Asimov's SF, Sep 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Controversy has dogged SETI from its very earliest days, in part because it appears to many as goofy as ufology. Indeed, some scientists regard it as an utter waste of time. Perhaps this was why NASA www.nasa.gov/home was so slow to embrace the idea, participating at first only in some low-level programs. However, in 1992, the space agency initiated the ambitious High Resolution Microwave Survey (HRMS) www.daviddarling.info/encyclopedia/H/HRMS.html, which included both an all sky survey and a targeted search for signals. A year later, Congress canceled HRMS and NASA was forced out of SETI. For more about SETI's vicissitudes, click over to Amir Alexander's The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: A Short History www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/history/History00.htm.

  For better or for worse, SETI and science fiction have been linked over the years. In 1982, for example, Steven Spielberg www.spielbergfilms.com released ET www.etfansite.com, which was the most profitable film of its time. Later that year, Carl Sagan www.carlsagan.com and his wife, Ann Druyan www.csicop.org/si/2003-11/ann-druyan.html, were having dinner with Spielberg and the conversation turned to SETI. The story goes that at one point Druyan looked pointedly at Spielberg and told him that he “could give Columbus his three ships.” Whether true or not, Spielberg donated one hundred thousand dollars to fund the Megachannel Extraterrestrial Assay www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/BETA/BETA-story-1.html and has continued to be a strong SETI supporter. And in 1998 David Anderson www.astrobio.net/news/article773.html, and Dan Werthimer library.thinkquest.org/C003763/print.php?page=interview03&tqskip=1 proposed to assemble the largest virtual supercomputer on earth, which they named SETI@home setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu. SETI@home was to analyze data from Project Serendip www.planetary.org/html/UPDATES/seti/SERENDIP/default.html, SERENDIP being the acronym for Search for Extraterrestrial Radio Emissions from Nearby Developed Intelligent Populations. But funding SETI@home was a hard sell. The Planetary Society www.planetary.org offered to pick up part of the tab, but needed a partner with deep pockets. At that time, Paramount Pictures www.paramount. com was about to launch Star Trek: Insurrection www.startrek.com/startrek/view/series/MOV/009/index.html (one of the better installments of the hallowed but now defunct franchise, it says here), and decided to provide SETI@home with the rest of its funding as a publicity stunt. The PR hacks spun it thus: “For the first time in Star Trek history, Planet Earth is invited to help the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise in a real search to seek out new life and new civilizations."

  Today two non-profits, The Planetary Society and The SETI Institute www.seti.org, carry on the search abandoned by NASA. Both their sites are well worth exploring. Over at The SETI Institute site, I can particularly recommend the articles on Interstellar Message Composition www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179195 and The Social Effects of a Detection www.seti.org/site/pp.asp?c=ktJ2J9MMIsE&b=179078 to budding (and experienced, for that matter) perpetrators of SF. The Planetary Society is more various than The SETI Institute and there is a bit of sprawl to the site; it bills itself as “The largest nonprofit, nongovernmental space advocacy group on Earth.” But The Learning Center www.planetary.org/learn/index.html is lively and accessible to the layperson and the News Archive www.planetary.org/html/what-is-new.html is up to date and comprehensive.

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  new worlds

  Poking around The Planetary Society's site, I came upon a set of pages that described the search for Extrasolar Planets www.planetary.org/extrasolar/index.html. Now if you're at all like me, you take delight in all the marvels our exploration of space has revealed in the last few years, most recently from our rovers on Mars marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home and the Cassini-Huygens mission saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.cfm. But what well and truly croggles my mind is the fact that we have increased the number of known planets from our own local nine to some 136 as of February 2005, according to the California Carnegie Planet Search exoplanets. org. And more are being added almost daily. Although there are no pretty photographs to look at, since these objects are all light years away, research into extrasolar planets has already led many to revise estimates upward for the (fp) variable in the Drake equation, that is, the fraction of stars that have planets.

  Long before astronomers confirmed the existence of extrasolar planets, science fiction writers were booking excursions to them. It must be admitted that all too many of these planets were shoddily constructed, but there is a long and honored tradition of trying to get world-building right. I remember as a pup writer poring over the late great Poul Anderson's www.catch22.com/SF/ARB/SFA/Anderson,Poul.php3 essay “How to Build a Planet” in the 1976 edition of the SFWA Handbook. That version of the handbook is long out of print,* but if you want to peruse God's own handbook on planet construction, check out World Builders Home Page curriculum.calstatela.edu/courses/builders. This incomparable resource collects materials for a course taught by Elizabeth Anne Viau at California State University, Los Angeles.

  With the advent of the computer, software has been written to assist do-it-yourself worldbuilders. My current favorite is StarGen—Solar System Generator home.comcast.net/~brons/NerdCorner/StarGen/StarGen.html. Constructed by Jim Burrows, “it's a program for creating moderately believable planetary systems around stars other than our own.” I don't know if it's the best, but it's certainly the prettiest. StarGen runs under the Mac OS or Unix; in order to get it up in Windows you need Visual C. But just visiting the examples page may be enough for many.

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  exit

  I was an English major in college and am pretty much an autodidact with regards to science and technology. Worldbuilding is still a serious stretch for me. But it's one of my favorite parts of the job of being a skiffy writer. Why? I think that, in part, it's because of the erector set www.ideafinder.com/ history/inventions/erectorset.htm I played with as a boy. Many of you are too young to remember erector sets, which were the mid-twentieth century version of Legos www.lego.com, but I certainly enjoyed mine back in the day. I loved building stuff and making up stories about it. And if a grown-up Jim Kelly could go back in time and tell young Jimmy that someday, instead of building “Mysterious Walking Giant Robots,” he'd be using computers to design imaginary solar systems, the kid would have thought that he was bound for science fiction heaven.

  And he was.

  —James Patrick Kelly

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  On Books: Paul Di Filippo

  The Shepard Is My Lord

  Lucius Shepard had an astonishing year in 2004. Four books with his byline on them appeared, from four different small-press publishers. Each was different in flavor and tone, although all shared the ineffable, unique Shepard touch. Here's a consideration of the quartet.

  Two Trains Running (Golden Gryphon Press, hardcover, $22.95, 112 pages, ISBN 1-930846-23-1) is surely the most eclectic of all the offerings before us. It consists of a long essay, a novella, and a short story, all centering around the lives of what used to be called, in simpler times, “bindlestiffs.” In 1998, Shepard wrote a piece for Spin magazine on the then-current “hobo” scene. That essay, “The FTRA Story,” much expanded here, is a fine piece of “new journalism” with the requisite personal slant, finding Shepard himself riding the rails in search of the reality behind the media hype. His empathy with these outcasts, whether exiled by society or by their own demons, and his insights into the milieu are first-rate and suspenseful.

  This experience led directly to the writing of “Over Yonder” and “Jailbait.” The former finds a group of hobos occupying an alternate reality akin to the paradise of Big Rock Candy Mountain—but with all the constraints and strictures that their old interpersonal relations entail. The latter piece is more mimetic, and charts the uneasy bonding of an older man and a young woman. In both pieces, Shepard's trademark bravura plotting, luscious language, and portraits of despairing seekers conspire to create unforgettable stories. This whole book has an Ellisonian ring to it, with the fiction flow
ing so cleanly out of the lived days, and is a testament to Shepard's continual seeking after new forms and inspirations.

  By contrast, the novel Viator (Night Shade Books, hardcover, $25.00, 196 pages, ISBN 1892389-44-4) rests firmly and brilliantly in an early-Ballard mode. It stands as cousin to such Ballard masterpieces as The Drowned World (1962) and other tales of obsessive protagonists penetrating the borders of consensus reality.

  First off, Shepard conjures up a metaphorically transcendent mise-en-scene. Twenty years before the story opens, a large cargo ship named the Viator was deliberately run aground, for reasons unknown, on the coast of Alaska, near the small town of Kaliaska. The force of the grounding was such as to drive the ship nearly entirely onto land. Now it sits, surrounded by overgrown greenery, a vessel journeying nowhere. Onto this ship are placed five men, all eccentrics, with the ostensible goal of professionally gauging how much of the ship is worthy of salvage at this late date. The experts are led by one Thomas Wilander, himself a sorry case. Not without intelligence, Wilander has reached the end of his personal road of failure, and has taken this job as a last resort, at the behest of a mysterious employer named Jochanan Lunde. Now Wilander alternates his time between riding herd over his crew and visiting a woman named Arlene in Kaliaska, a woman with whom he's gradually falling in love. But the Viator is a suitor of sorts as well, offering strange enticements, and in the competition between ship and woman, the outcome is uncertain right up till the end.

  Shepard maps the gradual mental and physical disintegration of Wilander and his compatriots in small, incremental, but cumulatively deadly steps. Every nuance of the Kafka-esque conceit is explored in minute, palpable detail. And at the same time, the love affair between Wilander and Arlene exhibits a naturalistic heft. Shepard's worked this conceit of interpenetrating planes of reality often before—in fact, it constitutes one of his signature motifs—but here he proves that a good trope is inexhaustible.

  Shepard's second novel of 2004, A Handbook of American Prayer (Thunder's Mouth Press, hardcover, $22.00, pages, ISBN 1-56858-281-1), is an even more impressive performance, in an entirely different vein. A fervid, satirical, phantasmagorical romp across the American landscape and psyche, the book conjures up comparisons to the work of such keen dissectors of human foibles as Will Self, Scott Bradfield, and Gore Vidal.

  The tale is narrated in the first person by one Wardlin Stuart. We encounter Wardlin as a disaffected, cynical, basically talentless young man. He commits a (partially and ambiguously) justifiable manslaughter and is sent to prison for ten years. There, he develops “prayerstyle,” a kind of secular, godless religion, if such a thing is even possible, an appealing self-help method mixed with New Age platitudes. In prison he establishes a correspondence with a woman named Therese Madden. Therese's friendship and love lead to the fulfillment of one of Stuart's own prayers, and he is released from prison. Now begins a roller-coaster journey through the American psycho-social circus, with Therese by his side. A publisher prints Stuart's musings in a volume that ironically bears the same title as the novel we're reading. The book goes on to become a bestseller. Stuart is anointed as a new Messiah for the twenty-first century. The only problem is that certain other Messiahs already in place—notably a preacher named Monroe Treat—are jealous. And the only help Stuart can rely on in the war of the preachers is a deity he might've conjured into being: the Lord of Loneliness.

  Shepard exhibits enormous brio and savage delight in his evisceration of all that is delusional, cant-filled, greedy, and fearful in American culture. At the same time, he finds some wise things to say about what is actually holy. His depiction of Stuart's meteoric career is bigger than life, yet utterly consistent with a hundred such trajectories that we have seen blazed across the night skies before. Yet simultaneously, no one in this book is a cliché, a mere prop for Shepard's pronunciamentos. The smallest walk-on characters are individuated and real. As for Wardlin Stuart, his voice is as seductively hypnotic—even while full of self-doubt and confusion—as any previous voice Shepard or his peers cited above have ever conjured. And Shepard's masterful understanding of the way everyday people talk and think finds zesty release in the form of Darren, the drifter who just might be the Lord of Loneliness. Darren's mad riffs read like the captured dangerous zaniness of every uncanny biker-bar spieler who ever lived.

  In this novel, Shepard both exalts and chastises the great and mingy American collective soul that has made us what we are today, and tells a hell of a story while doing so.

  Finally on display is the protean, cosmopolitan short-story writer we all observed Shepard to be in such early collections as The Jaguar Hunter (1987). From PS Publishing comes a monumental collection titled Trujillo (hardcover, $50.00, 682 pages, ISBN 1-902880-85-4). Ten stories previously published in various venues from 1999 to 2003 (including one from this very magazine), plus an eleventh piece original to this volume. All in all, a feast. By itself, this book would have made it a banner year for Shepard.

  The first seven stories range the map of Shepard's characters, obsessions and baroque prose stylings. In “Only Partly Here,” a man excavating the ruins of the World Trade Center encounters a disturbing woman in his off-hours. Soldiers in the Middle East stumble into a literal Islamic hell in “A Walk in the Garden.” In Africa, an American investigates the bestial killers of “Crocodile Rock.” The Russian nightclub named Eternity becomes an allegorical crucible for a gangster in “Eternity and Afterward.” “Hands Up! Who Wants to Die?” is a kind of Natural Born Killers (1994) with an SF twist. “Jailwise” details a surreal prison. And “The Drive-in Puerto Rico” recounts the redemption of a Latin American soldier.

  The remaining four stories—"Señor Volto"; “The Same Old Story"; “The Park Sweeper"; and “Trujillo,” a short novel—form a magical realist miniseries set in the town of Trujillo, Honduras, where sex and magic, demons and brujos befuddle the senses and wreak havoc and epiphanies in the lives of the protagonists.

  With his Graham Greene anomie, his respect for the quotidian shackles and wings of our existence, and his fertile inventiveness, Shepard brews a heady blend of hallucinogenic narrative. Long may he guide us through various valleys of death.

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  Spelunking

  An unplanned publishing synchronicity allows us the luxury of getting reacquainted with a writer whose career began in 1929 and extended right up until his death in 2004. The author under discussion is Hugh Cave, born 1910, who until his death formed a triumvirate with Nelson Bond and Jack Williamson of pulp-era veterans surviving into the twenty-first century.

  First, readers should probably take a look at Cave of a Thousand Tales (Arkham House, hardcover, $33.95, 287 pages, ISBN 0-87054-183-8), the engaging and informal biography of Cave by Milt Thomas. Thomas's name is not one formerly found on any list of SF/F/H critical experts. Indeed, his non-fiction credits seem to lie mainly outside the genre. But Thomas supplements any initial unfamiliarity with the genre with a host of virtues. First, his close personal friendship with Cave allows for a wealth of first-hand knowledge-gathering. Second, he has plainly done his homework into the history of the zines where Cave published. Thirdly, Thomas is just a flat-out good writer, able to array the significant events and emotions of Cave's life into a narrative that reads almost like one of Cave's own spellbinders.

  Like all those who emerged from the pulp crucible, Cave was forced to write enormous amounts of wordage at high speed in order to make a living. But he was always seeking to improve his work, and to venture out into new areas. Over the course of his career, Cave wrote several non-fiction volumes and a host of mainstream novels, besides the weird fantasies for which he is primarily known today. Many of the mainstream books stemmed from his time spent abroad in Haiti and Jamaica. This variegated resumé of an adventurous soul makes for a more fascinating life story than that of most writers, whose hard-working butts seldom stray far from their office chairs.

  Thomas exhibits intense
empathy with his subject, but manages to remain objective. Detailing Cave's frustrated first marriage, Thomas does not cast Cave's wife as a complete villain, despite her many character defects, which, however, matched corresponding flaws in Cave's own personality. Likewise, Cave's absentee parenting comes in for some scrutiny.

  Following a simple chronological scheme and leavening his reportage with copious extracts from interviews with Cave, Thomas also blends in plot synopses and contemporary critical responses to Cave's work. The result is a finely limned portrait of both the man and his accomplishments, offering plenty of pleasure and insight into a legendary career.

  Cave's pulp stories moldered, unreprinted and neglected, for years until Karl Wagner chose to assemble the best of them for his Carcosa Press in 1977, producing Cave's first story collection. Now, this highly collectible volume—fetching up to two hundred dollars from dealers—sees a reprint edition from Wildside Press: Murgunstrumm and Others (trade paper, $24.95, 475 pages, ISBN 0-8095-0069-8). (The original Lee Brown Coye illos are reproduced as well. For more on Coye, see below.)

  Over two dozen stories reveal Cave's solid craftsmanship and ability to conjur up eerie situations and emotion-packed plots, enacted by well-rounded characters. The tropes of pulp horror fiction loom large here: weird mansions, mad scientists, vampires, queer cults, psychotic killers. Cave was particularly fond of autonomous, evil-minded body parts: severed or possessed arms that crawl and strangle make an appearance more than once. But even when he was utilizing similar motifs from story to story, Cave always put a new spin on them, like some master potter turning out dozens of vases, all of them familially linked, but each one different.