Asimov's SF, October-November 2011

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Washington's architecture and decor as the creation of the Freemason Conspiracy of the Founding Fathers? George Washington as Prometheus? Human thought manipulating and creating reality because collectively it has some cockeyed quantum mass?

  Come on, Dan!

  Do you really believe this stuff ?

  But hey, there really is a pyramid with an all-seeing eye atop it on the dollar bill, the Founding Fathers really were mostly Masons, as was George Washington, and some of this stuff seems well-researched and credible. There are probably as many or more people who believe in this incarnation of the Secret Masters of the world's reality as believe in the Men in Black and the alien corpses in Hangar 51 and Timothy Leary's Curse of the Oval Office combined.

  Could it really be true?

  Well, there's the nature of Dan Brown's secret formula, and an utterly science fictional technique it is, as I should know quite well, having myself applied it to both the historical past and, like Brown, what might be called the speculative present. What you do is use the gaps, contradict nothing that is verifiably true, which lets you play freely with everything else.

  It's a most useful literary technique. You can't write immediate-future speculative fiction ("anticipation” as the French call it to distinguish it from “science fiction” because the speculative element need not involve science or technology at all) or historical fiction or hard science fiction without employing it. Dan Brown has it down cold in the speculative present, and in The Da Vinci Code it worked well for him.

  He uses it to good effect again in The Lost Symbol, but there he also employs a coldly cynical story-telling technique to keep the reader turning the pages without finding a good stopping point to place a bookmark and reading at warp speed to create the illusion of a breathlessly thrilling lead.

  He does this with short chapters, most ending just after the viewpoint character learns something important but withholds what it is from the reader by cutting away to another viewpoint character and doing the same thing again.

  And again, and again, and again, throughout most of the novel.

  Well, you pays your money, and you takes your choice. I say this is a manipulative cheat, and an obnoxious one. Once you perceive it, the thrill is gone away into the clunky clockwork machinery. On the other hand, maybe readers who don't perceive the carney move will enjoy the roller coaster ride.

  Or not. The Lost Symbol got unenthusiastic reviews, made the top of the bestseller lists, but didn't sell anything like The Da Vinci Code. Given the expectations, it could be considered a flop, at least by the publisher that shelled out a huge advance based on past Bookscan numbers for another cash cow and got one whose inky milk bled red.

  What Dan Brown demonstrates with The Da Vinci Code and The Lost Symbol is that you can enthrall a general mass readership that turns its nose up at “sci-fi” with fiction set in a speculative present, where everything that can be verified is set in the reality that those readers know and the speculative elements are presented as hiding within that matrix. Especially if that chosen matrix seems to have plenty of hidey-holes for Secret Masters and theological and/or political secrets whose existence cannot be logically or emotionally disproved.

  This fiction of the speculative present is certainly speculative fiction, but is it science fiction? Contend that it is not, and you will have to concoct a literary definition that excludes it. What does it lack, when done right? What does it do that it shouldn't?

  This is of more than mere academic hair-splitting interest because the speculative present is likely to supersede or at least dominate the speculative futures of “science fiction,” and for a general readership has just about done it already.

  The operative question is really can “science fiction” welcome it into the fold, can writers whose work has evolved within the genre parameters of “science fiction” adapt to this mode and use what they have learned in the process—which is plenty—or will it be left to the Dan Browns to reinvent the speculative wheel?

  I mean, pondering my own vector, I see that my novels were moving in this direction long before I even understood that it was a direction, starting with Bug Jack Barron, proceeding through Passing Through the Flame, The Mind Game, Pictures at 11, He Walked Among Us, and maybe arguably more.

  This I was doing while certain other writers were arguing about whether they should “leave science fiction” as rats escape from a sinking boat. Did I “leave science fiction"? Certainly I was never enthusiastic about this stream of my work being published in genre SF lines, where it didn't really belong in terms of marketing demographics.

  But while I was writing this sort of stuff, I was also writing things like Songs From the Stars, Riding the Torch, Child of Fortune, and The Void Captain's Tale, which I knew damned well could only and should only be published as science fiction. Because only people on familiar terms with that literature could have the intellectual tools to understand, let alone enjoy, fiction set in the far future, and dealing with such material as mutated consciousness and human destiny in a galactic context.

  Was I missing something here? Pondering that question and deciding thereby to write this column, I decided that I had to first read Anathem.

  Why?

  Because Neal Stephenson had begun well inside the tent of science fiction both commercially and literarily with novels like Snow Crash and The Diamond Age, but successfully snake-danced out of the tent and into the speculative past circa World War II with Cryptonomicon. He solidified his escape from singular genre restraints with a kind of historical fantasy trilogy called The Baroque Cycle.

  Not many “science fiction writers” have pulled off this Houdini act to reach a wider and more general readership while still more or less faithful to their own literary stars. But from what I had read about Anathem, it seemed like a novel that could only be comprehended by, let alone be of any interest to, the hard-core cognoscenti, set as it is in an alien civilization on a planet far far away in time, space, and the taste of any but a committed science fiction readership.

  Que pasa?

  Stephenson prefaces the novel with this Note to the Reader:

  “If you are accustomed to reading works of speculative fiction and enjoy puzzling things out on your own, skip this Note. Otherwise, know that the scene in which this book is set is not Earth, but a planet called Arbe that is similar to Earth in many ways.”

  He then proceeds to pages of Arbe pronunciation guides and a Cliff Notes guide to the rises and falls of thousands of years of civilizations on his fictional planet before even beginning the story.

  Well, this certainly seems like trying to prepare a naive and wider readership to sail the starry sea of science fiction, a cunning means of persuading it to take a flyer on this novel. But those who do will find themselves light years, multiplex realities, and consciousnesses from Kansas.

  The first person narrator and lead character of Anathem is Erasmus, a sort of monk in a sort of monastery, though as the song says, neither of them are quite what they seem. Stephenson leaves you encapsulated “intramuros” with Erasmus in the only context he has known since childhood, and all you know of Arbe, for a long leisurely while in this long leisurely and sometimes a wee overly discursive novel before he and you escape, flee, or are ejected into the wider world outside the walls. And it's not exactly what you expected it to be, Dorothy.

  Inside, the “fraas” do a kind of theoretical science cum existential philosophical calculus in a millennial attempt to understand life, the universe and everything by talking about it, pondering it, engaging in debates and logical jousts, and regarding material phenomenology as mere data, though one may engage aspects of the material world as hobbies.

  The feeling is cloistered Middle Ages, and the “dialogs” deliberately Socratic, often overlong even to a reader who does find such stuff fascinating. What someone will make of reading Anathem as their first immersion in this hardest of hard science fiction, I can't even imagine. But it does make sense if you can
fathom it, and it will end up being crucial to the story.

  Until Erasmus leaves the intramuros world, you are led by the monastery-like culture, steampunk level technology, and even the literary style to believe that outside the walls is some kind of medieval age, but nothing could be further from the truth.

  Extramuros, they do pragmatic science and technology, high, low, civilian, and military, and through millennia of sine wave ups and downs have evolved a high tech civilization rather more advanced than our own, with things like smart phones, an internet, helicopters, satellites, mini-nukes called “Everything Killers,” ballistic missiles, and, as it turns out, very sophisticated low Arbe orbit manned capabilities.

  You could take this set-up as a take on the dichotomy between theoretical and experimental physics, science and mathematized cosmological philosophy like string theory, cosmic Cartesian dualism, or all of the above.

  And when some sort of alien spaceship is discovered secretly orbiting the planet and Erasmus gets more and more involved in the efforts of The Powers That Be to discover its nature and intentions, the novel itself bifurcates along two different vectors.

  Discovering what the alien spaceship is, who the aliens are, where they came from, and what they want, is a fascinating tale and intellectual puzzle, delving deeply into the possible nature of multiplex universes and a definitive theory of universal consciousness. Vaporware, maybe, but way cool and logically vigorous vaporware. About as deep into hard scientific speculation as you can get, and brilliantly pulled off by Neal Stephenson.

  Stephenson does stepwise peel the layers of maya off his cosmological onion to reveal his at least literarily satisfying version of ultimate reality, as such mystical hard SF should. But this fades more and more into the background in about the last quarter or so of this long novel, which devolves into seemingly endless space commando high tech derring-do.

  What happened here?

  Like the novel itself, the readership demographic Stephenson seems to be writing for appears to bifurcate somewhere past the excellent first two-thirds of the novel, written for a scientifically sophisticated audience of veteran science fiction readers, and the final third, which descends from on high into action footage loops and nuts-and-bolts military SF.

  Why Stephenson did what he did only he can really know, which doesn't mean he had to know why to do it. But that Anathem seems to at least have been nicely commercially viable and critically approved would appear to say something, something that on balance is positive.

  I would surmise that not many readers who were intellectually seduced by the first two-thirds of Anathem felt all that satisfied by the handling of the denouement, and even fewer readers turned on by space war SF action were going to plow through all that geeky stuff to finally get to it. So it would seem that there still remains enough of a dwindling and perhaps aging-out demographic of sufficiently educated sophisticated readers to support the continued existence of hard-core science fiction.

  After all, in a country of three hundred million people, a tiny slice of the readership pie is sufficient to make any flavor of fiction commercially viable within certain parameters. And if you're willing to accept those economic limits, you can gain the creative freedom to write for your chosen ideal readership.

  Which by my lights should be yourself. Would it not be self-betrayal as well as of any potential readership, to write something you wouldn't want to read if someone else had written it?

  What its practitioners are pleased to call “Literary Fiction” recognizes that it can't attract some maximum bottom-fishing bottom-line readership, and must content itself with being an elite niche genre like science fiction. It's been a long time since literary lions like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, and Mailer could publish fiction that was “literary” and “popular” at the same time.

  The surrender of this synergy of front-line literary intellectual heroism to the creation of a duality between “literary” and “popular” may be not exactly peace with honor, but at least it does allow some niche literature like “serious” science fiction and “serious” literary fiction to survive with more or less creative freedom.

  But there is a feeling abroad that the handwriting of future commercial non-viability may be on the electronic wall for both of these genres with serious literary intent. Writers inside the science fiction tent have been attempting to “break out” of the genre and into the “mainstream” for decades now in various ways and with varying success. And, the grass always looking greener from the outside, of late “serious literary writers” are trying their hands at science fiction.

  The problem for science fiction writers is that attempting to address a larger audience means attracting a wider audience, and writing for a wider audience tends to dumb down the product.

  The problem for literary writers is that while their sort of inward-looking fiction has no trouble being understood by a general readership, it tends to bore it because of its disconnect from cultural and mass cultural relevance.

  Or, as I wrote long ago, “Science fiction treats matters of cosmic significance trivially, literary fiction applies its superior literary technique to the contemplation of the lint in its own navel.”

  Cormac McCarthy's The Road is at once a typical and peculiar specimen thereof. McCarthy is one of those currently rare major league novelists with a major league mass readership track record, and The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among other lesser awards, something I find hard to understand.

  Or maybe I understand too well, and am being cowardly reluctant to state what in establishment literary quarters would be regarded as Philistine lase majesté coming from a mere “sci-fi” guy. Well, frankly, Scarlett, I don't give a damn. I might as well stand up on my hind legs and say it out loud:

  The Road is superlatively written post-apocalyptic science fiction. But it is not a great novel, or indeed really a good one, and those who claim that it is are the ones who are embarrassing themselves in my eyes and in the eyes of anyone who knows what good science fiction is. Or for that matter, good fiction period.

  There, I've said it.

  In the first place, The Road is not really a novel at all, but a novella stretched out to book length. Not by the old trick of wide margins and large type, but by a newer one, a “post-modern” pretension that similarly increases the page count by padding many of the pages with white space, but in a manner counterproductive to the ease of the reading experience.

  —

  “What does he mean by that?” you might well ask.

  —

  “All I can do is demonstrate,” I'm forced to admit.

  —

  “So go ahead and do it,” you say.

  In The Road style, the above three lines would be printed as:

  What does he mean by that?

  All I can do is demonstrate.

  So go ahead and do it.

  No “saids” or said-bookisms in any of the book's dialog or any other form of speaker identification, replacing them with double line spaces every time the speaker changes. And not just in short sequences but in whole pages at a time, running up the page count by halving the words per page.

  Fortunately, at least there are really only two speaking parts in this book, a father and his boy; if there were more in a scene, this sort of thing would render it just about unreadable.

  Neither character is graced with a name, and the author seems to maintain a psychic distance from them, alternating subtle omniscient author narration with a scattering of stream of the father's consciousness that seems rather coldly generic. He never enters the son's consciousness at all as they trudge along through Cormac McCarthy's bleak and pitiless post-apocalyptic landscape, encountering a rogue's gallery of human monsters straight out of The Worst of Mad Max toward inevitable entropic doom.

  Th-th-th-that's all, folks, that's the whole sad content, except for a bathetic little bullshit ending that contradicts what theme The Road has had, which more or less amounts to �
��life's a bitch and then you die.”

  A nameless man and nameless son making their way south through the moribund landscape of a dying Earth; dying trees, dying foliage, ruined cities and towns, birds falling dead from the sky, the biosphere itself seemingly well on the road to extinction without a ray of hope.

  McCarthy is very good at physical description, and would seem to have done his homework, because he's quite meticulous about getting the nuts and bolts of everything not only well-described, sometimes over-described, but correct in the manner of a conscientious hard science fiction writer. Indeed, The Road would be a successful little piece of hard science fiction, at least in technical terms, except for one not at all minor flaw.

  Cormac McCarthy never enlightens the reader as to what has happened to create his post-apocalypse Hades. Nuclear war? Global warming? An asteroid strike? Escaped aliens from Hangar 51 taking vengeance on Gaia? Not only does McCarthy never tell you, he probably doesn't know himself—because the world he has created doesn't really jibe with being created by any or even all of the above. He probably didn't care either.

  Talented writers who misunderstand science fiction have often fallen into this trap, supposing that writing in the SF mode allows you to invent whatever literary world suits your purpose without regard to suspension of disbelief or scientific knowledge, and sometimes it even works.

  But you do have to havea purpose, a theme, a didactic ax to grind, a revelation to convey—something, anything, that pulls together your series of events, uniting character evolution with dramatic structure and with philosophical vector to reach a satisfying conclusion for the reader, an epiphany, if you're really on your game, even a satori.

  There is a technical term for this.

  It's called a story.

  Because it doesn't have that sort of literary or transliterary purpose, The Road doesn't tell a story. Because it doesn't have a story to tell. And I suspect that Cormac McCarthy didn't care to write a novel that told a story, but wrote the novel as a literary exercise.