Triton

by Samuel Delany

  The hugely increased repertoire of sentences science fiction has to draw on (thanks to this relation between the “science” and the “fiction”) leaves the structure of the fictional field of s-f notably different from the fictional field of those texts which, by eschewing technological discourse in general, sacrifice this increased range of nontechnological sentences—or at least sacrifice them in the particular, foreground mode. Because the added sentences in science fiction are primarily foreground sentences, the relationship between foreground and background in science fiction differs from that of mundane fiction. The deposition of weight between landscape and psychology shifts. The deployment of these new sentences within the traditional s-f frame of “the future” not only generates the obviously new panoply of possible fictional incidents; it generates as well an entirely new set of rhetorical stances: the future-views-the-present forms one axis against which these stances may be plotted; the alien-views-the-familiar forms the other. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations—the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to s-f not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a textus within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in Starship Troopers, by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through two hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hun-dred-and-fifty-page book), is black. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on sublimated homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments are inane; they do not relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: they do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my first reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the placement of the information about the narrator’s face is proof that in such a world the “race problem,” at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the textus (via the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the s-f textus that is, itself, embedded in the whole language—and language-like—textus of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.

  I feel the science-fictional-enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparant “simple-mindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to “conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conventional” textus with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment” is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, mete for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure to the best works, fall away—by the same process in which the best works charge the textus—the web of possibilities—with contour.

  The web of possibilities is not simple—for either abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their cliches, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: the map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given s-f text; as the reading of a given s-f text recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.

  In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the textus in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those ono-mal metonyms. The textus does not define; it is, however slightly, redefined with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that textus which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore—or rear-steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.

  It may even find her an engineer, writing a text on why, from now on, Red Squealers had best be painted blue, or a bell replace that annoying siren—the awe and delight, caught pure in the web, charging each of her utterances (from words about, to blueprints of, to the new, blue, bonging object itself) with conviction, authenticity, and right.

  IV

  Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts), with the possible exception of science fiction.

  V

  Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane-mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same name as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled the deployment across one of the gas giants’”captured moons”—the under-six-hundred-kilometer hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Neriad, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangeish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mar’s—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, and seas of methane and ammonia sludge. Its bizarre life-forms (the only other life in the Solar System) combined the most unsettling aspects of a very large virus, a very small lichen, and a slime mold. Some varieties, in their most organized modes, would form structures like blue, coral bushes with, for upwards of an hour at a time, the intelligence of an advanced octopus. An entire subgenre of ice-operas had grown up about the Titan landscape. Bron despised them. (And their fans.) For one thing, the Main Character of these affairs was always a man. Similarly, the One Trapped in the Blue, Coral-like Tenticles was always a woman (Lust Interest of the Main Character). This meant that the traditional ice-opera Masturbation Scene (in which the Main Character Mastur
bates while Thinking of the Lust Interest) was always, for Bron, a Bit of a Drag. And who wanted to watch another shindo expert pull up another ice-spar and beat her way out of another blue-coral bush, anyway? (There were other, experimental ice-operas around today in which the Main Character, identified by a small “MC” on the shoulder, was only on for five minutes out of the whole five-hour extravaganza, Masturbation Scene and All—an influence from the indigenously Martian Annie-show—while the rest was devoted to an incredible interlocking matrix of Minor Characters’ adventures.) And the women who went to them tended to be strange—though a lot of very intelligent people, including Lawrence, swore Titan-opera was the only really select artform left to the culture. Real ice-opera—better-made, truer-to-life and with more to say about it via a whole vocabulary of real and surreal conventions, including the three formal tropes of classical abstraction, which the classical ice-opera began with, ended with, and had to display once gratuitously in the middle—left Lawrence and his ilk (the ones who didn’t go into ego-booster booths) yawning in the lobby.

  Appendix B.

  Ashima Slade And The Harbin-Y Lectures:Some Informal Remarks Toward The Modular Calculus, Part Two

  A Critical Fiction for Carol Jacobs & Henry Sussman

  Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical. Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental fabula; heterotopias ... desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.

  —Michel Foucault, The Order of Things

  I

  [Concerning Ashima Slade and his Harbin-y Lecture Shadows, first published in Lux University’s philosophy journal Foundation, issue six and the double issue seven/eight.]

  Just over a year ago, at Lux on Iapetus, five million people died. To single out one death among that five million as more tragic than another would be monumental presumption.

  One of the many, many to die, when gravity and atmosphere shield were stripped away from the city by Earth Intelligence sabotage, was the philosopher and mathematician Ashima Slade.

  Lux University, where Slade taught, was unaccountably spared by the Earth saboteurs. A keep and suburb to itself just to the south, with its own gravity controls and plasma shield, the University was able to seal itself off until help could arrive from the surrounding holds and ice-farms, and gravity and atmosphere could be restored once more to the city, which had, in minutes, become a charnelhouse and necropolis.

  The University housed thirty-five thousand tutors and students. The war did not leave it undamaged. On the campus, a hundred and eighty-three died. Reports of what occurred there only pale beside the devastation of the city of which it was, officially, a part.

  Ashima Slade did not live on campus but, rather, in a spare room at the back of a co-op run by the Sygn, a religious sect practicing silence and chastity, in Lux’s sprawling unlicensed sector. Not a sect member, Slade lived there as the Sygn’s guest. From time to time it was rumored Slade was a Sygn official, priest, or guru.

  This is untrue. Various Sygn members had been Slade’s students, but Slade’s co-op residency was simple sectarian generosity toward an eccentric, solitary philosopher during the last dozen years of Slade’s (and the Sygn’s) life.

  Once a month Slade visited the University to conduct his Philosophy of Mind seminar Once a week, from his room, he would hold, over a private channel, an hour session whose title was simply its university catalogue number: BPR-57-c. During these sessions, Slade would talk of his current work or, occasionally, do some of it aloud or on the blackboard he kept beside his desk. These sessions were observed in holographic simulation by some three hundred students living in the University or in the city, as well as special attendees registered in the University rotation program These sessions were difficult, tentative, and often—depending on the extent of one’s interest—tedious. There was no question or discussion period. All response was by mail and seldom acknowledged. Yet students claimed them, again and again, to be endlessly illuminating, if not to subject, than in method, if not to method, than in logical style.

  II

  The Harbin-Y Lectures were established forty years ago as an annual, honorary series “... to be given by a creative thinker in the conceptual arts or sciences who will present a view of her (or his) field.” Seven years ago, Slade was first invited to give that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures. He declined, saying (a bit overmodestly) that his view of his own field was far too idiosyncratic. Two years later, he was invited again. This time, tentatively, he accepted, on condition he could lecture from his room, by holographic simulation, rather as he conducted BPR-57-c.

  Slade’s monthly seminar (which he held in person) had only six attendees. The traditional presentation procedure of the Harbin-Y Lectures is a personal delivery from the stage of the K-Harbin Auditorium to an invited audience of several thousand.

  Twenty years ago, Slade had recorded a superb programmed course called The Elements of Reason: An Introduction to Metalogics which is still on store, unre-vised, in the Satellite General Information Computer Network (and is considered the best introduction to Slade’s own, early, ovular work, the two-volume Summa Metalogiae). At ease before any sort of recording or mechanical device, Slade still felt he would be uncomfortable before such a large, live audience.

  The academic confusion over Slade’s not overly exceptional request escalated, however, out of all proportion. Slade was an eccentric figure in the University, whose personal rarity on campus had lead to some extraordinary (and extraordinarily idiotic) myths. Many of his colleagues were, frankly, afraid he would simply conduct a BPR-57-c session, completely inaccessible to his audience. No one was sure how to ascertain tactfully if he would discuss his work at the level they felt was called for by the occasion. How all this was finally resolved is not our concern here. But once more Slade did not deliver that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures.

  Slade was not invited to give the next year’s lectures; it is said he expressed great relief about this to some of his colleagues with whom he was in correspondence, as well as to his seminar students. The reports, however, of Slade’s work in the Modular Calculus (growing out of his early work in metalogics) had percolated down from the devotees of BPR-57-c, making it inevitable that he be asked again; once more the invitation was extended. Slade consented. This time he discussed the outline of the three lectures he wished to present with the Harbin-Y trustees in a way that lead them to believe the talks would at least approach the comprehensible. A holographic simulation was arranged in the auditorium. The lecture titles were announced:

  Some Informal Remarks Toward the Modular Calculus:

  1) Shadows

  2) Objectives

  3) Illuminations

  The three lectures were scheduled for the usual evening times. The usual invitations were sent. Thanks to five years confusion, there was a good deal more than the usual curiosity. Many people—far more than might be expected for such an abstruse affair—turned to Slade’s early work, the serious in preparation, the curious for hints of what was to come.

  A perusal of any dozen pages from the Summa reveals Slade’s formal philosophical presentation falls into three, widely differing modes. There are the closely reasoned and crystallinely lucid arguments. There are the mathematical sections in which symbols predominate over words; and w
hat words there are, are fairly restricted to: “... therefore we can see that ...”

  “... we can take this to stand for ...”

  “... from following these injunctions it is evident that ...” and the like. The third mode comprises those sections of richly condensed (if not inpenetrable) metaphor, in language more reminiscent of the religious mystic than the philosopher of logic. For even the informed student, it is debatable which of these last modes, mathematical or metaphorical, is the more daunting.

  One of the precepts of Slade’s philosophy, for example, explicit in his early work and implicit in his later, is a belief in the absolute distinction between the expression of “process/relation/operation” on the one hand and the expression of “matter/material/substance” on the other for rational clarity, as established by the contemporary episteme; as well as a belief in their absolute and indeseverable interface, in the real Universe. About this, Slade has remarked: “... This interface will remain indeseverable as long as time is irreversible. Indeed, we can only model the elements on either side separably with those tools—memory, thought, language, art—by which we can also construct models of reversible time.”[3] As one of Slade’s commentators has remarked, in an issue of the Journal of Speculative Studies: “Put this way, it is either understood or it isn’t. Explication here is, really, beside the point.”

  The confusion attendant on Slade’s previous invitations to lecture was a vivid memory for many of that year’s audience. The people who assembled in the K-Harbin Auditorium that evening came with curiosity, trepidation, and—many of them—excitement.

  The auditorium doors were closed.

  At the expected time, Slade (with his desk and his blackboard) materialized on stage—dark, small-boned, broad-hipped—in a slightly quavery holographic simulation. The audience quieted. Slade began—there was some difficulty with the sound. After a few adjustments by the student engineer, Slade good-naturedly repeated those opening sentences lost on a loose connection.