Other eyes

I had a very genteel argument with Martin Lewis earlier this week about Bob Shaw's story "Other Days, Other Eyes", which Martin had read as part of David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer's anthology The Ascent of Wonder. My admiration for the story is already on record, but the thing that struck me as I reread it was how much it feels like Shaw's work has become forgotten since he died in 1996. So far as I can tell, none of his books are in print on either side of the Atlantic, and his name rarely comes up in discussion of British sf.

There are probably reasons for this, but not ones to do with the quality of his work. He was unashamedly an old-fashioned writer, whose tendency was to create high-concept sf ideas but describe them in straightforward, journalistic prose. After the formal innovations of the New Wave, or even compared with contemporaries like Christopher Priest or Ian Watson, his work must have seemed small-c conservative. As Dave Langford suggests in his eloquent memorial piece, Shaw was as well known in fan circles for his "Serious Scientific Talks" as for his fiction. But there's a huge amount in his work that's work celebrating.

Quite apart from Shaw's ability to imagine huge sf venues such as Orbitsville, there was also a set of obsessions around time and memory. A late short story like "Dark Night in Toyland" is very much about nostalgia and the passing of the years. Slow glass is a wonderful way of literalising these ideas: an image enters the glass and is only visible on the other side months or years later. As Mike Harrison says in the comments to Martin's post, it's a way of making storyable the idea of deferring or avoiding the real. It also ties into another Shaw motif, sight. This comes to the fore in his novel Night Walk (1967), whose blinded protagonist has to create a new way to see. It's also there in A Wreath of Stars (1976), which gradually reveals a neutrino-world visible as a ghostly image inside our own.

If I had to nominate one passage from Shaw to point new readers at, it'd be the central set-piece of The Ragged Astronauts (1986). The set-up (in an alternate universe, so real-world physics objections don't apply) is that there are two planets, Land and Overland, close enough to each other that they are linked by an hourglass of shared atmosphere. So it's possible to travel from one to the other by hot-air balloon. The first voyage of this kind is one of the purest sf journeys of exploration I can remember - but described in a way that's so explicable, so transparent, that it seems the most plausible thing imaginable. But others, I'm sure, will have different favorite Bob Shaw moments....

No future?

Having gone on last year about how and why there's not much science fiction theatre [1], I felt duty-bound to go and see Tamsin Oglesby's Really Old, Like Forty-Five, which is unashamedly set in the future. It deals very directly with the question of what's going to happen as an increasing chunk of society is over working age, and the sorts of ideas that might get floated to address this.

So it is - I know it's a heartsinking phrase - an "issues play", but a satirical one, with plenty of incidental jokes along the way. It's set in Britain some time in the near-future. (I think I caught "midway through the 21st century" in an early speech, but then couldn't find it in the published playscript.) It focuses on three elderly siblings, Alice, Robbie, and Lyn. Also in the forefront are Cathy, Lyn's daughter, and Dylan, Alice's grandson. At the same time, there's a world of policy-wonks inhabiting an upper level of the set coming up with bright ideas about how to deal with the problems of old age. We're asked to believe that, along with an increasing number of people over 65, there's also been a huge leap in under-16s without a stable family to look after them. Hence the old are presented with two new options. They can adopt one of these children (as Lyn does) or otherwise prove they're capable of work. Or, especially if they're suffering from dementia, they can go into the new "Arks", hospitals where they're cared for free of charge but are required to participate in tests for new anti-Alzheimer's drugs. There also seems to be limited scope for euthanasia, but it's not central to the play.

The good things first. As a production, it's energetic, and there are some fine performances on stage. The show-stopper, actually, is Michela Meazza as a robot nurse: a sufficiently non-human performance to be well into uncanny valley. Of the siblings, Marcia Warren as Alice is the most affecting, not least because she seems most fully prepared for what old age olds; Gawn Grainger, as Robbie, is all too convincing as someone who desperately and implausibly wants to hang on to his youth.

The paragraph about the bad things is going to be, I'm afraid, much much longer. An issues play like this actually, oddly, has many of the same problems a science fiction story does: how do you give the audience the factual information they need to understand what's at stake? This play uses that old device, a lecture given by one of the policy experts. There are some decent jokes, but the point is made painfully clear that this play is meant to be good for you. The striking thing, actually, is how little has changed. People still read newspapers, use computers much like the ones we have, and play console games on their televisions. It's as if the author hadn't cared to think about the world beyond the immediate sphere she was concerned about. In fact - for the sf fan - the tone is very similar to the sort of light satirical sf you'd have found in, say, Galaxy in the 1950s. An idea is offered, some consequences are worked through, and it's left as a dire warning. There are, of course, very much more sophisticated treatments of this idea in sf: Geoff Ryman's VAO is the obvious example to spring to mind, but also Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, James Tiptree Jr's Brightness Falls from the Air, Logan's Run or (admittedly a very different kind of work) John Scalzi's Old Man's War.

The real weakness of the play, though, is how little it exploits the potential of its subject matter. Any work about old age will to some extent use two vast potential sources of emotional weight: memory and death. This play hardly uses the first, and the second only becomes a presence half an hour before the end. You could get more sense of dread from reading the first ten lines of Larkin's "Aubade" than from these two hours. A lot of time is spent, instead, on the dynamics of the family, on attempts to avoid thinking about old age, and on a rather overworked metaphor about turtles. There's very little sense that these characters have a past, and when they do talk about it their reminiscences seem weirdly second-hand, unfelt. Equally, the political material lacks precision in how it's presented. Do these policy-wonks work for the government or for pharmaceutical companies? Or is a convergence between the two being suggested? And given how quickly the Ark project seems to go wrong, it's implausible that the consequences wouldn't get played out in public - yet this seems to be what the play suggests.

I'm sure that an affecting and hard-hitting play about how old age is seen could be written without the sf elements that Oglesby has co-opted. There is, for want of a better word, a problem of gearing between the family scenes and the sf ideas here. Given how many people now deal with the agonising problems of dementia and old age, it's a real shame how much this play seems like a missed opportunity.


[1] And I'm not the only one.

Insert "Star" Pun Here

Thanks to yesterday's northeastern Snowmageddon, I was able to plow through a re-read of Heinlein's Double Star. In short: More than 50 years past initial publication, this Hugo Award Winner holds up and remains an enjoyable read.*

Most of its endurance can be explained by the book's focus on one character, the Great Lorenzo Smythe, rather than on the technology around him. Smythe is a down on his luck actor, sitting in a bar, hoping to hustle some credits out of a stranger. In walks Dak Broadbent, a spacer who eventually makes Smythe an offer he can't refuse -- an acting challenge that will keep a potential human/martian war from igniting.

Acting -- in the actual past and in Heinlein's imagined future -- is not a tech heavy profession. While the modes of experiencing performances have changed, the basic tools will always remain the same. Acting is about what an actor can do with her body, her voice and her brain that drives the character. Even James Cameron will cop to this.**

The world against which Smythe exists is simply but thoroughly painted by Heinlein, as he does so well. Mars, Venus, the Moon all have major human settlements. On Mars, the humans are working to co-exist with the Martians, who are easily recognized as the same Martians from 1961's Stranger in a Strange Land. There are futuristic breathing apparatuses and physics-defying space ships. Again, Heinlein, like so many writers of his era, failed to predict cell phones. And, again, a cell phone would have greatly changed bits of the plot.

Heinlein's knee-jerk heteronormativity shows up here, too. When Broadbent invites Smythe to a hotel in order to discuss the job at hand, Smythe muses, "You don't pick up a stranger in a bar and then insist that he come to a hotel room -- well, not one of the same sex, at least." Indeed.

Because Double Star is about Smythe's journey from self-absorbed prig into a fully functional Heinleinian human, all of the moments like these that signal the book's age don't feel nearly as important as what Heinlein does to his character. Double Star is Smythe's book. Even the standard Heinleinian didactic rants -- here focused on the usefulness of politics and ethics -- flow seamlessly into the narrative as Smythe ponders his ideals rather than jut out like awkwardly inserted lecture clumps.

Which isn't to say that Heinlein doesn't opine about some of his favorite topics, just that said opines*** are organically integrated. Like this one, which is part of a speech Smythe gives in a press conference:

"Let us protect our own -- but let us not be seduced by fear and hatred into foolish acts. The stars will never be won by little minds; we must be as big as space itself."

Fifty years on, we still forget this. Will we have a better grasp of the concept fifty years on?

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* Somehow, Jo Walton and I are on a similar rereading kick. And the laughable "modern" technology -- like vacuum tubes and robot diaper changers -- as well as the unsettling relationship factors Walton finds in The Door Into Summer are entirely absent in Double Star, which helps keep a modern reader from being thrown out of the story as violently.

** I am now seized by a compulsion to re-read Varley's The Golden Globe, if only to see how he approached the actor's craft.

*** It is too a word, just maybe not when used this way.

more later...

Yes, I'm still stuck on Heinlein.

Two small things recently wandered across my field of vision, tunnel-like as it is with the start of classes:

1) io9's Josh Wimmer talked about the Catcher in the Rye-ness of Stranger in a Strange Land. I mostly agree with him. You?

2) Does anyone know if there are Heinlein universe fan stories that use the same characters/settings? Any Friday/Kettlebelly Baldwin slash? Or is that just too odd? Or are Heinlein's books just too old?