Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  So what we have here is indeed a post-genre novel, a novel that works the interfaces between any number of genres, where the best modern fiction is now evolving. But Watermind is most definitely not "a romp through the biohazardous wastes of post-genre literature” by a day-tripper rummaging through the detritus thereof for material to recycle for “higher literary purposes.” Buckner is obviously a writer well-schooled enough in and respectful of this cultural and literary motherload of material, tropes, and techniques to move freely within it in a knowledgeable, serious manner rather than ignorantly exploiting it like a snobbish literary tourist.

  Nevertheless, this “post-genre” work of speculative fiction is being published by a genre publisher—by arguably the most literarily sincere and idealistic of “SF” publishers— which is all too likely to leave it floundering in the sucking mud of the commercial swamp that genre publishing has become in the twenty-first century, despite the best efforts of Tor.

  This is the dilemma of the serious writer of speculative fiction at the turn of the twenty-first century. If you truly understand the material and have learned the techniques evolved to deal with it by your literary ancestors over a century, you almost have to have had a track record as a “sci-fi” writer, and your work is going to be marketed to a dwindling readership that is not really the one you're after in the first place these days. And if you're just starting out, you're likely to have your work channeled into that machinery from the outset unless you get lucky or happen to have unusually precocious publishing street smarts.

  If you're trying to exploit the central literary material of the twenty-first century from outside the genre ghetto without knowledge of and respect for what's been accomplished with it in the past and how it was done, the chances are you really won't be able to do it literary justice yourself, because the attitude of the dominant literary culture toward “genre” is going to discourage you from even trying to learn how. Or even why.

  That's where speculative fiction has arrived at in the twenty-first century.

  In the United States, that is.

  But while English-language speculative fiction was literarily and commercially dominant throughout the world in the twentieth century, it was Anglophone speculative fiction that dominated, not simply American speculative fiction. And while they seemed to be more or less the same thing for a good part of the last century, as the best British writers thereof chased after the greater economic gains of the US market, they really weren't, not quite, and they are certainly not so today.

  Consider the long career and present plight of Brian W. Aldiss.

  Aldiss has been publishing forthright science fiction novels for a full half century now on both sides of the Atlantic and short science fiction longer than that, and has never hidden it behind prevarications like “speculative fiction” or “imaginative literature.” He's a regular convention-goer on both sides of the Atlantic, he's won Hugos and Nebulas, he's a Grand Master of the SFWA, he's written extensive criticism of the genre including a book-length literary history, publicly championed the genre in national newspapers and major literary journals, and was one of the major figures of the genre in the twentieth century in the United States as well as Britain.

  But Aldiss is also a significant British “man of letters,” publishing so-called “mainstream” novels, autobiography, plays, and much else having little or nothing to do with speculative fiction. Nor, in Britain at least, have these two aspects of his career really been regarded as separate incarnations. In British letters, there is a relatively thin but long history of writers who have managed this—H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Ian Banks—an historically supportive tradition, beginning with two novelists whose earlier science fiction was published before science fiction publication became genrefied.

  But while the likes of Thomas Pynchon and Gore Vidal have written fully rounded and literarily successful science fiction novels, they had solid reputations as “mainstream literary novelists” before they did, and so were never typed as “sci-fi guys.” I am so hard-pressed to come up with American writers with prior reputations as “science fiction writers” who have enjoyed similar careers in their own country and who have later been accepted as “serious” writers—Kurt Vonnegut, maybe Harlan Ellison and William Gibson—that I am reduced to pointing to myself. And with the exception of Vonnegut, none of us really have the literary stature that Brian Aldiss has in Britain, where at this writing he is still a serious candidate for a knighthood.

  Yet here, in an afterword interview to Harm, his most recent work of speculative fiction to be published in the United States, when speaking of a major apparently “mainstream” novel he's been working on, we have the following:

  Aldiss: “...You don't happen to know an Anglophone American publisher who might be interested, do you?”

  Interviewer: “It's incomprehensible to me that a writer of your proven gifts and stature could have difficulty placing a novel.”

  Indeed!

  Especially considering that the imprint under which Harm itself has been published is that of a subsidiary of Random House, under whose full spectrum of imprints just about anything under the sun can be published.

  Harm itself is an excellent example of post-genre speculative fiction written by one of the very writers who have been central in evolving it on a literary level with a mastery of the genre material, tropes, and techniques.

  There are two interwoven story lines here, with two protagonists.

  In near-future Britain, we have Paul Fadhil Abbas Ali, a British writer of Muslim descent whose brief joke about the assassination of a prime minister lands him in the Orwellian clutches of H.A.R.M, the Hostile Activities Research Ministry, an even nastier version of America's Homeland Security, and its more sophisticated version of Abu Ghraib.

  On the further future colonial planet of Stygia, the protagonist is one Fremant, about whom we know little because he knows so little about himself or his past. For in order to send colonists to Stygia, they were deconstructed for the long trip, then reconstructed upon arrival with little of their memories intact, and those they have are possibly programmed.

  Just as Paul's Britain has degenerated into a police state under the pressure of the current Holy War between Islamic jihadhists and the “West,” Stygia has become a kind of petty banana republic, where the humanoid natives have been pretty much killed off, the only fauna are insects, and Fremant gets involved in a rather pathetic, half-assed, ignorant liberation movement.

  This is a forthrightly political novel and an unashamedly nakedly angry one. From my description thus far, had I hidden the identity of the writer, you would probably surmise that this is the sort of thing that might be written by one of those writers unfamiliar with the actual literature of speculative fiction, confusing it with satire, and rummaging through it for superficial schtick to recycle into a less than artful political screed. The novelistically primitive Aldous Huxley of Brave New World rather than the mature speculative writer of Ape and Essence, or After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

  But you would be wrong, for this is a multilayered novel by Brian Aldiss, one of the creators of non-genre speculative fiction, who knows the mode as well as anyone does, who has not let his indignation override his attention to characterological depth, psychological subtly, thematic complexity and ambiguity, or irony.

  Actually, it would seem, there are two different story lines, but only one protagonist, the consciousness that is Paul/Fremant flashing back and forth unpredictably from stygian Stygia to the stygian clutches of H.A.R.M., dreaming of the one while embedded in the other. Maybe. Or maybe something even more ambiguous and subtle that Aldiss conveys as psychic complexity without ever really didactically explaining.

  So what we have here is a fully rounded and sophisticated work of non-genre speculative fiction by a thoroughly experienced practitioner of same. Without casting aspersions, this is fully the equal of all of the non-genre speculative
fiction written by the aforementioned literary lions and lionesses and superior to almost all of it on a literary level, including the science fiction of Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing.

  Had it been written by one of them, no doubt it would have been published by one of the literary imprints of Random House. Say Knopf, whose current honcho, Sonny Mehta, with an irony that might be appreciated by its author were he not its victim, would have considered it quite a feather in his editorial cap to have secured a novel by Brian W. Aldiss for the SF paperback line he was editing back in the day in London. Instead it could only find an American home with Del Rey Books, the SF genre line of Random House.

  Judging the work by the identity of the author? Outright literary prejudice against a denizen of the genre ghetto? Does the bear shit in the woods?

  That's where it's at now for authors typed as “science fiction writers” in the United States, no matter their level of artistry or proven literary accomplishment.

  But the United States is not the world. Even English-language speculative fiction is far from the whole enchilada. Perhaps you've noticed.

  Or not.

  Under the aegis and with the subsidy support of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, James Morrow and Kathryn Morrow, with the aid of the necessary diverse hands, have put together the SFWA European Hall of Fame, an heroic effort to remedy that ignorance.

  Here we have sixteen stories translated into English from thirteen different languages and relatively brief but cogent literary histories of the speculative fiction written in all of them. Nor are these old stories, but contemporary ones, more of them than not translated into English for the first time. This project was years in the making, a collective effort inspired by and in large part put together at the Utopials Festival in France created by Bruno Della Chiesa to bring together writers, editors, and publishers from throughout the non-Anglophone worlds of speculative fiction to create a trans-national community thereof. One that includes Americans and Brits, but as no more than equals. It says something touchingly positive that this collection was edited by Americans and financially subsidized by an organization that calls itself the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Noblesse Oblige, in the true and original sense.

  Far be it from me to attempt plot summaries or critiques of sixteen stories in this limited space. The salient point is that The SFWA Hall of Fame illuminates the often-obscured fact that speculative fiction has long and diverse individual histories in many countries, that a good many of them have little or nothing to do with “genre,” and that taken together they reveal that in the wider world speculative fiction is a much larger literary tent than it is in the English-speaking countries.

  In some of these languages it had never been genrefied at all, at least until quite recently. In Romania, for example, it arose out of and was identified with literary surrealism, and later, as in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, was utilized as a disguised political protest literature, often to the peril of its practitioners when the mask slipped. In some parts of Latin America speculative fiction coalesced out of Magic Realism, or maybe vice versa, while in other parts there was a “pulp tradition.” Ditto in Germany. France, of course, was the country of Jules Verne, progenitor of hard science fiction in English as well as in French, and there there has been a long history of genre SF.

  And so forth. A long, complex history revealing that, in the overall picture of world literary history, speculative fiction has not been a minor pop cultural backwater, nor has it everywhere been disconnected from or scorned by general literary culture or limited in its scope, depth, and angles of fictional attack by the action-adventure formulas of genre or “pulp tradition.”

  The subtitle of the anthology is Sixteen Contemporary Science Fiction Classics from the Continent, and this is significant. In the 1940s through the 1970s and even beyond, most of what little reached Anglophone SF readers from other languages seemed unimaginatively derivative of Anglophone genre SF. But these contemporary stories demonstrate that by now the French, the Germans, the Italians, the Spanish, the Eastern Europeans, the Russians, and so forth have not only thoroughly absorbed the material and techniques of Anglophone SF far better than the “literary writers” in the United States rummaging through the “wastes” for their own limited purposes, but have melded them with their own traditions to produce a range of fiction that can be called “Science Fiction” by the SFWA itself.

  A speculative fiction far more catholic and open-spirited than the general run of the fiction currently published by its own membership under the present dire commercial conditions.

  This is no longer derivative second-rate stuff, no longer even merely “SF” as we think we know it in the United States. Here we have sophisticated straight science fiction by Jean-Claude Dunyach and Valerio Evangelisti, even hard science fiction reminiscent of “The Cold Equations” by Andreas Eschbach, but also speculative fiction encompassing Magic Realism from the Spaniards Ricard De La Casa and Pedro Jorge Romero, the Russian Sergei Lukyanenko, the Greek Panagiotis Koustas. A bit of “post-modern space opera” totally tongue-in-cheek by the Romanian Lucian Merisca. Poetic psychic fantasies by the Dane Berhard Rib-beck and the Russian Elena Arsenieva.

  While America SF was devolving into retro nostalgic survivalism, perhaps because American product was becoming attenuated and therefore losing its commercial dominance on the European continent, in diverse European countries the homeboys and homegirls were capturing their own national markets from US exports, and doing it by writing the real deal in their own modes and styles. The contemporary non-Anglophone writers of speculative fiction are no longer aping English-language stuff.

  They've got it, they've absorbed it, they've picked up the torch, and are carrying it on.

  And sometimes boldly going where no western SF writers have gone before. For an extreme example take Ice, a novel by the Russian Vlad-imir Sorokin, which is about as extreme an example of any number of things as you are currently likely to find.

  In modern Russia, even in the Wild East of contemporary Moscow where literary, cultural, and pop cultural extremism is something of the norm, Sorokin is a notorious, popular, and widely reviled literary agent-provocateur, in and out of hot water with the powers that be. To give you an idea of what they're dealing with, he wrote a novel featuring a sex scene between Stalin and Khrushchev that got copies of the book literarily thrown in a fake public toilet bowl, and another that had Soviet citizens legally required to eat shit.

  Surreal black satire, be sure and impossible to take as anything else, let alone speculative fiction. But Ice is a work of true post-genre speculative fiction, science fiction even, by a writer who seems to know just what that is and how to write it.

  By the rules of the game, except for the hardest of hard science fiction, you are allowed at least one questionable speculative premise as long as it does not egregiously violate any of the known rules of physics, and perhaps even if it does as long as you can suspend disbelief. Otherwise it isn't speculative fiction.

  In Ice, Sorokin's is that the Tunguska meteor that hit Siberia in 1908 was composed of a strange form of ice (shades of “ice-nine” in Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle) that has been mined ever since by a secret tribe of blond-haired blue-eyed humans. When fashioned into the business end of a hammer and smashed repeatedly into the chest of someone with the appropriate genotype, it awakens the “voice of their heart,” revealing them as one of the limited number of the elite, transforming them into units of a transcendental cult whose eventual mission is to awaken all such people. When this is finally accomplished, the human race is through, and the elect will be transmuted into transcendental beings of light (shades of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End).

  Admittedly this is pretty far out there. But then faster than light spaceships, time travel, and any number of often used and well-accepted science fictional schticks are much further out, being plain impossible according to the known laws of mass-energy.

  Bu
t Sorokin does not use this outre McGuffin as a springboard out into the further realms where science fiction dissolves into fantasy. Nor does Ice really become a novel of mystical transcendentalism even in the final section where the mission is about to be completed.

  The bulk of the novel is a viciously realistic journey through the vicious underworld demimondes of contemporary Moscow and environs, or perhaps, one hopes, of the bygone Yeltsin era, as thuggish cultists do their coldly cruel stuff, often as not to even more thuggish gangsters, narrated by Sorokin in the hardest of hard-boiled styles and with the coldest eye imaginable.

  As extreme as the events of this novel are, this is not satire at all. This is nasty, violent, and vicious to the ultimate and thoroughly enjoyable if you have the stomach for such stuff, but it is hyper-realistically so, in the manner, say, of certain films of David Cronenberg or Sam Peckinpah. And as such it is non-genre speculative fiction par excellence—indeed non-genre science fiction by any meaningful definition. And it is a far better novel on that level than anything written so far by any of the American establishment literary figures attempting such stuff without similar control of speculative rigor.

  Amazingly enough, Ice has been published in the United States by New York Review Books, the book publishing arm of the New York Review of Books, perhaps the main journal of the American literary mandarinate, whose catalog of fiction includes nothing else remotely like it.

  Kudos to them for doing it, though I cannot imagine why; perhaps because Vladimir Sorokin himself has the necessary literary cachet in Russia, where, unlike in the United States, where William Burroughs had a long hard slog into literary acceptability, thanks in part to censorious conditions in the former Soviet Union, there is a tradition of accepting the work of literary shock-jocks into the literary canon.