Relativity

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Atwood’s future is one of gated communities, of the protected few living in fear of those roaming out in “the pleeblands.” But we already have the technology to give women back the night, to end most crime and bullying, to let everyone go about their lives unmolested; I discussed this at length in my essay “Privacy: Who Needs It?” in the October 7, 2003, issue of this magazine. Far from being an Orwellian nightmare, effective monitoring of the activities of both citizens and governments will be the great liberator of the twenty-first century. Gated communities aren’t the future; they’re the dismal past.

  Atwood suggests that genetic engineering is an evil thing. It’s not; it’s wonderful. In the next few decades, our new insights into how life works will cure cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes, heart disease, world hunger, and probably even aging itself.

  Indeed, anyone who lives to at least the year 2050—meaning almost every child born today in Canada—will likely get to see not only the twenty-second century, but also the twenty-third, and will do so in vigorous health, with full possession of his or her faculties.

  The beauty of such life prolongation is that it will give people perspective, letting us finally deserve our species’ name, Homo sapiens—man of wisdom. Problems can’t be left for future generations; anything you set in motion now—too much garbage, too few forests, too many weapons—will be your problem. Instead of fear-mongering, we should embrace the work of the visionary scientists who are striving to prevent deformity, enhance potential, and feed us all.

  By the time that Atwood portrays (she never commits to a date, but it’s obviously later this century), I believe we will be living in a true age of miracles and wonder, the kind of utopian society that only a thorough grasping of how the universe really works—by knowing the basic principles of life and physics—can make possible.

  And yet Atwood gives physics short shrift, although she does mention nanotechnology in passing. Nanotech—the science of the very small—is the current hobbyhorse of Michael Crichton, who decries it in his latest if-anything-can-go-wrong-it-will tome, Prey. Atwood and Crichton share nothing in terms of style—the lady from Toronto writes circles around the gentleman from Los Angeles—but they are depressingly similar in substance.

  Nanotech will allow us to build little machines to travel through our arteries, clearing out plaque. It will allow us to clean up oil spills, and scrub the poisons from our atmosphere. Indeed, in its strongest form—giving us the alchemist’s touch, allowing us to break down any matter into its constituent protons, neutrons, and electrons, and rearrange those particles into whatever we want—it will let us not only turn lead into gold, but dirt into steak, and garbage into trees.

  Sound far-fetched? Not after a single century that gave us widespread use of indoor lighting and plumbing and electricity; civil rights and feminism and a nascent world government; airplanes and television and microwave ovens; heart transplants and antibiotics and insulin; computers and lasers and space stations. Not after a brief hundred years in which we learned about other galaxies and the double helix and quantum mechanics, and became better, more compassionate people.

  Atwood has a nostalgia for the way things were, for a simpler past. But our past included slavery, 50-percent infant-mortality rates, abject poverty, epidemics, and ignorance. Today is better than yesterday; tomorrow will be even better still. If, as we look into the future, we can’t precisely see the wonders that are yet to come, it’s only because there’s so much glare from the bright tomorrows ahead.

  Atwood’s Depressing Future

  The foregoing wasn’t my last word on Atwood. The Ottawa Citizen asked me to do an actual review of Oryx and Crake. I initially declined, saying there were lots of people more conversant with Atwood’s oeuvre than I was. But editor Susan Allen said she didn’t care if the book was good Atwood; she wanted me to tell her readers if it was good science fiction—and I did so, in this review which ran in the Citizen’s Sunday, April 27, 2003, edition.

  Margaret Atwood doesn’t like to be called a science-fiction writer. Tough beans, says I. When she writes a novel set in the future that purports to be firmly rooted in contemporary scientific thought, she is indeed writing science fiction.

  Yes, one might have been able to argue that her earlier, and quite terrific, futuristic foray, 1985’s The Handmaid’s Tale, wasn’t really science fiction—it had no basis in science (even though it did win the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year, and was a finalist for the Science-Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award).

  But Atwood herself takes pains in an afterword to her new novel, Oryx and Crake, to direct you to her web site (inevitably, oryxandcrake.com), where she lists the scientific references she drew on in creating her future world.

  So, given that what she’s doing is indisputably science fiction, how does she fare by the standards of that venerable genre?

  The sad answer is: not very well. It’s not that her predictions are unreasonable—she rails against the decline of the environment, and decries the possibilities of genetic engineering gone bad. But such notions are already front-page news, and have been for years. Despite frequent references in her text to “the law of unforeseen consequences,” Atwood provides no wake-up call about anything that has hitherto eluded public consciousness. Rather, she has jumped on a bandwagon that long ago ran out of steam.

  It’s this failure of speculative insight that will doom Oryx and Crake to minor-league status in the SF field, although doubtless the book will zoom onto the bestseller lists. Atwood wraps up, admittedly in a very stylish package, a selection of old-hat concerns, and fails to give any new twist either in the way in which things might go awry (which at least would have been intriguing) or in how humanity might extricate itself from the problems it has created (which might have been instructive). Instead, we’re presented with an unalloyed it’s-all-coming-to-an-end tome, depressing in the extreme.

  Oryx and Crake is apparently set just a few decades down the road (the author, who seems so sure of what the future will bring, is surprisingly coy about specifying a date). The book is told from the point of view of Jimmy, the last genetically unaltered human being left alive after a bioengineered plague has wiped out civilization (in that, it recalls Richard Matheson’s 1954 classic I Am Legend, filmed as The Omega Man).

  Jimmy spends much of the book recalling his relationships with Oryx, a philosophical child prostitute from Southeast Asia, and Crake, a boy-genius with Asperger’s syndrome. During these flashbacks, we slowly learn about the artificial plague created by Crake that destroyed humanity; although global warming also plays a role in Atwood’s singularly unpleasant future, biotech and genetic engineering are the clear villains of the piece.

  And that’s unfortunate. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood at least was putting forth an important caution, one that very much needed to be heard when that book was released: if the religious right continues to gain power, all the strides made in gender equality will be erased. It was a warning, and a call for preventive action, at a time when something could have still been done. But in Oryx and Crake, Atwood has given up on humanity; we’ve already gone too far, she says, and it’s just a matter of decades before everything comes crashing down around us.

  Indeed, Atwood comes off as relentlessly anti-science; in that sense, she deserves the mantle of Canada’s answer to Michael Crichton, whose books are always of the if-anything-can-go-wrong-it-will variety (cloning in Jurassic Park, nanotechnology in Prey). Atwood and Crichton share nothing in terms of style—the lady from Toronto writes circles around the gentleman from Los Angeles—but they are depressingly similar in substance.

  Of course, it’s for the beauty of her writing that we come to Atwood. Other reviewers will doubtless praise her wordplay: new genetic hybrids called “snats” (snake-rats) and “rakunks” (raccoon-skunks), and supposedly futuristic websites with names such as NoodyNews.com.

  But none of this is uniquely Atwood; science-fiction wr
iters have always reveled in such portmanteau linguistics. Old masters including Samuel R. Delany, and newer voices such as James Patrick Kelly, wield this device much more deftly than she does. (Indeed, it seems pointless of Atwood to try to pawn off NoodyNews—a web-based newscast presented by naked people—as her own clever satiric invention when NakedNews.com, which offers precisely this service, has been up and running for years now.)

  Still, there is much to admire in Atwood’s prose (but then again, there also is much to admire in that of many SF writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin and Canada’s own William Gibson). And her satiric hand—when applied lightly to interpersonal relationships, instead of heavily to the Demon Science—is a joy, as always.

  But, to me, as a science-fiction writer, the saddest thing about Oryx and Crake is that it will be seen as cutting-edge and visionary by the literati, instead of as what it really is: a retread of timeworn ideas. For instance, others will doubtlessly chortle with glee over Atwood’s “ChickieNobs,” the meat of bioengineered chickens that have no brains or beaks, but produce eight succulent breasts per animal. But Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth did the same thing half a century ago in their wickedly satiric, and much more prescient, SF novel, The Space Merchants.

  I’d long thought that Atwood was a savvy businessperson who understood that, if she avoided the “science fiction” label, she’d get a bigger audience. After all, prejudice keeps many otherwise intelligent readers from entering the science-fiction section of bookstores (Toronto-based SF writer Terence M. Green counters the “I don’t like SF” chestnut with a simple question: “What work of SF did you read that led you to form that opinion?” The answer, of course, is none…).

  But after finishing Oryx and Crake, I better understand Margaret Atwood’s reluctance to let her work be considered as science fiction. And that’s simply that it comes off poorly in comparison to the truly great works in the genre.

  On Writing

  Great Beginnings

  Over the years, I’ve taught science-fiction writing at Ryerson University, the University of Toronto, Humber College, and the Banff Centre for the Arts, and for three years I wrote a column entitled “On Writing” for the quarterly Canadian SF magazine On Spec. Those columns proved quite popular, and several were later picked up by the Australian SF magazine Altair, as well as by various writers’ group newsletters. Here are all twelve of them, just as they appeared in On Spec’s Spring 1995 through Winter 1997 issues.

  Boo!

  Scared you, didn’t I? But I also got you to read on to this second sentence. So, even though it was only four characters long, that first line did its job: it served as a hook to bring you into this piece of writing. In that sense, it was a great beginning—and “great beginnings” are the topic of this, the first installment of my “On Writing” series of columns.

  A Canadian horror writer I know said something very intriguing recently: he was looking forward to the day when he was well known, so that he wouldn’t have to start off with a grabby first sentence. He wanted to be able to begin subtly, with the reader trusting that, the story would be worth his or her time just on the strength of the author’s name.

  But even the lions of literature still go for the snappy start. Consider this opening line from Robertson Davies’s Murther & Walking Spirits: “I was never so amazed in my life as when the Sniffer drew his concealed weapon from its case and struck me to the ground, stone dead.”

  In a short story, you really do have to hook the audience with the very first sentence. With a novel, you probably have the luxury of using an entire paragraph to snare the reader. But no matter which one you’re writing, there are only four major ways to start your tale.

  First, there’s evocative description. In some ways, this is the hardest, because nothing is happening. And yet, if you do it well, the reader will not be able to resist continuing: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (William Gibson’s Neuromancer); “Halifax Harbor at night is a beautiful sight, and June often finds the MacDonald Bridge lined with lovers and other appreciators. But in Halifax even June can turn on one with icy claws” (Spider Robinson’s Mindkiller). Note what these two examples have in common: beautiful use of the language. If you are going to start off with static description, then you must dazzle with your imagery or poetry.

  A second approach is to start by introducing an intriguing character: “Mrs. Sloan had only three fingers on her left hand, but when she drummed them against the countertop, the tiny polished bones at the end of the fourth and fifth stumps clattered like fingernails” (“The Sloan Men” by David Nickle, in Northern Frights 2, edited by Don Hutchison); “My name is Robinette Broadhead, in spite of which I am male” (Gateway by Frederik Pohl). The reader immediately wants to know more about Mrs. Sloan and Robinette, and so forges ahead.

  The third—and trickiest—approach is to start off with a news clipping, or journal entry, or something else that isn’t actually the main narrative of the story. It can be done effectively: the horror novels Carrie by Stephen King and The Night Stalker by Jeff Rice begin just this way. Be careful of this technique: you might think that by using such a device to tell the reader that the following story is significant, you’ll be forgiven for an otherwise slow start. But Carrie immediately goes into its famous gym-class shower scene, and The Night Stalker launches right into the first of the vampire murders. Really, this kind of beginning just postpones the inevitable—you’ll have to follow up your news clipping, or whatever, with one of the other three classic narrative-hook techniques.

  The fourth, and most versatile way, is to start off in the middle of the action. Sometimes a single sentence is all it takes: “Because he thought that he would have problems taking the child over the border into Canada, he drove south, skirting the cities whenever they came and taking the anonymous freeways which were like a separate country” (Peter Straub’s Ghost Story). All the explanation can come later—for a hook, all you need to know is that someone is on the run. Immediately, you began asking questions: Who is running? What’s he running from? Is it his child, or has he kidnapped one? And suddenly you’re reading along, wanting to know the answers.

  Another example: “The Dracon’s three-fingered hands flexed. In the thing’s yellow eyes I could read the desire to either have those fingers around a weapon or my throat” (Barry B. Longyear’s Hugo-winning novella “Enemy Mine”). We want to dig in and find out what a Dracon is and how the narrator ended up in a life-or-death confrontation with it.

  A variation on starting in the middle is leading off with dialog: “Eddie wants to see you.” / “What’s he want?” Nita asked. “Another blowjob?” (Charles de Lint’s “In this Soul of a Woman,” from Love in Vein edited by Poppy Z. Brite). People love overhearing other people’s fascinating conversations, and you can snare them easily as long as your characters are saying interesting things.

  But if you’re going to start somewhere other than the natural beginning of the tale, you have to choose carefully. I often take an exciting scene from near the end, move it to the beginning, and then tell most of the rest of the tale as a flashback leading up to that scene. An extreme example is my novel The Terminal Experiment, which starts out with a female police detective dying in hospital. The scene in which she is fatally wounded doesn’t occur until ninety percent of the way through the book.

  Whatever you choose, give it a lot of thought. Most people I know try to write the beginnings of their stories first. Although that seems sensible, I suggest you wait until you’ve got everything else finished—then work out the best possible start. It really is the most important element of your story—because it’s the part that determines whether the rest gets read at all.

  Constructing Characters

  Psst! Wanna hear a secret? The people in most stories aren’t really humans—they’re robots!

  Real people are quite accidental, the result of a random jumbling of genes and a chaotic life. But story people are m
ade to order to do a specific job. In other words, robots!

  I can hear some of you pooh-poohing this notion, but it’s not my idea. It goes back twenty-five hundred years to the classical playwrights. In Greek tragedy, the main character was always specifically designed to fit the particular plot. Indeed, each protagonist was constructed with an intrinsic hamartia, or tragic flaw, keyed directly to the story’s theme. These days, writers have more latitude in narrative forms, but we still try to construct characters appropriate to a given tale.

  Consider, for instance, Terence M. Green’s Barking Dogs. The book posits the invention of infallible portable lie detectors. Of all the people in the world, Green chooses to give such a device to Mitch Helwig, a Toronto cop. Why that choice? Well, no one other than a cop deals so directly with questions of truth, and no one but a cop is so frustrated by the perversion of that truth, seeing guilty people he’s arrested get off on technicalities. Armed with his lie detector, Mitch goes on a vigilante spree, ascertaining as soon as he nabs someone whether that person is guilty, and, if so, executing them.

  Green knew he had to find the character who could best dramatize his premise. Frederik Pohl knew the same thing when he wrote Gateway. Its premise is simple: near a black hole, the passage of time slows to a stop.

  To make this dramatic, Pohl came up with Robinette Broadhead, a man who had done something horrible to people he’d left behind near a black hole. The story is told through psychoanalytic sessions: Robinette can’t get over his guilt because no matter how many years pass for him, it’s always that one terrible moment of betrayal for those he’s left behind. The novel works spectacularly—in fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s the finest science-fiction novel ever written.