Clarkesworld Anthology 2012

by Wyrm Publishing

  From Tank Doctor to Atomic Expert

  Solandt was soon tasked to run the South West London Blood Depot during the Battle of Britain. He earned high marks for its efficiency in supplying blood to hospitals during the worst of the Blitz, as well as rescue work and research for those suffering from crush injuries (being pinned under debris). The British military took notice, too, and soon Solandt was selected to create and run a physiological laboratory for the Armoured Fighting Vehicles School in Dorset. Tank crews were passing out during gun trials just as the armored war in North Africa intensified. Solandt and his team soon realized it was the amount of carbon monoxide being released into the sealed tank, primarily from the Besa machine gun, and began work on ventilation and tank design. Other man-machine problems arose with optics, night fighting, and chemical warfare gear. Solandt and his crew were now in high demand.

  Solandt then jumped to the British Army Operational Research Group. AORG was an ad hoc science organization that did for all the British Army what Solandt was doing for the Armoured Corps: using science to solve a range of problems, from antiaircraft system design to lethality-of-weapons studies. Their approach was a new form of applied science known as operational research, in which pragmatic scientific methods from physics to zoology were used to solve problems, improve equipment and training, and even change strategies. Solandt soon became the deputy superintended of AORG under the command of Brigadier Basil Schonland, the famed South African physicist and lightning expert, and eventually ran AORG when Schonland left. At war’s end, he’d been tasked to become scientific advisor to Lord Louis Mountbatten’s South East Asia Command, but the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war before he arrived.

  Instead, in November of 1945 Solandt joined the British Mission to Japan to survey the damage of the atomic bombs. While their main objective was examining structural damage, Solandt’s medical training made him a boon to investigating the impact of the bombs on the Japanese people. So it was that when the Canadian government offered him the chance to lead its first peacetime defence research organization, the Defence Research Board (DRB), they got a genius, a pioneer in operational research, a seasoned leader and manager of military science organizations, and an early expert on the realities of atomic warfare. The kind of career that makes UFO hysteria look like third-rate science fiction.

  The Cold Warrior

  Solandt led the DRB from its birthing pains to its massive buildup after the Korean War, with over a thousand employees and dozens of establishments, labs, liaison groups and detachments. As Chairman, Solandt was both a chief executive of a national science organization and a member of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, Canada’s senior military body, where he was given the equivalent rank of lieutenant-general so he would not be pushed around or ignored by the senior services. He stuck out like a sore thumb in his civilian attire, slicked hair, and glasses, and the fact that he was a 37-year-old genius who’d retired his war rank as colonel in the Canadian Army Medical Corps in 1945, but knew what atomic war actually looked like.

  DRB did groundbreaking and valuable work in advanced radar communications, chemical and biological warfare defence, weapons design, and winter warfare research. He sent OR field teams to Korea and more. Solandt was perhaps the most knowledgeable member of the Canadian government on atomic affairs, attending British atomic tests in Australia, working with Canadian civilian nuclear researchers, and promoting atomic warfare courses for the Canadian military. In public, Solandt became a science celebrity in North America and Europe, conducting dozens of lectures on science, warfare, and the atomic bomb long before futurist Herman Kahn became famous for his controversial thermonuclear chats.

  The Soviets took notice. They were not pleased.

  In the Soviet press, Solandt was portrayed as a cold, inhuman tool of Western imperialism and an abuser of science. A May 1950 article in Pravda quoted Solandt as saying that robots were “cool-headed and able to concentrate under fire.” Such practical statements were taken by Pravda as evidence that the West was preparing to replace human soldiers with robots to face the Red Army. In April 1952, James G. Endicott, a former Canadian missionary from Toronto who was in China during the Korean War, made public speculations about Solandt and the DRB’s biological warfare work. In an interview broadcast by Moscow, Endicott said Canada was manufacturing germs at Suffield to feed the alleged biological-warfare measures the U.S. was employing in Korean War. He then maligned Solandt by falsely quoting him as saying that the prospects for mass death through BW were “extremely heartening.” No evidence of such claims were ever brought to light, but concern grew in government until Ron Kenyon of the Toronto Telegram interviewed Solandt. “This was no fire-spouting dragon as Dr. Endicott would have him,” Kenyon wrote. “He was just not the type to describe the horrors of bacteriological warfare as ‘heartening.’ In fact he had assured me that he had said no such thing.” Endicott’s statements were summed up by Solandt as a fishing expedition for propaganda purposes, and the matter dropped.

  And then came the UFOs. At least in the press.

  For three years Solandt had quietly ignored the rising tide of supposed flying-saucer sightings in Canada and the U.S., but by 1952, there was too much public interest. Solandt told the press that he was “as mystified as anyone else” regarding the sightings of odd lights in the sky and said he and senior scientists were “keeping open minds on the questions.” This included the creation of the aptly titled “Committee Set Up to Deal with ‘Flying Saucers’ Sightings” under the Chairmanship of astrophysicist Dr. P. W. Millman of the Dominion Observatory, and would be given the name Project Magnet (where engineer Wilbur Smith ran his failed tests). No evidence of UFOs was ever found. But for some, the fact that there were committees involved in investigating UFOS was proof enough.

  End Game

  When Solandt retired from the DRB in 1956, his list of accolades and awards was staggering, from a British OBE to an American Medal of Freedom and a Gold Medal from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (to name three of dozens), not to mention being made a Companion of the Order of Canada in the 1970s. Compared to the rest of his career, the sum total of his involvement in UFO hysteria amounted to peanuts. Sure, flying peanuts from Mars, but peanuts nonetheless. He’s also come a long way on the Internet; in addition to my own work, there’s finally a full Wikipedia entry and a Canadian Encyclopedia entry dedicated to him.

  Despite being a straight-laced fellow, Solandt had discovered that much of the breakthroughs in life are not done by the regular joes who tow the party line. As he told a graduating class in 1954:

  One of the very real dangers to our North American civilization is our worship of conformity. In almost every walk of life the person who conforms most pliably to the accepted standards of dress and behaviour is most likely to succeed. We must recognize that this enforcement of conformity will finally result in universal mediocrity. New ideas, especially in human relations and often even in science, come from those who refuse to conform.

  I’ve always found great solace in Solandt’s battle cry for the eccentric. Thankfully, there has been a bump in Dr. Solandt’s reputation in the growing online environment of the 21st century— from a secondary character in the UFO hysteria of the 1950s to his proper place as one of the finest minds Canada produced in the 20th century, who made distinct contributions to the use of science in warfare against both the Nazis and the Soviet Union. He led a life dedicated to service and helping his country more than personal gain. It is a life worth remembering.

  About the Author

  Jason Ridler is the author of the Spar Battersea thrillers (Death Match and Con Job) and the short story collection Knockouts. He has also published over 50 stories in such magazines and anthologies as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Brain Harvest, Not One of Us, Chilling Tales, Tesseracts Thirteen, and more. His nonfiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, Dark Scribe, and the Internet Review of Science Fiction. A former punk rock musician
and cemetery groundskeeper, Mr. Ridler holds a Ph.D. in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada. His doctoral thesis on Dr. Solandt will be published under the title Maestro of Science: Omond McKillop Solandt and Government Science in War and Hostile Peace by the University of Toronto Press.

  The Satirist’s Progress: A Discussion with Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay

  Jeremy L. C. Jones

  As a distorted, exaggerated, skewed, and otherwise mutated vision of the reality that surrounds us, satire shares a lot with speculative fiction. It’s to isolate humor as the element that separates the two genres, but it’s not that easy. As far back as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal (whose macabre premise could be the stuff of today’s weird fiction) and Voltaire’s Candide (which lampoons Leibniz’s proto-quantum concept of “the best of all possible worlds), satire has not only been grim; it’s been fabulist. And in the past 100 years, everyone from Thomas Pynchon and William S. Burroughs to Philip K. Dick and Terry Pratchett have mined the common ground between science fiction and satire.

  Those shades of ambiguity between humor, critique, reality, and fantasy have been well served within the genre in recent years by Nick Mamatas and Paul Tremblay. Each in his own way, these unique authors have poked and stretched the skin of human existence through the deft use of wild speculation and biting commentary. Their stuff is also deeply funny—that is, if you don’t mind belly laughs with an aftertaste of bile. Clarkesworld spoke with these two literary iconoclasts about the ins and outs of satire, SF, and the fuzzy boundary between the two.

  Nick Mamatas is a former fiction co-editor of Clarkesworld, and his works of satire include 2004’s cult classic Move Under Ground and 2011’s Sensation. His new novel, the non-satirical yet darkly reflective Bullettime, is published by ChiZine Publications.

  Paul Tremblay is the author of the narcoleptic-detective novels The Little Sleep and No Sleep till Wonderland, among others. The dizzying, dystopian Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye is his latest book (and first satire), and it also is published by ChiZine.

  In light of your new novel, do you consider yourself a satirist?

  Nick Mamatas: No, not in light of my new novel. My 2007 novel Under My Roof was a political satire, and so was 2011’s Sensation, but Bullettime isn’t a satire. Some reviews have mentioned “hilarity” amid the horror and such. But satire needs an object. What is Bullettime satirizing?

  Anyway, broadly I consider myself a satirist when engaging in satire. When I’m doing something else I consider myself something else. Isn’t there a joke whose punchline is “But fuck one goat…“? I try to keep away from totalizing identities like “satirist” or “goat-fucker.”

  Paul Tremblay: Hey, I heard the goat joke in its pig iteration, not for nothing.

  My previous narcoleptic detective novels weren’t really satires; certainly not political ones. But with Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, I’m now officially a satirist (I’d like some sort of membership card, if possible), and hopefully a successful one. Humor and absurd situations have been elements of all my novels so far, but the donkey novel is the only one of the three that squarely and broadly takes aim at American politics and culture.

  I guess to more directly answer your question, I consider myself a writer in general, but with this particular work, yeah, I’m a satirist.

  What is at stake in your new novel?

  Nick Mamatas: Nothing. It’s a novel. Novels are important, they aren’t crucial to the culture. It’s a good thing too, since these days anyone can get a novel published if he or she has an email address.

  Paul Tremblay: It’s true. I have an email address.

  What’s at stake? The fate of the my narrator’s mom and the state of localized Western Civilization! Or at least it is in my novel where there is a small scale revolution at the mega-conglom Farm, a bizarre election that could determine the fate of City, and the narrator (who is an indentured worker at Farm) finds out that his mother might be homeless back in City, which means she’s in danger of being shipped/deported below City to the Pier. He escapes Farm and instead of finding his mother, he finds his deadbeat dad, who is now a Catholic priest. My plan for the book was to start the dystopian novel off with wild, borderline goofy scenarios and have the novel’s tone gradually become more serious and emotional as the reader progressed. Genuine empathy/emotion (and not sentimentality, as John Gardner defined it, “emotion or feeling that rings false, usually because achieved by some form of cheating or exaggeration”) is always what is at stake for me as a writer.

  How has the role of satire changed in speculative fiction over the years?

  Nick Mamatas: It’s become much less important. Speculative fiction has become much less about transparent allegories or satires and such, and much more about itself. There are some “serious speculations” about the future and a lot of earnest adventuring, but not a lot of satire. Of course, there are plenty of SF novels full of kooky political and social ideas, but as it turns out the authors generally believe in their own nonsense about the importance of polygamy, asteroid palladium-mining-backed currencies, and mandatory spankings for willful females.

  Paul Tremblay: While I have to admit that I’m much more well read in horror fiction and general lit (whatever that means) than what is marketed as contemporary SF, I agree with Nick. What the heck do I mean by “marketed as contemporary SF?” Well, some recent examples of successful (both in terms of being a good book and having actually sold decently) satires include most of George Saunders’ work (Civilwarland in Bad Decline, Pastoralia, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil), Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, and Mat Johnson’s Pym, and they all relied heavily upon speculative-fiction elements.

  These are works of SF, but they weren’t marketed as contemporary SF. They were marketed as high literary satire. Perhaps I’m being too paranoid and way too anecdotal (I certainly haven’t done a detailed market analysis because, well, I’m lazy), but it seems to me that in the eyes of the larger publishing world, contemporary satire is the domain of high literature (right? even the canonized satirists Kurt Vonnegut, Franz Kafka, and Margaret Atwood, according to many, wrote literature not SF), and it trumps us lowly speculative-fiction toilers. Or something like that.

  Are satire and speculative fiction inseparable?

  Nick Mamatas: Yes. Even if it’s only a minor current within speculative fiction, satire will always have a place in it, because exaggeration is crucial to satire. You cannot satirize the here and now simply through reproduction of it via bourgeois realism. Even Jonathan Franzen, in The Corrections, had to throw in a science-fictional element. Freedom didn’t have one (though he did his tech homework on both mining and birding) and then everyone took the damn book seriously, as though we were supposed to like the characters or something.

  Paul Tremblay: To play devil’s advocate… Maybe I’m too broad with what qualifies as satire but some of my favorite satires are devoid of speculative fiction elements: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole, plus two more recent novels; Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine and Home Land by Sam Lipsyte. All three picaresque novels satirize class/society (with the latter two certainly taking jabs at suburbia) with their over-the-top narrators tweaking their betters, thumbing their noses at societal expectations, etc.

  That said, I agree with Nick’s larger point, because I don’t want him to yell at me.

  In what ways did writing a novel-length satire, or a novel with satirical elements, change your understanding of satire and of the novel form?

  Nick Mamatas: Satires are better when they’re short. There’s always a concern that the issues satirized may become obsolete, but it’s minor issue. Many more people read Nathanael West’s A Cool Million today than the Horatio Alger books it mocks.

  Paul Tremblay: I like shorter books in general, so I’m in agreement with that.

  This could be said for all novels, but I do think the best novel-length satires spend as much time/focus on developing character(s) as t
hey do their exaggerated plots/situations. To make a clumsy comparison to horror fiction: Generally, a horror story is only going to unsettle/scare/move me if the story is anchored by realistic, empathetic, interesting characters. I think the same can be said for satire. I can certainly enjoy clever scenarios and biting wit, but it’ll only really hit home with me if the story is grounded by the characters. The genius of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and so many of Vonnegut’s books are due in large part to Captain Yossarian, Billy Pilgrim, and Kilgore Trout.

  In your recent novel, what elements did you try to balance, and what elements were necessarily out of balance?

  Nick Mamatas: I’m sorry, I don’t even understand this question. It honestly sounds like it could be asked about anything but a novel—a cake recipe, an ice-dancing routine, the wheel alignment of a 1988 Volvo being outfitted for the Burning Man artcar parade. Anything but a novel!

  Paul Tremblay: As I mentioned a bit earlier, I wanted to achieve a noticeable (but not clunky) shift in tone, from comedy to pathos, in the arc of the story. So early in the novel, I really tried to make some of the humor/silliness over the top. By the end of the novel, hopefully, the contrast between the Farm the readers are introduced to is nicely contrasted to the Farm they’re reintroduced to after everything in the novel had happened. I hope that makes sense.