Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Then Jefferson turned to Ramiro. “You gave Collins the time machine. But then for some reason he killed himself.”

  “Ramiro gave him more than the time machine,” I explained. “He also told him the rest of the story. How he had come alone, and there was no Abraham, and every tragedy that had happened to the world was directly tied to what Ramiro had said to Collins, and what Collins had unwittingly fed upstream to the gullible and weak.”

  Jefferson put a hand on his pistol.

  I watched Ramiro's face. If it weren't for the tightness around the mouth and the glassiness to the eyes, I would have imagined that he was relaxed. Happy, even. Maybe he was assuring himself that these years and his sacrifices had been a great success. Not perfect, no. But who could have guessed that Moscow would have been nuked? Which meant that in countless realities—realms not too different from ours—he had achieved exactly what it was that he'd set out to achieve here.

  “And Collins didn't expect that part?” Jefferson asked.

  “That's my guess,” I admitted.

  His hand dropped back to his side.

  A few moments later, the elevator began to slow.

  My ears were popping. I felt my heart quicken, and I judged that Ramiro was breathing faster too. A sudden chill was leaking into the elevator, and I mentioned it, and then I suggested, “We should put on our masks.”

  Jefferson looked tired and angry. He wiped his eyes twice before making himself strap the oxygen mask over his weepy face.

  I left mine off for the moment.

  “I don't think you wanted this world to die,” I said.

  Ramiro didn't respond.

  “You were hoping to hurt a lot of people and leave the rest of us wiser,” I continued. “At least that's what you told yourself. Except what really inspired you was wielding this kind of power, and you won a lot of fun for your troubles, and now it's finally over. You're done. We're going to throw you into the cold, into the wasted darkness, and you'll have to stumble around until you die some miserable way or another.”

  Ramiro made a soft, odd sound. Like when a bird cheeps in its sleep.

  The elevator had nearly stopped. I stood facing the prisoner, my back flush against the door.

  He smiled with a weak, vacuous charm.

  In the end, the prisoner was defiant but terrified, utterly trapped but unable to admit his sorry circumstances. He believed that he was still in charge of his fate. Arrogance saved for this moment made him smile. Then he said, “You know quite a bit, Carmen. I've been impressed. But you should realize that I won't allow any ignoble, indecent finish for me.”

  The elevator door began to pull open.

  Ramiro's eyes never closed, even once he was dead.

  Behind me, a young woman's voice—a voice I knew from my ride to the nearby airstrip—called out, “Hello? Yes? Can we help?”

  The day was bright and warm.

  Two men suddenly dropped to their knees. But Jefferson stood again, stripping off the mask and then his heavy outer coat, staggering into the functioning, fully staffed office, finally stopping before a window that looked out over a flat, glorious landscape and a sky of endless blue.

  “Everything was faked?” he whispered.

  “Everything,” I said.

  “The newscasts, the communications?”

  “Digital magic,” I mentioned. “And playacting by real people, yes.”

  “The security cameras.”

  “Easy enough.”

  “But I felt the cold,” he said.

  I started to explain how when the elevator started to rise, a dozen portable air conditioning units began cooling down the top of the shaft.

  “But we felt the explosions, Carmen!”

  “Those were the easiest tricks,” I admitted. “A few tactical nukes thrown down some nearby oil wells.”

  He pressed his face against the warm glass, not fighting the tears anymore. Maybe he was crying out of relief. But in my case, I was crying for Jim, and for Collins, and for countless dead souls that I couldn't put names to. Behind us, a medical team was working hard to revive a man who refused to return to the living. When they finally gave up, we went to look at Ramiro's limp body.

  “Do you think he saw?” Jefferson asked.

  I knelt and closed the eyes.

  “In the end,” he persisted, “do you think he realized just how badly you tricked him?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I said, “No.”

  Then I stood and walked away, adding, “It happened both ways, and more times than I would care to count.”

  Copyright (c) 2008 Robert Reed

  * * * *

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  [Back to Table of Contents]

  * * *

  Department: ON BOOKS: POST-GENRE SPECULATIVE FICTION

  by Norman Spinrad

  THE CASTLE IN THE FOREST

  by Norman Mailer

  Random House, $27.95

  ISBN: 0394536495

  —

  SFWA EUROPEAN HALL OF FAME

  edited by James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow

  Tor, $26.95

  ISBN: 076531536X

  —

  WATERMIND

  by M.M. Buckner

  Tor

  —

  GREY

  by Jon Armstrong

  Night Shade Books, $14.95

  ISBN: 1597800651

  —

  HARM

  by Brian W. Aldiss

  Del Rey, $21.95

  ISBN: 034549671X

  —

  ICE

  by Vladimir Sorokin

  New York Review Books, $23.95

  ISBN: 1590171950

  * * * *

  It seems paradoxical that while genre SF in general and its subset of science fiction in particular and even long established writers thereof are struggling for bare commercial survival, with SF publishers desperately resorting to retro nostalgia-evoking packaging to retain a dwindling aging readership, in the wider literary realm, speculative fiction is becoming more and more a la mode.

  But many paradoxes are koans containing satoris that can be winkled out if one digs deep enough. Here is a blurb from the front cover of Grey by Jon Armstrong:

  “...It's a mad, stylish, trippy, endlessly inventive romp through the biohazardous wastes of post-genre literature.”

  On the surface, this is one more piece of blurbish hyperbole. But digging deeper, one finds much of significance in this single sentence of the usual book cover puffery.

  For one thing, the blurber is Michael Chabon. Chabon is one of a pride of literary lions and lionesses who have taken to the writing of science fiction or something superficially like it over the past few years—and in some cases longer—that includes the likes of Margaret Atwood, John Updike, Philip Roth, and the Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing.

  Some of these literary luminaries, like Atwood, shrilly proclaim that they're “not writing science fiction,” when of course they are, like the friend of a relative of mine who wanted me to help sell his novel about giant trees on Mars, which he also proclaimed “is not science fiction.” Others, like Roth and Updike, wisely ignore the whole question entirely, while Lessing, upon winning the Nobel, forthrightly acknowledged her science fiction as a part of her total oeuvre of which she was proud.

  But here Chabon, who makes no public bones about having written the stuff, is blurbing a novel published by Night Shade Books, a small genre press.

  And he is saying something of deep significance whether he knows it or not—and I suspect he really doesn't. Not so much about Armstrong's novel, but about a certain literary attitude, the key phrase being “...the biohazardous wastes of post-genre literature.”

  What does this really mean?

  Grey certainly is a “mad, styli
sh, trippy, endlessly inventive romp” through the hazardous psychic and cultural wastes of a supercorporate supermediated super brand-placement super showbizzy supertrendy future where all that counts, and I do mean all, is the styles and brands of the clothing you wear and the food that you eat and the magazines you subscribe to and the shows you watch and the bands you worship and every little bit of your life down to toilet paper and snot-rags.

  Nothing here is “biohazardous,” but everything is psychologically hazardous. One little wrong move can condemn you to a fate worse than death—you could suddenly find yourself less than au courant, oh my god, no longer chic!

  Grey is wickedly funny, camp on methedrene, beyond even satire, but nothing to be taken seriously. The “hero,” or narrator anyway, Michael Rivers, is such a fashionista that he's had his vision tweaked so that he sees everything in grey because that's the trend he's following. He is instantly smitten by an inamorata following the same fashion constellation for no other reason. And that's about the sanest thing in Armstrong's first novel. It's hilarious, it's nasty, it's all surface and no depth, it's full of future artifacts, gizmos, technology, clothing, that doesn't really violate any of the laws of mass and energy per se, but doesn't care about them either, that builds the novel's comic inferno verisimilitude entirely on futuristic brand name recognition.

  Is this science fiction? Is this speculative fiction? Is this “SF” ?

  What Chabon seems to be saying is that this sort of thing is a “romp through ... the wastes of post-genre fiction.” And that therefore Jon Armstrong is a “post-genre” novelist mining the wastes of genre literature, in this case “genre science fiction,” for material to be recycled for his own higher literary purposes.

  Whether this is what Jon Armstrong is really doing, or what he thinks he's doing, or what Chabon himself is doing, or even what Cha-bon may think he's doing, is beside the point here. The point is that this literary attitude is what “post-genre” fiction is really all about.

  Notice that this stuff is being called post-genre fiction, not non-genre fiction. Non-genre fiction would be a critically useless distinction, since it would encompass every bit of fiction written before nineteenth century printing technology created the very possibility of mass produced affordable books and magazines for mass as opposed to elite tastes, at least as conceived of by those very self-appointed elites, thereby creating “genre” itself.

  This was one of the great inflection points in literary history, and the emergence of “post-genre fiction” may turn out to be another.

  What is “genre?” The ultimate literary authority in English, the Oxford English Dictionary, defines it as “A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose.”

  Well, one might argue that “genre fiction” need not be written in any particular style or for any particular purpose other than to make money by selling it to a targeted readership, but any given genre of genre fiction must certainly be defined by “form” in the extended sense. Extended to include not only the basic plot structure of a hero facing a problem or villain, struggling against same and reaching a dramatic cre-scendo, and terminating with some sort of resolution, but also the setting in which the story takes place. Westerns in the Old West, nurse novels in hospitals or doctors’ offices, high fantasy when knighthood was in flower, and so forth.

  Therefore, to extend the OED definition to its converse, “non-genre fiction” would be any fiction that cannot be characterized by a particular form, style, or purpose. But the OED defines science fiction as “Imaginative fiction based on postulated scientific discoveries or spectacular environmental changes, freq. set in the future or on other planets and involving space or time travel.”

  As we all know, science fiction can also be set in the present, or the past, or the alternate present, or the alternate past, and certainly does not have to involve space or time travel. But even under the OED's excessively restricted definition, taken together with its definition of “genre fiction,” the OxfordEnglish Dictionary in effect declares that science fiction is not inherently genre fiction by literary definition.

  We all probably know this, too, but we also know that while science fiction itself did not begin with the publication of the first issue of Amazing Stories in 1926, genre science fiction more or less did. Science fiction written to pulp action-adventure plotlines with a restricted set of character types, with time-honored and weathered tropes, evolving into a less and less restricted literature closer to the extended OED definition through the Campbellian Golden Age, the post-World War II Renaissance, the New Wave, and so forth, to where it is today.

  Which is a long upward literary evolution from where it started, but leaving it still trapped in the commercial, demographic, marketing, and packaging parameters of genre publishing. At least, that is, for those writers who for whatever reasons have had their fiction published by that expiring apparatus long enough to have become identified with it no matter what they've been writing in the more mature stages of their careers, including yours truly.

  And that is the “wastes of post-genre literature” in general (and not) the wasteland of genre science fiction that Chabon's blurb is a comradely attempt to keep a talented first novelist like Jon Armstrong from being stranded in by declaring that he is only a day-tripper “romping” and rummaging through the cultural detritus.

  Detritus?

  Not at all. In fact, Chabon, Lessing, and even the likes of Atwood know that even when they don't know that they know it. Far from being a cultural rubbish heap, the material of speculative fiction is the current cultural mother lode and will be for the foreseeable future. Inherently. Inescapably.

  In the twenty-first century, what else is there to write culturally meaningful fiction about? Global warming. An exponentially exfoliating cybersphere. Designer genes. World-wide Jihad. Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Stupidity. Human cloning. Post-humanity. The possible death of the biosphere. That is the present that is making the future, and the impending future than has already transformed the cultural landscape. Literature that ignores it all can only be written by and for human ostriches gazing into their navels with their heads so thoroughly buried in the sands of the present that they don't realize that it has long since become the past.

  Genre science fiction is dying.

  Long live post-genre speculative fiction.

  The operative questions being who is going to write it, how and where is it going to be published, to what extent those writing it will be hamstrung by lack of access to nearly a century's worth of knowledge, craft, and experience into endless reinvention of the literary wheel, and therefore how successful post-genre speculative fiction is going to be on a literary level. Or to put it another way, how long it will take the new breed of authors to reach the level of Philip K. Dick, Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, or Brian W. Aldiss? Or for that matter, even a first novelist like M.M. Buckner.

  Buckner's first novel, Watermind, though published by Tor, a long-standing last bastion of genre science of fiction of literary quality (and that is by no means a contradiction in terms) is, I would contend, the sort of post-genre genre speculative fiction (and that is not necessarily a contradiction in terms either) we are seeing more and more of in these latter days.

  There is a superficially hard SF premise, namely that the profligate dumping of all manner of electronic garbage into the Mississippi River system—cell phones, batteries, motherboards, television sets, microchips, solar cells, whatever—has combined with the superabundance of complex chemical sludge and microorganisms therein to create a kind of electro-organic hybrid organism, the Watermind of the title, a bioelectronic neural network evolving into a kind of sentience.

  The Watermind, which has come into being in a backwater “Devil's Swamp” near Baton Rouge, grows, evolves, oozes and then speeds into the Mississippi toward New Orleans and the open sea beyond, perhaps ultimately threatening technological
civilization itself. The story is that of a cast of characters trying to prevent it.

  You can already see the movie of which Watermind could be the novelization, as one more giant amorphous monster from the Swamp threatens the end of Life As We Know It and our doughty crew of heroes seeks to save civilization from mucoid doom.

  That would be the straight genre version. But that's not what Buckner has written. It may seem that the McGuffin of the novel, the combining of e-trash and chemical pollution to create the Watermind, is very rubbery science indeed, best taken as a grand cautionary metaphor, and therefore turning the novel into fantasy. But that's not the way it feels, because Buckner has taken enormous care and apparently done exhaustive research to make this politically correct green conceit scientifically believable on a literary level.

  And that is the very essence of not merely science fiction, but hard science fiction. And the physical action of the story—as a brilliant young female scientist, her musician and worker lover, a ruthless corporate CEO, and a cast of other technically proficient characters chase, track, attempt to destroy, communicate with, and even save the Watermind —is more of the same. It's an exciting novel of technological and scientific detection and combat, in the course of which Buckner masterfully brings to life the diked, leveed, dammed machinery with which technological civilization has tamed the Mississippi, or at least tried to.

  But Watermind is also a sort of sub-species of the Southern Regional novel, a novel of place, in which the region of Louisiana through which the Mississippi wanders from Baton Rouge to New Orleans is a major character too—the landscape, the flora and fauna, the local deni-zens, the music, the food, the patois.

  And this being Louisiana, it is also a novel steeped in the mystical and religious ambiance thereof, a rich gumbo of Christian fundamentalism, gris-gris, voodoo, laced with a corruption that itself borders on the cultural. Then too zydeco, the music thereof, plays a key part of the plot itself on a technological level that is rendered in considerable musicological depth.

  Yet beyond and within all of that, Watermind is almost dominantly a novel of character—that of the psychological, emotional, and sexual relationships of the young female scientist, her “lower-class” musically adept lover, her dead father, the Argentinean CEO of the corporate entity pursuing the Watermind, indeed the alien Watermind itself.