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September
1996, Locus #428
Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling
Quicker than the Eye, Ray Bradbury
Over the River & Through the
Woods, Clifford D. Simak
Starlight 1, edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden
If you go back far enough, you can trace a sizeable chunk
of SF (and a bigger chunk of utopian fiction) to a mutual parent genre of
travel writing. When, for various reasons, distinctions between
fiction and nonfiction became important, travel writing spun off the
imaginary voyage subgenre, which in turn begat tales of imaginary
societies and imaginary adventures. So it's not really surprising
that many of the more thoughtful modern SF writers should bear genetic
markers of these older ancestors. The Grand Tour--whether of the
galaxy or a future earth--has long been one of SF's easiest and most
entertaining expository devices, and with intelligent writers like Kim
Stanley Robinson and Bruce Sterling taking a hard look at the workability
of various social structures and schemes, that old utopian sensibility
seems to be enjoying a kind of minor renaissance. But today, we
rightly expect utopian ideas to be explored in more densely realistic
contexts, free of the kind of ideological sucker-punches and texture less
landscapes and characters that nearly caused utopian fiction to die out
early in this century. I'm not saying that Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire should be described as a
utopian work--that would be the kiss of death for a first-rate novel
these days--but he does explore the merits and hazards of a future
gerontocracy with the discipline of a social scientist and a sensibility
toward character that goes far beyond anything he's shown before.
Good social thought and good characters are rare for utopian fiction, and
they're not all that common in SF, either. Sterling has visited this
utopian-futurist territory before, most notably with Islands in the Net, but while there
his occasional tendency to pontificate gave the novel overtones of a
corporate long-range planning report, here the people are almost as
interesting as the ideas.
Holy Fire is set exactly
one hundred years in the future, in 2096. Someone once pointed out
that such round-numbered displacements from the present--50, 100, 1000
years--can be taken as a signal that the author wants to underline the
immediacy of the text by reminding us of the year of its
publication. I'm not sure that works in all cases, but it does with
Holy Fire, which examines
the social and economic impact of biomedical advances through the story
of Mia Ziemann, a wealthy 94-year-old who
chooses to undergo a rejuvenation process so radical and disorienting
that those who survive it call themselves "posthuman.”
(The term has appeared before, mostly in the work of prefix-happy
theorists, but here for the first time it seems self-evidently
right.) Ziemann is easily the most
convincing and interesting character Sterling has so far created, and the
core of the novel is her sometimes confused but always resilient attempt
to forge an identity for herself in her "new" 20-year-old body
in a gerontocracy that both honors and exiles her. She is at once
nearly a century old and barely two weeks old, and Sterling makes the most of the inherent
dramatic irony. Along the way, he offers us rich glimpses of a
colorful 21st century in which dogs host TV talk shows, computers are
made of smart fabrics, whole city blocks are made of edible fungi, and
virtual reality has advanced several generations to create a mystical, posthuman alternative consciousness called "holy
fire.”
After undergoing her experimental rejuvenation treatment, Ziemann rebels against the lab-animal circumstances
of her recovery and escapes to Europe, where she takes to calling herself
Maya and meets a succession of thieves, artists, and intellectuals who
offer her what amounts to Sterling's version of the familiar utopian
lecture-tour, mostly through Prague and Stuttgart, which become emblems
of different aspects of Sterling's future world. For the most part,
the story is so richly textured and the characters complex enough that
the pace never really flags even when they begin speaking in bumper
stickers: "The human condition is over,” says Paul, a
university lecturer who is explaining to Maya the high-tech Dadaism that
passes for late-21st century art. "Nature is over. Art is
over. Consciousness is ductile. Science is an infinite powder
keg." Paul and his compatriots are seeking Maya's assistance to
prepare for the "singularity,” a crucial moment when human
history passes into the posthuman, when life
extension treatments have advanced far enough to guarantee virtual
immortality. Needless to say, there is considerable tension between
the younger generation of incipient immortals and the gerontocrats
already long in power, and Maya finds herself caught in the middle.
There are aspects of Holy Fire
that call to mind novels by authors as diverse as Norman Spinrad, Joe Haldeman, and
Neal Stephenson, but what is noticeably missing is the swaggering hipness of much cyberpunk writing, of which Sterling was the
original theorist. But Sterling's
ideas always seemed too complex to be entirely comfortable in such a
surface-worshiping mode, and he may temperamentally have never been
cyberpunk in the first place (although, of course, one of the most useful
definitions of a cyberpunk writer is any writer who has occasion to deny
being a cyberpunk writer). He does, however, write well about characters who are cyberpunk, and
they show up in Holy Fire
as well, but with a depth and substance we haven't seen before. It
may be Sterling's
best novel, and it's certainly one of the best of the year.
After decades of collecting, Ray Bradbury finally owns
all the exclamation points. He is the most irrepressibly
enthusiastic of all major living American writers (Walt Whitman would
have given him a good tumble), and for more than half a century this
attitude has helped shape what is probably the most unmistakeable
prose style ever to escape from the SF pulps (even though that style has
long since demonstrated more influence outside the SF field than within
it). In his new collection Quicker
than the Eye, you only need to read the first story--no, the
first paragraph, the first sentence, the first clause--to know you're in Bradburyland: "They drove into green
Sunday-morning country." This is the sort of warmly reassuring
baritone that has fed a generation of breakfast cereal commercials, Ronald
Reagan campaign ads, theme park "villages" with fake front
porches, and movies from Big
to E.T. (not to mention
the oddly unsuccessful attempts to translate Bradbury directly to film or
TV). If the voice has largely faded from the SF world (which Bradbury
himself all but abandoned decades ago), the reason isn't lack of
affection for the man or his work--it's simply that he never belonged
there in the first place. His aesthetic owed less to Heinlein or Stapledon than to Thornton Wilder or Aaron Copland
(whose music, incidentally, has been appropriated for some of those same
breakfast food ads). He's an American author who got out in time,
escaping the small-town midwest before it could
turn him into Sherwood Anderson (or David Lynch) and the decaying boardwalks of Venice, California
before growing into the cynicism of Nathanael
West. He's the only author to destroy the world in a nuclear
holocaust and turn it literally into a picnic.
Yet among non-SF readers, Bradbury is still the name that most often
comes to mind when SF is mentioned, and one of a handful of writers
anywhere who can command a first printing of 50,000 copies (according to
the promotional material for Quicker
than the Eye) for a volume of short stories. So even
if, by a fairly generous stretch, there are only three or four stories
here that could remotely be called SF, the book commands attention as
Bradbury's first collection of recent stories in many years. And
for those who had long since concluded that Bradbury had forsaken the
short story form in favor of ill-conceived detective stories and
appalling poetry, it may come as something of a pleasant surprise.
There is, to be sure, a fair measure of cloying sentimentality (such as
"Remember Sascha?,” about a poor
couple in Venice, California--he bears the trademark
autobiographical-signature name of Douglas Spaulding--who get cheery
messages from their unborn child), and there is precious little of the
hard-edged young Bradbury of Dark
Carnival (although "Free Dirt" strives for the
horror-story tone), but there are a good number of lightly entertaining
tales that often recall earlier stages in Bradbury's career. The
book isn't a retrospective collection of stories, but it is of themes.
For all that's been written and said about Bradbury, I don't recall ever
seeing him discussed as a ghost story writer, even though ghosts of one
sort or another figure in several of his most memorable tales, as they do
here. "Night Meeting,” one of the most popular stories
from The Martian Chronicles,
gets recast in Dandelion Wine country in "That Woman on the
Lawn,” about a cross-time encounter between a grown man and a young
girl who turns out to be his mother. Earlier tales like "The
Exiles" and "Usher II" grew out of Bradbury's fear that
some of his favorite imaginative writers might be banned or forgotten; in
"Last Rites,” he sends a time traveler back to assure
Melville, Poe, and Wilde that this hasn't been the case. The ghosts
of Laurel and Hardy get similar assurances in "Another Fine
Mess.” In "The Witch Door,” one of the few tales
to echo Fahrenheit 451, a
fugitive in a dystopian future hides in an ancient cubby once used to
hide witches--and trades places with a witch hidden there centuries
earlier. There are distinct echoes of "The Million Year
Picnic" in "The Other Highway" in which an overgrown road
almost lures a family to spurn their fast-paced urban life. And
Bradbury's favorite haunted places are here as well: small-time
carnivals ("The Electrocution,” "Quicker than the
Eye") and libraries ("Exchange").
While there has always been a mordant humor to some of Bradbury's more
grotesque tales (one thinks of "The Handler"), his later
attempts at comedy (dating perhaps from his stint in Ireland
with John Huston) have seemed far less edgy and often just too damned
jolly. His attempt to blend a Sherlock Holmes hommage
with an Irish tall tale in "The Finnegan" succeeds as neither,
while "The Ghost in the Machine,” his latest tribute to the
bicycle (also celebrated in several of his Irish tales), lays out its one
idea and then pounds it into pavement grease. The conceit in
"At the End of the Ninth Year" is so lame it doesn't even need
the pounding. Humor requires a certain amount of bile, and Bradbury
only occasionally manages to subdue his cheerfulness long enough to bring
it off. "The Very Gentle Murders" is a genuinely funny
story about an aging married couple trying to do each other in but
getting innocent bystanders instead, and "Zaharoff/Richter
Mark V" features the grandly loony paranoid fantasy that earthquakes
are caused by architects to drum up more business. "Unterderseaboat Doktor,”
with its magic periscope and U-boat captain turned psychiatrist, is so
off the wall I'm not sure what it's meant to be.
It's both reassuring and dismaying to think that on the basis of the
evidence in Quicker than the Eye,
Bradbury has hardly changed as a writer in decades. As always, it's
virtually impossible to speak his dialogue aloud with any hint of
conviction--people simply don't talk with all that boisterous
punctuation. As always, he views plots as optional accessories,
like adjustable lumbar seats, while the main business--the chassis --of
all his fiction is that famous cadenced language. There's no
denying that the language works: it's marketed an evanescent dream
of a Waukegan that probably never was to generations of readers and a
handful of genres; it's finessed its way past the second dumbest Mars on
record (Burroughs gets the honors) and probably the dumbest Venus; it's colonized high-school
creative writing classes the way kudzu colonized Georgia. But it
must also be said that no one can do it like Bradbury, that Bradbury can
make it work a surprisingly good part of the time, and that the best
device for imposing some restraint and discipline on this ebullient voice
is the short story. There are no masterpieces in Quicker than the Eye, but there's
some good innocent fun, and a master's voice.
Clifford D. Simak is another
classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his
rural midwestern roots--only a couple hundred
miles north of Bradbury's--but he never strayed very far from a few
classic SF themes, which he treated with considerably more rigor than
Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City
is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles--some would
say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework--and his
other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods
(a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications) attests. Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into
the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely
available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost
like new discoveries--and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may
be not that Simak's folksy language seems to
belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes
much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional
idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson
to Nancy Kress (with some further examples to be found in Patrick Nielsen
Hayden's new anthology Starlight 1
[see below]). Simak's territory isn't
entirely Simak's any longer, and it's not a bad
thing.
Over the River and Through the Woods
contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through
1980--which means it includes none of the classic stories, like
"Desertion" or "Huddling Place,” which later went to
make up City, but does
include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of
the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front
Yard.” One of the first things that comes to mind when
rereading the latter story after several years--it concerns a characteristically
laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the
only name Simak seems to have permitted for
dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds--is that few
contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be
confined to a novella. One thinks, for example, of Jack McDevitt's Ancient
Shores (reviewed here in July); like McDevitt,
Simak eventually brings in the U.N. and hints
at the political and social implications of such a discovery, but it's
clear that Simak's focus is on the unimpressed
rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep
intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien
presence, such as in "A Death in the House,” it is less likely
to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of
alien encounters in a way bizarrely suggestive of the way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are
strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor")
they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la,
isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own dreams of lost innocence.
But Simak could write about more than wonderful
things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr.
James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call
a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for
what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty
Zebra,” in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension
in return for high-tech wonders. "Construction Shack"
ironically explores an almost Stapledonian
notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto
is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the
matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is
isolation and abandonment. The title story (widely familiar
from its inclusion in LeGuin and Attebery's Norton
Book of Science Fiction) concerns children from the future
sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the
collection and one of the high points of Simak's
late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer,” concerns an
anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far
too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been
their creator. Simak's evocation, in a
few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting
perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of
younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak
was capable of.
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