Asimov's SF, April-May 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

Fantasy written as if it were science fiction. Like alternate-history fiction.

  Just like alternate-history fiction.

  There is quite a bit of this sort of fantasy being written these days, perhaps because there's only so much you can do with the usual high fantasy and traditional horror characters and tropes and great reams of it have already been written. Or perhaps because, though fantasy has come to dominate the “SF” genre, there is arising a generation of newer writers not particularly interested in things technological or scientific but possessed of more of a hard-edged private eye, rock-and-roll, underground, and, well, punkish, sensibility and angle of attack than what the unkind might deem airy-fairy. Science fiction with a fantasy face, you might say, or just as well fantasy with a science fictional attitude.

  In the marketplace, science fiction and fantasy have long since come to inhabit the same commercial multiverse encompassed by the “SF” logo and rackspace. And it may be that the literary concept of the Multiverse might be bringing them closer esthetically, at least stylistically and in terms of angle of attack.

  But not in terms of what cutting edge physics is now telling us about the true nature of, well, ultimate reality. For what quantum physics is now telling us is that the Multiverse is the ultimate reality, and not merely a literary construct. That a multiplicity of separate universes or realities must exist because of quantum indeterminacy. And not just a multiplicity, but an infinite number of universes branching out fractally from every moment of time, and with an infinity of our alternate selves exfoliated within them.

  This now seems to be turning out to be the true nature of existence(s), however paradoxical and counterintuitive that may seem to our aching minds when we attempt to encompass it experientially. It is science which has fed science fiction an enormous morsel to attempt to chew on this time, and not the other way around. The Multiverse, it would appear, is not merely subjective perception, but the way things really are, the way our selves really are, our alternate selves, the truth of all existence on a quantum level.

  To deal with this fictionally with anything like rigor, let alone convey it to the reader on an experiential and emotional level, is one daunting and even frightening task. But it is also a rich vein of thematic and speculative material only beginning to be mined on that level.

  Just as my extended nautical metaphor demolishes Maddox's contention that science and technology have, or even could, render science fiction obsolete, so does the frontier of quantum cosmology physics render my conceit of the science fiction writer as standing in the bow of a boat moving through the sea of time and gazing through the fog into the future a gross oversimplification.

  For every quantum of time through which the boat moves generates an infinite number of avatars of that “single” science fiction writer within an infinite number of universes radiating out from it, and that's only the timeline of “one” person. Multiply that by the population of the planet, and then multiply that by the interaction of all these interacting personal universes, and you get ... you get....

  You maybe get a transfinite number of universes, and while there is such a thing as transfinite mathematics, I freely confess that such a mathematical construct is beyond my understanding. Anyway, I seriously doubt that even transfinite mathematics can begin to convey the experiential reality.

  And yet physics, at least currently, seems to be telling us that this is the true existential nature of ultimate reality. And even if that concept should be overthrown later, it is certainly a Big Enough Idea to severely challenge the literary powers of science fiction writers for quite a while. Maybe permanently.

  As I've said, science fiction writers have been using the Multiverse, the concept of alternate realities, alternate histories, since Philip K. Dick wrote The Man in the High Castle. And, indeed, in a way long before, since the hoary old time travel paradox story is a sort of subset of the same thing, or at least couldn't exist without assuming it.

  But attempts to put the reader inside anything much like the kind of Multiverse that physics is now telling us is probably the real deal have been few and far between, and no wonder. The full scientific explication is not only rather recent, but seems almost impossible to fully wrap the human mind around on any but a theoretical level.

  How to describe what would be the true state of being of characters in a situation where each of them, far from being singular, is an infinite clade of iterations in an infinite (or transfinite?) set of isolated universes, each slightly different from the next? Let alone put together a coherent story in which several of them interact!

  Kathleen Ann Goonan begins to inch up to it in In War Times, an excellent novel, though there are sections where it becomes somewhat tediously over-discursive, perhaps because the author is a bit too entranced with her own formidable recreation of the period. Or perhaps this is a necessary flaw, for to succeed it has to be two different sorts of novel in one.

  On one level, In War Times is a World War II historical novel, that follows the main protagonist Sam and his buddy Wink from the death of Sam's brother in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor through the whole war and onto into the Allied, and particularly American, occupation of Germany afterward, and beyond. Needless to say, there have probably been thousands of World War II novels written by now, but even this non-science fictional aspect of In War Times is interestingly (mostly) different from a lot, if not all, of them.

  For one thing, while Sam and Wink do see some combat, their war is mostly that of behind the lines technical and logistical support troops, and few writers have chosen to narrate World War II novels from that perspective. And for another, Sam and Wink stay on after the end of World War II as part of the occupying forces in Germany, something that Goonan goes into in interesting if sometimes excessive detail—a scene and story not exactly overly exploited in the mountain of World War II literature.

  Kathleen Goonan was of course not there. But in an afterword, she explains that her father was—that although the character of Sam is not based on him, Sam's trajectory through the war and into the occupation follows Thomas Goonan's in terms of deployments, and that he actually wrote some small sections of the novel that are true accounts of his experiences. Furthermore, his daughter obviously had access to his memories as a further resource.

  The happy result is that In War Times evokes the times and places with a depth of reality that is pretty damn masterful. Or at least it seems so to someone like me, who likewise has no way to compare Goonan's re-creation of the 1940s and a bit beyond with personal memories of the historical reality, whose only points of comparison are the films of the time, the cinematic recreations, some tales told by my own father, and a very small boy's fragmentary memories of life in New York while my father was in the Navy.

  But in literary terms, the accuracy of what Kathleen Goonan has created doesn't really matter, because the times and places she recreates (or creates) in In War Times are utterly convincing not only in wealth of cultural and pop cultural detail, not only in sensual evocation, but somehow in the very attitude of the period.

  Indeed, sometimes the evocation of the period and places seems a bit overdone, to the point where it slows down the story and has this reader, at least, wishing she would get on with it. But on the other hand, this grounding of the novel in the retro, somewhat clunky, almost dimly remembered milieu of the 1940s, entirely accurate or not, a bit overdone or not, seems necessary to making the science fiction novel both within and surrounding the historical aspect work as well as it does.

  Sam enlists after the death of his beloved brother at Pearl Harbor and spends the rest of the war and beyond nursing the fantasy of somehow undoing the reality of his brother's death. Sam is a kind of nuts ands bolts and wiring techie guy, not really a warrior, and his war is spent working with, repairing, improvising, and tinkering with the new technology being slung together under the pressure of wartime—clunky steampunk or vacuumtubepunk feeling stuff to the contemporary reader, but gee-whiz at the time.


  Much of this military gadgetry is the real thing of the time, rendered in a manner that would easily enough satisfy John W. Campbell. But not the McGuffin of the novel. Sam is seduced by a mysterious and enigmatic female physicist who gives him somewhat incomplete plans for an even more mysterious and enigmatic device that will somehow end the war, or end the human predilection for war, or ... or something....

  Sam, wizard electronic tinkerer on the then-current vacuum tube level that is spawning things like radar and devices leading to the earliest computers, spends the rest of the war and beyond trying to build this thing, then trying to perfect it, at times with the aid of Wink. While doing his duties, he meets Bette, also a woman of mystery, who will become the love of his life.

  It takes quite a while for him to more or less begin to figure out what the thing is supposed to do and what it actually does. These are not quite the same things, particularly since the gizmo's physical nature keeps changing as Sam tinkers with it, or for that matter even when he doesn't and keeps it hidden.

  It appears that the device somehow changes the world as it changes itself, or warps Sam into alternate worlds where Bette, the mysterious physicist, and Wink themselves change personas, histories, names, where world histories mutate—giving Sam the hope that he can somehow change the world into one where his brother is still alive, or warp himself into such a world, or...

  Well, in light of all the previous discussion of the Multiverse, you at least can see where Goonan is taking this. Even if Sam can't quite understand except on a basic phenomenological level, even if the author can't quite go all the way there herself, since this is all taking place in a time period (or time periods) when the concept of ultimate reality as an infinite number of universes branching out fractally from every moment of time, and with an infinity of our alternate selves exfoliated within them, could not have even been a gleam in contemporary physics’ eye.

  Kathleen Ann Goonan can't overtly broach that concept in In War Times, since this is a period piece the maintenance of whose grounding in this wartime and early post-wartime past is absolutely essential for the novel to work. But she herself, writing in the present, does seem to comprehend it at least up to a point, and sidles up to it, using the progressive jazz of the period as an extended musical metaphor for the physics and metaphysics of the Multiverse.

  Sam and Wink are dedicated fans of progressive jazz and good amateur performers thereof, too. There are numerous long sections where Goonan conveys their presence in the audiences for some of the real jazz geniuses of the age, their own jams, even the occasional jams with a great or two. She does not do this on a superficial level, either. She conveys the depths, passions, musicological nature, and psychic realties of all these improvisations on themes, and builds them all into a grand analogy for the workings of the Multiverse.

  It's a brilliant ploy, using the jazz of the era to bring the period piece and science fictional natures of the novel together, while approaching an explication of the nature of mutable multiversal reality on a heartfelt and beautifully portrayed musical level.

  As Goonan herself puts it in her afterword:

  “I have likened the evolution of modern jazz ... to the creative ferment in science that has led to our ever-growing understanding of the world, nature, and ourselves.... We can never revisit the original luminous thoughts of Charlie Parker as he and Dizzy Gillespe birthed a new art form. In reality, the physicists, chemists, and biologists of the nineteenth and twentieth century birthed modernity and its reflection and interpretation in literature, art, and music. Our art and our science are inextricably linked.”

  Well spoken!

  However...

  However, while Kathleen Ann Goonan has taken it as far as anyone save Ian McDonald, who we will get to shortly, like everyone else, she has not fully been able to make fiction portray the full consequences of the quantum multiverse. For while physicists of the nineteenth and twentieth century may have indeed birthed modernity and its reflection in literature, art, and music, in the twenty-first century they seem to have a birthed a concept which, if true, or even if not, music, art, and literature, are going to have a hard time conveying to the human mind on an experiential, emotional, and spiritual level.

  Just trying to encompass it on a theoretical level beyond the mathematical gives one an existential headache. Think about it head-on if you dare. Return to my metaphor of the science fiction writer standing in the bow of a boat moving forward through the ocean of time. Only now it's you standing there, dear reader.

  Every infinitesimal unit of time through which the boat moves generates another avatar of you, a you in another timeline in another universe, an infinite number of slightly different yous, each in a slightly different universe, each in turn generating more yous in more universes, an infinite number of them radiating from each instant like a fractal explosion.

  So who are you? Where are you? What are you?

  Paradoxically, cutting edge human science would seem to have come up with a model of reality that not merely violates what the human mind perceives of as the space-time matrix in which it exists, but which violates human consciousness’ perception of the nature of its own existence.

  It's obvious that humans just don't have the sensory equipment to perceive this ultimate level of reality. And we may not have the mental software to deal with it directly if we did. Which may be why we have evolved without the means to perceive it. Because if we did....

  What?

  What happens if science proves that, contrary to our experience and perception, this is really the way things are, which is certainly within the realm of possibility?

  What if we know something we can't possibly understand? What if each of us, our bodies, our consciousnesses, truly exist as infinite and infinitesimally different iterations, each in an infinitesmally different universe, and none of them able to interact with any other?

  Can music bring this one home to human experiential understanding?

  Seems to me it would take something like an infinite number of Bachs writing an infinite number of fugues, each with an infinite number of harmonically interacting melody lines.

  Can visual art?

  Marcel Duchamp's “Nude Descending a Staircase” maybe approaches it at right angles. Take a look at it sometime. An abstract figure descending an abstract staircase, rendered as if it were a series of connected still shots taken rapidly, each strobe-flowing into the next, so that Duchamps has succeeded in actually painting the passage of time as an immobile image on canvas. View it instead as a human attractor radiating iterations into the Multiverse, and maybe you've got something.

  But it would seem that it is the job of fiction in general, and science fiction in particular, to use language to actually create the virtual experience of multiversal reality in the human mind. Is this even remotely possible?

  Well, in Brasyl, Ian McDonald comes pretty damn close. Arguably, he may even have succeeded.

  Why the strange spelling of the country's name as the title? Maybe because the obvious title Brasils would have been giving too much away. Or not. In any case, there's no way to discuss this novel without saying that it's about three different Brasils. At least.

  Timewise, there are three Brasils in this novel.

  There is a story thread set in a Brazil of the very near future centered on Marcellina Hoffman. Hoffman is a trash reality TV producer searching for the man who cost soccer-mad Brazil a World Cup for the purpose of resurrecting her damaged career by tormenting him on television to produce a hit reality show.

  There is a Brazil of the 2030s where Edson, a street-entrepreneur con-man type, likewise and always in search of the Big Score, falls in love with Fia, a quantum computer hacker.

  There is a Brazil of the colonial past in the 1700s, in which Father Luis Quinn is sent deep up the Amazon into its heart of darkness in search of a Kurtzlike apostate cult leader.

  For much of the novel, these three threads seem like three entirely dif
ferent stories centered on three entirely different casts of characters, which just as well could have been extracted separately and published as three novellas. Marcellina tracks the man who blew the World Cup through the mondes and demimondes of something close to contemporary Brazil, Edson chases after the elusive and increasingly mysterious Fia three decades later, Father Quinn delves deeper and deeper into the tribal mysteries of the Amazon rainforest in the colonial past.

  As with River of Gods, only here triply so, Ian McDonald has managed to bring alive not just the future culture and technosphere of a country unfamiliar to the western reader of science fiction, but its popular culture, mystical inner life, style, and rhythm, and in the case of Brasyl, its deep history, too.

  If that was all there was to Brasyl, it would still be more than enough to confirm McDonald as one of the most interesting and accomplished science fiction writers of this latter-day era. Indeed, maybe the most interesting and accomplished, and certainly the most culturally and musically sophisticated—the Frank Herbert, William Gibson, or arguably even Thomas Pynchon of the early twenty-first century, if only the early twenty-first century would allow such a writer to reach that kind of eminence.

  But there is much more to Brasyl than the intercutting of three bravura novellas set in three different eras in the same Brazil. Slowly, the story lines of Marcellina, Edson, and Quinn begin to converge, and in unconventional manners.

  Without, I hope, giving too much away, when Marcellina finds her fallen soccer star, now an old man, he is the shaman of a cult whose sacrament is the hallucinogenic exudate of an Amazon frog. This frog was likewise the center of the mystical life of a strange tribe in Father Quinn's timeline, and some sort of doppelganger of Marcellina has begun to haunt her in hers. Edson's quantum hacker Fia becomes lost to him, and then returns, but doesn't seem to be quite the same person, and they are pursued by assassins from somewhere or somewhen whose major weapons are blades sharpened down to the quantum level so that they can literally cut through anything, and—