Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 95

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  We’re already going down that road: for years now, mathematicians have been using automated “proof assistants” that presume to test and verify theorems—but we have to take their word for it, because apparently their automated analyses are opaque to human understanding. Science itself is becoming an act of faith.

  That said, whether Brüks is right about the value of field work depends largely on how long it takes before Moore’s Law lets us model those “million unpredictable variables” in electrons. I’ll hazard no guesses as to how long that’s likely to take.

  Regarding predictions of future (though it’s not the purpose of science fiction), many of your science fictional ideas had acquired their real-world analogs quite quickly (“head cheeses,” outside metabolism, guilt-response-modulating drugs, deep-sea tourist cruises). Doesn’t it sometimes almost scare you how fast are these things happening?

  Oh yes. That’s the problem with basing your fiction on cutting-edge research; it doesn’t stay cutting-edge for long, and in my experience the stuff always fades in the rear-view mirror years before I would have expected it to. I suspect my books will stale-date pretty quickly.

  This goes back to what you mentioned earlier, regarding my opinion that scientists don’t necessarily make the best science fiction writers. I try, I really do—but it’s a real effort to push beyond the current state-of-the-art. It’s probably a vestigial reflex from my days as a scientist, when unwarranted speculation was frowned upon.

  In another novel you’re planning, Sunflowers, you venture into the very far future. It’s set on the relativistic ship Eriophora, known to your readers from the Hugo-winning novelette, “The Island.” The characters can literally watch the rest of the universe grow old, even though their own technology and culture stay essentially the same. How did you cope with presenting a universe far from now, seen through the eyes of characters similar to us?

  Hell, that’s the easy part—just steal the light show from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey. If the characters are similar to us, that’s all they’d be able to comprehend when confronted with a truly transcendent future anyway.

  But I didn’t have to face that issue in “The Island;” the bioDyson entity that Eriophora encounters there was presumably a natural phenomenon, not some posthuman piece of magitech. We may not encounter it for another few billion years, but it could be quietly photosynthesizing away right now for all we know.

  I also ducked that challenge in the two other stories I’ve written in the sequence so far, “Hotshot” (which appears in Jonathan Strahan’s latest anthology Reach for Infinity), and “Giants” (which appears in an invisible book put out by Chaosium, although it may be appearing elsewhere soon since those bozos haven’t paid any of their authors and are therefore in breach of contract, not to mention burying the release itself so virtually no one knows the fucking anthology even exists. But I digress.). “Hotshot” takes place this century, just before Eriophora sails, so the culture shock isn’t so much of a challenge. “Giants” is another weird-phenomenon-outside-the-ship-tangly-domestic-discord-inside story.

  I’m still working up the courage to confront what we’ve become after millions of years of cyclical rise-and-fall. I have the seeds of an idea: a small ship pops out of a freshly booted gate, a ship containing a single posthuman from one of humanity’s immortality phases. She rides along with our crew and brings them some news from home—but rather than going into suspended animation between builds, she just wanders through the caverns and corridors of the ship for thousands of years while Sunday and her buddies sleep away the eons. Something profound happens to her during that time, but she refuses to talk about it afterward.

  That’s all I’ve got so far. But obviously, I’m going to have to grab this particular bull by the balls more than once before the cycle is finished.

  Creating characters outside the scope of today’s humanity is a challenging task; and as you mentioned in one older interview, many authors avoid showing the Singularity directly and rather go around it somehow. In my view, you’re very good at making especially those characters who don’t fit typicality and often are partially products of advanced technology. Was it difficult to write them, particularly Theseus’s crew in Blindsight? How hard do you have to imagine you’re Siri Keeton?

  Ooooh.

  Some of the more superficial aspects of my characters didn’t take much work at all, since I Tuckerised real-world characters at least insofar as physical appearance and (roughly) profession went. Siri was more personal; I’m nowhere on the spectrum, and I like to think I have a vastly more refined set of social skills than our protag, but one or two of his more emotional moments do spring from autobiography.

  I did know someone who was dying, and it took me forever to screw up the courage to reach out to him simply because I didn’t know what to say (it turned out to be easier than I’d feared). I also had a tendency to shut down and go into what a former partner termed “battle-computer mode” when dealing with emotionally sticky issues; I’d see the tears rise in her eyes and feel nothing more than a sort of cold contempt that she’d resorted to such cheap emotional trickery so early in the game. (Or maybe that wasn’t me so much as that particular relationship, which kinda sucked in a lot of ways. Certainly it’s been years and years since I’ve felt the urge to boot up that mode.) Regardless; those were bits of Siri that came out of me.

  You have to remember that I cheated when delineating that character, though. The story is told in first-person flashback, after Siri Keeton was traumatically rehumanised. The man in the narrative was repressed and shut down and in utter denial about who he really was; but the tale was told from the perspective of a much more self-aware Siri looking back on his earlier behavior. That let me humanize the telling, even during those parts of the tale when he wasn’t especially human. It meant he wasn’t really so alien after all.

  About the Author

  Julie Novakova was born in 1991 in Prague, the Czech Republic. She works as a writer and an evolutionary biologist. So far, she has published three novels, some twenty short stories in Czech and one other story in English (The Brass City in Penny Dread Tales Vol. Three: In Darkness Clockwork Shine). Her novels were The Crime on The Poseidon City, Never Trust Anything and A Silent Planet. Julie’s short stories appeared in Czech speculative fiction magazines (Ikarie, XB-1 and Pevnost) and anthologies. She’s a severe were-workaholic (which means that most of the time she’s quite lazy and she magically transforms the night before deadline).

  Another Word:

  Obstacles and Style

  Daniel Abraham

  My father is a songwriter and has been since before I was born. Many of the songs he writes take the form of stories with narrative arcs, characters, and resolutions at the end. One of the things he told me was that personal style—as a musician or a songwriter or a novelist—is made from all the ways you find to cover up your shortcomings.

  I’ve come to like that idea a lot.

  Imagine you pick up a book, open it at random and read:

  “Building a human was easy: the Auditors knew exactly how to move matter around. The trouble was that the result didn’t do anything but lie there and, eventually, decompose. This was annoying, since clearly human beings, without any special training or education, seemed to be able to make working replicas quite easily.”

  If you’re familiar with Terry Pratchett, it seems likely you’ll recognize him, even if you haven’t read Thief of Time. And that holds true for any writing by an author with a strong, distinctive voice. And part—I think most—of what creates that familiarity is the toolbox of shortcuts, habits, and challenges the author brings to the project.

  There’s a movie I watch every year or two by a director I hate. The director is Lars von Trier, and the movie is The Five Obstructions. It’s a kind of documentary, which is part of why I like it better than anything else von Trier has done. In it, he finds a man who was a friend and mentor: Jørgen Leth. Leth had made once influential short
film called The Perfect Human. Von Trier challenges him to remake the film five times, each time with a different set of constraints. So, for the first remake, von Trier insists that 1) the film be shot in Cuba, 2) no sets be employed, 3) all the rhetorical questions asked in the original film be answered, and 4) that no piece of film be longer than 12 frames long (about half a second). Leth’s response was to make a version of his work that was, to my tastes, more interesting and engaging than the original.

  Four more times—or maybe only three, depending on how you count the last one—the original film is recreated with new constraints and limitations. Each one is fascinating in its own way, and watching a brilliant, creative man pushed to his limits is—for me, at least—better than sports. Each time the rules get harder in new ways. Sometimes Leth despairs. But then there is a moment where he smiles and starts to get excited. He’s found his way around the problem, and his solution becomes the thing that makes that particular version interesting.

  In the last few years, I’ve been lucky enough to be involved with several examples of a story being remade in a new medium. I adapted George R.R. Martin’s, A Game of Thrones as a series of graphic novels, and I helped to adapt my own co-written novel Leviathan Wakes into a television show that will be airing next year. In both cases, the strengths of the novel matched poorly to the needs of the new form. Like Leth remaking The Perfect Human under different constraints, we had to retell the old story in a new way. Where the books had exposition, the graphic novels had visual imagery. Where the books had internal monologue and unreliable narrators, the TV show has the impartial eye of the camera. By changing the conditions under which we could tell the story, we changed the experience of it. It became something that was clearly related, but different.

  You can see something like it when the world changes things around a genre too. Police procedural and suspense novels in the 1990s struggled to revamp the standard plots to fit a world of ubiquitous cell phones and Internet access. Sometimes they were successful, other times . . . well, less so. One novel I particularly remember made a point of using an ampersand in a domain name. But over time and with experience, writers learned ways to include new technologies into the plots, and even exploit new opportunities for suspense that hadn’t been possible before. The style of plotting changed because the world played the role of von Trier to our communal Leth. Tell the same story again, but the characters can always update each other instantly no matter how far apart they are.

  These examples of adaptation and remaking are important because they throw a light on the relationship between obstacles and creativity. They let us see the same project done under different conditions. But sometimes limitations don’t change. Sometimes—maybe often, maybe always—there are constraints that never go away.

  The best poetry reading I ever went to was by a friend and former professor of mine who stuttered. I knew that was the case because I knew him, but the ways he’d found to incorporate the idiosyncrasies of his body into the delivery of his poems worked beautifully. And, because the other poets at that same reading weren’t dealing with that issue, they didn’t sound like him. He stood out.

  I remember seeing a dance recital by a man on crutches and recognizing the way he’d incorporated his particular body into the movements. But the truth is, if it hadn’t been for the cue of the crutches, I wouldn’t have attributed his style to anything in particular other than his own identity as a dancer. I’ve seen other performers whose works were probably shaped by other things—a tricky knee or a particularly long waist or an old injury that healed poorly—that I couldn’t recognize the origins of. I’ve heard poets read without knowing that they tended to avoid certain words or rhythms that they had a hard time pronouncing. I’ve seen paintings discussed as satire or social commentary or explorations of material that might have suddenly become much more explicable in a context of mental illness or the paints and dyes available to people in abject poverty.

  If there were a single, objective standard for excellence—and I don’t believe there is, but if—then those who excelled would also converge. The best writers would be the ones who adhered to the rules most closely: who never used passive voice, who always showed and never told, who didn’t include any unnecessary words. They would be the same voice, and so they’d be voiceless. Thankfully, the world doesn’t work like that.

  We are our bodies, and we are our minds, and we are even (to some degree) our circumstances. None of us work quite according to spec. We’re all flawed, and the best artists among us find ways to pause the way Jørgen Leth did, smile, and incorporate the work-arounds into what we do. So do the best non-artists. And everyone, really.

  Whether our styles are pleasing or challenging or annoying, whether we’re writing or dancing or working in an office, our strengths and talents make us competent. Our flaws and failings—and the ways we’ve invented to work despite them—make us interesting.

  God save us from one without the other.

  About the Author

  Daniel Abraham is a writer of genre fiction with a dozen books in print and over thirty published short stories. His work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, and Hugo Awards and has been awarded the International Horror Guild Award. He also writes as MLN Hanover and (with Ty Franck) as James S. A. Corey. He lives in the American Southwest.

  Editor’s Desk:

  Having an Adventure with Dad

  Neil Clarke

  This month, my father and I will embark on a little adventure. In a few days, we’ll pack up our bags and board a flight bound for Dublin, Ireland. We’ll be spending most of our time in Navan, the town in which my parents were born and grew up. My parents visited “home” just a few years ago, but it’s been almost thirty years since I’ve been back. Most of my aunts, uncles, and cousins are still in Ireland. In the time I’ve been gone, some of my cousins have had children and became grandparents. I’ve lost count of just how many of them there are, but I look forward to seeing everyone again. It’s been too long.

  I’m particularly looking forward to doing all this with Dad. I recall my childhood trips to Ireland quite fondly and remember him dragging us around, showing my brother and me the castle he used to play in, the school where the Jesuits used to beat the children, and all manner of other events. The difference this time is that I’m old enough to appreciate it and smart enough to write some of it down. It will be his time to show off and it will be followed by mine.

  After Ireland, we’re heading to London for Worldcon. He isn’t planning on attending, but I’m taking him anywhere I can. That Sunday is my birthday and I’m celebrating by bringing him to the Hugo Awards events with me: the reception for nominees, the ceremony, and the Hugo Loser’s Party. I’ve never had a member of my family at one of these ceremonies, so win or lose, I’ll be happy because he’s with me. As a child, he once told me that if there was ever a book I wanted, he’d buy it for me. I think it’s time he experiences the consequences of that action. I can only hope that my actions inspire my own children similarly someday.

  If you’ll be at Worldcon, maybe I’ll see you there. Otherwise enjoy the rest of your summer!

  About the Author

  Neil Clarke is the editor of Clarkesworld Magazine, owner of Wyrm Publishing and a current Hugo Award Nominee for Best Editor (short form). He currently lives in NJ with his wife and two children.

  Cover Art:

  Slumbering Naiad

  Julie Dillon

  About the Artist

  Julie Dillon is a science fiction and fantasy illustrator creating art for books and magazines, as well as for her own projects and publications. She has won two Chesley awards, and has been nominated for two Hugo Awards and two World Fantasy Awards.

 

 

 
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