"Play some old!"

The British music magazine Word had a discussion on its site a few years ago about a common phenomenon in gig-going. Your favorite band releases a new album, but it's not as good as the stuff they did 3 or 5 years ago. Nonetheless, you go along to see them play live out of a sense of loyalty or somesuch. Inevitably, they insist on leading off with a series of songs from the new album. You feel grumpier and grumpier because their attitude seems to be about disdain for their history - the history that got you interested in them in the first place. And the heckle rises in your throat: "Play some old!" (Word used to have a T-shirt bearing this slogan, but no more, it seems.)

All this came to mind earlier today when I saw that Jonathan McAlmont had tweeted, "If SF isn't dead then why is 50% of Tor.com made up of posts about really old books? Someone called Leigh Butler is reading Robert Jordan." Since a good 90% of my work for Locus is made up of writing about "really old books" - at least those more than a few decades old - I thought this might be the time to do a post about the why and how of that. I can't speak for tor.com , of course, or even for Charles Brown and the rest of the editorial team at Locus. And to be fair to Jonathan, a) he may have been exaggerrating for rhetorical effect; b) the 140-character format of Twitter doesn't allow for much nuance in argument; c) there was a further exchange with Niall Harrison in which he modified his position a bit. Niall: "I like Jo Walton's re-reads, but I do find the re-reading LOTR/Jordan/rewatching Trek/etc stuff interminable."; Jonathan: "Jo Walton's just good value all round. she's the only reason I bother to check the site. The rewatching thing is weird tho"

I started doing the "Yesterday's Tomorrows"[1] column for Locus in the summer of 2006 at the suggestion of Charles Brown. His rationale was that he wanted a sense of whether the classics of science fiction stood up to reading now by a relatively young reader. (How I got to count as someone "relatively young" is an issue we'll pass over, thankyou very much.) From my point of view, the rationale for doing them has been slightly different. As a reader of sf and, in particular, a reviewer, there's a kind of compulsion to keep up with the state of the field at present. One of the reasons I took on the column was that I thought, beyond a certain point, this was unhealthy. I don't make any prescriptions for readers in general, but I'm certain that as a reviewer the more you augment your sense of the history of the field you're working in, the better.

That's all very well for me, but what value is the column, then, for readers? My sense, from those people I've talked to, is that it's useful for people because they want an idea of the way into the canonical works of science fiction. It's for that reason I'm glad I get to write about an author's body of work rather than just a single novel - I like to try and give a sense of how someone's career evolved, how things changed, and what works were turning-points for them. I often have to write the column in a state of what I call willed innocence - ignoring, for instance, the secondary literature that's sprung up since a given author published. (You need to make exceptions every once in a while, though; my next column is on van Vogt, and I don't think you can read him without talking about Damon Knight's famous attack on him.) I'd note as well that several other people are doing similar work in looking back at classic sf. Jo Walton's posts on tor.com are indeed terrific (here's her latest one on Samuel R Delany's Nova), and there's also Sam Jordison in the (UK) Guardian, covering all the Hugo novel winners in chronological order, and Robert Silverberg in his Asimov's Reflections (scroll down). So us lot at Locus HQ are clearly not the only people who think this kind of work is useful.

None of this, though, answers Jonathan's real question: what does it say about sf if we're spending all our time looking back? Well, from my point of view, I'm not that worried, so long as it's not the only thing we're doing. My column is only one of half a dozen in Locus, and all the others talk about more contemporary work. I personally don't follow the posts on tor.com covering Robert Jordan or Star Trek, but that's because I'm not especially interested in Robert Jordan or Star Trek. Sf is a broad enough church that you ought to be able to tolerate someone liking different stuff from you. And I think there's a reason specific to science fiction for doing this kind of retro reviewing. More intensely than any other genre I can think of, science fiction tends to be about critiquing and revising predecessors. So, say Charles Stross revises and intensifies much of what's in Bruce Sterling's work and Sterling in turn revises Bester, and so on and so on... (Or, indeed, Firefly builds on Blake's Seven, which builds on Star Trek, which builds on van Vogt...) So even more than with most fields, in science fiction you don't know where you are unless you know where you've come from.

The problem with "Play some old!" as a slogan is the assumption - in the story I told at the start - that the new album isn't as good as the older stuff. That's not an assumption I share. The one thing I will say about tor.com is that a critique of them for being backwards-looking seems a little odd given that Tor's main business is putting out a bunch of new books every month. Presumably they have some success with that, since they've been doing it for a few years; which in turn suggests that the sf community is perfectly open to reading new works. But new works get discussed all over the place. If Tor and Locus and a bunch of other venues find that their readers want to pause and reflect and look back, why not provide a space for them to do that?

The final thing to say on this subject - since I'm here, and since it's relevant - is that "Yesterday's Tomorrows" will slowly be moving to cover more recent authors. This is a change I discussed with Charles Brown last year but, given lead-times and backlogs it's only happening slowly. We both felt that we were running out of "Golden Age" authors to cover, and so moving to more recent authors was a logical step. The column in the June Locus on Octavia Butler was a first step in that direction; more will follow (subscribe!). If there are any authors you'd especially like me to cover, comment away.

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[1] Only after it had been running for a year or two did I realise that I'd unconsciously filched the title from a Kate Wilhelm novella published a couple of years before. I hope to atone by covering Kate Wilhelm in the column before too long.

Zelazny Mystery

The Dead Man's Brother, Roger Zelazny (Hard Case Crime 978-08439-6115-7, $6.99, 256pp, pb) January 2009.

Roger Zelazny was one of the brilliant stars to emerge into the science fiction universe in the mid-1960s. He was a prolific and versatile writer who spanned the science fiction and fantasy fields as well as writing poetry and devising computer games. His earliest works, emotionally powerful, dreamily imagistic and often experimental, received great critical acclaim including multiple Hugo and Nebula Awards. Later in his life he tended toward less challenging but nonetheless entertaining and hugely popular adventure fantasies.

A soft-spoken, gentle-natured person, he was also seriously addicted to nicotine. It is hard to remember Roger without a cigarette in his mouth. This addiction surely contributed to, if it did not actually cause, his death at age 58 from cancer.

The impending publication of The Dead Man's Brother early in 2009 came as a happy surprise to Roger's myriad admirers. Allegedly written in 1970 or '71, this novel was discovered by Roger's agent, Kirby McCauley. Why it took nearly 40 years for the manuscript to emerge is itself a mystery.

The Dead Man's Brother is dramatically different from any other Zelazny work. The book starts in the fashion of a classic hardboiled mystery. The protagonist, Ovid Wiley, proprietor of a Manhattan art gallery, arrives one morning to find a corpse awaiting him. We learn that Wiley is a reformed art thief. The body is that of his quondam partner in crime, Carl Bernini.

Wiley, now a solid citizen, calls the police, who take him into custody. Before long he realizes that he is going to be prosecuted for Bernini's murder, but before things can progress very far he is "rescued" by CIA operatives who recruit him as an agent. He winds up in Rome, trying to track down $3,000,000 of stolen Vatican funds.

Things get incredibly tangled as Wiley becomes involved with a beautiful, hot-blooded Italian woman, travels briefly to Portugal, and thence to Brazil. Here he is once more entangled in a murder investigation. He winds up trekking through the Matto Grosso, dealing with a regional separatist movement, captured, tortured, escaping, dodging bullets, and – did I mention this before – smoking?

Roger was addicted to cigarettes. Oh, I said that already. Yes. So, obviously, is Ovid Wiley, whom I take to be a kind of fantasy alter-ego for the author. Wiley smokes before, during, and after virtually every scene in the book. He smokes when he wakes up in the morning. He smokes with his meals. He smokes while he waits for things to happen. He smokes whenever the author wants to pause the action. In the music world I believe the term for this is, vamp till ready.

After a while it becomes a kind of contest between reader and author, to see how long Roger – er, Ovid – can go without lighting a cigarette. He seldom goes longer than page without a ciggie, sometimes several on one page, and when Ovid isn't smoking he's being offered a smoke, offering a smoke, lighting a smoke for someone else, or watching somebody else smoke.

I had to take a shampoo to get the stink out of my hair when I finished reading this book.

My recommendation: Read Lord of Light. If you've already read it, read it again. It's a masterpiece. Even if Roger couldn't help having Buddha smoke a cigarette.

--Richard A. Lupoff

Editor's note: This review, from the May 2009 issue, generated several letters of comment, which are reproduced as the first four comments below.

The Hovercraft of Disbelief

A couple of years ago, there was a conversation between some friends of mine about a science fiction story that went something like this:

Person A: You know what problems in worldbuilding are like? They're like when you're cycling along, and suddenly hit a patch of stony ground, and end up flipping over your handlebars.
Person B: Hmm, I think I've got better suspension than you.
Person C: I've got a hovercraft!

[Dialogue slightly edited from original post following an account from someone who was there]

I wasn't present at this conversation, but since then "the hovercraft of disbelief" has been helpful shorthand to denote one person having a different threshold of disbelief from another. For instance, when I posted a couple of weeks ago the video of someone skydiving from low orbit, Russell Letson commented to say 'my first response is "How the hell did she avoid burning up on re-entry?" Sense of wonder can be overcome by skepticism, and maybe one of the distinctions between the core readerships for SF and fantasy is that ordering (or perhaps triggering-level) of responses.' [1] The same question had occurred to me, a bit, but was overtaken by primal isn't-this-cool-ness. Which I suppose is an obvious point: different people will have their hovercrafts (to extend the metaphor) floating at different altitudes over the ground. Reader expectations play a part too: if you read a story in Analog, by and large, you expect more in the way of rigorous scientific worldbuilding than if it's in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. And I do agree with Russell that one of the things reading in genre sf does is to prime you to ask these kinds of questions.

Case in point. Martin Amis's short story "Straight Fiction" (1995, collected in Heavy Water and Other Stories) is about a world where almost everyone is gay and an embattled minority is straight. So, for instance, movie stars get outed as "Totally Het", there are samizdat erotic novels called things like Breeders, and Amis gets to have fun with ideas like this:

"Every winter Cleve reread half of Jane Austen. Three novels, one in November, one in December, one in January. Every spring he reread the other half. This was January and this was Pride and Prejudice.
"'Yeah,' he said. 'For like the ninth time. What I can't get over is - every time I read it I'm on the edge of my seat, rooting for Elizabeth and Mr Darcy. You know - *will* Elizabeth finally make it with Charlotte Lucas? *Will* Mr Darcy finally get it on with Mr Bingley? I mean, I know everything's going to turn out fine. But I still suffer. It's ridiculous.'" (208)

The problem I ran into was the elementary one: where do all the babies come from? "Straight fiction" is set in more-or-less contemporary New York, in a world where, until recently, you could be arrested or worse for public displays of heterosexual affection. Amis seems to recognise this is a problem, and provides various different accounts of where all the straight people have gone: San Francisco is referred to as a place where as many as two in five people are heterosexual; and the protagonist Cleve "learns" from a news magazine that there might be as many as two and a half million straights in greater New York City. One assumes that gay couples use surrogacy techniques as they do in our world, but none are shown doing so. A straight pregnancy is depicted, but it seems as rare and strange to Cleve as a green sky. And if only a minority are having children, how did New York get to be as populous as it is? How do the demographics work? Are those children brought up in straight families socially disadvantaged? There must surely be a huge number of them. Did none of Amis's characters come from straight families? Amis could, I suppose, be making a point about social erasure of groups that majority culture isn't concerned about, but his response to the question of children is so twitchy and partial that I doubt it. Amis's response would doubtless be that he's not interested in that kind of question, that he wants to explore the satiric potential of his central conceit. And perhaps the sorts of questions I ask above are the sort that a science fiction reader would tend to ask. (Amis has another story in the same collection, "Career Move", riffing off exactly the same kind of inversion: in this world, poets are the ones who get flown to Hollywood and have their work made into huge-budget epics, whereas screenplay-writers get their work published in micro-circulation magazines run by catastrophic alcoholics. Again, there's no sense of how this inversion works, how the poems actually make money.)

There's a separate issue with the Amis. On the surface, he seems to be depicting a mostly-gay New York as a benign and idyllic place. But at times, he seems to be deriving his comedy from playing up to stereotypes of gay life: "So Cleve, who had not had sex at the gym, blew Kico in the front hall and then set about making dinner: a Gorgonzola souffle to be followed by the Parma-ham confit with pomegranate, papaw, papaya, and pomelo" (205) The gay men who are depicted - and the story focuses almost entirely on them rather than women - are gym-obsessed, tank-top-wearing and, of course, have moustaches.

Maybe I'm living up to the stereotype of sf-reader-as-overly-literal-irony-free-zone. But one of the things that genre sf has built up over its history is a huge armory of technique to do with worldbuilding - how to convey information naturalistically, how to make a world at least seem consistent. (Because it's all scenery flats in the end.) As a reader you build up a matching set of skills. There are different writerly approaches to the issue (Ursula Le Guin, Larry Niven) just as there are different degrees of readerly tolerance: I myself find the political issue with "Straight Fiction" - the stereotyping of gay culture - far more of a problem than the worldbuilding issue. And worldbuilding can escape the shackles of literalism - probably the most prominent practitioner/advocate of this is M John Harrison. The weird thing about the Amis story, in particular given the moral and intellectual rigour of Time's Arrow, is that it clearly knows there's a vacancy in its ideas and it just doesn't care.



[1] Admittedly, Gregory Benford weighed in later to note that "[The video] appears to be based on my short story, "Orbitfall," published in Baen's Universe about half a year ago. Indeed, avoiding burnup on reentry places demands on the suit. But as well, in the film and in "Orbitfall," she isn't in orbit. The falling velocity is thus much less (about 10% of orbital velocity)."

A good question

Why is there no sf theatre?

I've talked before about my admiration for Nick Lowe's criticism, which has appeared in Interzone since 1985. The above question was one he asked in his second column (Interzone 14), and he helpfully proposed a number of possible answers:

a) Theatre is a moribund artform too inflexible to accommodate the mind-expanding concepts of modern science fiction.
b) Same, reading "science fiction" for "theatre" and vice versa.
c) Live performed sf would find itself competing unfavourably with the technical legerdemain available to recorded media.
d) Science fiction is an essentially popular genre and theatre is an essentially elitist medium; consumers of theatre and consumers of sf are minimally overlapping social groups.
e) Historical accident: no science-fictional plays established emulative traditions.
f) Genre sf is too crummy, radical sf too fringey, to be a bankable risk in a subsidised medium.
g) SF habitues are a bit of a bunch of dimmies and wouldn't touch live theatre with any more appreciation than they'd pick up Daniel Deronda or Travels with my Aunt.

Lowe allowed, perfectly fairly, that there were occasional individual instances of sf theatre such as Illuminatus or Little Shop of Horrors; but his core point was that there's "no sense of a tradition within the medium that new works can acknowledge, build on, plagiarize." Nearly 25 years on, I'm sure plenty of individual instances of sf theatre could be listed, but I think the general point remains. (Possibly indicative datapoint: the first four Google results for "science fiction theatre" are a tv series, a rock album, the tv series again, and a record label.) And certainly, there's a huge contrast between sf in theatre and in film - where sfnal works can be blockbuster or arthouse or anywhere in between, where directors can carve out careers for themselves primarily in the genre, and where CGI imagery has hugely augmented the possibilities of the form in the last two decades.

What I would like to suggest, though, is that there is a sense in which one can talk about the fantastic, more generally, as a tool in theatre. I'm not saying that there's a tradition of fantasy works in theatre; I am saying that there's a tradition of using the tools of the theatre to create fantastic moves. Some examples off the top of my head: the statue of Hermione coming back to life in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; J B Priestley's time-slip plays; the metafictional devices used by Tom Stoppard, such as the critics in The Real Inspector Hound getting trapped in the play they're watching; Martin McDonagh's The Pillowman, which flirts with the idea (and enactment) of the vicious fairy-tales written by its writer protagonist. I suppose the point of view I'm arguing is close to that put forward by Tony Kushner in his note on the staging of his play Angels in America (itself one of the great works of recent fantasy):

The play benefits from a pared-down style of presentation with minimal scenery and scene-shifts done rapidly (no blackouts!) employing the cast as well as stage-hands - which makes for an actor-driven event, as this must be. The moments of magic - the appearance and disappearance of Mr Lies and the ghosts, the book hallucination, and the ending - are to be fully realised, as bits of wonderful Theatrical illusion - which means it's OK if the wires show, and maybe it's good that they do, but the magic should at the same time be thoroughly amazing.

It was this approach that helped make Angels in America one of the most memorable experiences of my theatre-going life - and its absence made the HBO miniseries a lot less interesting. Film is a literal medium in which anything is possible - hence perhaps the difficulty in apprehending works that shade from "realism" into "dream" such as Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut. But theatre is (or, at least, can be, and perhaps is most at home being) figurative. Perhaps that's another answer to Lowe's question: many readers expect science fiction to be literal and widescreen when it depicts the future, and that simply isn't what theatre's best at.