Childhood's End as Parental, as Metaphysical, as Metafictional

Adam Roberts argues that Childhood's End embodies aspects of parenthood.

Roberts argues persuasively and insightfully, so the essay's well worth reading. But a more obvious corollary is the metaphysical embodiment of the Overlords, who behave more inscrutably like gods than interventionally like parents. In most religions, gods father the people, so the connection is here as well.

In fact, "sense of wonder" itself may be an unwitting pseudonym for the transcendently metaphysical, so Clarke finds it necessary to distance himself from this while he simultaneously and ironically embraces the spiritual through the stipulation that, since the world's religions are all different, they must all be wrong (a little specious, but a logic trap that we all fall prey to).

The embodying of the metaphysical while rejecting the metaphysical is almost omnipresent in the field. Even Asimov, devout atheist, dipped into the Gaian mythology with his Foundation series. This strange relation is made less strange when we boil down both science and metaphysics to express the same ideology: The universe is far larger and stranger than we can know (at this time).

Although this is a well of inquiry that intrigues and has much left to plumb--it seems likely that someone else has tackled this in one form or another (feel free to discuss it further)--I'm actually more interested in the less obvious connection: Childhood's End as metafictional.

1953, the date of publication, may be early for the first use of the term, "The Golden Age," but certainly writers had time to consider that a regime change was underway. This was the height of the magazines' explosive proliferation. Even Hollywood was also growing increasingly fascinated with the genre at the time. For the moment, we must forget what we know happened beyond 1953 and examine what the view from there looked like.

Clarke published his first story around 1937 with comparatively little publication to later decades. 1949 appears to mark Clarke's logarithmic catapult to fame. What's interesting to observe, especially in light of the metafictional theme of Childhood's End, is that Clarke's esteem had a beautiful trajectory, climaxing sometime after Stanley Kubrick's 2001. One could chart the catapult with Childhood's End itself using various polls regarding the all-time SF novels.

(In some ways, Jonathon Lethem may have Kubrick to blame for Thomas Pynchon's loss at the Nebulas--not that Rendezvous with Rama is without merit, especially in the realm of wonder. It's too unfortunate Kubrick didn't have the same effect on Brian Aldiss' career.)

With the background estabished, we can now examine Clarke's book as metafiction or, as Barry Malzberg puts it, "recursive science fiction."

The Golden Age of man, as Clarke defines it, is the bringing of peace, order, and stability to Earth as instituted by the Overlords (Campbell's Astounding?) but later the conditions stagnate the world into a blasé culture.

A new age of man comes through the children of the Golden Age, who are able to transcend the achievements of humanity beyond its imaginings--an ability that the Overlords do not possess. Clarke's character, Jan Rodricks, witnesses the final transfiguration, not with hate or envy or loss, but with simple awe.

Clarke's style is definitely Golden Age, but this perspective is a retrospective assignment, and his best work came after the Golden Age through the 50s' Childhood's End, the 70s' stunning "A Meeting with Medusa" and Rendezvous with Rama and on into the 90s' "The Hammer of God."

But whatever your choice of interpretation, do not forget Clarke's opening words: "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author," which leaves us the question of which opinion does the author not agree with?

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Theorists: Notes Toward Building a Testable Theory

Science recently had a multidisciplinary issue on language. It's worth checking out at the library (or ordering photocopies of the pertinent articles from the interlibrary loan). If you've got the money, the magazine's worth a subscription. The front half is written for the general public while the latter has the specific articles in great detail, written for specialists--articles which are difficult to wade through but it can be done: the more you wade, the easier it gets.

From the introductory article "First Words" by Elizabeth Culotta and Brooks Hanson:

"But how did this powerful ability [to string meaningful words together] evolve? And how has language changed through time, from what was presumably one mother tongue to the babel of thousands of languages spoken today? This interdisciplinary special issue explores these twin problems of language evolution, and also peers ahead into our ever-evolving linguistic future. Five News stories explore the history and prehistory of language evolution, from the origin of speech to recent language changes, and three Viewpoints speculate on the future. Elsewhere in this issue, three Book Reviews explore the latest in a growing crop of books on this topic.

"In several cases, old theories associated with leading scholars are breaking down. For example, as Holden reports (p. 1316), linguists and neuroscientists armed with new types of data are moving beyond the nonevolutionary paradigm once suggested by Noam Chomsky, and tackling the origins of speech head-on...."
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Splendid Isolation: Does SF Play Well With Others?

It turns out that mainstream lit is paying more attention to the genre than I, at least, thought. It leaves me wondering: what if it's the culture more than the content that isolates SF from a wider range of readers. discuss this post at our messageboard

Mining Our History

If "in the high-tech 80s, 'technological literacy' meant outright *ecstasy and dread.*," as Bruce Stirling proposes in Cyberpunk in the 90's, perhaps I should be more understanding if today's current rate of technological innovation has frightened the science fiction community into "head in the sand" SF and flight to fantasy, while the core of fantasy has become so static as to be confused with deceased. Only the faint fog of "New Weird" and interstitial appearing on the mirror as a sign of like--and even these movements are keeping their distance.

"Cyberpunk," before it acquired its handy label and its sinister rep, was a generous, open-handed effort, very street-level and anarchic, with a do-it-yourself attitude, an ethos it shared with garage-band 70s punk music.

Cyberpunk's one-page propaganda organ, "CHEAP TRUTH," was given away free to anyone who asked for it. CHEAP TRUTH was never copyrighted; photocopy "piracy" was actively encouraged.

I've always had a high regard for CP as a breakaway literary movement, a radical departure from what came before. I was never aware that it was a successful grass roots movement, or that it owed its success to a samizdat publication--CHEAP TRUTH--which would correspond to Gabe Chouinard's smartmobs.

CHEAP TRUTH had rather mixed success. We had a laudable grasp of the basics: for instance, that SF writers ought to *work a lot harder* and *knock it off with the worn-out bullshit* if they expected to earn any real
respect. Most folks agreed that this was a fine prescription -- for somebody else.

Somehow it is both reassuring and distressing to visualize the influence and health of SF as a cycle, but I'd be a lot more comfortable if the genre looked like this cycle belonged to an ascending spiral of increasing readership, influence and adventure. From here it looks like each turn of the wheel brings fewer readers and more of a sense of claustrophobic contraction. If this were a revolution, reducing the genre to a core membership might be a strengthening move, but this is supposed to be a populist literature.

What the history of dawn of cyberpunk also says is that anyone, even everyone, can play a part in identifying what is good, original, unique, and promoting it by doing nothing more than talking about what you like to others who might like it (or something like it).

Best Regards,
Alan Lattimore
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SF Coulda Been a Contender or Why We Need a History

This is an excerpt from Barry N. Malzberg's The Engines of the Night from an essay entitled, "I Could Have Been a Contender, Part One":

"Revisionist canon now holds that science fiction would have had a different--and superior--history if Hugo Gernsback, by creating Amazing Stories in 1926, had not ghettoized the genre, reduced it on the spot to a small asylum plastered with murals of ravening aliens carrying off screaming women in wonderous machines from a burning city and thus made it impossible for serious critics, to say nothing of serious writers, to have anything to do with it...."

Malzberg goes on to state Melville and Hawthorne wrote speculation without harm to their reputations.

"The argument has a certain winsome charm--I believed it myself when I was but a wee lad, and some of our best or better minds hold to it right now--but is flawed.... [H]e did us a great service and... were it not for Gernsback, science fiction as we understand it would not exist. We would have--as we do--the works of fabulation in the general literature--Coover, Barthelme, Barth, and DeLillo--but of the category which gave More Than Human, The Demolished Man, Foundation and Empire, Dying Inside, The Dispossessed and Rogue Moon we would have nothing, and hence these works would not exist. It is possible that some of these writers, who were inspired to write science fiction by a childhood of reading, would never have published at all.

" 'Science fiction builds on science fiction,' Asimov said once, and that truth is at the center of the form....

"Only the rigor and discipline of the delimited can create art...."

Malzberg cites the sonnet and Bach.

"Without the specialized format of the magazines, where science fiction writers and readers could dwell, exchange, observe one another's practices and build upon one another's insight, the genre could not have developed."

Malzberg describes how first generation readers of Amazing became Campbell's stable, and their readers, in turn, became...

"Science fiction, as John W. Campbell once pointed out expansively, may indeed outdo all of the so-called mainstream because it gather in all of time and space.... Extrapolative elements, cultural interface, characteriological attempt to resolve the conflicts between the two: this is science fiction.

"The fact pervades all the decades after about 1935: no one could publish science fiction unless exposed to a great deal of it."


I would only argue (with Campbell? or Campbell and Malzberg?) that no one outdoes anyone. It's just a different game, different rules.

Gabe would be happy if I finished the quote, so I won't finish it. Oh, okay. Malzberg predicted that SF may become so sophisticated that it becomes inaccessible. I don't buy it, however. I think it has essentially the same accessibility with more sophistication in some ways and forgotten sophistication in others.

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“Repent, Barthelme!” Said the Imperialistas of Realism

Donald Barthelme (1931-1989) sold his first story to New Yorker in 1961. John Updike sold his first to New Yorker in 1954. Donald Barthelme won the National Book Award, for a children's book. John Updike won two National Book Awards, three National Book Critics Awards, and two Pulitzers. Donald Barthelme was a prolific writer of short stories. John Updike is a prolific writer of short stories, novels, verse, criticism and other non-fictions. In one essay, Updike asked where all the Don B. acolytes are now. It's a good question. He also brought it up in an interview at Salon.com when he's asked what will happen to his generation:

“Donald Barthelme? Is he read now, by people of your age...? He's become a curiosity.... There are fads in critical fashion, but a writer at his peril strays too far from realism. Especially in this country, where realism is kind of our thing.”

I happen to be a big fan of both Updike and Barthelme, but in that old-fashioned spirit of devil's advocation, let's call "a writer at his peril strays too far from realism" the attitude of the Imperialistas of Realism. Of course, Updike has not necessarily advocated this attitude of realism-only, but he does recognize it's existence. Non-realism does win awards: if you're an uncivilized savage (i.e. non-American) or you're writing children's books in any non-realistic form. (How do the Imperialistas of Realism respond to people who don’t read fiction because it isn’t real? Oh, the irony.)

Instead, let’s speculate on why Don B. has lodged in Updike’s brain: Don B. was hip in the 60s and 70s. He reinvented language, form, and function. And Updike, well, Updike is a damn fine writer. I own all his collections and a handful of novels. And Rabbit Is Rich deserved all the attention lavished upon it. And yet there’s that Harlequin phenomenon:

You’re the All-American quarterback, the All-American center of the basketball team, the State record holder in the 400m dash, and the most popular clean-cut of all the teachers and the principal... but damn that sass-mouthed class-clown, in the jester suit! How does he get all the babes?

But even now, though Don B. has passed on to the other side of longevity, you still wonder what all the girls--girls of today, tomorrow and the day after--think of him, the idea of him, molding six feet under.

We could also speculate on the reasons why the most interesting thing to happen to Realism--though the Imperialistas are loathe to admit it--happened under the editorial helm of experimentalist Gordon Lish: Raymond Carver and Minimalism. When the Imperialistas found out who was truly responsible, they said, “Always knew them minimals was sour sentences. Carver only got good when he wrote like the rest of us.”

But one thing is certain: the lifeblood and longevity of any empire depends on its flexibility. Hindsight won’t treat too kindly the latter twentieth century’s rigidity of Realism if it doesn’t learn how to adapt in the twenty-first (you mean it ain’t the twentieth no more?). Don B. taught us much about what fiction can do that we promptly forgot because “in this country... realism is our thing.”

Fortunately, we have the texts here with us. The Imperialistas were kind enough not to burn the Pagan Library. Renaissance scholars may again learn and bring us out of the Dark Ages, resurrecting the Barthelme corpus of literature (which is not to say that realism doesn’t have its place in literature; we need not reciprocate with our own brand imperialism. Should the unbelievable occur, you'll find me in a jester suit promoting Realism).

***

At his Peril: Don B. Shadow-Boxes in a Savage Tongue

Donald Barthelme was no stranger to the world of savage children, making his start in the pulps under various pseudonyms at $500 a pop until the big break in the New Yorker.

Whether Judith Merril, one of Don B.’s first anthologists, noticed him much before 1965 is unknown at present, but that is the date she formally introduced him to the speculative community in the Year’s Best SF gala sans pseudonymous costume: "The Game," is just one of Don B.’s many games. James Sallis later reprinted the story for War Book and Jonathan Lethem for Vintage Book of Amnesia (two titles to help you interpret the story for yourself).

Two men have been underground longer than they were supposed to be: Shotwell--aptly named before we know why aptly named--and the narrator. The narrator is jealous that Shotwell’s playing jacks, alone, and occupies himself, therefore, scratching six thousand words about a baseball bat on the wall. If either acts strangely, they are supposed to shoot one another; if either acts strangely...:

"If he decides I am behaving strangely he will shoot me not with the .45 but with the Beretta. Similarly Shotwell pretends to watch my .45 but he is really watching my hand resting idly atop my attaché case, my hand resting idly atop my attaché case, my hand. My hand resting idly atop my attaché case."

Here we see Don B. trying out technique--a technique that, if the reader isn’t careful, he will dismiss its contribution to the overall theme and get irate at the author for being difficult without pausing to think why, a difficulty that lesser authors might imitate but come up with not art but the surreal for surreality’s sake. The characters are repetitious to make sure accidents don’t happen, but they slip into insanity when they’re forgotten. Like the cold war stand-off, they are antagonists with the power to destroy through their insanity.

Too often readers who don’t understand a thing--like metafiction, like New Wave, like literary experiments--and like to blame their impatience on that thing, claim it means nothing or possibly anything. Perhaps this misperception is due to the well-intentioned definers of the then new fiction like Philip Stevik who anthologized the above story in Anti-Story under the heading “Against Meaning.” Much as I like Jessamyn West’s website, her subtitle misleads as well. It simply isn’t the case. Take the "The Balloon," where Don B. fills us full of his hot air:

"The balloon... the exact location of which I cannot reveal..., expanded... I stopped it... experienced a faint irritation at stopping..., seeing no reason the balloon should not be allowed to expand upward.... But it is wrong to speak of 'situations,' implying sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension; there were no situations, simply the balloon hanging there.... A deliberate lack of finish.... we have had a flood of original ideas in all media, works of singular beauty as well as significant milestones in the history of inflation, but at that moment there was only this balloon.... There were reactions. Some people found the balloon 'interesting.' As a response this seemed inadequate to the immensity of the balloon."

He goes on to elaborate on various failed attempts at interpretation of the balloon. Failed attempts at interpretation? I must have been wrong then, and the Imperialista detractors right. There is no situation, no resolution, no meaning, no escape from tension, no... But hold on. You have to read it with a double-mind: two meanings at once, for Don B. has been lying like a sack of compost, ending:

"on the occasion of your return.... The balloon, I said, is a spontaneous autobiographical disclosure, having to do with the unease I felt at your absence.... it is no longer necessary... is now stored in West Virginia, awaiting some other time of unhappiness, some time, perhaps when we are angry with one another."

T. Coraghessen Boyle is one of those Pen/Faulkner-winning Barthelme acolytes that Updike wondered where they were now. Boyle picked “The School” in You’ve Got to Read This as his favorite since it escalates "--a progression from trees to snakes to fish to mammals--and...presents the author with his biggest dilemma: how to get out [of]... painting himself into a corner."

But my favorite to pick apart--although my true favorites might be "Me and Miss Mandible" and "For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You"--is the oft-reprinted "Indian Uprising," a story that savagely messes with your sense of reality, among other things:

"We defended the city as best we could. The arrows of the Comanches came in clouds. The war clubs clattered on the soft, yellow pavements. There were earthworks along the Boulevard Mark Clark and the hedges had been laced with sparkling wire. People were trying to understand."

Understand what? This is a regular cowboy-indian showdown, no? The paragraph continues:

"I spoke to Sylvia. 'Do you think this is a good life?' The table held apples, books, long-playing recordes. She looked up. 'No.' "

What a sec. Records? When does this story take place? This is a difficult story, I admit. It took me several reads to figure it out. But I strongly disagree with Ann Charters’ and Donald Hall’s (nonetheless intelligent editors) interpretation of linking it to Vietnam. Although that note may be struck, it is a minor key. Consider that more than one war is taking place here. The narrator describes his camp’s torture of a Comanche, then says (juxtaposition is everything), "I sat there getting drunker and drunker and more in love and more in love. We talked," but the "we" discuss a long-playing record of Gabriel Fauré’s "Dolly," which Sylvia describes her playing it "requires four hands.... [managed by accelerating,] ignoring the time signature."

How many hands was that? How many hands do the "we" have? Yet she plays it alone. How? Sort of how Don B. tells his tale, don’t you think? The joy of Barthelme is in the discovery. I have unveiled only a few of his bag o’ tricks. The rest is up to you.

So what will become of our daring hero Don B., poised over the South American tar pit of realist oblivion? Will he "become a curiosity?" Or will writers one day learn from the one who reinvented the form? Or will all the experimental Americans expatriate themselves to write the stories they want to and allow the Imperialista pool to stagnate? You, dear readers and writers, shall decide his and our fate. Stay tuned....

Caveat Lector: The article’s author is a slut. He often whores with books by Imperialistas and expatriate savages alike. Tonight he dreams of a ménage-a-trois with both Updike and Barthelme: their covers in disarray: creased and well-worn. Mmm, baby. Variety is the spice.

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Donald Barthelme: a selected bibliography (with partial thanks to William G. Contento and additions/corrections by this article’s author)

Two out of Four Novels:

Snow White: a humorous and sometimes crude retelling of Snow White

The Dead Father: James Morrow owes an idea-from-the-ether debt here, or at least Don B. anticipated him by a few decades (read both takes and decide for yourself).

***

Collections & Re-collections (12-ish):

Any and all!

Sixty Stories

Forty Stories

***

Twenty Stories and an Essay in Forty-Five Major Anthologies:

"At the end of the mechanical age"
1) Selected shorts, volume I [sound recording] : [a celebration of the short story, Symphony Space, 1989.

“The Balloon,” (ss) New Yorker Apr 1966
1) SF12, ed. Judith Merril, Delacorte 1968
2) Science Fiction: The Future, ed. Dick Allen, HBJ 1971
3) The Harper Anthology of Fiction, ed. Sylvan Barnet, Longman 1991
4) Telling Stories: An Anthology for Writers, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, W. W. Norton 1998
5) Innovations, ed. Robert L. McLaughlin, Dalkey Archive Press 1998
6) Wonderful town : New York stories from The New Yorker, ed. David Remnick, Random House, 2000.

“Basil from Her Garden,” (ss) New Yorker Oct 21 ’85
1) The Best American Short Stories 1986, ed. Raymond Carver & Shannon Ravenel, Houghton Mifflin 1986
2) On the couch : great American stories about therapy, Erica Kates, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1997.

“Captain Blood,” (ss) Overnight to Many Distant Cities, Putnam 1987
1) New Mystery, ed. Jerone Charyn, Dutton 1993

“A City of Churches,” (ss)
1) The Best American Short Stories 1973, ed. Martha Foley, Ballantine, 1973
2) Science Fiction, ed. Herbert Kaußen & Dr. Rudi Renné, Munich: Langenscheidt-Longman 1990
3) Short Fiction, ed. Charles H. Bohner & Dean Dougherty, Prentice Hall 1999
4) The Best American Short Stories of the Century, ed. John Updike & Katrina Kenison, Houghton Mifflin 2000

“Cortes and Montezuma,” (ss)
1) The Art of the Tale: An International Anthology of Short Stories, ed. Daniel Halpern, Penguin USA 1989
2) Fiction 50: An Introduction to the Short Story, ed. James H. Pickering, Prentice Hall 1993
3) Fiction 100: An Anthology of Short Stories (9th edition), ed. James H. Pickering, Prentice Hall College Div. 2000

“The Death of Edward Lear,” (ss) New Yorker Jan 2 ’71
1) The Literary Ghost, ed. Larry Dark, Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991

“The Emerald,” (nv) Esquire Nov ’79
1) The Best American Short Stories 1980, ed. Stanley Elkin & Shannon Ravenel, Houghton Mifflin, 1980
2) The Slaying of the Dragon, ed. Franz Rottensteiner, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984
3) The Best American Short Stories of the Eighties, ed. Shannon Ravenel, Houghton Mifflin, 1990

“Game,” (ss) New Yorker Jul 31 1965
1) The 11th Annual of the Year’s Best S-F, ed. Judith Merril, Delacorte 1966
2) The War Book, ed. James Sallis 1969
3) Anti Story: an anthology of experimental fiction, ed. Philip Stevick, The Free Press, 1971
4) Vintage Book of Amnesia, ed. Jonathan Lethem, Random House/Vintage 2000

“The Genius,” (ss) New Yorker Feb 1971
1) Best SF: 1971, ed. Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss, G.P. Putnam’s 1972

“The Glass Mountain,” (ss) City Life, 1970
1) The Oxford Book of Modern Fairy Tales, ed. Alison Lurie, Oxford University Press, 1993

“The Indian Uprising,” (ss) New Yorker Mar 6 ’65
1) To Read Literature, ed. Donald Hall, Holt, 1981
2) Norton Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, R. V. Cassill, Norton 1987
3) Major American Short Stories, ed. A. Walton Litz, Oxford University Press 1994
4) The American Short Story and Its Writer: An Anthology, ed. Ann Charters, Bedford Books 1995
5) The Granta Book of the American Short Story, ed. Richard Ford, Penguin/Granta 1998
6) The Longman Anthology of Short Fiction, ed. Dana Gioia & R. S. Gwynn, Longman 2000

“Me and Miss Mandible,” (ss)
1) Norton Anthology of Short Fiction: Sixth Edition, ed. R. V. Cassill & Richard Bausch, W. W. Norton & Co. 2000

“Not Knowing” (essay)
1) Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses XI, ed. Bill Henderson, 1988

“The Piano Player,” (ss) New Yorker Aug 31 1963
1) Fantastic Worlds, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Oxford University Press 1979
2) Stories: An Anthology and an Introduction, ed. Eric S. Rabkin, Longman 1994

“The Police Band,” (ss)
1) The American Short Story and Its Writer: An Anthology, ed. Ann Charters, Bedford Books 1999

“The President,” (ss)
1) The American Short Story and Its Writer: An Anthology, ed. Ann Charters, Bedford Books 1987

“Report,” (ss) New Yorker 1966
1) Inside Information, ed. Abbe Mowshowitz, Addison-Wesley 1977

“The Sandman,” (ss)
1) A Web of Stories: An Introduction to Short Fiction, ed. Jon Ford & Marjorie Ford, Prentice Hall 1998

“The School,” (ss)
1) American Short Stories (6th edition), ed. Eugene Current-Garcia & Bert Hitchcock, Addison-Wesley Pub Co. 1966
2) The Oxford book of American short stories, ed. Joyce Carol Oates, Oxford University Press, 1992.
3) You’ve Got to Read This, ed. Ron Hansen & Jim Shepard, Harperperennial Library 1994
4) Modern Fiction about School Teaching, ed. Jay S. Blanchard & Ursula Casanova, Allyn & Bacon 1996
5) Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction, ed. Lex Williford & Michael Martone, Scribner 1999
6) Texas Bound Book III, ed. Kay Cattarulla, Southern Methodist University Press 2001
7) American Short Stories (7th edition), ed. Eugene Current-Garcia & Bert Hitchcock, Longman 2001

“See the Moon?,” (ss), 1964
1) Postmodern American Fiction, ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron & Andrew Levy, Norton, 1997

“Sentence,” (ss), 1970, New Yorker
1) Super Fiction or The American Story Transformed, ed. Joe David Bellamy, Vintage, 1975
2) Postmodern American Fiction, ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron & Andrew Levy, Norton, 1997

“?”
1) Single Voice: An Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, ed. Jerome Charyn, Collier, 1969

“?”
1) The Best American Short Stories 1975, ed. Martha Foley, Ballantine, 1975

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The Problem of Humor

Last night I attended a poetry reading by local graduate school students. The first girl poet was rather good, using humor to crack the ice of her audience in the cramped space between bookshelves and shifting bodies that did not arrive early enough for a seat.

The veteran poetry intellectuals came armed with guffaws and used them readily from the first glimmer of humor. But she was really funny--even if not always laugh-out-loud funny (one on dating Warren Buffet, another on a sexual escapade while embalming someone and listening to Gordon Lightfoot). After each poem, the audience clapped. I was still warming my hands from outside, so I made the sound of one-hand clapping--against the bookshelf of the travel section.

The next poet shuffled to the stage in her shy, sweet smile and mid-length blonde hair falling over her cheekbones to hide her face. She invoked the labor of youth, our ire against early treatment of Native Americans. No one laughed, and no one clapped after each poem. One could see the toll that no-one-clapping took by the straining of her smile. It was not that her poems were bad--if occasionally over- or underplaying what the drama should be--but the audience was growing tired and had forgotten they'd clapped after each poem of the first poet.

I wanted to comfort her and tell her, "It's okay. The other poet will never win an award. People who use humor never do."

I no sooner thought it than Robert Sheckley came to mind.

"Never" is a strong term, of course. Certainly R.A. Lafferty won a Hugo for "Eurema's Dam" and Connie Willis has won a few awards herself (but then humor is not necessarily her main mode of storytelling).

Sheckley did win a Jupiter, a short-lived award given by the "Instructors of Science Fiction in Higher Education," back in '74 (no mean feat if you consider that the other stories are considered major classics today). His Author Emeritus award is certainly nothing to look down on, but it is interesting that, aside from sharing the title with authors who have all retired, William Tenn is the only other who worked primarily with humor and irony. The Grand Master list has none who worked primarily with humor and irony as Sheckley and Tenn did.

When a writer asked me why I thought Bob Urell's petition to make Robert Sheckley a Grand Master was so sparsely signed in comparison to his realm of influence, I speculated on possibilities: 1) unfathomable politics, 2) no one's read him these days, 3) he's gotten an award already.

But this new reflection on humor strikes me as the strongest possibility. Humor sneaks past our guard, disarms and charms us more quickly than a normal narrative. Of course, that is all some humor manages to do, eliciting a chuckle or even a guffaw. Lawrence Block once wrote an essay where he sat in on a movie based on his work where the audience laughed heartily, but when he asked their final assessment, he found them negatively disposed. You can make them laugh, but you can't make them love.

Likewise, not every Sheckley story is equally important simply due to the presence of irony or humor. But my suspicion is that because this irony or humor immediately charms and disarms us, we automatically dismiss it from deeper significance. Or, even if we admit a deeper significance, we assume the significance is cheaply or artificially won. I've demonstrated on a couple of Sheckley stories already that his humor and irony is not cheap but far more profound than one would assume due to our (largely American?) prejudice against any insights delivered through humor.

(But if we dismiss Sheckley, we forget his reprints in well over three dozen major anthologies--retrospectives of year, genre, or magazine--as well as his acknowledged or unacknoledged influence on major writers like Douglas Adams, David Brin, Alan Dean Foster, Matt Groening, Stephen King, Ursula K. LeGuin, Spider Robinson, Rudy Rucker, and perhaps even Joseph Heller (whose Catch-22, which he'd begun working on around the publication of Sheckley's "If a Red Slayer"--some uncanny resemblances arise from comparison). As I've said, there's a transformative power in reading Sheckley en masse that one simply does not find even from such Grand Masters as Robert Heinlein, who clearly deserves the award for easily delineated contributions to the genre. And maybe that's Sheckley's problem. His contributions are much more insidious--in the best sense of the term.

Look at all the awards Kurt Vonnegut has won. More tellingly, look at the major literary awards. Off the top of my head, I can think of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, but could his recent death at the time have influenced that choice? It seems the field of SFF may have less prejudice toward humor than elsewhere.

If we dig deeper, we may find the problem of humor is merely a tributary vein of a larger bias: entertainment. It's like the old phrase we've all used: "Anything that tastes that good can't be good for you." If some are reluctant to accept SFF as holding any profundities, perhaps our misunderstanding of humor can in part answer why.

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Ulysses Gets Panned

Roddy Doyle and another critic give reasons why Ulysses is a failure.

I've only read sections of Ulysses, which I found amusing, so I cannot argue for or against. I will add that time does seem to play a factor in critical opinion and that an "ethical aesthetics" (one that has regard for all of fiction's parts as well as broader views of where it fits into the schemata of literature--in other words, a critical theory of practical use) is crucial. Hype eventually dies. If Ulysses is better than the attacks--never fear, fans--it shall breathe again to critical acceptance.

What's next? Remembrance of Things Past?

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James Van Pelt talks plot

On March 1, the Online Writing Workshop is sponsoring an online discussion group on plot, led by James Van Pelt. The drawback is the steep workshop fee ($49/year & $30/6 mo.). If you don't try to do anything too fancy and you're looking for a workshop and you've got money to burn, this may be the place.

Van Pelt is a good man for the job. I've yet to read a story of his that was not well-structured. Take a gander for yourself:

"The Last of the O-Forms" (up for this year's Nebula, third on Asimov's Reader Poll)

"The Wreath"

"A Flock of Birds" (in Dozois' Year's Best, 26th on the Locus Poll)

"The Miracle at Ramah"

"Teaching"

"Parallel Highways"

If you ever visit the Speculation's Rumor Mill, look for his posts. Always worthwhile.

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Think I better dance now!

Sorry. Tom Jones gets in my head and that's it....
So, since it was brought out in the comments section of a couple of posts ago, I guess it's fair game to blog about it: What am I doing besides talking about it?
Well, unfortunately, not much. In the last year I've begun putting the pieces together for the unveiling of a new fantastic literature reading series here in Portland, OR. We're basing it on Ellen Datlow's KGB series and she's been good enough to give us advice and smacks on the head when called for. "We" being a group of Portland writers and publishers whose names I do not have the permission to disclose, excepting perhaps Jason Williams who has already mentioned this somewhere else in the distant past.
I'm also still pushing for Bob Sheckley's installment as SFWA Grand Master. I think this is more important than it looks on the face of it because, one, it's a clear, reasonable goal, and two, it shows that we're not just a flash in the pan "movement", whatever that means, but a divergent, self-aware branch of fantastical literature with a history and an honest to gawd purpose. I think anyone who loves SF/F/H of a literary bent owes Bob a huge debt for helping identify and overcome the trend toward juvenilia and escapism that marked the genre pre-1951. It's not much, and it's not enough, but it's something.
And then there's the most concrete difference of all: My own writing. Yep, I'm a writer. Even worse, I'm a writer who's completely aware of the fact that writing will never support my family. Therefore, I'm a writer who writes stories with all the honesty and frankness that I can. I've got no audience to lose and no career to destroy, so I can do that, I can write about death and racism and misogyny and I can write those stories with all the harshness and passion that I feel for and against these things. Even better, I've got friends who've taken the time to help me get along, even if it's to say that I've got a long way to go.
I know there's been a lot of hot air and hype blowing through this blog, and not a small portion of it's been mine. But the thing is, even if we never get anything done at all, at least we're not sitting on our asses in the shadows laughing at anyone else who tries, right? This thing may never accomplish a single thing, though I think that's unlikely. Maybe the most we'll ever do is sell some books by authors who deserve it. But maybe that's enough to justify our existence right there.
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British Book Event

Steve Aylett and China Mieville are appearing at the Bath Literature Festival on 4 March.

Aylett's latest (last?) book of the Accomplice series was just released: Karloff's Circus.

How to describe the series? Take Alice in Wonderland. Now take out Alice. Now put in the Wonderland characters and have them make sense of Wonderland. It's that damned crazy--if not crazier and a little seedier.

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[method three]

Here's a meme for you.

I call it Operation:Get 'Em On The Shelves.

Here's what to do.

On March 1st (or any time during that week), go into your favorite chain bookseller. Take a look at the SFF shelves. Is anything missing? Are there any particular books that you love, which you'd like to see on the shelves?

Order 'em. Three copies, actually.

Personally, I'll be heading to Borders, where I'll be ordering three copies of Graham Joyce's awesome The Facts of Life, which I never saw on the shelves.

See, if you order multiple copies of a book and never pick them up, odds are they'll be added into inventory... which means they'll go on the shelves until the next 'pull'. The pulls take place monthly, so if you do it at the beginning of the month, odds are they'll remain for at least the month of March, and maybe April.

When you order, ask for an email confirmation. Once you receive that confirmation, forward it to guerrillaSFF@yahoo.com, and I'll report the number of respondents.

Will it work? Will it accomplish anything besides headaches for bookstore employees? I don't know.

But it's worth a try.

So go forth and spread the word. Tell your friends, tell your lovers, tell your family. After all, no one is going to happen upon a new book that isn't on the shelves....


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Genre Idiosyncrasies

I find all the talk of genre idiosyncrasies fascinating.

Alan Lattimore begins the discussion here.

Matthew Cheney takes off from there.

(Matthew and I discuss various implications here.)

And, not so tangentially in my mind, Alan talks further about the genre in regards to Jonathan Lethem's essay.

My first response to Lethem (and to Gabe) essentially said that SF turned its back on the literary culture long ago, but of course it is much more complex than that. In the process of separation, I believe, it's developed an art quite different from the tradition literary culture (the "Who Shot SF?" essay attempted to point out one aspect of its art through Robert Sheckley as did this other essay on another aspect of genre art where stories that may seem insubstantial separately add up to something more thought provoking)--an art which, if we recognize it, we also tend to turn our back on since it's that big scary unknown thing we call art. But acceptance of art in the genre goes through its cycles. (An academic essay was floating somewhere on the web regarding Lethem's essay--where "Who Shot SF?" had become a footnote--although I cannot find it now for further references.)

In fact, I propose that SFF continues to invent new art forms, it just doesn't know it. This is what I've been trying to get people excited about and encouraged about and to get us to EXPLORE FURTHER for a while now (I made one proposal of a new art form within the Interstitial movement, but since it didn't encompass the whole movement, it's been downplayed, but I hope it eventually gets air-time.) We could be on the tip of a huge iceberg.

I'm not yet sure where Gabe's going on the main website, but his ideas are starting to gel and excite me--is he on the verge of a conceptual breakthrough? I shall wait with bated breath. (If not, who cares? It's the attempt that's important, and as Tarkovsky says, "If one were to perform the same single act..., the world would be changed." I hope we one day fulfill Jeff Ford's prophecy: "They eventually lead to other universes." Is this just hype? Or the real thing? Stay tuned to find out.)

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The Chain of Responsibility Has to Start Somewhere

I'm helping out with reviews at TangentOnline. They're backlogged, so I'm just now reviewing the Spring '03 issue of The Third Alternative. Way in the back, in Peter Tennant's review of Tideland, is the following:

On the cover, Terry Gilliam describes the book as 'F*cking wonderful.' Sorry Terrence, but you need to read more.

I am gratified to finally see people who write blurbs publicly held accountable for their endorsements.
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The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction

Jonathan Lethem's essay on how post-New Wave science fiction took a wrong turn and lost our innovative edge to mainstream writers. Don't sit there-read it. discuss this post at our messageboard

Meaning/Change/Theme/Dreams/Hope/Love/Truth in "The Sacrifice"

I'm conflating the terms in the above title because I see them as related. I'll parse out some of the differences here, but it is this necessary entanglement of our existence that our postmodern "enlightenment" has lost sight of--a loss that Andrei Tarkovsky lamented.

Colleen @ Del Rey asked what I thought about Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. I think everyone should see it. I'll unravel just the beginning, so that you may unravel the rest for yourselves--the truth/change/etc. If you see dreams/hope/love as the vector that drives a character toward change, which leads to lifting the corner of a page in the book of meaning/theme/revelation/truth, it is difficult not to see things from Tarkovsky's perspective.

The story begins with Alexander helping his son, Little Man, to erect a dead tree. He tells his son if he waters the tree for years, one day it will blossom:

"A method, a system has its virtues. If one were to perform the same single act,like a ritual, unchanging systematic..., the world would be changed.... Something would change. It would have to."

Later, the two bump into the bicycling postman who, being something of a mystic, warns Alexander, "We all are waiting for something. I've always felt as if... the living I've done, so far, hasn't actually been real life, but a long wait for... something real.... We hope, we lose hope, we move closer to death. Finally, we die and are born again. But we remember nothing. And everything begins again, from scratch. Not literally the same way, just wee wee bit different. But it's still so hopeless and we don't know why. Just the next performance so to speak."

Alexander responds, "Do you really think that mankind could devise a universal concept, a model... of Absolute Law, of Absolute Truth? Why it'd be like trying to create a new universe, to be a demiurge [dramaturge?]. Do you truly believe...?"

"Yes," says the postman, mounting his bicycle. "If I truly believe, it will be so."

Alexander takes his boy into the woods, where they will meet a couple motoring down a dirt road. He tells the boy, "In the beginning was the word. You are mute, mute as a fish. We've lost our way. Humanity is also on the wrong road, a dangerous road."

One of the couple is a doctor who, on reflecting of the child's speechlessness, says, "Gandhi had one day a week when he spoke to no one."

The couple head back to the house in the car while Alexander chooses to finish his speech to Little Man although, when the major points are revealed, "Little Man" is not listening but gone.: "We had no map. We forgot to bring one.... There is no such thing as death.... there's the fear of death and that... makes people do things they shouldn't. [Typical anti-science speech]. Savages are more spiritual than we.... How weary I am of all this talk.... If only some could stop talking and DO something instead. Or at least try to."

Later the postman hands Alexander a birthday gift of an old map: "Every gift requires a sacrifice. If not, what kind of gift would it be."

"It must have been lovely when men thought the world looked like this," Alexander said. "This Europe looks more like Mars. That is, it has nothing to do with truth."

"No. But people lived then."

"I have a feeling that our maps have nothing to do with truth, either."

Watch for maps, opening/closing of doors, bicycles vs. motor cars. Think of the story as one of a cycle of such stories--i.e. Abraham and Isaac, etc.--and the ending should become quite clear.

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give me particulars

But why, in particular, is fantastic fiction in all its varied forms, important? Why should we encourage other people to read it? Why should we care, when we have a strong core of readers that barely changes over the years?

I'm looking for specifics. Actionable, quantifiable specifics that can be utilized instead of resorting to people shrugging and saying "because it's cool" or something.

This is important. To me, at least.

For example, I think a lot of the techy sorta-SF works that have been put out by Cory Doctorow, William Gibson, etc. are important because they help us deal with 'future shock' (for lack of a better term). Like the cyberpunks, these writers give us an 'inroad' for understanding and adapting to rapid change in technology.

I'd be more coherent if my head wasn't pounding so badly....

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Joe Public and Barry N. Malzberg

Why is speculative fiction an important, necessary component of our culture? What makes it worth Joe Public's time read an SFF novel?

Jeff Vandermeer and Matt Peckham have already discussed that one success of SFF is that is it shares certain similarities to other fiction. I agree, but more importantly so does T.S. Eliot:

"[N]ot only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors assert their immortality most vigorously."

But as Eliot points out, there are also dissimilarities or we'd have mimicry, which would fall short of art.

A second aspect that Joe Public should already be aware of, if he didn't already know from our popular climate or from McSweeney's Mammoth anthology, is that one of the genre's priorities has always been entertainment.

But this still doesn't make the genre unique as other genres could easily accomodate this attitude.

One of my favorite genre aspects is that it has invented or changed-up more reliable modes of storytelling than others. I gave Fredric Brown's "Letter to a Phoenix" as an example that may be disappearing ("The Weapon" would also qualify as one whose effect requires displacing the character change into the reader, but while less common than it once was, this is probably not in danger of extinction).

Another example would be the discursive-discourse style of Barry N. Malzberg. I'm not sure if a Malzberg-type could be published today--not that his style was always effective but it was almost always pertinent which few writers can claim. Moreover, when his discourse-fiction mode was spot-on mixed as in "Understanding Entropy," we encounter both powerful thought and emotion.

The genre used to pride itself on its variety, but I wonder sometimes if we've become a codified commodity. Perhaps the genre's too big to notice all the new invention in its corner pockets. If so, why are they in the corner pockets?

Noam Chomsky had an interesting theory of evolutionary/natural-selection education that went something like: those who do as they're told become worldly successes, those who go against the grain become taxi drivers.

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I think there have been some misconceptions around what it is that I, personally, want to accomplish within the field of speculative fiction. Some people assume that I am out to change the genre itself; that somehow, I don't like speculative fiction, and would like to see the field either co-opted or coerced into something that resembles my personal favorite vision.

Quite the contrary.

Rather, my mission, such as it is, is something a lot more complex and a lot deeper than that.

My goal, my aim, is to bring speculative fiction out of the 'ghetto' and into the world-at-large. I want to break down those barriers that we've erected that keep the field from interacting with the rest of the world. I'm interested in ruining the dichotomy that persists between the SFF Reader and the Non-SFF Reader.

I believe that speculative fiction, moreso than any other form of fiction, has social and cultural relevance that is overlooked and denied to non-SFF readers. I believe that, with the proper goading and proper coercing, the field of speculative fiction can bridge the gap between popular entertainment and full-blown 'Important Literature'. In some ways, I am like the Fan of old, the boy that believes that Fans are Slans, that SFF is a superior form of fiction. But where the typical Fannish mindset is exclusionary, my mindset is more inclusive. I don't want to close the field to 'mundanes'; I want to embrace them, to show them exactly why I think SFF is vital, important culture.

There are many angles of attack to pursue in this mission. One way, which I'll be exploring in depth with s1ngularity.net, is via proper marketing; the idea that the "revolution will be marketed". Another method is through the critical study of speculative fiction, which encourages both discerning readers and more rigorous reviewers. Yet another angle is to discover (and encourage) the "whys" behind speculative fiction; why we read it, why we write it, and why others should read it. In essence, we must explore the reasons for speculative fiction, so we may properly describe why others should bother reading it.

So, bloggers and blogreaders… start your engines.

Why is speculative fiction an important, necessary component of our culture? What makes it worth Joe Public's time read an SFF novel?

Speak out.



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Frederic Brown: the Arena of SF

One of the problems of focusing on the present is that we bypass standing on the shoulders of giants who have made great yet forgotten strides in whatever field. Robert Sheckley is one name you’ve heard much mention of here. Frederic Brown is another.

The best essay on Brown is by Barry N. Malzberg found in his genre collection From These Ashes. He writes, “[Brown] has in the last few decades fallen almost completely out of print.” This is rather astounding, considering that his shorts have appeared in around a dozen or two of the year’s bests as edited by Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov, and Everett Bleiler--not to mention major retrospective anthologies like Terry Carr’s Treasury of Modern Fantasy and SFWA’s Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

“Arena,” his most famous story, is tenth on William G. Contento’s reprint list and fifteenth on SFWA’s list of best stories between 1929-1964, which is not too shabby considering the stories on that list. After one reads that story, the connection to Orson Scott Card’s masterwork, Ender’s Game (also influenced by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers), is unambiguous.

His best story may be “The Weapon,” which some may consider a vignette due to its brevity but packs a narrative arc which makes it unmistakably a full short story with the potency of stories ten-fold its length. But he wrote a number of works at this length and shorter that have more power than people generally give them credit because readers may fail to reflect on the portent of meaning/purpose/truth/theme/change [see forthcoming essays on meaning in life and in Andrei Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice] unpacked in relatively short space--a lesson in brevity that only passionate readers of poetry seem to be aware of [see forthcoming essay on the connection between poetry and SF]. One would have to take “Abominable” as another example--here, however, both Emshwiller’s and Brown’s stories combine for a greater effect than either alone.

His greatest work, however, gives its effect in a form that inhabits almost solely in the SF realm--an effect almost forgotten by our present-tense only eyes for genre [again, refer to future essay on poetry]: “Letter to a Phoenix.” The time-spanning effect we can grant to Olaf Stapledon who used it to compress entire histories of the universe into one narrative (although Wells predates both in his finale of The Time Machine). But Brown does it to such an impact that neither predecessor quite achieves through its use: as Malzberg writes, “[it] holds that humanity may be hopeless but it is absolutely unassailable.”

This is but one major attribute of SF almost wholly forgotten except in a few brief glimmers today (i.e. Paul di Filippo), which gives us the first in a string of examples of what the genre could learn from the example of poetry [see future essay on the connection between SF and poetry].

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Oye!

Okay. I did my best to construct a reasonable argument here. I appealed to emotion here. I threatened you here.
The only fallacy I haven't yet committed is ad populum. So that's what I'm gonna do now. Sign my petition and you'll have your name in the same list as Jeff Ford, Kage Baker, Lucius Shepard and Nick Mamatas. That's kinda cool, right?
Apologies to those who very much wish they didn't have to read about this anymore....

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