Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  Such a method is found, and put - successfully - into practice (Hodgkin tells us all the details of this conclusion, but as a reviewer I hold back from such spoilers). Suffice to say that it makes use of the differential between troposphere height at equatorial and polar locations. ‘However ingenious this conclusion,’ opines Hodgkin in his persona as critic-biographer, ‘however exciting the final chapters, it cannot be denied that the later draft lacks the distant, stilly, bleak beauty of the earlier. Bayle’s genius was not in pot-boiler plotting, but in finding fictional expression for his acute sense of alienation. His motto might have been: Every man is indeed an island

  The novels of the 1960s and 1970s ring changes upon the main fashions in American SF from those decades. Some sound more interesting (such as Troposphere); most of them sounding tired and conventional. The Perils of Certain Spacemen, supposedly from 1977, sounds like regular space opera, although on a larger than usual scale. Next Bayle wrote Twenty Eighty-Four, a sequel to Orwell’s famous dystopia, written from the perspective not of individual humans but of the hive-minds that have been successfully created by the social engineering Nineteen Eighty-Four satirised. This sounds interesting, although Hodgkins says that Bayle was prevented from publishing it ‘by the aggressive copyright policing of the Orwell estate’ which obviates more detailed discussion.

  We get more info on The Explorers (1984), a sort of alternate history based on the theory of the aquatic ape, the idea that proto hominids spent a portion of their evolution in the seas (hence our love for swimming and our streamlined hairlessness) - Bayle imagines the present-day earth populated by Homo aquans, the descendants of these apes, instead of Homo sapiens. His novel relates the explorations of ‘InLand’ by people who live in the sea and have traditionally only ventured a little way in at the coast. The Washington Review called this novel ‘a roller-coaster of a book, big, moving, wholly engrossing’ (Yes, Hodgkin makes up reviews and reactions as well as making up the original books.). But this is exactly the problem here: a two-page summary of this storyline can hardly be ‘big, moving, wholly engrossing’. At most it can be intriguing, and leave the reader wishing that he or she could read the whole book.

  Indeed, one of the flaws of Hodgkin’s approach is his particular mode of summary. His summaries, not to beat around the bush, are too crammed and too hurried to give the satisfaction of short stories; and they are too shrunken to give the satisfaction of novels. They fall, alas, between the two stools; reading them is somehow unsatisfactory. Better are the Bayle short stories that Hodgkin summarises: less is lost in such a transformation. In ‘Avalanche Pregnancy’ (Quasar, Nov. 1965, collected in The Rafts on the River, 1970) a humanoid alien has sex with a human woman. The alien physiology is such that ‘he’ becomes pregnant with the evacuation of his seed; it so happens that she is also impregnated by the encounter. ‘The two pregnancies,’ says Hodgkin, ‘develop together, and the tension and indeed competition between the two parties is very subtly delineated’. If you say so.

  In ‘The Foam Spaceships’ (Utopian Science Fiction, June 1969 -Hodgkin calls it ‘the Star Award winning story’, the Star Awards being his fictional version of the Hugos) mankind is given the true technology of interstellar spaceflight, based on a kind of quantum foam, by a seemingly benign race of aliens; we use it and spread rapidly through the galaxy. But there is a price to pay: those who use it are changed by the technology, their cells turning into foam, their corporeality dissolving into a kind of not-quite-solid, not-quite-fluid state. Who would use such technology given that it exacts such a heavy price? Everybody, according to this story: ‘the puritanical solids who remained in the prison of earth were looked on with pity rather than contempt; for everybody else, for the majority, any price would be worth paying to travel the stars.’

  ‘The Picture of Dorian Greebo’ (1962), despite its awful title, is an especially interesting conception. Wilde’s Dorian Gray revolves around a portrait in the protagonist’s attic that ages in his place. In Bayle’s retelling, space explorers find an artefact on the moon placed by aliens; tests reveal that is anti-entropic, and in fact that this artefact is becoming younger minute by minute. They discover that this object’s youth-ing and human aging are connected, and indeed that an alien race is rejuvenating itself via this device at our expense.

  The 1975 story ‘Tour de Lune’ (collected in Forward-view Mirror, 1978) concerns pedal-powered spacecraft racing to the moon. Bayle also has an arresting way with a first sentence. This from ‘XRose’ (1971): ‘As I peed I thought how strange it was that I would never again urinate; but Hart reminded me that there was probably some fluid in my system still to work its way through. “One more trip to the bathroom,” he told me. “I’m thinking, one more still to go.” ‘

  Hodgkin’s ingenuity and his fecund imagination are certainly well displayed by this book. But I hope I am not being only puritanical if I say that it is, somehow, vulgar. I can’t shake the sense that the point of all this is only to display Hodgkin’s undeniably impressive creativity, and nothing else. The book, supposedly about Denis Bayle, is actually an elongated boast by Thomas Hodgkin - look how clever I am! Look how careless I can be with ideas for stories! Other writers hoard their conceptions, but I scatter them left and right. It is an impression not helped by the melancholy end Hodgkin inflicts upon poor old Bayle. His fiction, once popular, now passes from fashion. His 1991 Midwich Prime, a retelling of Wyndham’s Midwich Cuckoos from the point of view of the alien children, is rejected by his publisher, again for reasons of copyright, but in fact because Bayle novels simply aren’t selling. ‘You need to write more popular stuff,’ he is told, but he doesn’t understand why popular stuff is popular. Cyberpunk baffles him, his mind still running along the clockwork devices inside 1950s alarm clocks. He writes a long novel, provisionally entitled Marigold, his first attempt at Heroic Fantasy, in the belief that Fantasy sells better than SF (which is true, of course). But this book becomes a folly in its grandeur, swelling to three thousand, four thousand pages: ‘it is a hybrid,’ Hodgkin tells us, ‘of Tolkien and Proust, a sort of A La Recherche de Middle-Earth Perdu.’ He works obsessively over and over this manuscript, filling out lengthy descriptions of every detail of his fantasy world; but the project was not yet half finished at his death. ‘His body lay undiscovered in his apartment for three days,’ says Hodgkin, which seemed to me a low blow: gratuitously nasty on behalf of Hodgkin-as-God.

  Had Hodgkin used this format as an opportunity to comment, satirically or otherwise, upon the world of SF over the last half-century I think the book would have been more successful. But his invented world-of-SF is only there as the backdrop to the invented novels, and those are only partially successful. We admire Hodgkin’s inventiveness, but leave the feast unsatisfied.

  Imaginary books, I’m afraid, are simply not as filling as real books.

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  ~ * ~

  S-Bomb

  What does the ‘S’ stand for?

  ~ * ~

  There’s a black blotch in the sky where the starlight has been hoovered away. Any northern hemisphere night sky shows it. You’ll have heard of this, of course. It can’t be a planetary body, although it’s round enough for that, for there are no gravitational effects detectable. One theory is that it is a concentration of dust occluding the starlight in a circular patch. There is concern, for the dust seems within the solar-system and therefore close to Earth, but it is above the line of the ecliptic and approaching no closer. There are of course plans to launch probes to examine the phenomenon. It’s a question of finding the funding, of working out a launch window, that sort of thing.

  ~ * ~

  — I’ll tell you what. When they named the A-Bomb, they plugged into a cultural context in which A was the top school grade, and A-OK and A1 had these upbeat, positive associations. Even the word Atom connoted focus and potency, think of The Mighty Atom. And then, only a few years later, the world hears of a more powerful bomb, th
e H-bomb, and ‘H’ meant nothing, except itself: Hydrogen. It connotes the gaseous, diffuseness, the whiffy. In their heads people knew this bomb was more deadly than the former, but in their hearts they couldn’t truly credit it. So, I guess what I’m saying is, what, really, might people make of S? S-Bomb?

  — Sex-bomb.

  — Wasn’t that a song?

  — If it was?

  — When I was a child, there was a pop group called S-Club. Or was it S-Group? But, see, S-Group, no. That sounds more like a secret arm of the military. I can’t believe a kid’s pop group would go for that sort of name.

  — And when I was a child, there was a pop group called the Incredible String Band. So what do you think of that’?

  — The Incredible String Bomb?

  — Incredible, after all, is a pretty good word for it. From where I’m sitting I’d say that incredible describes it pretty well.

  — Except . . . these are no ordinary strings - Super - after all.

  — String bomb sounds like a Wallace and Gromit device. A back garden shed concoction.

  — See, that’s my point. S-Bomb is a phrase that lacks the necessary.

  — Or further back”? There’s the echo of SS. Don’t you think? The SS-Bomb? Some Nazi artefact. That sounds pretty mean.

  — Better. Better.

  — Also - I mean, you correct me, you’re the expert - who calls them superstrings any more? Clumsy and ropey metaphor.

  — I guess. S for Sub-materialities. S for Severe. Serious, ser, Seriousnesses. Sparks. Sparkles inside everything, and this bomb harnessing that.

  — Except, see if I understand right, not so much inside as —

  — Not inside things. No. Constitutive of things. Yes.

  — You do sound - nervy. Do you have something to tell me?

  ~ * ~

  The two of them were sitting in a coffee shop, the Costarbucks Republic, the Coffee Chain, whatever. There were two thick-lipped porcelain mugs, large and round as soup bowls, on the table before them. Inside one a disc of blackness sat halfway down, with little pearls of reflected brightness trapped in its meniscus. The other mug was as yet untouched, and brimmed over with a solid froth of white that was dirtied with brown-black like pavement snow.

  So much for their coffees.

  The one man was senior, a face like the older Auden, nose fattened with age, two wide-spaced inkdrop eyes. His hair was white and close-trimmed and expressive of the undulating contours of his big old skull. The other man was young, and you might call him handsome if you happen to find male beauty in that block-faced, pineapple-headed muscular type. But he was very nervous indeed; very fidgety, and anxious, and gabbly. Why was he talking about long-vanished pop groups and suchlike chatter?

  The place was partially occupied, readers and laptop-tappers distributed unevenly amongst the dark-wood tables. Behind the counter two slender men, both with skin coloured coffee-au-lait, waited for the next customer. It’s a neutral place to meet, is the point of it.

  ~ * ~

  What’s the weather like? Aren’t you interested? Look through these wall-high plates of carefully washed and polished glass.

  What can you see?

  It’s a pretty windy day. The weathermen didn’t foresee that. There have been clear-sky gales to the west. A weird turbulence, unspooling tourbillons to the north and the south that resonate into unseasonal storms, flooding, wreckage. Nobody can explain it. But it’s only weather.

  ~ * ~

  The two men sat in complete silence, the older one staring balefully at the younger, for two minutes. Two minutes is a very long time to sit in silence. Try it. Life is hurry and bustle. People come into the coffee shop and grab cardboard tubes of hot black and rush out. Those cars lurching forward, slowing back, lurching forward, slowing back, all day and every day, such that the tarmac is being continually obscured and revealed.

  The sun moves through the sky. But it doesn’t. It’s the sky moves around the sun. That’s the truth of it.

  The older man sat upright, and his little felt-circle black eyes seem to expand. Those white fur eyebrows, up they go, towards the hairline.

  ~ * ~

  — Run me through again what I am to tell my bosses.

  — Well, sorry, is one thing.

  — We’ll take sorry as read. We’ll assume it.

  — Obviously we should have been in closer communication with - by we, I don’t mean me, specifically, individually. We’re a team, obviously - but, see, I’ll be frank, scientists, our first reaction is, wait and see. It’ll be OK. We think we can sort the problem, present you people with problem and solution in one neat package. Or at least, wait until there’s a proper quantity of data before we report anything.

  — You saying there’s no solution ?

  — No.

  — You’re saying the bomb doesn’t work?

  — I take your startlement as a yeah.

  — Sorry - sorry - you think that’s what I’m here to report?

  — As opposed to?

  — Oh, the bomb works.

  — You’re sure?

  — We tested it.

  — You have already tested it?

  — Tested it. It works. Jesus.

  — The people I work for will be pleased to hear that at any rate.

  — What I mean is. Look.

  — You think superstrings are myriad little-little separate strings, one-dimensional extended objects that resonate and shake, that aggregate and disaggregate into subatomic particles, and thence into atoms and molecules and everything in this diverse and frangible world. You think so. Think again. Think laces. Think of it this way: one single string, ten-to-the-trillion metres long, weaving in and out of our four dimensions, like laces weaving in and out of cosmic fabric, tying it together. Superstrings is a misnomer. This singular thing, this superstring. The equations require ten dimensions, and we’re personally familiar with four dimensions, and all that is true. But when you look at it clearly, there is only one dimension. Only the one singularity, the thread that ties all of reality together and also the thread out of which all reality is woven. The one string.

  — One string.

  — The nature of the technology is that, and the, the thing is, said the younger man.

  — You’re saying you broke it.

  — I’m saying, said the younger man, and swallowed air.

  The older man lifted his coffee mug, finally, and tucked his white moustache into the white cap of froth.

  — S-bomb, boom-boom, said the younger, and the explosion. Now we were surely not expecting the explosive out-gassing, the violent rupture, the A-Bomb thing. But I was expecting - I don’t know. Maybe sparks, the sparkles, something fizzy.

  — None of that?

  — Then, said the young man, it detonates. The point is - you’re wondering if I’m going to get to the point. The point is, it blows, but not with any explosive detonation. These strings, these threads, these laces stretching, as it were, across ten dimensions, connecting it all together, the whole of reality. Cut them, and, plainly put, our dimensions start to unweave, or unspool, or unpick, you choose the un word you like best. It’s a baseline reality event. The earth turns away from it. That’s not a metaphor. The earth turns; it spins around the sun; it leaves the event behind at the speed of kilometres a second.

  — You tested it underground?

  — On the contrary. We tested it in the sky. We lifted it up there by a toroid helium balloon. No, no, if you dug it under the ground . . .

  — Let’s say, interrupted the older man, under Tehran. Underneath and a little to the east of Tehran.

  — Sure. Then the world itself moves through space, and the effect is to blast out an empty conic up from underneath the city. A hollowness that shoots out, angled and up out of the city and goes into the sky at a tangent, and loses itself in space, the city thereby collapsing into a great mass of rubble. The air, meanwhile, rushin
g about to fill the vacancy. But it’s gone in minutes, because we all are travelling at such prodigious speeds, because the world is in orbit about the sun.

  — So you’re saying that, in effect, the point of detonation of an S-Bomb will appear, from where we’re standing, appear to hurtle away up into space, said the older man.

  — Yeah. Or it might cut a tunnel right through the earth, depending on the world’s orientation when it was detonated. Or it might just fly straight up. The earth orbits the sun at about 30 kilometres a second. The sun is moving too, with us in tow, and rushing in a different direction at about 20 kilometres a second. That’s a fast shear vector. It means that the blast leaves the world behind pretty rapidly, hurtles above the plane of the ecliptic and away.