Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 4: September 2013 (22 page)

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Views expressed by guest or resident
columnists are entirely their own.

FROM THE HEART’S BASEMENT

by Barry Malzberg

Barry N. Malzberg won the very first Campbell Memorial Award, and is a multiple Hugo and Nebula nominee. He is the author or co-author of more than 90 books.

THE DEMOLISHED MAN
AND WOMAN

For Alice Sheldon (1915-1987) and Alfred Bester (1913-1987) science fiction writing was a diversion, a kind of play, an
allegro giocoso
if you will, enacted in a romper room. The other kids in the romper room were bizarre, eccentric, inhabitants of a different reality or maybe no reality at all, and initially by wandering into that room and picking up the toys Sheldon and Bester were indulging themselves, even condescending. Bester’s memoir, “My Life in Science Fiction,” published in his early sixties, depicts his fellow science fiction writers “as all having a screw loose.” Sheldon, at about the same time, was writing her academic mentor of her prized secret life, dealing under the persona of “James Tiptree, Jr.” with the strangest and most exotic of types, a subterranean pastime which amused her.

It was a
jeu d’esprit
for these two at the beginning. Bester wrote science fiction in his mid-twenties, sold
Astounding
, had a modest reputation, but engaged himself then in comic book continuity, radio scripts, agency campaigns, and then returned with a story, “Oddy and Id”, in
Astounding
(his last sale to Campbell) before writing his novel
The Demolished Man
for Horace Gold’s
Galaxy
and virtually inflaming his colleagues with its audacity and brilliance.

Sheldon, like Bester, had the basic youthful reading acquaintance that science fiction writers must have, but did not begin writing in the field until she was 52, and although her short stories found attention almost from the beginning and although she won Nebula and Hugo Awards only half a decade after beginning, nothing she wrote had quite the impact of
The Demolished Man
. She was not really a novelist, and then, too, the field she entered was more populated, more sophisticated, more diverse than what Bester had found a quarter of a century earlier. Nonetheless, she had been recognized as a major figure before her unmasking in 1976 (her mother, a prominent anthropologist, died at an advanced age and details of the obituary coincided with some admitted facts of “Tiptree’s” life). After that unmasking she fell silent for a few years – science fiction was no longer escape or play—but she returned cautiously in the late ’70s and published another 20 or 30 stories and two novels, none of which had the impact of her earlier work.

Bester took a somewhat longer sabbatical from science fiction. He became a roving editor for
Holiday
magazine in 1960 and virtually abandoned fiction until that magazine collapsed, was sold to a group of apron manufacturers in Indianapolis, and disappeared as a meaningful publication. Bester, a self-admitted magpie, had loved his celebrity interviews and expense account, and losing his prerogatives at 57 was devastating. He needed money, too. Accordingly he returned to science fiction, producing over his last seventeen years three novels of steadily diminishing achievement and a scattering of short stories. His last years were not attractive…severe alcoholism, marital collapse, retreat from his beloved New York to a farmhouse and bar in Bucks County and finally exit to a nursing home where he died in isolation and of malnutrition. He was given a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master Award some months after his death and in my opinion was ineligible: the award must go to a living writer, and the alleged decision to give him the Grand Master (and officers’ trek to the nursing home to inform him the previous Fall) was, I believe, faked.

Sheldon ended somewhat less quietly: she shot her 85-year-old husband to death in early May of 1987 and then gave herself one shot in the heart, making the front page of the
Washington Post
in the process. She left behind no suicide note (and conflicting, gnomic hearsay claiming her husband had Alzheimer’s which he apparently did not). A quarter of a century later, she is more honored in the breach: her novels are gone, her best short stories are occasionally reissued, she has a middling reputation as a feminist “pioneer,” and of course is the subject of an award-winning 2006 biography by Julie Phillips which is a model of the form and which will probably outlast her own work. Bester’s first and second novels,
The Demolished Man
and
The Stars My Destination
, remain central to science fiction writers and readers, but there are diminishing numbers of both. The short stories Bester published in
Fantasy & Science Fiction
in the ’50s are if possible even better (and more central) than the novels. They were fully collected 35 years ago and
Starlight
is certainly still available…but time withers and age does not heal all constancy rendered inconstant. He is a fading figure as are 98% of all major writers decades after their death. (Forget minor writers.)

They knew one another, but only in a glancing way. Early in her career Sheldon’s “Tiptree” was writing fan letters to every good science fiction writer (partly from enthusiasm, and partly for more cynical self-promotive reasons), among them Bester…but Alfie, according to the Phillips biography, was having none of it. Bester’s lack of interest in correspondence probably had no motive other than a general disdain; this was the guy who after all had written of his colleagues’ loose screws and he held himself as superior to most of them. Just as Alice Sheldon, the Ph.D. in psychology, felt that hanging out in epistolary fashion with science fiction was a kind of amused slumming, Bester thought of himself as glittering hip New York City’s delegate to the barrio which crawled with interesting screwloose figures, none of whom you would want in your own “real life.”

Science fiction slumming for both these writers was very likely a kind of joke, an amused partaking below what they considered their real lives and world. But of course—and this is hardly the first time this kind of thing has happened—the joke turned out to be on them. Science fiction for them was Ray Bradbury’s Veldt; the plush toys and furry furniture were night carnivores and committed ravages in the dark. In the end on McCluhan’s plain, they became what they beheld. You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger. You don’t mess around with Jim.

They were two of our ten best, maybe two of our five. Their lives and deaths are terribly instructive, but as I said the same of Walter Tevis when he died in 1984: “I am not sure I know the lesson.” Not yet. Still working on that.

—New Jersey, June 2013

Copyright © 2013 by Barry N. Malzberg

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Paul Cook is the author of 8 books of science fiction, and is currently both a college instructor and the editor of the Phoenix Pick Science Fiction Classics line.

BOOK REVIEWS

by Paul Cook

Railsea

by China Miéville

Del Rey 2013

Trade Paperback, 448 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0345524539

China Miéville’s
Railsea
is another of this author’s novels that evokes some of the surreal, far-future landscapes that Jack Vance once characterized. In
Railsea
, the oceans have dried up and the land that is now exposed is covered practically everywhere with rails (built by whom we don’t know; maintained by whom, we know even less). Upon the rails roll all manner of locomotive vehicles (and some human-propelled) in search of trade, warfare, or of the swiftly-burrowing creatures that make for a good meal. Moles are now the size of whales and are hunted by various crews, one of which hires on young Sham Yes ap Soorap, who gets taken for a ride in search of a
moldywarpe
, one of those big moles,
that bit off the arm of their female captain Abacat Naphi. Sham, though, makes a discovery in an abandoned wreck of a long-ago train that hints at a stranger world at the “end” of the tracks which, to Sham’s crowd, is inconceivable.

The novel is a happy
homage
to the familiar adventure stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (there are pirates galore, and a bat-like creature not unlike a parrot that perches on Sham’s shoulder) as well as the symbol-heavy whale-hunting tales of Herman Melville. The novel is frequently advertised as being in the Young Adult category, but given Miéville’s dense prose, literary allusions, and textual convulsions that include his use of an ampersand (“&”) wherever the word “and” would appear, the novel might come off as a difficult read. (I would say here, as a matter of principle, that just because a book has a young protagonist in it, it does not mean that the book is automatically YA. Locus placed this book under their “Best Young Adult Novels for 2012,” a category in which it does not belong. It belonged in the “Best Novels of 2012” category, plain and simple.)

Fans of Miéville will enjoy
Railsea
immensely. I am of two minds about the book, however—and I must be honest here. The book does not scan well because of the heavy use of “&” wherever the actual word “and” should be. This elevates the book into the realm of “meta-fiction” which is (loosely described) fiction
about
fiction or fiction that calls attention to itself as a contrived document written by a real person. The narrative is straightforward, set in a future time that would be very familiar to science fiction readers, and Miéville doesn’t play tricks with any aspect of the plot’s progress. In other words, there was no real need for the use of the ampersand (though Miéville does explain why it is used in the story: the curling-in-on-itself shape of the ampersand is symbolic of the Railsea world). It was thus a slow read for a payoff that could have been better achieved (and reached more swiftly) had the book been told in a traditional manner. But don’t get me wrong here. I am not averse to experiments and/or the uses of meta-fictional tropes, strategies, or conceits. I just thought that, with such a traditional science fictional setting, a more conservative story-telling approach might have been called for. That said, the book is a unique view of a world of mysterious rails covering the seabeds of the world’s oceans and of a culture born to those rails hunting for some of the strangest creatures yet found in science fiction.

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Empty Space

by M. John Harrison

Night Shade Books, 2013

Trade Paperback, 280 pages

ISBN-13: 978-1597804615

Empty Space
is the third volume of a trilogy that began with
Light
(2002) and continued with
Nova Swing
(2006). With
Empty Space
, Harrison ties the loose threads of the previous two novels into something of a coherent whole…but it’ll take a very patient and extremely devoted science fiction reader to make sense of that “coherent” whole.

Loosely, the novel picks up where
Nova Swing
leaves off: A widow, Anna Waterman is wallowing in the memories of her late husband and she has a cat that brings in the glowing internal organs of a creature she cannot recognize; a nameless female detective comes across a series of grisly murders where the corpses are left in the form of floating ghosts; and a group of scallywags (or the science fiction equivalent thereof) absconds with a strange bit of cargo in the ship
Nova Swing
that causes them immense trouble in the end. In the midst of this is a lot of philosophical
angst
and some Big Ideas about the Universe and Everything Else.

Harrison has often been lumped in with Peter Hamilton, Alastair Reynolds, and Iain M. Banks, as being part of the “New Space Opera” generation. This true of the first two books in this trilogy, but less so in
Empty Space
, mostly because what’s of importance here is so internalized. There’s the “empty” space of outer space and then there’s the “empty” space of the human soul when confronted with an indifferent universe.

In each of the sections of
Empty Space
, the characters rhapsodize on various questions of existential worth, but not in a Heinlein sense where one character talks and the others listen for paragraph after paragraph. All of this is woven into the skein of each dramatic moment in each section, including Mrs. Waterman who’s about the most lost and lonely character in all of science fiction. Harrison’s characters are what I’d call chronically depressed but on a grander scale. German is a great language for medical terms and English needs something for what these characters have. They’re depressed, yes, but they haven’t given up on life, but they also know that it’s going to turn out badly. (This isn’t quite the sense of
ennui
the French had in the 1890s.) The crew of the
Nova Swing
do offer some humor in this novel—they seem to be the only ones having fun, but Harrison is quick to squelch any sense of joy in this book. It goes to great pains to stay both clever and obscure and is riven with Harrison’s dense stylistics that will put off many readers. It did me. I think what caused the disconnect was that he seemed to be trying really hard to bring the three (sometimes four) plot elements together. And because of Harrison’s prose style, I never was without the sense I was reading a novel, an artifact, written by a very clever man. I was never submerged into the story as I remember being when I read Farmer’s
To Your Scattered Bodies Go
or Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle’s
Footfall
. (I had the same problem with
Railsea
, mentioned above.) I’m interested in story, not language. Any attempt to reverse that order generally fails, unless you’re James Joyce or Thomas Pynchon.

Harrison has his fans, and they will be rewarded by the challenges of these three books. But I just didn’t have any fun reading this last one, and that’s a requirement of mine. Fun. Pleasure. Enjoyment. Not that a writer can’t lecture, pontificate, rant, or rave (we’ve all read Heinlein at both his best and his worst), but the narrative has to make sense along the way and seem somewhat lucid. Honestly, I never knew what was happening at any one time in this novel and I’m usually an attentive reader. Harrison is a skilled wordsmith and I admire him for that, but he also has to tell a coherent story that we shouldn’t have to guess at as we go. There’s probably a German word for that process, too, but I don’t know what it is.

***

Blue Remembered Earth

by Alastair Reynolds

Ace 2012

Hardcover, 512 pages

ISBN-13: 978-0441020713

Alastair Reynolds is one of our present-day masters of the New Space Opera, and the novels he’s written so far have fallen into that category rather comfortably. This latest book,
Blue Remembered Earth
, is what appears to be the beginning of a trilogy or a series that follows the members of a well-to-do family of scientists and businesspersons from a now-dominant Africa who are presently scattered across the inhabited solar system (cities on the Moon and Mars and outposts stretching to the Kuiper Belt). We know this is the beginning of a series (the publisher calls it an “epic” as all publishers do these days) because the pacing of this novel is very slow (in the manner of a long-distance runner who needs to conserve his or her energy for the long haul).

The main character, Earth-bound Geoffrey Akinya, is studying elephants in east Africa and wants to be left alone but he’s quickly drawn into his family’s business empire. His feisty, gritty and adventurous grandmother has died and has left him a mysterious space-suit glove with several colored bits of glass or rocks tucked in the fingers of the suit that no one recognizes and whose purpose they don’t understand. The novel centers around the family members who want Geoffrey to find out what the glass objects are and other family members who don’t.

The novel is mostly Earth-bound (or Moon-bound), and what planet-hopping there is remains comfortably within the solar system instead of the wide-open galactic spaces of Reynolds’ other novels that are more in the Space Opera vein.
Blue Remembered Earth
is filled with the now-standard lectures on “how mankind has ruined Gaia, how we’ve killed off all of the important animals, how we’re truly a scourge upon the Earth, how democracy sucks or how capitalism sucks.” This is the only aspect of the novel that is a turn-off. These lectures on how humans have misbehaved have been in nearly every science fiction novel over the last decade, and some going back into the 1990s. It makes me wonder whom these books are written for. Fourteen-year-olds who haven’t gotten the memo or seen enough Disney After School Specials on how we’re killing penguins? If not, then for whom are these novels written? I’ve read books recently by Ben Bova, Nancy Kress, John C. Wright, John Scalzi, Robert J. Sawyer, Kevin J. Anderson, Kim Stanley Robinson (
especially
Kim Stanley Robinson) and many, many more. The list is endless. We get it already! We’ve screwed up! The environment is collapsing! We’re eating all the fish in the sea and the ice is melting! Please, God, stop with the sermons! Just tell a story!