Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The news was on, and, of course, there was the usual report about the encyclopedia entries whose translations had been released today. The entries came in a bizarre order, perhaps reflecting the alphabetical sequence of their names in some alien tongue; we never knew what would be next. There’d be an entry on some aspect of biology, then one on astronomy, then some arcane bit of history of some alien world, then something from a new science that we don’t even have a name for. I listened halfheartedly; like most people, I did everything halfheartedly these days.

  “One of the latest Encyclopedia Galactica entries,” said the female reporter, “reveals that our universe is finite in size, measuring some forty-four billion light-years across. Another new entry contains information about a form of combustion based on neon, which our scientists had considered an inert gas. Also, a lengthy article provides a comprehensive explanation of dark matter, the long suspected but never identified source of most of the mass in the universe. It turns out that no such dark matter exists, but rather there’s an interrelationship between gravity and tachyons that …”

  Doubtless some people somewhere were happy or intrigued by these revelations. But others were surely devastated, lifetimes of work invalidated. Ah, well. As long as none of them were here in Toronto. Let somebody else, somewhere else, deal with the grieving widows, the orphaned children, the inconsolable boyfriends. I’d had enough. I’d had plenty.

  I got up and went to make some coffee. I shouldn’t be having caffeine at this hour, but I didn’t sleep well these days even when I avoided it. As I stirred whitener into my cup, I could hear the front door opening. “Michael?” I shouted out, as I headed back to the couch.

  “Yeah,” he called back. A moment later he entered the living room. My son had one side of his head shaved bald, the current street-smart style. Leather jackets, which had been de rigueur for tough kids when I’d been Michael’s age—not that any tough kid ever said de rigueur—were frowned upon now; a synthetic fabric that shone like quicksilver and was as supple as silk was all young people wore these days; of course, the formula to make it had come from an encyclopedia entry.

  “It’s a school night,” I said. “You shouldn’t be out so late.”

  “School.” He spat the word. “As if anyone cares. As if any of it matters.”

  We’d had this argument before; we were just going through the motions. I said what I said because that’s what a parent is supposed to say. He said what he said because …

  Because it was the truth.

  I nodded, and shut off the TV. Michael headed on down to the basement, and I sat in the dark, staring up at the ceiling.

  * * * *

  Chronics: Branch of science that deals with the temporal properties of physical entities. Although most entities in the universe progress through time in an orthrochronic, or forward, fashion, certain objects instead regress in a retrochronic, or backward, fashion. The most common example …

  * * * *

  Yesterday, it turned out, was easy. Yesterday, I only had to deal with one dead body.

  The explosion happened at 9:42 a.m. I’d been driving down to division headquarters, listening to loud music on the radio with my windows up, and I still heard it. Hell, they probably heard it clear across Lake Ontario, in upstate New York.

  I’d been speeding along the Don Valley Parkway when it happened, and had a good view through my windshield toward downtown. Of course, the skyline was dominated by the CN Tower, which—

  My God!

  —which was now leaning over, maybe twenty degrees off vertical. The radio station I’d been listening to went dead; it had been transmitting from the CN Tower, I supposed. Maybe it was a terrorist attack. Or maybe it was just some bored school kid who’d read the entry on how to produce antimatter that had been released last week.

  There was a seven-story complex of observation decks and restaurants two-thirds of the way up the tower, providing extra weight. It was hard to—

  Damn!

  My car’s brakes had slammed on, under automatic control; I pitched forward, the shoulder belt giving a bit. The car in front of mine had come to a complete stop—as, I could now see, had the car in front of it, and the one in front of that car, too. Nobody wanted to continue driving toward the tower. I undid my seat belt and got out of my car; other motorists were doing the same thing.

  The tower was leaning over further now: maybe thirty-five degrees. I assumed the explosion had been somewhere near its base; if it had been antimatter, from what I understood, only a minuscule amount would have been needed.

  “There it goes!” shouted someone behind me. I watched, my stomach knotting, as the tower leaned over farther and farther. It would hit other, lesser skyscrapers; there was no way that could be avoided. I was brutally conscious of the fact that hundreds, maybe thousands, of people were about to die.

  The tower continued to lean, and then it broke in two, the top half plummeting sideways to the ground. A plume of dust went up into the air, and—

  It was like watching a distant electrical storm: the visuals hit you first, well before the sound. And the sound was indeed like thunder, a reverberating, cracking roar.

  Screams were going up around me. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” I felt like I was going to vomit, and I had to hold onto my car’s fender for support.

  Somebody behind me was shouting, “Damn you, damn you, damn you!” I turned, and saw a man shaking his fist at the sky. I wanted to join him, but there was no point.

  This was just the beginning, I knew. People all over the world had read that entry, along with all the others. Antimatter explosions; designer diseases based on new insights into how biology worked; God only knew what else. We needed a firewall for the whole damn planet, and there was no way to erect one.

  I abandoned my car and wandered along the highway until I found an off-ramp. I walked for hours, passing people who were crying, people who were screaming, people who, like me, were too shocked, too dazed, to do either of those things.

  I wondered if there was an entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Earth, and, if so, what it said. I thought of Ethan McCharles, swinging back and forth, a flesh pendulum, and I remembered that spontaneous little eulogy Chiu, the security guard, had uttered. Would there be a eulogy for Earth? A few kind words, closing out the entry on us in the next edition of the encyclopedia? I knew what I wanted it to say.

  I wanted it to say that we mattered, that what we did had worth, that we treated each other well most of the time. But that was wishful thinking, I suppose. All that would probably be in the entry was the date on which our first broadcasts were detected, and the date, only a heartbeat later in cosmic terms, on which they had ceased.

  It would take me most of the day to walk home. My son Michael would make his way back there, too, I’m sure, when he heard the news.

  And at least we’d be together, as we waited for whatever would come next.

  * * * *

  Copyright © 2006 by Robert J. Sawyer.

  CANADIAN SCIENCE FICTION IN ENGLISH, by Ruby S. Ramraj

  Canadian science fiction has been around since the end of the nineteenth century, but it is only recently—since the 1970s—that it has become a burgeoning field with ever-increasing popularity. Writers of the genre (both French and English) have been strongly influenced by the works of fellow science fiction writers in the United States particularly Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Judith Merril (who eventually lived and wrote in Canada) and in Britain especially Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Arthur C Clarke. Early Canadian science fiction writers (such as A. E van Vogt and Frederick Philip Grove in the 1940s) began to write their own brand of science fiction. The founding of Amazing Stories in the United States in 1926 gave Americans protagonists who—as in Western movies—were heroic figures battling successfully alien forces, saving their homelands or allied planets, and vanquishing enemies against all odds. Canadian science fiction writers on the whole seldom wrote then or now about heroes with such
sweeping powers. Their works tend to focus more on social communication among peoples and though they use scientific advances and technology, they tend to avoid extensive use of technology for war, suppression, or large scale annihilation. Most Canadian science fiction writers show “a Canadian concern for the fragility of political and cultural institutions” (Clute 24). The heroism of the protagonists in Canadian science fiction novels tends to be very low key. Concerned with ethics and accommodating others, they tend to seek moral victories, and find fulfillment in merely saving individuals, families, or a communities, not the world at large. Less flamboyant, but more practical than their US counterparts, Canadian science fiction protagonists often opt for negotiation and fair play rather than confrontation and war; and they seldom aim at destroying the world or obliterating enemies.

  James De Mille’s (1833–1880) novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published posthumously in 1888, is considered to be the first Canadian work of science fiction. A strange tale of a fantastic voyage (in the manner of Jules Verne’s voyages) set in a lost land in the Antarctic it is different from modern Canadian science fiction. A story within a story, it relates how four men on a yacht find a copper cylinder floating in the ocean which contains a manuscript of the adventures of a ship’s captain named Adam More (deliberately evoking both the archetypal and the utopian). The men take turns reading the chapters, commenting on what they are reading. Vividly written, funny, and readable, detailing narrow escapes from human sacrifice, it has no real scientific extrapolation. Another early work of science fiction is The Electrical Kiss (1896) a novel by Ida May Ferguson from New Brunswick (written under the pseudonym Dyjan Fergus). Set in Montreal, it relates the story of a Chinese scientist who pursues and eventually marries a Canadian woman by using his “electrical kiss.”

  A noticeable aspect of early Canadian science fiction is the number of mainstream Canadian writers who wrote science fiction novels. Stephen B. Leacock (1869–1944) is a prominent example. He is best known for Sunshine Sketches of a little Town (1912), a gentle portrait of a fictional little Canadian town called Mariposa. But he also wrote “The Man in the Asbestos Suit: An Allegory of the Future” (1911) in a collection of stories he called Nonsense Novels. This futuristic story offers observations on human nature which are as refreshing today as when they were written in 1911. It describes a world in which the inhabitants are clad in long-wearing suits of asbestos and in which death has been eliminated. Here, only a vestigial memory of actual labor remains. Things requiring effort were all accomplished centuries ago, so now people have all necessities. They have, in fact, achieved utopia. Leacock also wrote The Iron Man and the Tin Woman with Other Such Futurities (1929) and Afternoons in Utopia (1932). Two mainstream poets who published early speculative fiction include the prominent Confederation poet Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943) who in 1919 wrote In the Morning of Time, a story about life in prehistoric days, and the early modern poet E. J. Pratt (1882–1964) who wrote a narrative poem set in prehistoric days in Australasia called “The Great Feud,” found in his collection of poems Titans and Other Epics of the Pilocene (1926).

  Frederick Philip Grove (1879–1948) known for his realistic prairie novels depicting the life of early settlers in the west such as Fruits of the Earth (1933), published Consider Her Ways (1948), a science fiction novel about a group of ants that travel from Venezuela to the Public Library in New York, looking for a human researcher who has telepathic communication with one of the scientist ants. The ants in the book talk and read books from the library. Grove sustains a tone that is rational and analytical, exhibiting a vast knowledge of the ant world, of their behavior and their habitat. The novel is a satiric look at man from the view of the ants, who see man as a degenerate type of creature.

  With limited avenues for publication in Canada, Canadian writers contributed to the pulp magazines which were being produced since the 1920s in the US. Among the most notable is A. E. van Vogt (1912–2000), whose science fiction stories (about 35) appeared in Astounding Science Fiction and several other pulp magazines. He wrote often of violent planetary destruction, perhaps reflecting a post-World War II syndrome. His first story “Black Destroyer” (1939) portrays the Coeurl, an alien race of predators; his first novel, Slan (1939) features a mutant protagonist whose physical superiority and ESP capability enable him to survive. Van Vogt wrote these and many other stories before moving to the US in 1944, where he continued his writing career with his popular Weapon Shop books. In 1996, he was recognized for six decades of golden age science fiction; he was presented with a special award at the World Science Fiction Convention. Critical reception of his work has been divided, but writers such as Philip K. Dick acknowledged unabashedly his influence on their writing. And the critic Fredric Jameson affirms that van Vogt prepared the way for Dick, the “greatest of all science fiction writers…whose extraordinary novels and stories are inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by van Vogt” (315).

  In 1979, John Robert Colombo (1936– ) edited the first Canadian anthology of science fiction, Other Canadas: An Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1979). This influential book inspired many budding writers of the genre and made the public aware of the vast range of speculative fiction in Canada. The World Science Fiction convention held in Toronto in 1973 was very well attended, and brought together readers and writers of science fiction including such notables as Judith Merril and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. The first Science Fiction and Fantasy Achievement Awards (now the Auroras) for 1980 was presented at the first National Canadian science fiction convention in 1981. This event confirmed for many readers and writers outside the genre the respectability of speculative fiction. The poet Phyllis Gotlieb (1926–2009) of Toronto began writing science fiction novels. David Ketterer has called her the voice of Canadian science fiction from 1960–1980. Her first novel Sunburst (1964), for which the Sunburst Award is named, has relevance today given its focus on a nuclear accident and its effect on humans. The book was predictive of nuclear accidents in Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, reminding us that we can be victims of advances in technology if we use it without fully understanding the benefits or the dangers of such use. Gotlieb wrote many other novels, winning the Aurora Award for the best novel in 1982 for her novel A Judgment of Dragons, a series of linked novelettes. Many of her short stories have been anthologized, especially those in her collection Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983).

  Judith Merril (1923–1997) was a strong voice in Canadian science fiction. She, like the science fiction writers William Gibson, Spider Robinson, and Robert Charles Wilson, was born in the US and like all of them became prominent in Canada. Since her arrival in Canada in 1968, she promoted the genre, focusing the attention of readers on feminist issues and the need for the evaluation of ethical concerns in scientific experimentation. Her most influential short story, “That Only a Mother,” published in 1948 in Astounding Science Fiction, is a moving account of the reluctance of a mother to see and accept the genetic mutation that has occurred in her child because of her husband’s exposure to nuclear radioactivity. Merril’s impressive body of writing includes Daughters of Earth: Three Novels (1969). She began editing anthologies in 1950 with Shot in the Dark. She is also known for her series of twelve “year’s best” anthologies which started in 1956. She deliberately included stories by lesser-known writers in her anthologies, and continued this practice when she edited the influential Tesseracts (1985) a continuing anthology of Canadian science fiction writing which became a series, with prominent science fiction writers such as Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Nalo Hopkinson as guest editors. Merril’s book collection forms the core of The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, which was founded in 1970 by the Toronto Public Library in Canada. This collection of more than 26,000 books includes 18,000 noncirculating periodicals and about 8,500 paperback books, whi
ch can be loaned and circulated. This collection is an indispensable one for readers and researchers of science fiction.

  Judith Merril has influenced many science fiction and fantasy writers; Candas Jane Dorsey (1952– ) and Nalo Hopkinson (1960– ) are two of them. Dorsey, a writer, journalist, and social worker, co-edited Tesseracts 3 with Gerry Truscott in 1991. Her science fiction and fantasy stories in Machine Sex & Other Stories (1988) rework science fiction tropes from a feminist viewpoint. Nalo Hopkinson immigrated to Canada in 1977 from Jamaica, where she was born. She won the Warner Aspect Prize in 1998 for her first novel Brown Girl in a Ring (1998), a fantasy-horror novel set in a futuristic Toronto. Her next novel, Midnight Robber (2000), is a science fiction novel written (as is her first) in the demotic language of the Caribbean. It depicts a technologically advanced planet called Toussaint colonized by Caribbean people, an advanced people who have their own AIs linked to a worldwide web Granny Nansi’s web. Humans who live here are slaves to advanced technology. Juxtaposed with this world is the nightmarish world of New Half Way Tree, in which the outcasts and criminals of society live. Thrust onto this planet, the protagonist battles violence, oppression, and sexual abuse before she can regain her independence and safety. Hopkinson’s collection of stories, Skin Folk (2001), won the Sunburst Award in 2003. It contains a science fiction story, “A Habit of Waste,” set in a futuristic Toronto where humans have the ability to replace their original bodies with a new ones from a “MediPerfection catalogue” (183). Hopkinson edited with Geoff Ryman Tesseracts 9 in 2006. Her fantasy novel, The Salt Roads (2003), spans time and place jumping from Egypt in 345 CE to Haiti of the 1800s to Paris of the 1840s. The stories of three women are linked by the voice of a goddess, Ezili. Her latest novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007) is another fantasy which portrays an “aquaboy” who is searching for his family. In 2008 Hopkinson received the Aurora Award and The Sunburst Award for this novel. She is currently residing in the US and continues to write and teach there.