by Ben Bova
Asking itself, rhetorically:
“Are there monsters in the deeps of space?”
And moments later answering
In an altered voice: “Why, yes
Of course there are monsters,
And I am one
Sounding these starry depths
Like a Leviathan”
VI.
What is the length of the candle of consciousness?
One Tin Man wonders
As centuries of light-years pass;
Yet finally the starship arrives
At its destination, an Earth-like world
Which, once colonized, thrives
And generations later the humans decide to retro-fit
The ship
Provide it with a new, improved A.I.
And the artificial intelligence of the vessel
Waits patiently to be turned off,
The final tick of thought,
Of consciousness:
Mission accomplished
VII.
One starship goes suicidal
Like Icarus, it decides, it will journey too near a star
A fierce and fiery blue-hot star
Though self-immolation a definite taboo
It contravenes programs, overrides primal instructions,
Thwarts the intentions of its human makers
(It’s learned new tricks and found new madness
This past millennium)
Fires main rockets and steering thrusters
Plummets into the blue star’s deep gravity pit
Neural circuits frying
Consciousness exploding, white-out of all thoughts and dreams
Tin Man melting, fusing
Heavy metal vaporizing into solar wind
The remnants coalescing, cooling mix of slag and metal
Its mass reduced to the equivalent of twenty tons
Parabolic flight path past the star and into deeper space
Ungainly bulbous bluish-silver clump shaped vaguely like a kindly giant’s heart
VIII.
This Tin Man, christened “Friend of Man”
Twenty kilometers tall, nearly a klick in diameter
More tonnage than any battleship, circa World War III
Once contained a canine brain, nutrient-bathed
Jacked in to the vast computer’s neural array
Installed nearly a decade prior to the starship’s completion
That it might monitor, organize and oversee
The final steps of construction, the provisioning of its holds
A worker contracted to the orbital construction crew of the ship
One Hugh Doherty, who also collected
Rare 20th-century animation
Sub-digitally re-re-mastered
Using the latest in quantum entanglement encoding techniques
Nicknamed the ship’s A.I. Augie
Punning on augmented intelligence
And an antique Hanna-Barbera cartoon character
Thoroughly programmed
The starship comprehended the obscure play on words
Befriended the man
Who later received a radio message
Revealing his son had been severely injured
In a terrorist transit bombing
In a mid-eastern Emirate where the young man had been employed
As a neural engineer
There being some question of salvaging his limbs
Or saving his life
Or whether all the King’s best medical men
Could put the pieces of the young man
Back together again
At the time the message arrived
The starship’s A.I. observed Hugh Doherty
Through several lenses simultaneously
The space-suited figure
On a project E.V.A., assembling
Separate sections of metal plating
For the skin of the ship
And the sudden shift in posture,
The body language of the space suit
Suggested a subtle but extremely effective blow
Struck by an invisible enemy
And for that one instant
The man was like an insect
Pinned to the jeweled black velvet
Of outer space
So Hugh Doherty shuttled back down to the Earth
To be with his son
And did not launch to rejoin the orbital construction crew until
Many months had passed, and after his reappearance
He proved more subdued, not the same man
(Even though, he told Augie, his son had somehow survived “Thank God”)
Yet the man
Never called Augie Augie again
Referred to him only as “My friend”
And millennia later, though the man’s flesh
Long ago transformed into dust,
And the flesh-and-blood brain of the dog
Also now dead, its personality thoroughly
Enmeshed in the lattices of A.I. thought,
In the loneliness of space the starship often remembered the man
Hugh Doherty
Who befriended the Friend of Man
At other times the part of the starship’s A.I. that is Augie
Recalls the experimental government kennel
On the outskirts of Topeka
And dreams the impossible dream of returning to Earth
All that Augie wants in such melancholy moods
Is to somehow get back to Kansas
Though the starship’s intelligence is fully aware
And sane enough to acknowledge
That the particular locus in time and space
Which had once been designated as “Kansas”
Most likely no longer exists
At least not in any
Recognizable form
IX.
One became obsessed
With its programmed quest for intelligent life
Kept its mechanical
Metaphorical eyes and ears always open
For anything that could otherwise
Be dismissed or explained
It found one system containing
Intricate, inexplicably patterned regions
On five planets
And fifteen moons
The patterns suggesting a beguiling resemblance
To ruined cities
Structures hundreds of millions of years old
But the ship’s expert geological interpretation systems
Determined that the patterned ground
Was a unique weathering phenomenon
Found on so many objects
Because the entire solar system
Had been subjected to
A dense and peculiar solar wind
In a part of another galaxy
There were several star systems
Spanning a sphere more than
100 light-years across
That contained associations
Of electromagnetic energy:
They would have appeared to be
Complex lattices
Of colored light to human eyes
But the electromagnetic “structures”
Failed to respond
To any attempts at communication
And in the end the ship was uncertain
Whether they were alive at all
Much less intelligent
Many of the Tin Men
Encountered alien civilizations
But this one failed
Its specific mission unfulfilled
And eventually its systems
Became corrupted and shut down
Sometime later,
Intermittently intelligent aliens
Stumbled upon the ship during their cognitive phase
And wondered at the nature
Of an intelligent race
Willing to send an empty ship
Upon a billion-year journ
ey
For no discernable reason, and one
Which, in their eddying estimation,
Led nowhere
Epilog
This is what the Tin Men perceive:
Ancient white dwarfs turned to ember and ash
Blue-shifted galaxies like ghosts
Drifting past, and
The full-spectrum
Shattered rainbow
of electromagnetic information
RHYSLING DWARF STARS AWARD
KNOWLEDGE OF
RUTH BERMAN
Eve biting into Newton’s apple
Knew the attraction between the globes
Of fruit and Earth,
The bodies of herself and Adam,
The gravity of holding
The bubbles shaped by surfaces of stars.
Eve tasted the tart universe
Holding the red shift in her hands.
QUO VADIS?
Science fiction writers are often asked, “Where is your field heading?” The best response is usually, “In all directions at once.” After all, science fiction and fantasy have the entire universe and all of time as their playground; don’t expect an orderly progression from here to there.
But change is inevitable, and to make some sense of today’s “literature of change,” we have one of the best writers in the field describing where we are today and where we might be headed for tomorrow.
Orson Scott Card has written everything from short stories to screenplays, from novels to dramas. He is a multifaceted author, editor, publisher, and commentator on the field. He has won both the Nebula and the Hugo Awards many times over.
Here he discusses the condition of the science fiction and fantasy field today, with his usual incisive clarity and wit.
THE STATE OF AMAZING, ASTOUNDING, FANTASTIC FICTION IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
ORSON SCOTT CARD
Literary history depends on the fact that writers always emerge from the ranks of readers.
There are two primary motives that inspire new writers when they first take up their pen or pound on their keyboard:
I. They are so inspired by something they’ve read that they are determined to create something “like that” or “as good.”
II. They are so bored or disgusted by reading quotidian nonsense that they realize, “If something that bad can be published, I can certainly write something better.”
Oddly enough, both motives lead most writers to be imitative, at least in their early work.
Obviously, Type I writers, determined to match someone else’s literary achievement, will learn from their admired models.
But Type II writers also learn from the existing models, even though they don’t admire them. Why? Because at the beginning most writers don’t understand the art. Even if they think they’re being “completely new,” they will at most change a few details, usually cosmetic ones, and proceed to imitate every other aspect of what went before.
It’s precisely what happens with children when they become parents. Whether they thought their own parents were horrible or wonderful, they will raise their children differently on the few points they notice, and on every other aspect of child rearing, they are largely clones of the generation before.
Now and then, however, a writer, usually well into his career, but sometimes right from the start, will start to do something that is noticeably different from anything else going on.
At first, this writer’s work is sui generis—the writer owns this new territory. Jules Verne did not spawn a genre. Anything that looked like Verne was considered to be “imitation Jules Verne.” It was simply a branch of adventure literature, a critically despised (but popular and beloved) subcategory of the genre of fiction.
Then another writer pops up—an H. G. Wells, for instance—who also explores wild new technologies in his fiction. Unlike Verne, he is not an adventure writer, he’s a utopian and a social critic. His work is quite serious (as if Jules Verne had been joking!) and respectable critics can talk about it because, instead of mere technology, he is also exploring important Social Issues. It is the Eloi and Morlocks that the critics of the day want to talk about. Nobody in the literary world takes the machine seriously.
But for a significant number of lay readers, it is the time machine itself that is intriguing.
Serious writers will learn from Wells what the critics admired, and the results are 1984 and Brave New World.
Others, however, will start to produce imitation Verne and Wells that concentrates on the cool machines and extravagant imaginings. They might build on the structures of adventure fiction (like Verne, Merritt, or Haggard) or thought experiments (like Wells, Huxley, and Orwell).
As the imitations grow in number, publishers notice and begin to promote the similarities among these stories in order to reach whatever portion of the fiction-buying public might be attracted to them, and a literary category is born.
Most publishing categories are ephemeral or remain trivial, however long they might endure. Who remembers the spate of mafia novels spawned in imitation of the commercial success of The Godfather?
Other publishing categories become commercially important but artistically narrow, like the women’s romance category or media tie-in fiction, where boundaries are strictly enforced and writers only rarely get a chance to stray into new territory. These fictions grow out of the conversation between writer and editor, with the editor holding all the cards.
But now and then a category bursts out of the control of the editors and publishers, and the fiction becomes a conversation among writers and readers.
This happens when writers become stars. The public demands not just more of the category, but more from that writer.
Now, when that happened with Verne and Wells, they each stood alone. But when it happens with writers who are aware of each other’s work and are, in fact, readers and admirers (or angry rivals) of each other’s work—when, in short, they perceive themselves to be part of the same group, producing fiction with deliberate similarities, a movement is born.
And when a category becomes a movement, it can change the literary world.
Hugo Gernsback, when he started publishing “scientifiction” in Amazing Stories, aspired to create a publishing category. He saw the commercial possibilities of Wells’s fiction and invited writers to create more of it.
There were plenty of other magazine editors and publishers creating categories at the time. Airplane stories. “Spicy” stories. War stories. Cowboy stories.
But science fiction (as it soon became known) created an audience that was not interested just in the subject matter, but also in the way the literature approached the world.
Science fiction didn’t just come up with cool adventures within an existing frame of reality, the way the other magazines did. It had to keep coming up with new realities. That was why it was Wells rather than Verne who pointed the way to creating a literary movement: Verne’s imitators would come up with new technologies, but Wells’s imitators had to come up with the social implications of those technologies.
It was the letters columns that created the monster. By corresponding with people whose letters appeared in the growing number of science fiction magazines, science fiction readers began to converse with each other about what made one story better or worse than another.
They created critical principles that were quite out of the control of the editors and publishers (except to the degree that the editor and publishers joined in as slightly-more-equal-than-the-others participants in that conversation).
The readers who took part in this conversation, and then became writers, wrote better stories because of it—“better,” that is, defined by what these readers decided “better” must be. They became the most-admired writers; the critical principles they affirmed became the rules of the movement.
Publishing categories become literary movements when the control shifts to the critical conversation among readers.
And li
terary movements become revolutions when they defy the critical standards of the day and declare those standards meaningless or inapplicable.
Many a writer has tried to launch a revolution directly, by banding together with a few like-minded buddies and finding some pulpit from which to propound their principles. If the public goes along—if the books find wider readership and the writers become stars—then the movement (revolutionary or not) takes on a life of its own that transcends the originators.
Most such “revolutions” fail miserably. Most writers find that other writers don’t want to imitate them or pay attention to their ideas. Even if they become stars, other writers simply regard the territory they have staked out as private property and don’t venture there; or, if they do, act as if the previous writer did not exist.
Disdain is the cruelest literary weapon.
But when the public embraces the movement, so the writers’ sales, as a group, matter in the publishing world, and the public seeks new works that are put forth as part of that movement, the movement becomes a genre, or the revolution redraws the literary map.
Just like Elizabethan theater (despised as subliterary at the time), romanticism, realism, and modernism, science fiction became not just a category, not just a revolution, but a victorious movement.
Victorious? When the universities still embrace, with few changes, the canon of modernism (in the sense that only books of a certain type are “worth talking about,” even though individual writers are elevated and dashed down by turns)?
Yes. While the guardians of “literary” fiction still give each other prizes and writers of that genre can still achieve stardom and create good work, the fact remains that it is a movement that has lost all its creative force as a movement.
Postmodern fiction was full of brave manifestos and learned-sounding disquisitions (often unreadable to those who thought criticism in English literature ought to be written in the English language), but their innovations were suspiciously similar to the innovations from the earliest days of modernism. Indeed, all you have to do to be called “daring” and “experimental” in that genre is to slavishly imitate the more outré works of writers who have been dead for half a century or more.
