NYRSF February 2013 Issue 294

by Kevin J Maroney

  * * *

  Mike Barrett lives in Wilmington, Kent.

  Damien Broderick

  The Mellor’s Tale

  A Foreword to Greg Mellor’s Wild Chrome

  Forty-five years ago, when I was young and in love with science fiction, and Gregory Mellor was a toddler, the great sf fantasist Theodore Sturgeon faced a tough task, introducing the first collected stories of a then-new writer. Here’s how he began:

  There has been nothing like Zelazny in the science fiction field since—

  Thus began the first draft of this introduction and there it stayed for about forty-eight hours while I maundered and chuntered for ways to finish that sentence with justice and precision. . . . Suffice it for now to say that you’ll be hard put to it to find a writer like Zelazny anywhere.

  Suffice it as well to declare that there has indeed been nothing like the meteoric arrival of Mellor in the Australian science fiction field since—since who? Terry Dowling? Stephen Dedman? Lucy Sussex? Sean Williams? Yes, there are resemblances to all of these in different ways—the professional competence pretty much right from the start with a rapidly developed accomplishment, high-energy attack, a poetry blending reflectiveness and kinesis, closely observed detail of surfaces and scrutiny of what lies below the surface.

  So I’m not making preposterous claims here. Greg Mellor is a new and remarkable writer of enormous promise. Enjoy these early premonitions of considerable achievement. Mellor pulls you right into realities as vivid as any I’ve inhabited lately, replete with the fabled sense of wonder. A mother searches for her absconded, angry son, pursuing hints to the far extremes of the outer solar system, and finds him transformed:

  Silhouettes glided languidly across the star field until I could see the sheer, terrifying wonder of him. He was there—at the centre—but the rest of him was strung out in many disconnected parts. What looked like advanced relay panels were stretched over delicate bio-ceramic bones, unfolding over kilometers. Titanium pivots and joints secured critical junctions of the larger pieces. The entire array ebbed and flowed, resonating to Matt’s remote commands, a thousand separate parts miraculously working in synch—a dark cybernetic angel gliding down to meet me.

  I extended my arms as he approached, the sheer scale of his structure more daunting as he got closer, until I was at his centre, his human body encased in a sleek black bio-alloy skin. His eyes were still the same, that dark brown with green flecks, glazed with a protective covering that blended into his skin.

  At its core, Mellor tells us, this is a book about being a man, yearning for completion, buggering things up, trying again, moving into realms we dimly imagine but cannot quite perceive. Some of his men are genuinely monstrous and abetted in their monstrousness by technology out of control. Other stories share a universe blighted by relict weapon systems able to overwhelm and parasitize men and women alike in ways that make the horrifying scenes in Alien seem cozy:

  The air crackled around her as the entity tunneled into the nexus. It thrashed over her head and latched onto her collar bone. She screamed as it ripped open her chest.

  Blood sprayed across my face and I staggered back. I heard grunting in the distance and realized it was coming from me. . . . I stepped out into vacuum. The entity was inside Chenzira now, zipping her up from crotch to shoulder. Her skin blackened as the spacesuit activated, its amber lenses glowing.

  A Scourge cloud sprayed out from the suit, boiling space in a confusion of black on black. It spread in all directions, penetrating my field, cutting through me.

  Aliens can be frightful but there’s also a clear-eyed recognition in these stories of how flawed our own species is, even in its most utopian ambitions. This recognition is not cynicism, just brutal and uncompromising honesty, and we need to face such truths if we hope to go beyond them, especially into uploading of minds into machine substrates or along the screaming upward curve of a technological singularity:

  The Enlightened Age lasted a decade, a short-lived, contained tech singularity. For the first time in history, life-changing, global-spanning technology was in the hands of scientists and philanthropists with no agenda other than to provide a lasting vision for humanity. But Old Earth choked on its own vomit before the new memes could get a foothold, and the survivors came clutching at Mars like ghouls.

  An alien visiting a slightly future world appraises us sorrowingly:

  >Working hypothesis: the dominant meme has hampered global self-awareness and intellectual capacity.

  She placed her wine glass down, propped her elbows on the table, slipped her shaking hands under her chin, and held me with her gaze.

  I’d stared down politicians and dictators alike, brought corporate executives and rogue activists into line, and convened peace talks around the world . . . but this . . . damn it, I just wasn’t prepared. No one was prepared.

  “I have not seen anything like it,” she said. “And trust me when I say I’ve seen a lot in my time. You’ve created a slaughterhouse in your own backyard. The environmental degradation and bio-depletion is staggering, but still you carry on with your consumption.”

  It’s not all gloom and despair, though; that would smack of adolescent posturing. Indeed, of one story, Greg Mellor notes in an illuminating afterword:

  I really did just want to write a feel-good story set against the backdrop of the solar system. I wasn’t trying to break new ground or develop new takes on future science or provide fresh insights into the genre.

  It was interesting how the feedback from the reviewers varied from the readers. I think the reviewers see such a volume of material that they are always looking for that needle in the haystack that takes the genre another step forward—“something new.” But I think there’s a place for heartfelt, traditional themes that don’t constantly stretch (and shred) the limits of science (and plausibility), so long as they are entertaining and make readers feel something. Judging by the readers’ comments on “Signals in the Deep,” I think they felt something.

  Mellor has two advantages not all sf writers bring to bear on our play with words: he holds an honors degree in astrophysics (which admits him into the privileged company of such scientifically trained sf experts as Alastair Reynolds, Catherine Asaro, Gregory Benford, Vonda McIntyre, Greg Egan, Joan Slonczewski, Paul McAuley, Charles Stross, not to mention Asimov and Anderson and others of the old guard), and he has worked in industry (“professional service firms”) for a decade and a half, so he also knows a thing or two about the non-academic world. He has a wife and son, and aside from a decade-long residency in Britain, he’s lived in the Australian political and bureaucratic capital, Canberra, all his life. That provides grounding in reality and a distinctive vantage point such that most readers in the rest of the planet will find his everyday world sufficiently alien to give it a running start into the imaginary.

  You’ll feel astonishment in most of these pieces, and sometimes your pulse will race; always, there’s that very Australian way of looking at, let’s say, the end of the world or a son’s relationship with his father. When I opened the submission file of “Defense of the Realm” at Cosmos science magazine where I was fiction editor for its first five years, I had that immediate clutch of delight that grabs you when you find new talent. When I passed over the editorial keyboard to Cat Sparks, the current editor at Cosmos I bequeathed her a truly extraordinary story by Mellor, “Day Break.” She added her own touches, honing the piece to a hard gloss. Here is the funny but heartbreaking opening of that terrific story:

  It rained cows on Christmas Eve.

  When the world broke, the atmosphere tore in raging cyclones, tornadoes, oceans of air sucked up and flung down, and those poor animals were caught in the turbulence, hurled into the sky. Until they fell back to Earth, crying in terror.

  They were Jerseys, all deep tan with white patches. The sight of them rupturing like swollen bladders was terrifying. I had known each of them by name, with their soft brown eyes and flickering ears. Only Je
ssica had survived, tethered to a fence. I sobbed my heart out in the three days of cold snow that followed, and then again when the snow melted and I found Jessica in a pile of muddy slush with her legs sticking up stupidly.

  How many professional writers with years under their belt would have the chutzpah to start with “It rained cows on Christmas Eve”? It sounds like a shaggy dog story. And yes, the black humor, the gallows comedy, is intended. But the global catastrophe that murdered the terrified animals is of larger than Biblical proportion and is told with exactness and poignancy from the viewpoint of one man moving toward the end of the earth—literally, in several senses. This is a tour de force, and by itself is proof that Gregory Mellor is a writer to watch in the way we kept an eye on Ursula K. Le Guin and Brian W. Aldiss and Roger Zelazny when they were setting out, learning to pilot their burning imaginations into the realm of words shaped to ignite the dreams of their readers.

  * * *

  Damien Broderick lives in San Antonio, Texas. This essay appeared in Gregory Mellor’s collection Wild Chrome (Greenwood, Western Australia: Ticonderoga Publications, 2012; $13.99 tpb; 308 pages).

  Tom Easton

  A Post-Steampunk Manifesto

  Steampunk is da bunk. It’s passé. It’s past its prime.

  The times demand something newer and better and more in tune with the twenty-first century! We therefore raise our fists in the air and cry “Manifesto!”

  Sure, some good stories fit under the steampunk label, and a lot of elegant imagery has made its way onto book covers and into costumes. But, really—a top hat with motoring goggles or a steam-powered dirigible? Or a steam-powered computer, when almost as soon as steam engines were in wide use, they were being used to generate electricity?

  Oh, well. What makes steampunk steampunk is that it is stuck in the Victorian era, from about the birth of the telegraph to the end of the nineteenth century. That era was admittedly marked—at least in Europe—by ornamentation and elegance. Some people consider it a time of innocence, which ended with the carnage of the Great War.

  It thus provides a nice setting for modern fantasies of zombies and vampires. Sometimes it’s a game whose players ask, “If the Victorians had thought of doing this, how would they have done it using the technology they had at their disposal? Certainly they’d have done it more prettily!” But no matter how good the story or ingenious the inventions or elegant the setting, steampunk can’t help but strike a modern sensibility as quaint. It’s also a bit of a prettified cheat, for all that steampunk imagery is polished brass and wood and rope and sexy leather, when anything to do with real steampower was marked by black grease and soot. And social relations were marked by racism, sexism, and the oppression of labor. Life was not pretty if you were not a member of the gilded class.

  If you’re a fan of technology, we can lay a further charge against steampunk: It is static. Further advances are not permitted, except as variations on Victorian themes. This has been very nicely illustrated by two non-steampunk books. In 1986, Isaac Asimov published Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000. It was a compendium of cigarette cards published in 1899, and its vision of the future was marked by commuters in personal airplanes with fabric wings. Albert Robida’s The Twentieth Century, first published in 1882, has personal travel based on balloons. In both cases, it is as if the futurists were saying “Whatever we do, the future will do it more elegantly.” In the case of steampunk, writers throw their minds backward in time and say much the same thing.

  If there is more advanced technology, as in Karl Schroeder’s ether-sailing Virga series, it serves as a frame or context supplied by outsiders in which people rely on primitive, Victorian-level technology. At the heart of the steampunk ethos is denial of the nature of technology as endless improvement and change. The Victorian era lasted quite a while, but by the end it was rapidly giving way to oil, gasoline, and electric power. The first few decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion of new technologies, of which the most dramatic were the automobile, airplanes, and radio. By the 1920s, the explosion of interest in such things gave rise to modern science fiction.

  Not that Hugo Gernsback called it “science fiction.” He proposed “scientifiction” and presented it initially in the pages of The Electrical Experimenter (founded 1913), which became Science and Invention in 1920, and only later in Amazing Stories (founded 1926). He conceived it as a way of teaching the youth of the day the basics of science and technology. Not surprisingly, the early stories—including his own, of which Ralph 124C41+ is the most famous—were exceedingly didactic, given to great wodges of explanation, some of which was even reasonably accurate. But there were also a great many ideas—blasters and rocket belts and shrink rays, among others—that could not possibly be explained accurately. They were fun; they aroused enthusiasm for science and technology in many of the youth of an age when scientific and technological wonders filled the air. But they were pure fantasy, and they have remained that ever since.

  But let’s be fair. For all that many of the ideas in the science fiction of the 1920s and 1930s (and later) were nonsense, they did not present science and technology as static. Progress was the watchword! The world was full of wonders now, but even more wonders, more wondrous than ever, were just around the corner.

  Through the dreary Depression years, science fiction kept the dream alive for many. Then came World War II and an explosion of technological achievement, capped by the very literal explosions that ended the war. By the 1950s, progress was the watchword in bold-face italics. The economy was humming, computers were shrinking in size thanks to the replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors. The Consumer Society was off to a roaring start, and although people were generally delighted with the fruits of the technology boom, they almost immediately began to notice problems. Pollution was one. So was the Cold War, and as people (like myself) grew up under the shadow of the atomic mushroom cloud, there developed a pervasive malaise. Technology, it seemed, could be dangerous. It could even threaten the survival of us as individuals and as a species. There had to be a better way!

  Many people have sought that better way by looking toward the future. To them, the answer must be more science, more technology, more ways of understanding and counteracting problems such as pollution and cancer and a great deal more. Some people, however, have looked backward. They have sought a simpler time with safer lifeways. In the 1960s, they were hippies and back-to-the-landers. Later, they were (and are) off-the-gridders. In literature, their yearning for saner, simpler times fed the burgeoning of fantasy over science fiction. And in the 1980s, some fantasy took the form now called steampunk.

  But steampunk is retro. It’s static and antiprogressive. If the wish for a safer, saner world has any part in its appeal, it’s a lie at heart, for the Victorian era was less than sane or safe. Racism, sexism, and oppression were pervasive. For large parts of it, no one knew about such things as treating sewage or chlorinating water supplies often drawn from the very rivers into which raw sewage was dumped. The Victorian Era didn’t have antibiotics, either, so it’s no wonder that life expectancies were a lot shorter, lower than we are used to today.

  It is therefore time to replace steampunk with something a little more contemporary. That replacement should not be static nor anti-progressive nor backward-looking. Let’s move up the timeline a bit to the 1920s, when modern science fiction was born.

  This was a time when kids played with crystal radios. Crystalline vacuum tubes powered larger radios that occupied pride of place in the living rooms of the day, much as wide-screen televisions do today. Blown-glass tubes filled with violet glows and giving off sparks (violet ray devices) were medical marvels. Prohibition was the order of the day as were rum-running and flappers and gangsters with tommy guns hidden in violin cases.

  Science fiction celebrated diamond lenses that could look into the heart of the atom. Crystals powered both spaceships (dilithium crystals were not the first such) and superheroes (�
�Doc” Smith’s Lensmen wore crystalline lenses). All very sparkly and shiny, not at all like brass and wood and rope. We can keep the sexy leather.

  The post-steampunk revolution needs a name. Perhaps “crystalpunk” would do. Or maybe, since the 1920s were also the time of the Art Deco movement, “Decopunk.” Either would provide a host of images for cover designers and writers to play with, all of it distinctively different from the images of steampunk. Either would also reenergize the efforts of the artisans who sell costume-ware to con-goers, not to mention their incomes as those con-goers unlimbered their credit cards to replace their collections of steampunk paraphernalia.

  Raise your fists! We have nothing to lose but the stale imagery of an obsolete past!

  * * *

  Tom Easton lives in Dedham, Massachusetts.

  Planesrunner by Ian McDonald

  Amherst, New York: Pyr, 2011; $18.00 hc; 290 pages

  reviewed by Damien Broderick

  Ian McDonald’s splendid novel River of Gods (2004) was an intensely felt, overwhelmingly detailed portrait of India in the middle of the twenty-first century. Most of the cast are Hindu or Muslim in a landscape at once instantly recognizable yet radically unfamiliar to most Westerners. What’s surprising and impressive is that this compulsive, densely imagined work came from a white Irishman who had never set foot in India. River of Gods deservedly won a year’s best award from the British Science Fiction Association and was shortlisted for the Hugo and Arthur C. Clarke awards. More awards and notices attended Brasyl (2007), set with equal conviction in equally unfamiliar South American landscapes of the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, and The Dervish House (2010), set in Istanbul. McDonald’s special genius is the evocation of post-colonial landscapes, reflecting his own childhood during the terror-drenched Troubles of Northern Ireland.