If you don’t particularly want your consciousness raised about certain subjects, any subjects, then reading a fair amount of science fiction can be threatening. Because sooner rather than later, you are going to run into a science fiction story that adopts an a priori world view different from yours. For instance, Brian W. Aldiss’s novel The Dark Light Years (1964) is about a peaceful and passively resistant alien race superior in intelligence to humanity who travel about the galaxy in specially grown wooden spaceships and who worship their own feces. Humanity puts them in a zoo. Philip K. Dick’s novel, Counter-Clock World (1967) is about a future in which on a certain day time begins to run backward for everyone born after that moment, so that the world begins to fill with people who rise from the grave old and grow younger, imbibing nourishment in the bathroom and eliminating waste at the dining table. After all, one of the absolute givens of the whole of SF is that every single story must take place in a world that is not, in some identifiable manner, mundane reality. As a body of literature, science fiction is a catalog or encyclopedia of ideas about how things might be, might have been, or really are—although we don’t know it yet.
The most comfortable and nonthreatening kind of science fiction would seem to be the stuff set 3,000,000 years in the future on a distant planet, nicely distanced from anything real and nearby. Many SF readers prefer this type of SF, usually cast as space opera, with good guys and villains, ray guns and spaceships, and the odd alien or three. It can be wonderful escape. But even in this kind of paraphernalia-filled adventure, you are being asked to believe, for a moment, in an adventurous optimistic future filled with technological wonders and exceeding strangeness. And if you do limit your reading to only this kind of stuff, and even one minor element of it comes true right here today—like spaceships suddenly translating from the realm of space adventure into the NASA program—then you are threatened, you have to rethink a basic preconception and consider, for at least a millisecond, the possibility of rethinking others. In a minority of cases, you are then further hooked on SF—otherwise you stop reading it and turn to other areas for escape from the humdrum.
The committed SF reader gets part of his excitement from knowing that every new story will require some reconsideration of reality. Some idea, some new bit of information or speculation or recombination of old ideas will require thought, excite the mind as well as the viscera.
And, for goodness sake, some of the ideas are there for the pure fun of it. Not for contemplation or significance, or even to help validate the setting—some ideas are included by some writers just for atmosphere, for the sake of humor, or better, wit. The short stories of William Tenn or Robert Sheckley or Ron Goulart, Alfred Bester’s novels, much of Frederik Pohl’s short fiction are all examples of playful ideas supporting serious purpose.
Add all of the foregoing up, and science fiction is jam-packed with ideas of all sorts. Some chronics maintain that they read SF for the ideas alone, from the definitely possible to the widely improbable. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler recommended that SF be studied and read by adults and taught to children to insulate them, through exposure to the vast interplay of possibilities, from a feeling of defeat in the face of unceasing change. Science fiction reading, he said, protects you against future shock, instills appropriate new ways of thinking, makes you ready to adapt to change because it teaches you to assume change as inevitable. This is true, certainly, and is another way in which science fiction can be used, just as it can be used to teach religion, as noted above. But the primary purpose of all those ideas is to entertain: to allow you, for a moment, to consider the idea in passing and draw whatever pleasure you can from it. And part of the game is the free access of all the other writers in the field to your ideas and yours to theirs. T. S. Eliot, the author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” who said that good poets borrow and great poets steal, would have approved.
I would like to take you on a trip through a very good science fiction story, in all its complication, and show you ideas in place. The story is “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, an early work of this popular author, which was first published in 1976 in Galaxy and later collected in The Persistence of Vision, one of the most important science fiction books of the 1970s. Varley’s story is a particularly successful tale of wonder and allows us to examine in some detail the role played by a proliferation of ideas within a science fiction story both in supporting the development of the central thematic complex and in creating independent flashes of wonder, moments of intellectual excitement and gooseflesh as the story progresses.
“I do my banking at the Archimedes Trust Association.” The first sentence of the story introduces the first-person narrator and indicates, by use of the present tense, that the speaker assumes a contemporary audience. This is a common device in science fiction—an experienced reader of science fiction knows the several signals this technique conveys: that contemporary to the speaker does not mean contemporary to the reader, and that the “when” of the story will emerge from the narrative through significant details; further, that Archimedes is a famous location on the moon, so that the matter-of-fact tone and the focus on the ordinary detail of banking suggest the possibility of a large and significant disparity between our world and the world of the story. This possibility is immediately confirmed in the second sentence, which indicates that the bank has its own “medico facility” and “takes recordings for the vaults.” This must be a new and different kind of bank—the reader’s anticipation is whetted, knowing that a new idea is about to be unveiled. But first a narrative hook—the plot is introduced: The bank was robbed two weeks ago.
Then, pow! The next two paragraphs contain in summary the caper plot for a whole mystery and detective novel. In this world, the technological re-creation of personality is possible, using recordings made regularly (to insure that your policy is up to date) and stored in bank vaults in plastic memory cubes, along with valuables and “negotiable paper.” When a bank robbery occurs, it is most often only a blind for the destruction of the memory cubes, since you can’t murder someone who has been recorded—he won’t stay dead unless you destroy the cube—and you destroy lots of cubes so the police won’t know whom you are going to kill. But this is all by the way. As a result of the robbery, the narrator is about to be rerecorded quickly, at the bank’s expense—“They had contracted to keep me alive forever.” Of course! This technology really means immortality! And this implication is just slid in as part of the everyday world of the story, never mentioned again—a wonderful moment.
The eighth paragraph of the story makes it clear that all of this is passing through the narrator’s mind in the moments before the narrator is led into the recording room. We are not fully in the dramatic present of the story: As the narrator is prepared for recording, there is a moment of reflection on having lived so long and met so many people over so many decades. How old is the narrator? We never really know, since this is a world in which it literally does not matter. As the narrator passes into unconsciousness for recording, we are left for a moment with this new idea to ponder.
As the narrator awakens, one of the attendants says, “She’s in,” and we know for the first time that the narrator is female. And though the narrative persona is continuous, she finds that she has died and been reborn in a new body two and a half years later—two pages later, she learns that she has died three times in those years, that she is the fourth incarnation of herself: “We suspect murder,” says the bank president.
The heroine’s multiple deaths are used to ignite the big idea of the story: the problems and complexity of preserving personal identity in this particular future (“the first order of business was to recognize that the things that were done by those three previous people were not done by me.”). Two years and more have been lost from her life, in which she lived and died, but which she can never remember because “she,” the first-person narrator, wasn’t there—she is discontinuous. (The person who wakes up is a print of the re
cording made two and a half years ago—so she can have only the memories that belonged to her when she was recorded. She knows nothing of what “she” did after the recording was made.) She learns the circumstances of her three deaths and, it seems, we have a murder mystery on our hands.
Then a whole new thread is introduced. We learn that Fox, the narrator, is an artist in a new art form: weather. This is the moon, after all, where only artificial weather can exist. And we get another infusion of ideas.
I had been robbed of an entire symphony. For the last thirty years I had been an Environmentalist. I had just drifted into it while it was still an infant art form. I had been in charge of the weather machines at the Transvaal disneyland, which was new at the time and the biggest and most modern of all the environmental parks in Luna. A few of us had started tinkering with the weather programs.… Later we invited friends to watch the storms and sunsets we concocted.… At the time of my last recording I had been one of the top three Environmentalists on Luna.
What a rich idea complex, a wonderful layering and mixing of inventions, analogies, and extrapolations! Environmental parks called “disneylands” on the moon, weather machines, the evolution of an art form. And then Fox 1 (the first of her three murdered selves) “went on to compose Liquid Ice … the high point of the art to date.” But she, Fox 4, has no memory of the creative process or the accomplishment of Liquid Ice, so her work has been stolen from her. Her whole identity is in question. In a single page of text we have a new art form, with all attendant paraphernalia—performances, reviews, cash rewards, and the intangible rewards of creativity (these last stolen from her)—and in the further course of the story, one pleasure for the reader is the revelation of more of the details of this art form, in which the artist works in tandem with a benign computer (the great “CC,” central computer, which runs the whole civilization) to create a program for the weather machines.
A forest of further complications arises as the plot progresses, as Isadora, the detective, outlines the problems and complexities of finding a criminal in this future society—knowing that the killer was a man when he killed Fox 3 tells them nothing, for he could have bought a “Change” the next day. Even an individual’s sex is technologically alterable at whim, for a price. Here is a society where identity is truly complex in every way.
Our narrator meditates on the problems of immortality and identity: Thousands of years in the future, there will live a being who is at least partly her, still “stringing chunks of experience onto her life” but with all her memories, even remembering her first sex change. So the loss of crucial memories, such as the creation of Liquid Ice, is the worst kind of disaster. “Robbed! Violated!” she exclaims dramatically to herself. And we become sentimentally involved in her desire to triumph over this foul murderer (even though Varley does overdo it by a hair).
Time passes and Fox must stay locked in her apartment while Isadora uses the police computers to attempt to track the killer down. Fox is content, for she is creating her next great work, A Conflagration of Cyclones, to be performed in the Kansas disneyland (note the allusion to Oz). CC, the benign computer with “free will” (borrowed, I think, from Samuel R. Delany’s Empire Star), becomes an important supporting character. We learn details of the planned artwork, absorb information about the world of the future, a fascinating environment—and find that Fox inhabits an attractive seventeen-year-old forced-grown clone body (the body has had its development speeded up). The benign computer is a marvelously effective expository device, especially since it can suggest information: Perhaps the murderer was a “ghost.”
“The term ‘ghost’ covers all illegal beings.… These are executed criminals with their right to life officially revoked, unauthorized children never registered, and some suspected artificial mutants.… They have no right to life. I must execute them when I find them.… It’s a job humans find distasteful. I never could keep the position filled, so I assumed it myself.”
By this point in the story the chronic reader of science fiction will have spotted enough allusions in this story to know that it takes place in the same future landscape as a number of Varley’s other stories, a future where sex and body design changes are the accepted norm, when humanity has adapted itself to live on most of the planets and moons of the solar system, but no longer on Old Earth, from which the race has been exiled by unknowable and superior alien beings (not present in this story). This allusive technique is a borrowing from Robert A. Heinlein’s famous Future History series (in turn a borrowing from H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes). The chronic reader derives an additional dimension of pleasure from perceiving a wider context for the events. But the unnoticed allusions all function in place for the uninitiated reader as simply additional details increasing the verisimilitude of the context.
But return to our catalog of the ideas of the story. Identity is confirmed in this society by analysis from a tiny skin sample of the unique genetic pattern of the individual—such samples are used in place of ID cards and credit cards—and this technique is infallible. If the killer is a ghost and is captured, he will be killed.
The night of the performance of A Conflagration of Cyclones arrives and Fox goes to Kansas to witness her opening. We are treated to a vivid description of the show. At the climax of the performance, it becomes evident to Fox that someone is tampering with it: her killer. She finds him, confronts him, and discovers that he is her!—of course, a ghost, a phantom of herself.
She cannot bring herself to kill her double. They talk and we discover that he was created by the initial bank robbers by error, and set free by them to be caught and destroyed. Instead, to survive, he killed her, desperately, three times—but he cannot do it again. They make love in the weather, and she decides that they must be together, he must be saved.
She develops a careful plan to save him by emigrating to Pluto (a frontier planet where his existence is not illegal) and succeeds in buying her own spaceship and getting him aboard. The romantic denouement occurs in a final scene in which the CC clears them for takeoff and reveals that it is aware of what is happening, yet is allowing it to happen. Working closely with Fox and her art has given this cold machine a sense of mercy. Humanity and its technology triumphs.
Whew! We remind you that all this has taken place in a long short story, not a novel, and that “The Phantom of Kansas” is the work of a talented newcomer, not a mature and experienced artist. Nevertheless, it is a highly developed example of the science fiction story, a particularly satisfying reading experience for most segments of the SF audience. Even readers who find the romantic subplot corny or unconvincing are delighted by the steady flow of original and stimulating ideas.
The big idea of the story is the changes that may be wrought on human identity by what we might term the technology of identity—sex change, cosmetic surgery, cloning, transfer of memory by technological means—and what complex, subtle new problems and variations could result from this technology. We even have a new kind of illegal love. The crazy ideas that fill the story—weather art, memory banks, disneylands, ghosts, and the digressions on art and the critics, police procedure, history, alien invaders—all make the story better and more popular science fiction. Every one of those crazy ideas contributes specifically to the wonderful world of the story, a world that reveals itself to the reader only through the details of these ideas.
As near as we can pinpoint it, without becoming absurdly categorical, the stimulation of the sense of wonder by Varley arises not just from the big idea of the story or from the crazy ideas, but from the whole story situation, from the big idea in the context of the crazy ideas. Not all big ideas evoke wonder, nor all crazy ideas—but both can and will when set within a well-told story.
We are reading and discussing stories such as the Varley piece in a more concentrated and analytic fashion than you would under normal circumstances, when you might not even notice many of the details in the pleasurable heat of reading. The point is that there are
a whole lot of ideas, major and minor, borrowed and new, all organized and in place in the story. Some, if not all, of the ideas have an impact on you, the reader, even if you are skimming the story on a bus, snacking on science fiction.
The crazy ideas of science fiction are not always really serious (such as the idea of space travel) and thematically complex (such as Varley’s personality recording and the problem of identity). Something like the famous “eggplant that ate Chicago” is the reductio ad absurdum crazy idea. But in a real SF story (as opposed to a media representation) the craziness is ordered and placed within the self-defined boundaries of the story so that it is specifically not absurd, however improbable:
Absurdity is produced by taking the idea out of context. “The Phantom of Kansas” is a story about a future in which a woman is killed three times by a duplicate of herself. The duplicate is a man, and on the fourth try they get a chance to talk, fall in love, and leave the country to live together as a perfect couple.
That sort of summary is the other side of the question we discussed in Chapter 3, in this case a summary without the essentials of context which make a story rational and encourage suspension of disbelief. Misrepresentation of SF as absurdity is the most common response of an uninitiated reader to the ideas in SF. SF people are so used to this kind of treatment that they often do it ironically.
It is a thin line, sometimes, between irony and absurdity. People in SF have always treasured such works as the vignettes of Fredric Brown (and his novel What Mad Universe), the stories of William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Ron Goulart, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Saloon stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, and Henry Kuttner’s stories of Gallagher, the drunken inventor. Often in these stories, the purpose is to take an absurdity and place it in a story situation, the stranger the better, that allows it to be science fiction and therefore no longer (ironically) an absurdity.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 12
