Lightspeed Magazine Issue 3
Page 7
The answer, which would be beyond her understanding even if provided, is that the wet, sordid physicality of the experience is the very point.
BIRTH (II)
Jennifer Axioma-Singh is fully plugged in to every cramp, every twitch, every pooled droplet of sweat. She experiences the beauty and the terror and the exhaustion and the certainty that this will never end. She finds it resonant and evocative and educational on levels lost to a mindless sack of meat like Molly June. And she comes to any number of profound revelations about the nature of life and death and the biological origins of the species and the odd, inexplicable attachment brood mares have always felt for the squalling sacks of flesh and bone their bodies have gone to so much trouble expelling.
CONCLUSIONS
It’s like any other work, she thinks. Nobody ever spent months and months building a house only to burn it down the second they pounded in the last nail. You put that much effort into something and it belongs to you, forever, even if the end result is nothing but a tiny creature that eats and shits and makes demands on your time.
This still fails to explain why anybody would invite this kind of pain again, let alone the three or four or seven additional occasions common before the unborn reached their ascendancy. Oh, it’s interesting enough to start with, but she gets the general idea long before the thirteenth hour rolls around and the market share for her real-time feed dwindles to the single digits. Long before that, the pain has given way to boredom. At the fifteenth hour she gives up entirely, turns off her inputs, and begins to catch up on her personal correspondence, missing the actual moment when Molly June’s daughter, Jennifer’s womb-mate and sister, is expelled head-first into a shiny silver tray, pink and bloody and screaming at the top of her lungs, sharing oxygen for the very first time, but, by every legal definition, Dead.
AFTERMATH (JENNIFER)
As per her expressed wishes, Jennifer Axioma-Singh is removed from Molly June and installed in a new arvie that very day. This one’s a tall, lithe, gloriously beautiful creature with fiery eyes and thick, lush lips: her name’s Bernadette Ann, she’s been bred for endurance in extreme environments, and she’ll soon be taking Jennifer Axioma-Singh on an extended solo hike across the restored continent of Antarctica.
Jennifer is so impatient to begin this journey that she never lays eyes on the child whose birth she has just experienced. There’s no need. After all, she’s never laid eyes on anything, not personally. And the pictures are available online, should she ever feel the need to see them. Not that she ever sees any reason for that to happen. The baby, itself, was never the issue here. Jennifer didn’t want to be a mother. She just wanted to give birth. All that mattered to her, in the long run, was obtaining a few months of unique vicarious experience, precious in a lifetime likely to continue for as long as the servos still manufacture wombs and breed arvies. All that matters now is moving on. Because time marches onward, and there are never enough adventures to fill it.
AFTERMATH (MOLLY JUNE)
She’s been used, and sullied, and rendered an unlikely candidate to attract additional passengers. She is therefore earmarked for compassionate disposal.
AFTERMATH (THE BABY)
The baby is, no pun intended, another issue. Her biological mother Jennifer Axioma-Singh has no interest in her, and her birth-mother Molly June is on her way to the furnace. A number of minor health problems, barely worth mentioning, render her unsuitable for a useful future as somebody’s arvie. Born, and by that precise definition Dead, she could very well follow Molly June down the chute.
But she has a happier future ahead of her. It seems that her unusual gestation and birth have rendered her something a collector’s item, and there are any number of museums aching for a chance to add her to their permanent collections. Offers are weighed, and terms negotiated, until the ultimate agreement is signed, and she finds herself shipped to a freshly constructed habitat in a wildlife preserve in what used to be Ohio.
AFTERMATH (THE CHILD)
She spends her early life in an automated nursery with toys, teachers, and careful attention to her every physical need. At age five she’s moved to a cage consisting of a two story house on four acres of nice green grass, beneath what looks like a blue sky dotted with fluffy white clouds. There’s even a playground. She will never be allowed out, of course, because there’s no place for her to go, but she does have human contact of a sort: a different arvie almost every day, inhabited for the occasion by a long line of Living who now think it might be fun to experience child-rearing for a while. Each one has a different face, each one calls her by a different name, and their treatment of her ranges all the way from compassionate to violently abusive.
Now eight, the little girl has long since given up on asking the good ones to stay, because she knows they won’t. Nor does she continue to dream about what she’ll do when she grows up, since it’s also occurred to her that she’ll never know anything but this life in this fishbowl. Her one consolation is wondering about her real mother: where she is now, what she looks like, whether she ever thinks about the child she left behind, and whether it would have been possible to hold on to her love, had it ever been offered, or even possible.
The questions remain the same, from day to day. But the answers are hers to imagine, and they change from minute to minute: as protean as her moods, or her dreams, or the reasons why she might have been condemned to this cruelest of all possible punishments.
Adam-Troy Castro’s seventeen books include Emissaries from the Dead (winner of the Philip K. Dick award), and The Third Claw of God, both of which feature his profoundly damaged far-future murder investigator, Andrea Cort. His next works will be the alphabetic primers Z is for Zombie and V is for Vampire, both illustrated by Johnny Atomic. His short fiction has been nominated for five Nebulas, two Hugos, and two Stokers. Adam-Troy, who describes the odd hyphen between his first and middle names as a typo from his college newspaper that was just annoying enough to embrace with gusto, lives in Miami with his wife Judi and a population of insane cats that includes Uma Furman and Meow Farrow.
Author Spotlight: Adam-Troy Castro
Jordan Hamessley
Can you give us an idea of the class structure in the world of “Arvies”? What determines whether a fetus becomes an arvie or stays in the womb?
This is a post-poverty utopia where everybody lucky enough to be plugged into the society’s opportunities—the passengers or if you prefer “pilots” of the arvies—gets to do whatever the heck they want to do with their lives, indulging their slightest whims via the bodies whose wombs they occupy. I left unexplained what criteria determine who gets to enjoy all of this world’s vast opportunities and who becomes an enslaved recreational vehicle; that decision is made, from standards you and I can only guess at, long before any fetus is granted the gift of adult awareness. There must also be genetic and medical issues involved far beyond us. But no doubt, if some zygote possesses genetic gifts that promise vast talent in athletic pursuits, that’s a quality that would render their future body very very much in demand as athletic gear for some fetus interested in enjoying the ride from the safety of the amniotic fluid.
The story takes place after an apparent fetus uprising, any ideas as to how that came about?
The premise of a literal fetus uprising—man the pitchforks, Sparky!—is too risible to be borne. Even in the unlikely satirical world I posit, I refuse to believe that it happened in that precise way. I presume that, at some point in the story’s far, FAR future, an era that defines Clarke’s dictum about sufficiently advanced technologies being indistinguishable from magic, somebody said, “you know what? We have the medical technology to grant us all eternal lives living our wildest and most hedonistic dreams inside host bodies bred for the purpose,” and everybody else said, “yeah, you know what, I think you’re on to something there, let’s do that.”
The idea that an unborn child can have full lives, multiple even, is interesting. Would these humans ever a
ctually be born or would they eventually die in the womb?
The entire point of the story is that they have no interest in being born; they can enjoy all of life’s opportunities without being born. As being born is a fate reserved for future arvies, it’s something nobody would ever want. The ability to arrest the fetuses at a stage before birth presumes a tremendous capacity to retard aging, for many hundreds of years if not even longer. There would be deaths due to the occasional accident capable of killing both arvie host-body and fetus passenger alike—let’s say, in the case of some hypothetical cliff-climbing arvie taking the long fall and carrying its unlucky passenger along with it—but such occurrences would be relatively rare. Think of it as functional immortality. But the question of whether any would “ever” be born — that brings up a potential story idea; a hated criminal in this world, who is sentenced to birth…
Do you have any upcoming work you would like our readers to know about?
There’s plenty of stuff in the pipeline. Short stories: “Anteroom,” a zombie story for the John Joseph Adams anthology; The Living Dead 2; the downright vicious “Pieces of Ethan,” in the John Skipp anthology, Werewolves and Shapeshifters; and the very very very very very short (25 words) “Chance Encounter At the Insurance Office,” for the Robert Swartwood anthology Hint Fiction. Later this year, the third Andrea Cort novel, Fall of the Marionettes (right now only available from a German publisher, but still an entirely new installment in that series). I am as of this writing almost done with a new Andrea Cort novella, not placed yet. There are a bunch of book projects I cannot announce yet, but there are two set for publication early next year that I can brag on: Z is for Zombie and V is for Vampire (both Eos), collaborations with leading artist Johnny Atomic that are wild-and-wacky alphabetic primers to those two titular monstrous icons. I predict that those volumes will pop a lot of astonished eyes from their sockets in 2011.
Jordan Hamessley is a children’s book editor at Penguin Books for Young Readers where she edits the Batman: The Brave and the Bold and Chaotic publishing programs. In addition to developing original series, she occasionally writes books for children and performs voiceover work for promotional materials. She is also blogger for Tor.com and can be found on Twitter as thejordache.
Interview with Robert J. Sawyer
Andrea Kail
Robert J. Sawyer hardly needs an introduction. The Hugo, the Nebula, the Campbell, he’s won them all, one of only seven writers in history to make that science fiction hat trick. And that’s not even mentioning the multiple Seiun and Aurora wins and his genre-crossing Arthur Ellis Award from the Crime Writers of Canada.
With the success of Battlestar Galactica and Lost, science fiction seems to be gaining in popularity in the mainstream media. Do you think the genre is experiencing a renaissance or is it just that people are beginning to feel like it’s ok to come out of the science fiction closet?
Well, you’re talking apples and oranges. In a really good week, Battlestar Galactica, on tiny cable channel Syfy, had one million viewers in the US—out of 300 million people. Lost had well over ten million in a good week, but most people watching Lost had no idea they were watching science fiction. So, it’s anything but mainstream acceptance.
In fact, look at FlashForward, the ABC TV series based on my novel; the novel is unequivocally science fiction. All of the major changes made in adapting the book were to downplay any visual clue that it was science fiction for people flipping channels: instead of physicists working at CERN, you saw FBI agents working in L.A.; instead of flashing 20 years into the future, you never saw any futuristic skylines or technology.
So, I guess I reject the question’s premise. As much as we who love SF wish it were true, I feel that SF fans have come down with what used to be thought of as a purely Canadian disease. We Canadians go around saying stuff like, “Pamela Anderson? Oh, yeah—she’s Canadian” or “Jim Carey—did you know he’s from Toronto?” It’s a thing we do out of pride, but going around saying, “Hey, you like Lost—did you know it’s science fiction?” or “Oooh, your book club just did The Time Traveler’s Wife—are you going to do any more SF?” is just fooling ourselves. Sure, Avatar is the biggest grossing movie of all time, but, come on, we no more own the box office than Canadian athletes owned the podium in the winter Olympics.
Your own work tends to straddle the science fiction and mystery genres, but do you think we should even have labels? Do they help or hurt?
In the United States, they’re a necessary evil—so many books are published, they have to be organized somehow for browsing. But in general, they hurt. I’m proud to call myself a science-fiction writer—my website is sfwriter.com and my car’s license plate says SFWRITER—but in Canada, I’m mostly thought of as a writer, period, and my audience is much, much wider than it is in the States.
It’s similar to what we were talking about in your previous question: there are way, way, way more people who read Michael Crichton, Audrey Niffenegger, or J.D. Robb than there will ever be readers of any writer published as science fiction you care to name. A lucky few have left the category—William Gibson is no longer published as SF—but mostly if you start there, you’re stuck there. Oh, we may be able to see, and understand, the stars better than just about any other writers alive, but there’s a definite glass ceiling on our sales, imposed by the simple fact that 95% of book buyers never, ever go into the science fiction section, because they can’t imagine it holds anything of interest for them.
How was it watching your novel FlashForward made into a TV series? Changes always need to be made in order to adapt a novel into a movie or TV show. How do you feel about the changes that were made to FlashForward?
Before I optioned the rights to them, I sat down in Los Angeles with executive producers Jessika Borsiczky, David S. Goyer, and Brannon Braga. They told me what changes they felt would be necessary to make the show work for a major American TV series. If I hadn’t liked what they’d had to say, I could have said no, and turned down their offer. But I did understand the logic of what they felt needed to be done.
In retrospect, of course, we didn’t have the success we wanted: the show only lasted 22 episodes. But I’m not going to play Monday morning quarterback; despite our subject matter, we didn’t know what the future held. David Goyer and I used to have quite spirited discussions on some points, and I guess I won the arguments about half the time—which is fine. I consulted on every episode, wrote the nineteenth episode, made lots of friends, had a blast, had a lot of people discover my writing for the first time, and made a lot of money. What’s not to like?
Illegal Alien has also been optioned for TV. Will you have any involvement in the development of the miniseries?
I’m attached as Executive Producer. I won’t be writing the script—I wrote that novel in 1996, and going back to re-do it as a script after all these years would, in some ways, feel like a step backward for me. But I’m super-enthusiastic about the project, and really hope it will come to fruition. The director attached to the project, Michael Robison, is terrific, as is producer David Coatsworth.
Your current trilogy, WWW, is about the awakening of an internet sentience. In your novel, the Webmind seems benign. Do you believe that any future artificial intelligence will be a benign creation or is the machine dystopia of the Terminator movies more likely?
“Any” is the loaded word in your question. No, of course I don’t believe that; it’d be foolish to take that position. What intrigued me was that SF—especially in film and TV—had taken as a given that future AI will be malevolent, and that there’s no way for humanity to survive the advent of things more intelligent than we are. Well, SF is supposed to be about offering choices for tomorrow—and if we don’t have a positive blueprint, then the negative one becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Works of science fiction don’t exist in isolation; they’re in dialogue with each other. That my novels Wake, Watch, and Wonder say something different than what everyone else is saying on thi
s topic is precisely what made them worth writing.
Religion plays a large part in a lot of your fiction. What early religious experiences (if any) influence your repeated return to the theme of science vs. religion? What is it about religion that is so fascinating to the scientific mind?
Actually, the experience came when I was 23. Up until that point, I had a pretty simple worldview, one shared by a lot of SF fans: religious people are self-deluding and stupid. But then, in 1983, with a freshly minted bachelor’s degree in Radio and Television Arts, I was hired to edit the license application for what became Vision TV, Canada’s multi-faith TV channel. And instead of working alongside a bunch of rubes, I found myself working with some really intelligent, thoughtful, scientifically literate, socially aware, well-read people, from across the faith spectrum—Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, and more. These were guys I respected, in most cases, and they believed in something I didn’t believe (and still don’t). That made me want to understand religion not in the straw-man sense that you so often hear it dismissed, but in the sense that can and does attract great thinkers.
As it happens, yesterday I just finished reading Amir D. Aczel’s book The Jesuit and the Skull: Pierre de Chardin, Evolution, and the Search for Peking Man. It’s a great portrait of a deeply religious man who thinks very much outside the box, was a staunch evolutionist, and made real contributions to science; Chardin—or, for that matter, my friends Vatican astronomers Chris Corbally and Guy Consolmagno—are such interesting, intelligent guys; you can’t help but be engaged by what they have to say.
Novels like my The Terminal Experiment—which won the Nebula Award—and Calculating God—which was a break-out top-ten national mainstream bestseller in Canada—come out of not wanting to ridicule or dismiss those who have other ways of perceiving. We SF readers are supposed to want to explore alien minds; well, religious minds are alien to me, but I struggle to comprehend them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes—well, as Stanley G. Weinbaum’s aliens said in “A Martian Odyssey,” “We are v-r-r-riends! Ouch!”