel as introduced by Eisner. Art Spielgman, writer and artist of MAUS (2003), offers the following playful definition: “A comic book that you need a bookmark for.”2 Spielgman’s definition reveals the graphic novel as longer than a monthly comic title. A graphic novel, for example, might consist of a single, long, independent story; it might offer an original story over a limited run of several longer than average issues; or, it might collect several issues of a monthly comic into a consistent thematic storyline. Moreover, in “The Myth of Superman,” the restrictive serial continuity that Umberto Eco argues serves an essential role in the longevity of a monthly title3 need not exist in a graphic novel and offers writers and artists dealing with a traditional character more latitude in their exploration of ideas as in Grant Morrison’s and Dave McKean’s treatment of Batman in the prestige format Arkham Asylum (1989). McKean’s use of collage landscapes and Francis Bacon-inspired character details emphasize Morrison’s narrative in a story where the Dark Knight faces his own dark night of the soul and his inner demons eclipse the standard battle with a rogues gallery. In addition to the expansion of page count and latitude in the treatment of art and subject matter, graphic novels further offer an expansion of genre to include nonfiction, history, biography and autobiography in addition to fiction.4 The student might consider not only Spielgman’s treatment of his father’s experience in Nazi-occupied Europe in MAUS, but also Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (2003) and Peter Kuper’s Stop Forgetting to Remember (2007).

  It Rhymes with Lust by Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller and Matt Baker, may arguably be considered one of the first attempts at a graphic novel. Predating Eisner’s use of the term by more than two decades, It Rhymes with Lust draws inspiration from the school of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as film noir, to detail the ascent of a woman named Rust through the criminal underworld of Copper City.5 A plot informed more by science fiction appears in 1968 with Gil Kane’s and Archie Goodwin’s His Name is…Savage in which the title character must save the world from an insidious cyborg who, in his intent for humanity’s utter destruction, descends from the ro
bots of American pulps in the first half of the twentieth century. 1968 also bears witness to the formation of Robert Crumb’s Zap Comics and the underground comix movement.6 Crumb marketed his Comics to an audience of adult intellectuals interested in the questioning of social norms, a traditional role of science fiction as evidenced the same year by Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In a 2009 act of thematic homage demonstrating the overlapping concerns of science fiction and graphic novels, Boom! Studios began its release of Do Androids Dream as a series of graphic novels.