The Hot Breath of the Future

Uh-oh.

The Chill Hand of Mortality

In an interview published in The New Yorker, part of the publicity for his new novel Exit Ghost, Philip Roth says this:

. . . at this stage of the game I’d much rather spend my reading time - as I have been doing - revisiting, for the last time around, other writers, like Conrad and Hemingway and Faulkner and Turgenev.

So now, in addition to books (some as yet unwritten) I haven’t yet read, books I don’t ever want to or need to read, and books I’ve read but won’t ever read again, I have to look forward to a time when I have to concentrate on books I really must reread, one last time, before it’s too late. At least, if I’m carried off in the middle of rereading one of my favourites, I won’t have to worry about never knowing how it ends.

In the same issue, Louis Menand beautifully evokes that old, still-potent romance:

. . . I often stopped for gas at a service area on the Mass Pike about fifty miles from Boston. It’s fairly high above sea level there, in the lower ranges of the Berkshires, and I would stand at the pump in the dark looking at the stars in the cold clear sky as the semis roared past and with the wind in my hair, and I liked to imagine that I was a character in Kerouac’s novel, lost to everyone I knew and to everyone who knew me, somewhere in America, on the road.

Before The Fall

While researching Cowboy Angels, I spent a lot of time figuring out what Manhattan might have looked like before it was settled by any humans. Eric Sanderson's project came a little too late, and would have saved me a lot of trouble...

(Thanks to Jack Womack for the link.)

Rorschach Moon

Iapetus close-up.

Heads or Tails

It’s the fiftieth anniversary of Hugh Everett’s ‘many worlds’ interpretation of quantum mechanics, which attempted to apply quantum mechanical equations to both the subatomic world and the macroscopic world we ordinarily inhabit. It’s long been accepted that subatomic particles like electrons or photons exist as both wave and particle until collapsed when an observer makes a measurement; Everett’s proposal that hawks, handsaws, and human beings also exist in a multitude of simultaneous states - parallel worlds - has been much more contentious. But now, at a meeting at Oxford University, reported in the latest issue of New Scientist (you need to be a subscriber to read the full report, but Peter Byrne has blogged the meeting for Scientific American), David Deutsch and his colleagues claim that ‘key equations of quantum mechanics arise from the mathematics of parallel worlds’. Or to put it another way, if they’re right - and it’s an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence - every time we make a decision, the universe really does split into two parallel branches. Coin-tossing may never be the same again.

Desperate Fun...

...was had by all at a small party to wet the head of Cowboy Angels, in the Phoenix Artist Club. Copies should now be out in the wild; head straight past the 3 for 2 tables to the shelves towards the back of the bookshop, where authors are democratically ranked in alphabetical order.

London's New Forbidden Zone...

...has a very long, very blue boundary.

Seriously Weird

Among the science-fictional paradigms named in the mundane SF crowd’s fatwah are time-travel and parallel universes. David Toomey’s The New Time Travellers: A Journey to the Frontiers of Physics is a superb examination of ideas that are gaining serious scientific attention, including the possibility that time travel and the multiple worlds theory are two sides of the same coin. The kind of stuff, in fact, that helped me put in some solid foundations to the multiverse of Cowboy Angels.

Brautigan

For some reason, my local library, in the 1970s, had all of Brautigan's novels. And I read them all. So when I read this, I found the secondhand copy of Trout Fishing In America I bought in Vancouver, and read:

I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper.

Zapped

The images from Cassini's flyby of Iapetus that I was very much looking forward to closely analysing (trans: ripping off) has been delayed by a galactic cosmic ray hit that tripped a solid state power switch and sent the spacecraft into safe mode. What could be more science-fictional?

Borderline Anxiety (2)

Whenever mainstream or literary fiction dares to trespass on territory that science fiction considers its own, reaction from within the field ranges from the kind of hooting animosity displayed by apemen contesting ownership of a waterhole in the opening scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, through serene indifference, to the craven capitulation of The Simpsons' news anchor, Kent Brockman: ‘I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords . . .’

Paul Kincaid’s recent column in Bookslut is, unfortunately, a pretty good example of Brockmanism. After discussing use of a medical procedure as a plot device in Graham Swift’s novel Tomorrow, Kincaid, previously the administrator of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, goes on to imply that literary fiction may be doing a better job of portraying real science and real scientists than science fiction. While science was once ‘one of the things that cut science fiction off from the rest of literature,’ he says, now it’s ‘ordinary and about something.’ Further, now that ‘the transcendence, the wonder that were handy terms when talking about big concept sf have been taken seriously and science fiction has become almost an ecstatic experience . . . perhaps it’s a good thing that the mainstream has discovered the scientist -- because science fiction seems to have lost him.’

The insect overlords have taken up SF’s most treasured theme! Surrender at once! Round up the usual suspects and set them to work in the underground sugar caves of our new masters!

Well, it’s certainly true that literary fiction is paying more attention to science these days. And the idea that, as science becomes normalised and incorporated into the tropes of literary fiction, so SF has retreated into a kind of mystic ecstasy, is an interesting one. Unfortunately, it’s completely false. And Kincaid’s attempts to justify it don’t hold water for a second.

In discussing literary novels that feature scientists, Kincaid ranges over the past sixty-fifty years (it should be noted that he mistakenly attributes authorship of his earliest example, The Small Back Room (1942), to Nevil Shute; in fact, it was written by Nigel Balchin, and Balchin’s scientist hero was no boffin or administrator, remote from ordinary human experience, but a genuinely tortured soul). Yet after claiming that ‘we seem to be seeing fewer and fewer scientists in science fiction’, and telling us that SF is disappearing up its own transcendental fundament, Kincaid gives only one supposed example of this trend, M. Rickert’s Map of Dreams (2006). I confess that I haven’t yet read it. But I have Googled it. It’s a fantasy novella. It’s clearly labelled as a fantasy novella, and is published in a small press collection of fantasy stories. Its time-travel may well be achieved through what Kincaid describes as ‘a mixture of amateurism and mysticism’, but it can’t typify his claim that SF is retreating from realism for the simple reason that it isn’t SF.

And even if Rickert’s novella was SF, it doesn’t take much thought to come up with a hefty list of SF novels from the past decade, much less the past sixty-five years, that have dealt with science and scientists in a serious, realistic, and sympathetic manner. Here are a few, more or less off the top of my head: Stephen Baxter’s Moonseed; Greg Bear’s Vitals; Gregory Benford’s Cosm, Eater, and The Martian Race; Greg Egan’s Teranesia and Schild’s Ladder; Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica, and his climate change trilogy; Bruce Sterling’s Distraction. As I have no shame, I’ll also mention my own The Secret Of Life and White Devils. I’m sure that you can think of many more, but I hope this little list is enough to convince you that SF has neither ‘lost’ the scientist, nor its interest in rigorous, serious, and thrillingly speculative explorations of the outer reaches of science and technology. Of course, some SF does have a problem with keeping abreast of science’s rapidly advancing cutting edge, but I think I’ll reserve that topic for another time.

Robots Survive Dust Storm, Prepare To Conquer

They're alive!

Product

I’ve just received advance copies of the hardback and trade paperback editions of Cowboy Angels. As usual, I can’t quite bring myself to open them just yet, but they look lovely.

I’ve posted another extract from Cowboy Angels, the fourth, on the web site.

Borderline Anxiety (1)

Despite New Wave fantasies about reinsertition of science fiction into the so-called mainstream of literary fiction after the collapse of the Gernsbackian hegemony, or attempts by postmodernists to erase the hierarchy of high/low culture, the distinction between genre and mainstream is ineradicable. Science fiction, like crime, horror, or romance fiction, is distinguished by an internalised dialogue based on development and variation of unique tropes. This genre gestalt implies a border: an inside and an outside. Writers working inside a genre border must always be aware of their relationship with their chosen genre and with the mainstream outside the border. But mainstream writers are untroubled by this Janus-like duality unless they find it necessary to make use of genre tropes. Even then, if they are secure in their reputation, mainstream writers don’t need to excuse this borrowing. They might even admit an admiration for the genre to which they’re indebted. But because reputation is an important part of their self-worth, and because they’re hyperaware of status, most mainstream writers, like Jeanette Winterson (for instance), feel that they must deny that they writing science fiction when they are writing science fiction. They feel that they must neutralise the ant-pong of genre with disinfecting hyperbole. They must declare that they ‘hate science fiction.’ It’s ridiculous, of course. Hypocritical. But it usually works because journalists are usually too lazy to question it. When Jeanette Winterson declared to Liz Else and Eleanor Harris of the New Scientist that ‘I hate science fiction’, the two intrepid interviewers accepted it without demur. Would they have remained silent if Winterson had said ‘I hate scientists’, or ‘I hate Ian McEwan’?

Fortress America

Via Dan Froomkin's essential White House Watch:

Bush visited Al-Asad Air Base -- an enormous, heavily fortified American outpost for 10,000 troops that while technically in Anbar Province in fact has a 13-mile perimeter keeping Iraq -- and Iraqis -- at bay. Bush never left the confines of the base, known as " Camp Cupcake," for its relatively luxurious facilities, but nevertheless announced: "When you stand on the ground here in Anbar and hear from the people who live here, you can see what the future of Iraq can look like."

More Stuff

I’ve added a third section of Cowboy Angels (the last of the prologue) to the website. More will be put up at random intervals until publication day, September 20th. Meanwhile, as the hinge of the year swings close on summer, I’m starting in on the final revision of the ongoing.

Currently reading: Spook Country, William Gibson.
Currently listening to: Stanley Brothers, Earliest Recordings. Altogether now: 'I'm just a roaming rambler, I'm always on the roam...'

Placating the Border Cops

I’m not certain that Jeanette Winterson’s flat disclaimer, ‘I hate science fiction,’ (see Without Prejudice) was generated by real hatred and loathing of the genre. More likely, it was a reflexive blurt driven by anxiety. Winterson is an author with impeccable literary establishment qualifications. And part of belonging to the ‘literary’ establishment is the need to maintain a strong and impermeable barrier between ‘literary’ and genre fiction, between so-called high and low art, between ‘proper’ fiction and despised, degenerate pulp. So although Winterson has felt it necessary, for the purposes of her novel, to borrow from science-fiction’s toolbox of tropes, tricks, and imagery, she has to make it clear that she is in no way tainted by or sympathetic to science fiction. Saying ‘I hate science fiction’ is not only like displaying a properly stamped passport to a border cop, proof to the cultural critics that she belongs on what she perceives to be the right side of the barrier; it’s also a powerful disinfectant spray that cleanses the taint of genre from borrowings smuggled out of the forbidden zone.

It occurs to me that the champions of so-called mundane science fiction may be displaying the same anxiety about genre taint as Winterson and other literary novelists who have borrowed from science fiction. The mundane movement, rejecting ‘myths’ such as aliens, faster-than-light travel, parallel worlds, time travel, and so on, declares strict adherence to mimesis and realistic speculation about known scientific truths. They aren’t the first science-fiction writers to attempt to differentiate themselves from the rest of the genre - Heinlein, for instance, attempted to erect a wall between real science fiction and mere fantasy by declaring that fantasy is ‘any story based on violation of a scientific fact’ - and I doubt that they’ll be the last. But like all the rest they are doomed to failure not only because their internal borders are artificial and impossible to police, but also because they are attempting to argue a case for legitimacy before a court that cares not a jot for the differences they are attempting to define.

From Fairyland

‘... You should be interested in fembots, Alex. They do what your viruses do, only it's purer, very intense and very precise. I made the first strain. It gives you a vision of the Madonna -- the Mother of God, not the pop star. I let it loose, and the hackers took over. There are fifty-eight strains I know of, now, all developed inside a year. Some reveal Elvis Presley or Princess Di, others God Herself in clouds of glory, or LGM.’

‘LGM?’

Alex is thinking of the white room -- she zapped him for sure. His brain crawls under his skull.

Milena is eager to explain. ‘Little Green Men. You know, like flying saucers. Right brain visions. There's one strain, the Streiber, that gives you a complete abduction experience, even with fuzzy false memories of rape. It's amazing what you can pack down inside a bunch of metal-doped superconducting buckyballs.’

Housekeeping

I’ve regrouted the web site, and added another short extract from Cowboy Angels.

Infinity And Beyond

Set up when the interweb was mostly fields brimming with golden idealism, infinityplus was one of first sites for free fiction and reviews and is still one of the best (more than 2 million words of free fiction), going static after ten years hard work by its publisher and editor, Keith Brooke.

For its tenth anniversary:
* Cross Roads Blues by Paul McAuley [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Inheritance by Paul McAuley [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R/revised]
* Paul McAuley interviewed by Stuart Carter [non-fiction, 25-Aug-07, 1W]
* Song of Bullfrogs, Cry of Geese by Nicola Griffith [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Freezing Geezers by Kit Reed [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* The Edge of Nowhere by James Patrick Kelly [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Distant Galaxies Colliding by Gareth L Powell [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Three Days in a Border Town by Jeff VanderMeer [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* Tall Tales on the Iron Horse by Colin P Davies [short story, 25-Aug-07, R]
* What's Up Tiger Lily? a novelette by Paul Di Filippo [novelette, 25-Aug-07, R]
* And in the end... a last word from Keith Brooke