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I sometimes
suspect that the guiding world-views, if not the actual plots, of most
contemporary thrillers can be found in the American Psychiatric
Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
That's the
problem with transcendence--it's only a few doors down the street from
incoherence, and it's easy to get the wrong address.
Airport newsstands may have more to do with the aesthetics of bestsellers
than we'd like to admit, since all an airport novel really has to do is
be marginally more interesting than the dog-eared Sharper Image catalog in
the seatback in front of you.
The more opinionated SF readers--those for whom an anthology is by
definition a collection of the wrong stories--will find in The Norton
Book of Science Fiction a target as big as a barn door.
Every once in while, SF writers toy with an idea for a few years or even
decades, and then--as if by spontaneous consensus that the idea may just
be Too Dumb To Live--nearly abandon it.
I suspect one reason why SF novelists like to play with the logic of
history is that there isn't any.
If you're setting out to knock us for a Stapledonian
loop, you'd better produce something more than Turtle Men from the End of
Time.
Lithia may be a utopia, but hey, they're all lizards down there,
and who ever saw a stressed-out lizard anyway?
Probably the worst thing you can say about Silverberg's career since is
that, even though he spectacularly transcended those early potboilers, he
never entirely got rid of the pot.
Even though none of us are very good at articulating what SF is, we don't
hesitate for a moment when it comes to selecting its best examples.
After decades of collecting, Ray Bradbury finally owns all the
exclamation points.
With due respect to Coleridge, some disbelief can be willingly suspended,
and some has to be beaten down with a stick.
Fantasy worlds which may seem richly detailed as long as there's a
quest going on can dry up like dead leaves as soon as we try to imagine
anything other than a quest ever happening there; it's the only
plot such worlds can support. (No one wants to read Pride and
Prejudice set among Hobbits.)
Fantasy is evaporating. I don't mean that it's disappearing
altogether--quite the opposite--but that it's growing more diffuse,
leaching out into the air around it, imparting a strange smell to the
literary atmosphere, probably even getting into
our clothes.
Horror, of course, has no particular need for the supernatural; it's
always been a genre identified by its affect more than by its narrative
conventions (in fact, it's the only genre I can think of actually named
for the feeling it tries to evoke).
Why does SF, for all its willingness to tackle enormous cosmic questions,
seem so often to shy away from genuine intellectual fictions?
At first, Paul J. McAuley's Red Dust
looks like it's going to be just another novel about Elvis-worshipping
Chinese Martians.
Slan novels contend that a better world can be
achieved once we replace everyone in power with people as weird as
ourselves
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