New Worlds 4

by Edited By David Garnett

  Similarly, Yod’s final sacrifice to save the community has been criticized as unnecessary, since (being an artificial intelligence) he could be multiply copied, downloadable into other cyborg bodies. Yes indeed, but he explicitly chooses suicide and also takes pains to bump off his maker and destroy the manufacturing records, because Yod himself has come to disapprove of having been created as a weapon. There is a hint of the uniqueness pitfall discussed above, in that now it’s known that Yods are possible more will surely be built, very probably by the nasty conglomerates against whose depredations Yod was made as a counterweapon... but that’s the future, after the book ends.

  What is a little dissatisfying about Piercy’s novel is that her whole picture of state-of-the-art 2059 cyberspace comes straight from the work of our very own sf visionary and technological know-nothing, William Gibson. This is implicit in the text (‘She called up the time on her cornea’) and explicitly acknowledged: ‘I have freely borrowed ... I figure it’s all one playground.’ Which is fine, except that the real world of the net has already read Gibson and moved on.

  The threat against the lovable Jewish commune of Tikva, where people embroider folksy computer software better than anyone else in the world, consists of net-riding information pirates who lethally invade Tikva’s local cyberspace work-zone. Such a killing mode of attack is not yet with us, but we already have the defence - you pull the plug and disconnect your local computer complex from the net. Or, with more sophistication, you work behind ‘firewall’ systems that allow data in and out without surrendering program control to any outside source.

  I suspect that Piercy is one of the many people who haven’t quite got the hang of the difference between data and programs. When Yod and friends electronically invade the cyberspace of the wicked conglomerate Yakamura-Stichen, they do so ‘along the com-con channels, to pass in with messages. There was no way a base could distinguish between legitimate entering data and folks along for the ride. ‘ Right. They have transmitted computer simulacra of themselves as data, like a multi-gigabyte electronic mail message. The next step is presumably for this data to be run as an executable program within the Y-S system - otherwise it just lies there, inert. Who is going to run it for them? ‘Hey, that’s interesting, an anonymous friend has sent me this 15 gigabyte program file - I wonder what it does? Let’s try it and find out

  For the rest: the street slang is pretty good, although I couldn’t swallow the Glop - would you? This is the name for an extended urban blight closely resembling Gibson’s Sprawl, based on the term apparently on all street folk’s lips until shortened by usage: ‘megalopolis’. Hmm. Least convincing future scene-setting: I imagine one must need a good eye for fashion to spot that a silk robe is ‘from the mutated worms that were the rage’.

  Body of Glass is nevertheless an enjoyable and satisfying book despite wonky technological premises.

  ~ * ~

  There is another oft-told tale lurking in Paul Theroux’s O-Zone (1986): the thuddingly familiar sf yarn of the very bad place, the feared land beyond the pale, which when confronted at ground level turns out less awful than expected - indeed rather a good thing, whose noble savagery makes a man of you. O-Zone is this place, a chunk of midwest America (Ozarks) closed off ‘for over fifteen years’ after an escape of radioactive wastes. Wastes with short half-lives, presumably; their impact on the plot is zero.

  Theroux is never less than literate, but his narrative has strange dips and o lurches, with dense pockets of exclamation marks. O-Zone! Think of that! They were here, here in O-Zone! In forbidden O-Zone itself! It may be a sign ET of not wholly thought-out sf that the first party to be issued an Access Pass and allowed to land in O-Zone after its long seclusion are not official explorers, nor investigators checking whether the land is commercially reclaimable, but tourists out for fun.

  Besides O-Zone the USA comprises sealed, fortified cities of the decadent rich, who evince decadence by doing things like walking around naked except for masks. There is also ‘Godseye’, a semi-official organization of futuristically armed psychopath vigilantes whose hobby is to blast, stun or incinerate anyone seen behaving suspiciously on the streets - e.g. running in terror, looking like a member of the underclasses, or standing too close to such a suspect person. (It seems a distinct flaw that these weapons freaks never, ever compare their beloved killing tools in terms of brand names, but go on about generic burp guns, particle beams, stunners or lasers.) Later we visit a community echoing the wonderfully banal American Good Place of a thousand ungood sf novels, a town where people go to church, eat nice home-made pies, wear decent, old-fashioned guns with real moving parts ...

  The story is burdened with one of the most tiresome characters in recent sf - Fisher ‘Fizzy’ Allbright, teenage physics genius and brat, whose neurotic inability to cope with human relations goes beyond parody. Naturally he’s soon dumped in O-Zone and forced to get along with some of its native hunter-gatherers over the course of a lengthy trek, maturing slightly in the process.

  One marvels at the good nature of the Zone dwellers, who put up with Fizzy calling them aliens (city jargon), monkeys, herberts, dongs, tools, whackos, jigs, dipshits, shit-wits, etc, and at no time drop him down a deep hole. There is a complementary strand about the O-Zone girl called Bligh who is taken off to the joys of city life, but she seems almost devoid of personality, and barely reacts.

  O-Zone’s science is quite remarkably unconvincing, conveying the impression that Theroux regards lasers, particle beams and fibre-optics as all very much the same thing. Fizzy’s deep knowledge of particle physics seems to be based on study of E.E. Smith or Hugo Gernsback: ‘It’s fibre-optics, fuck-wit... This weapon can do it. We just program it to fire a continuous exode full of antigons.’ When someone who knows a little physics complains (as did I) that he’s never heard of antigons, the reply is, ‘I only discovered antigons last year, wang-face!’ What the weapon, a particle-beam handgun with a ludicrous seven megawatt output, is being programmed to do is to bend the lethal laser beam that runs near ground level around the O-Zone perimeter, so the party can slip under it and escape. Why they can’t jump over it is unclear, but using a particle stream to bend a laser ray makes as much sense as trying to deflect light with a magnet. And it would have taken very little research to ascertain that, far from being silent and invisible, the mooted laser and particle beams have power densities that would violently ionize the air in something like a continuous, noisy lightning bolt.

  O-Zone has a worthy stance, a general worrying about dependence on technology and the resultant depersonalization. Its tiresome length and its over-familiarity to any sf reader must count against it, though, and the technobabble smells of that dangerous attitude, ‘I can put down any old rubbish - this is only sf.’

  ~ * ~

  Nicholson Baker’s The Fermata (1994) uses yet another premise with deep sf roots. H.G. Wells started this particular hare in ‘The New Accelerator’, his account of a potion that temporarily speeds one’s biological clock by a factor of thousands. Like a conjuror, Wells distracts you from the absurdities by keeping the story short, thrusting one surprise consequence under your nose (the accelerated experimenter’s trousers begin to smoulder as they whiz around) and concluding with a spectacular diversion in the form of a practical joke. Much practical joking also features in the best and funniest treatment of the notion, John D. MacDonald’s sf thriller The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything (1962). Here the speed-up is wisely rooted in physics rather than biology, with some (though not too much) thought given to its effects: the super-accelerated hero finds the slowed outer world dull and red, while objects seem to have huge inertia and speedy things like bullets do visibly move even from the fast-lane perspective.

  Baker’s endlessly prattling hero Amo Strine does not merely slow external time but stops it completely, through a mere effort of will and belief. He calls his private time-zone the Fold or Fermata, in which he lives and moves while the universe outside is static. The
re are periods when he can’t enter it and needs to find a new focus of belief (ranging from simple gestures through gadgets - transformer, rocker- switch, fingernail clippers - to odd or fetishistic acts like stitching thread through his skin). One sees the dramatic opportunities: Strine will be unable to enter the Fold when he urgently needs to; will exit into real time at an inconvenient, embarrassing or downright dangerous moment through failure of concentration...

  No, none of these possibilities is followed up. For a man with super powers, Strine lives a life oddly short on drama - perhaps because his moral sense won’t let him use the Fold to steal, and he even feels intensely guilty after dealing with armed muggers by halting time and lashing them by their goolies to a signpost. However, Strine’s otherwise rigid code does let him use stopped time to remove women’s clothing; also to fondle them all over, explore their orifices from ‘ane’ to ‘vadge’, spy on them in the bath, attach electric sexual stimulators to them as they ride on public transport, cause subliminal flashes of rude photographs in their field of vision, scrawl dirty comments in the margins of books they’re reading (although not books written by women, which would be going too far), ejaculate all over them, affix exotic ‘nipple nooses’ during bookshop signings (Anne Rice of all people is singled out for this fate)... the list goes on.

  Not much drama, but a great deal of fuzzy embarrassment for the reader; one hardly knows whether it’s the narrator’s or the author’s painful transparency that is so uncomfortable, most especially in the dildo-infested porn fiction -included in full - which Strine writes to excite women whom he can then watch masturbating. How different, how very different, from the home life of our own dear Queen.

  Best coinage, all too appropriate and evidently loved by the author since it’s repeated several times: ‘chronanism’. Worst euphemism, by a hair, out of an enormous selection: ‘my triune crotch-lump’.

  Excuse me, I was talking about the sf content. Of course The Fermata is pure fantasy, but there is the occasional rationalizing mention of physics. Baker is savvy enough to consider that if all time-flow ceases outside Strine’s body, he’ll be trapped in a form-fitting bubble of frozen air. So our chronanist’ s immediate vicinity is not quite halted: women aren’t rigid statues but conveniently warm and soft, while equally conveniently failing to be conscious. Far enough from Strine himself, the stasis is total. There is some babble about Polaroid photos taken in the Fold not developing properly. Taps merely trickle because ‘water pressure is never good in the Fold’ - nonexistent, surely, cut off at the time-frozen main? Electrical supplies are similarly fudged when Strine wants to use his word processor.

  Thought experiment: safe in the Fold, Strine strips a woman and gropes her for an hour. All this time she is warm but not breathing; it is uncertain whether her heart beats. Are the inner chemical furnaces at work, burning sugars to generate warmth? If the answer is no, she ends up probably dead from hypothermia; if yes, definitely dead from anoxia. You choose.

  Thought experiment: Strine halts time out in bright sunlight. An infinitesimal fraction of a second later, total darkness must surround him (the Sun is not in his immediate vicinity) and the only illumination is infra-red blackbody radiation from Strine himself and any women unfortunate enough to be adjacent. Blackout.

  All this shows the superiority of Wells’s and MacDonald’s device of slowing down exterior timeflow (or speeding interior time) by a large amount, rather than introducing the awkward factor of infinity.

  But what’s the use? The Fermata genuinely is about sexual fantasy and nothing else, and even there refuses to explore any dangerous edge (compare Alasdair Gray’s harrowing ‘slipstream’ 1982, Janine). Its shallowness runs deep. Even one’s growing hope that Strine will eventually meet a sharp comeuppance is frustrated - in fact he postmodernly gloats over this. That’s the joke: a practical joke on the reader.

  ~ * ~

  Now would be the time for some lofty generalization about these sf or sf-like works written by - let’s not say outsiders, but writers other than the usual genre suspects. The exercise is futile, though: even this small sample is too diverse for facile summary. Just like science fiction, really.

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  ~ * ~

  The Final Word

  Michael Moorcock

  A long time ago someone asked me the schedule and policy of New Worlds. My answer was ‘erratic’, and ‘optimistic’, which isn’t a formula you often come across in Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook but it does appear to be a formula for survival. In fact for the past quarter of a century whenever someone tried to put New Worlds on a regular schedule, it didn’t so much die as faint with shock and have to be revived, sometimes years later. Admittedly, we pretty much missed the eighties altogether, which is probably how many of us would have wished to experience the insane simplifications of the Reagan/Thatcher decade which reintroduced tribalism and the blood-feud into modern politics.

  It’s thirty years since I edited my first issue of New Worlds. I was proposed as editor by Ted Carnell (who had edited the magazine and its companions for some twenty years). I remember that I was rather reluctant to take the job. I had lost interest in science fiction. I had lost hope in its ability to revivify or even become the mainstream. I had attended conferences when Ballard and I had planned to discuss the literary possibilities of the form, and most of the other writers wanted to discuss how to break into TV writing. I wasn’t sure I could do anything worthwhile with the magazine. As it happened, the writers eventually began to emerge and a lot of what they produced was everything I’d hoped for. I particularly remember the excitement of reading Disch’s Camp Concentration, Harrison’s Running Down, Ballard’s concentrated novels which became The Atrocity Exhibition, Bayley’s stories which were to appear in The Knights of the Limits, Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, Spinrad’s Bug Jack Barron, Sladek’s Masterson and the Clerks and Zoline’s The Heat Death of the Universe.

  Not that everyone who attended science fiction conventions would agree that such work was sf, or even speculative fiction. Once a whole group of fans came down to a Brighton Arts Festival to demand of New Worlds and its writers that we ‘return’ sf to them. I wasn’t aware we’d rustled it.

  Michael Kustow, then director of the IC A gallery, said that he’d experienced something similar when he had run the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Dedicated fans, he said, never wanted anything new. They believed Shakespeare to be theirs and resented any tampering. He called this ‘the anxious ownership syndrome’. It was never the general public who complained, he said, only those who for some reason had identified the stuff (sf or Shakespeare or religion) so thoroughly with their own personalities that any change was an attack on their very being...

  That particular form of insanity is no longer as evident as it was and the messianic element of sf fandom appears to have discovered Scientology, Star Trek or some other low-level quasi-religion to occupy its time. But it was never surprising that so many sf fans were of that persuasion, for there has always been a strong visionary element in sf and it is this which initially attracted many of us to the form. It is what continues to attract people to Ballard, Banks, McKay, Ackroyd, Nye, Rushdie, Carter and many of the writers who now dominate fiction in Britain.

  It’s probably fair to say that the film 2001 had a profound effect upon the public vision of the future which would not be challenged until Blade Runner set the tone for the eighties. Bleak as that vision was, it was far more sophisticated than Kubrick’s celebration, and where his film had been dominated by a kind of technoporn, Ridley Scott’s was primarily about human beings coping with the excesses of other human beings’ greed, and represented an important change of emphasis. Just as 2001 gave birth to billions of words of ‘hard’ sf, so Scott’s film has spawned its cruder clones and inspired an equally boring sub-genre. Such public visions set the tone for most genre fiction, but it was left to New Worlds and those like it to encourage individuals to express their own private
visions, to reject the conventional and to write for themselves. Which is probably why New Worlds and its writers never had the immediate success of those who were only too pleased to offer genre ingredients over and over again. Yet it’s interesting to note how relevant they are to the present, when most of the bestsellers of their day have disappeared.

  I have a feeling that many of the stories here will stand at least another reading or two in years to come. Obsessive, idiosyncratic, bizarre and odd as some of them seem (and this edition contains a batch of my very favourite writers, including Barry Bayley, who continues to astonish me), they are the visions of individuals who will retain their readership long after the massive bestsellers have gone the way of Ouida, Marie Corelli, Hall Caine and Warwick Deeping, all of whom sold in their tens of millions in their own particular golden age. Without David Garnett and New Worlds some of these §: stories would not exist. Without you, New Worlds would not exist. We’re all in this together. I hope you found this especially fine collection as satisfying as I did.