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OtherRealms Issue 18 Part 05
Electronic OtherRealms #18
Fall, 1987
Part 5
Rebellion, Counter-Revolution
Blemishes and Potential
Commentary by James Brunet
jimb@ism780c.uucp
Copyright 1987 by
James Brunet
Books in this column:
Hardwired
Walter Jon Wiliams
Tor, 1986, 343pp.
Voice of the Whirlwind
Walter Jon Williams
Arbor House, 1987, 248pp.
The Uplift War
David Brin
Bantam/Spectra, 1987, 638pp.
Neuromancer
William Gibson
Arbor House, 1986, 278 pp.
Count Zero
William Gibson
Arbor House, 1986, 278pp.
Speaker for the Dead
Orson Scott Card
Tor, 1986, 415pp.
The Year Before Yesterday
Brian Aldiss
Franklin Watts, 1987, 227pp.
Fire Watch
Collection from Connie Willis
Bluejay, 1985, 274pp.
Cyberpunk now comes in a spray can. At least that's the impression
fostered by some current novels cashing in on the latest hot trend
within SF.
'What should Science Fiction be?' is just an allotrope of the
old question 'What is Science Fiction anyhow?' We all know that
the only proper answer to that one is 'Shut up.' -- Joe
Haldeman**
Well, okay, but before we talk about cyberpunk spray, what is
cyberpunk, anyway? Someone needs to know.
Cyberpunk is held by some to be merely a marketing label; others hold
that it is the only worthwhile work being done in SF today. With
literary antecedents that include Alfred Bester, John Brunner, and
P.K. Dick, the current cyberpunk movement catapulted to prominence
with William Gibson's Neuromancer, which swept the major SF awards of
1984. Which is not to say that the current wave labeled cyberpunk
began with Neuromancer. Certainly Gibson's short fiction "Burning
Chrome" and "Johnny Mnemonic" had received critical attention two to
three years previously and writers such as Gibson, Bruce Sterling, and
John Shirley were already influencing each other.
But it was Neuromancer that brought cyberpunk to the masses. Defined by
Gibson's example, cyberpunk is marked by high-tech flash, dwelling
particularly on human-computer interfaces and biological modifications
to the human body. Cyberpunk prose traditionally (traditionally?
already?) is intense and energy-filled, hard and glittery. Cyberpunk's
heroes come from the ranks of the anti-heroes residing in the underside
of society.
But these characteristics are superficial. Cyberpunk is most intensely
a matter of rebellion. Rebellion permeates its tone -- the attitude of
the authors toward their material. But rebellion against what?
The rebellion takes on two forms. Many cyberpunk writers and fans are
fond of saying that the future is different now, meaning that the old
futures of SF -- optimistic techno-imperialist visions where virtue and
hard work pay off an upgraded version of the American dream, replete
with success on technical, social, and personal fronts -- have been
dumped into the dustbin of history. Cyberpunk's visions are different,
drawing upon a legacy of urban decay, political corruption,
assassination, formation of an international corpocracy, and social
decadence.
Cyberpunk's characters are no less revolutionary than the vision. Many
characters from traditional SF are idealized. They never seem to have a
problem finding a parking space or an empty bathroom stall (some seem
as if they never need the facilities of the latter anyway), they've
never had a baby vomit in their hair, their family relationships are
either well within bounds of tolerable normality or else conveniently
absent.... Cyberpunk rebels against this image, choosing as its heroes
the sleazy, the losers, and, well, the rebels.
Beyond vision and character, cyberpunk's whole ethos is different. The
ethos of traditional SF seems to be, "Things will work out if we try
hard enough and in the right direction." Cyberpunk seems to counter
with "Life is a bitch, and then you die, but a little hedonism and
nihilism in the meanwhile is not a bad thing."
In some ways, cyberpunk seems to be a redirection of the New Wave which
swept SF in the late 60's and early 70's. But New Wave seemed to
concentrate most intently on matters of form, considering content
mostly in terms of what it should not be as exemplified by traditional SF.
Returning, then, from our thumbnail exploration of cyberpunk, consider
Hardwired, a first novel by Walter Jon Williams. Hardwired is the story
of Cowboy, a panzerboy. As a panzerboy, Cowboy plugs into the computer
of his heavily armed and armored vehicle and smuggles compact,
high-priced products such as scarce pharmaceuticals from one side of
the Balkanized ex-USA to the other, eluding the state militias,
competing smugglers, and agents of the rich, powerful, and oppressor
Orbitals, corporate space-based de-facto states.
In the course of his adventures, Cowboy links up with Sarah, the hard-
bitten, tough-as-nails bio-enhanced freelance mercenary. Thrown
together as allies -- neither can afford to have friends -- they fight
to survive against lethal doublecrosses and the intrigue of some
Orbitals who get the idea that smallfry like Cowboy and Sarah can upset
their nice little status quo. While passing time on their escapades,
they punctuate bouts of taunts and suspicion by screwing each other
silly, which I suppose demolishes any notion that emotional environment
has something to do with sexual response.
Among other things, Hardwired is an homage to Zelazny and Gibson. The
panzerboy dash across country is right out of Damnation Alley; at least
Williams has the good grace to acknowledge Zelazny and Alley in his
dedication. The Orbitals, the mercenaries, the computers, and the drugs
are all ripped-off from Gibson, much as the fotocopy-fantasy writers
rip-off Tolkien.
To Williams' credit, at least the ending is a reasonable compromise. If
Evil does not triumph, at least Case and Molly, er, I mean Cowboy and
Sarah, do not amble off to live happily after.
But when all the dust settles, this is not the cyberpunk novel that you
might expect from the cover illustration and superficial indications
like prose style. Yes, we have a whole slew of cyberslang terms such as
mudboy, dirtgirl, zonedancer, buttonhead, etc. And all the
computer-jacking terms are there. But it's all sprayed on. What
Williams has written is a good old- fashioned adventure romance and
then lacquered it over with cyberpunk imagery.
Now I happen to like some good old-fashioned adventure romances. As
such, Hardwired isn't bad. But it will give aid and comfort to those
who see cyberpunk as a marketing label, and it will betray any reader
who picks it up expecting something of a cyberpunk sensibility.
Beyond the issue of a horse in camel's clothing, Hardwired fails to
convince on its own terms. The world has a papier-mache feel to it. As
an example, the Orbitals are supposedly rich and powerful, keeping the
earthbound states fighting over dregs and scraps. Yet in this allegedly
impoverished society, arms and armament are everywhere, as are bio-
enhancements and recreational pharmaceuticals. Who pays for all of
this, and how?
Another problem is the lapse into pseudo-profound philosophical
reflections that are difficult to take seriously, to wit:
""He and the other deltajocks were not an abstract response to
market conditions, but a continuation of some kind of
mythology. Keeping a light burning in the darkness, hope in the
shape of an afterburner flame. The last free Americans, on the
last high road....""
Hardwired is not a novel I would hand someone as introduction to SF. It
is, however, the sort of passable entertainment suitable for a plane
trip or a day at the beach.
But a first novel is a first novel. For every writer that breaks in
with a brilliant best-seller, another dozen begin slogging at the
bottom of the ramp, hoping to work their way up. Williams' second
novel, Voice of the Whirlwind is less self-conscious, more original,
and shows some promise.
The story is that of Steward, a ex-corporate mercenary. The Steward in
this book is a Beta, a clone of the original who was murdered. Only the
original (the Alpha) was sloppy in keeping his memories updated, so
Beta Steward must figure out who murdered his original, and why, or
else life could be terminated just as easily a second time. And this
time Steward doesn't have the financial resources to set up clone
insurance.
Steward careens around the solar system in pursuit of his mystery. He
comes into contact with the aliens who maintain trading posts in the
asteroid belt, dirty tricks operatives from various corporations, a
hard- bitten female with whom he maintains a shaky alliance (does this
sound familiar?), another ex-mercenary who served under Steward's
Alpha, and a full menu of sleazy, conniving, no-goodniks that would
make Boris Badunov proud.
Voice of the Whirlwind has two outstanding flaws. Considering how
useful it would be to produce various characters in the flesh on
demand, it's amazing that this very corrupt universe doesn't find clone
insurers running off illegal copies of people for various purposes.
Secondly, Steward always winds up getting to where he needs to go,
regardless of what part of the solar system and how tight the security,
never questioning the apparent serendipity. If I were into duplicity
and paranoia as part of my trade, I would surely have suspicions if a
taxi always appeared, heading toward my destination, just as I needed
it. Yet this is what effectively happens to Steward and he never stops
to consider whether or not someone might be setting him up, and if so,
why.
Michael Swanwick wrote "A User's Guide to the Postmoderns," an essay
which appeared in the August, 1986 issue of Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine.
It was a coherent, insightful analysis of the cyberpunks and the
humanists -- the two main camps of post-New Wave groups of SF writers.
Unfortunately, Swanwick's novel Vacuum Flowers represents a triumph of
incoherence over accessibility, plot, character, and other literary
values. The story concerns a woman who steals a hot personality
implant, the equivalent of getting a copy of next month's hot video
release that everyone will want and bootleg distributors will pay
dearly for to have an advance copy. Of course the problem is that the
woman, Rebel Elizabeth Mudlark, is essentially wearing this new
personality, with her original personality, which went by the name of
Eucrasia Walsh, completely suppressed and gone. More than this, I can't
tell you, because I found it impossible to continue. Pity, because
Swanwick has previously demonstrated that he has an understanding of
what is going on in the SF field and has written some good fiction in
the past (In the Drift, et al.).
David Brin is a clever man. With The Uplift War he has managed to avoid
that affliction of so many SF writers, sequelitis tedious. For instead
of a sequel to the Nebula- and Hugo-winning Startide Rising, Brin has
given us the third piece of a four-dimensional jigsaw puzzle (Brin's
first novel, Sundiver, was the first piece).
The pieces are related in time, plot, and theme, but strictly speaking
they are not sequels to each other. The distinction is important,
because it means that Brin is not trapped trying to flog new life and
new complications out of a set of continuing characters. While I think
that ultimately some characters may reappear, in cameo roles or
otherwise, they will still be fresh enough, unfettered enough, that
they can still be dynamic -- changed as a result of their previous
experiences but subject to being affected by the new adventures --
instead of being forced into a static mode like so many on-going
characters of endless series.
In response to questioning during a signing at The Change of Hobbit,
Brin said that he expected that there would be six or seven novels when
the grouping is complete. He also indicated that the Streaker and its
crew from Startide would probably figure in a future novel, that he
(Brin) wanted to find out what happens to them.
The Uplift War takes place on the planet Garth, one of the Earth's few
colony planets in a Galaxy (actually, Galaxy cluster) teeming with
intelligent races, all of whom have been "uplifted" to intelligence by
other races, their patrons. This chain of uplifts extends back millions
of years, back to the mythic progenitor race. When life with potential
for intelligence is discovered on a planet, it is subjected to genetic
manipulation by the discoverers. The client species, in turn, must
serve their patrons for a period of 100,000 years.
As established by Brin's two previous novels set in this universe,
Earthlings have stumbled out into the Galaxy without the benefit of
Uplift. Furthermore, they themselves have already begun uplifting two
of their own "client" races, dolphins and chimpanzees. From the
standpoint of many of the races in the Galaxy (called Galactics),
Earthlings are a "wolfling race" due to their own lack of patron, and
as such are effectively religious heretics. The tension erupts to a
flashpoint in Startide Rising, where a Terran starship, captained and
crewed mainly by dolphins, discovers a derelict fleet of spacecraft. To
the conservative Galactics, possession of the derelict fleet would be
an enormous advantage in their internecine religious and political
disputes. As a result, they are determined to wring the location of the
fleet from Earth by whatever means possible, and war ensues.
The Uplift War concerns Earth's colony named Garth. The only reason
that Earth has this colony is that the Galactics consider it to be
hopelessly ravaged by ecological mismanagement of a now-exterminated
client race. Poor possession that it is, one race of Galactics, the
birdlike Gubru, decides to invade Garth and hold it hostage in exchange
for information regarding the location of the Progenitor derelict fleet.
Garth defends itself sharply before being overrun, thereby gaining
points in Galactic politics, which resemble nothing so much as an
elaborate game of shifgrethor[*] Most of the colonists -- a mixture of
humans and uplifted chimpanzees, the mineral salts of Garth's waters
being poisonous to dolphins -- either sullenly or actively collaborate
with their overlords.
The three main characters are Robert Oneagle, son of the Planetary
Coordinator; Fiben Bolger, a chimpanzee military pilot; and Athaclena,
daughter of the Tymbrimi Ambassador. (The Tymbrimi are one of the few
Galactic races openly sympathetic to the Terrans.) The Gubru expect an
easy occupation of Garth because they have used biological weapons to
cause all humans to surrender (Robert escapes the effects of the
biological agents) and they hold the Terran's chimpanzee clients in
disdain. Yet Robert and Athaclena forge a band of chimpanzees into an
effective, er, guerilla fighting force.
Brin handles the chimpanzee personalities and culture fair enough,
certainly in a more satisfying manner than the lone chimpanzee, Dr.
Charles Dart, who seemed something of a buffoon stereotype in
Startide. The treatment of the chimpanzee characters falls short,
however, of the inventiveness Brin displayed in capturing the soul of
his dolphins in Startide.
Brin does carry over, though, one of his greatest strengths from
Startide, the treatment of the various Galactic races. He manages to
convey alien cultures, alien ethos, alien personalities in a
multi-dimensional manner captured by few writers. And he has done this
with not one or two alien races, but several. Indeed, I often found the
chapters written from the Galactic's points of view to be among the
most interesting.
One of the threads buried in Uplift that seems as if it might warrant
future development is the existence of hydrogen-breathing races in the
galaxy which remain almost entirely outside the political and cultural
commerce of the oxygen-breathers.
A substantial sub-plot of Uplift is the romance between Robert and
Athaclena. The Tymbrimi, who look somewhat like elves with tentacles in
their hair, have the useful ability to adapt their physiologies, within
limits, under conscious control. If Brin ever takes a stab at writing
SF porno, this is a natural. (Which shape do you prefer? This? Or this?
Is this tight enough? Tighter? Etc.)
The basis of the cross-species romance is explained, though I found my
credulity wavering at that point. And unfortunately the romance is not
resolved in any satisfactory manner. But what struck me as most
interesting was the psychological resemblance of Athaclena to any
number of adolescent heroines from Heinlein's work.
Which brings us to a controversial contention. Brin is making a move to
occupy the niche held by Heinlein for so long, that of the master
storyteller. In terms of tone and content, Brin's work is a throwback
to the fifties and early sixties, but with a fresh coat of paint. His
work is optimistic, there is a sense of wonder, the heroes are drawn
from the ranks of the heroes, the good guys -- at least so far -- do
win. Brin belongs to the counter-revolution and his work is sure to
grate the teeth of any dedicated cyberpunk.
And yet Brin is a counter-revolutionary, not a reactionary seeking to
restore status quo ante. His plotting, themes, and general literary
craft are superior to most of the work from the fifties and sixties.
And the optimism is not pure; there are cautionary notes, explicit
reminders that we are on the edge of disasters -- technical, economic,
political, and ecological.
Writing is a curious, complex activity. One way to make distinctions
between parts of the activity is to divide the whole into the
storytelling and the writing (literary craft) -- the way the story is
told. Certainly the two aspects are interrelated, one affects the
other. Quibble with labels, if you will, I use them only as reference
points. Brin does not declaim from under a proscenium arch on the stage
of an amphitheater. No, instead he is squatting in front of the fire,
telling us a tale that begins "There were these guys, see..." as we
listen and try to forget for a moment the howling of the wolves away in
the night or the fact that the morrow's hunt will be long and demanding.
Brin is a storyteller. He leaves to others the finely polished prose,
instead just trying to tell a tale, but well. His narrative breaks
every now and then to throw in an aside seemingly intended for only the
reader, the single listener at the edge of campfire to the exclusion of
all the others.
It is in this capacity as a storyteller that Brin is taking aim at
Heinlein. Heinlein, who these days seems to be writing a series of
valedictory novels (his latest may prove me wrong), secured his place
in SF history not on the basis of his writing per se, but his ability
to spin out engrossing yarns from his fecund imagination, year after year.
There are literary 800 lb. canaries who, having established a popular
reputation, manage to get published anything that rolls off their
printers. This is because as long as their name is on it, the masses
will continue to buy it, even if it's nothing more than a translation
of the Albanian national anthem. If Brin continues in his present vein,
assuming that he does not let himself become one of the aforesaid 800
lb. canaries, he will be pressing hard to claim Heinlein's niche. It
may be premature to declare Brin heir to Heinlein's mantle, but perhaps
it's time to start measuring the fit.
"It seems to me that we are too ready in SF to praise or
condemn too loudly, and without perspective. Too often what
passes for real criticism...reads not much different from the
blurbs on the backs of paperbacks." -- John Kessel ***
The 1987 Hugo Awards are history. Two of the leading contenders for
Best Novel were William Gibson's Count Zero and Orson Scott Card's
Speaker for the Dead, with Speaker garnering the award. Both are decent
novels. Yet in the context of discussion about the best that SF has to
offer, both present problems that make them fall short of the ideal.
Count Zero is a good flash-and-grit novel of the cyberpunk variety.
It's characters include a cynical corporate-world mercenary, a bright
but naive punk kid with ambitions of becoming a bright punk
wheeler-dealer, a betrayed down-and-out artist given a shot at
achieving financial, if not artistic, status, and a whole gaggle of
opportunistic, manipulative, street- wise, electro-cunning,
software-enhanced morally-zeroed thugs.
Gibson does a nice job of threading our heroes -- and compared to their
opponents, they're certainly the morally superior human beings --
through their intense, high-energy adventures, which are interesting.
Only... the ending. If the name Joe Schlobotnik had been on the
manuscript instead of William Gibson, an editor would have written
back, "Gee, this is nice. But do you think the ending could have a
little more to do with the actions of the characters?" The plot lines
converge only for the characters to find themselves in one hell of a
pickle, and what happens? A minor character -- out to revenge another
minor character killed early in the story -- comes in and wipes away
the Threat, Deus ex Machina.
Gibson creates a brilliant background. He tells his stories lucidly,
brilliantly at times. His characters, even if they aren't the people
you want to have living next door, are adequately drawn, if at times
they rely upon novelty rather than depth. Against this background, a
failure of the storytelling apparatus is frustrating.
SF is renowned for its nitpickers, particularly those of the flavor
that write authors to inform them that they missed a technical nuance
that would have affected the fifth and sixth decimal points of an
equation's result. Curiously, the nitpickers fall silent when it comes
to non-technical details. The situation is not unlike a conference on
computer animation where some individuals sneer at those who don't know
what an algorithm is, only to be sneered at in turn because they lack
any training in art or even a sense of esthetics.
Before I make my first nit at Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead,
I should make it clear that I don't particularly care for Steven
Spielberg movies. The connection is one of manipulation. Spielberg
pulls the heartstrings by using scenes and components that are all but
guaranteed to get an emotional reaction. Sure, I got bleary eyed during
ET; I was also angry at the palpable manipulation on a level not far
removed from showing Lassie run over by a truck, Bambi being vivisected
in a laboratory, or Snow White being molested by the dwarves.
Card performs similar manipulations with his characters in Speaker .
He isn't content to let us feel sympathy or pity for the orphaned girl
or the abused children, he makes sure we sympathize.
A separate, more astonishing point in Speaker is Card's treatment of
the Catholic church, which is portrayed more than 3,000 years in the
future as having regressed by 250 years as an institution. The
conservative bent of the present Pope not withstanding, even a cursory
review of Church history finds that attitudes and doctrine continually
evolve, if at a glacial pace in some areas.
Card trips up on the rendering of practical details of Catholic
communities as well. Speaker features a woman who has several
children, even though her husband suffers from a lengthy disease, of
which one of the first symptoms has been sterility in every other case
ever observed. The resident medical expert writes this off as an
anomaly, and it never occurs to anyone that the woman is having her
children fathered outside of marriage.
Catholic communities and Catholic priests are well acquainted with
human frailties. In practice, Catholics are expected to aim at
perfection, while simultaneously holding that such perfection is
impossible to achieve.
From a sociological point of view, the institutions of confession and
penance (or reconciliation if you prefer the newer terminology) provide
a method for containing and controlling moral transgressions. Note,
contain and control; there is never any serious expectation that such
transgressions will not occur, even though Christ-like perfection is
the aim. Therefore a Catholic community will not find adultery impossible
to conceive and will not be terribly surprised when it does occur.
A third facet of Speaker to argue over is the character Jane, a
computer-resident consciousness that, via instantaneous ansible link,
is connected to computers on a network spanning light-years. Jane
maintains that she has 50,000 levels of awareness, and that government,
academic, corporate, and personal computer files are an open book to
her; not a significant action occurs anywhere without her knowledge.
Furthermore, she manipulates these files to the ends of Ender Wiggins'
needs, sometimes without his foreknowledge or consent, thereby causing
desired actions to occur. Thus, Jane is effectively both omniscient and
omnipotent. She also seems omnibenevolent. Folks, forget the
technobabble explanation of how Jane came into awareness. What we have
here is the Fourth Person of the Holy Trinity and Ender Wiggin is the
first human to experience Her grace. Card ducks all but the most
trivial implications of Jane and misses a lot of potential for it.
Finally, Card sets up a major moral conflict and then simply washes it
away with a convenient accident to keep things from getting too
sticky. Because of the adulterous relationship previously referred to,
two characters find that they are half-brother and half-sister, not
completely unrelated as they had thought. The discovery shatters a deep
romance. But instead of struggling with conflicts involving the nature
of love and the potential of incest, Card ducks the entire question by
having one of the characters become severely crippled -- effectively
aged by several decades -- and shipped off-planet on a mission for the
Good of the Planet. Fooey. Card has set up a powerful situation
between love and morality, worthy of some compelling storytelling, and
then bails out. This is not a signpost of superior writing.
One curiosity finding its way into my reading pile lately was Brian
Aldiss' The Year Before Yesterday. I say curiosity, because it's
difficult to know what to make of this book.
Year is published by Franklin Watts Press as part of a handsomely
designed hardcover line that also includes a reprint of Alfred Bester's
The Demolished Man. The cover of Year is right out of a pulp tradition,
portraying a blaster-carrying hero wearing an Izod tunic (complete with
alligator symbol), with a Union Jack fluttering in the background.
Nothing unusual except that the Union Jack has a large swastika
superimposed on the center. The cover also informs us that Brian W.
Aldiss is a winner of the Hugo Award.
The story begins in an alternate universe, one where the USA stayed
isolationist as German and the Soviet Union, the latter aided by their
Japanese allies, gobble up most of the world. The main character is a
Finnish composer whom we meet walking home from a concert. Finland has
managed to maintain its independence between its powerful neighbors to
the east and south, but the independence is so precarious that concert
music has its political implications.
On his walk home, our composer discovers the body of a murdered woman
by the side of the road. He carries the body to his house, where he
discovers two American science fiction novels, which he characterizes
by the Finnish term "Maybe-Myth," in her knapsack. He calls the police,
checks on his wife sleeping in the other room, and then sits down to read.
Most of the rest of Year is an excuse to tell the two condensed novels
found in the knapsack. Each is mildly entertaining in their own right,
and there is something of a nod to P.K. Dick's Man in the High Castle
with the alternate views of history.
Surfacing from the Maybe-Myths every now and then, we learn about the
composer's unsatisfying relationship with his wife, a bit of Finnish
international politics, and that the composer ultimately is arrested as
the prime murder suspect. Add to this melange the fact that the policeman
who arrests the composer periodically metamorphoses into a reindeer.
Either I am Missing Something, or this is what passes as a literary
joke among the British, or the publisher wanted a manuscript by a Hugo-
winning author (cf., 800-lb. literary canary).
"I try to write about adults. A lot of readers don't understand
that. I try to write about adults who matter, men and women who
are in the midst of the great forces of change that swirl
around us. Like any writer, I am not always successful. And
sometimes I relax and write something that is not meant to be
taken all that seriously."-- Ben Bova **
Connie Willis will be an acquired taste for readers accustomed to wish-
gratification adolescents-disguised-as-adults science fiction. A nice
sampler of her work is her short story collection Fire Watch.
Willis writes for and about adults. Her characters have adult
sensibilities and adult problems. Many of Willis' stories feature what
could be called ordinary characters in extraordinary situations, though
often the situation itself is muted, lacking the splashy pyrotechnic
plots of conventional SF.
In the Fire Watch collection we meet a collection of characters. As
with any group of people that we meet, we will like some more than
others and our tastes will not necessarily be in agreement with that of
others. I particularly liked the stories "All My Darling Daughters,"
"Mail Order Clone," "Samaritan," "And Come From Miles Around," and the
wonderful "Blued Moon." I won't reveal much of the stories except to
say that few authors have tackled orangutans wishing to be baptized,
hell-for-leather students at an orbital boarding school (complete with
sandstone buildings), the universality of the scientific persona, or
the interrelationship between language and reality.
I'm afraid that Willis may be a writer's writer, which is perhaps odd
for someone whose literary career began by writing women's confession
stories, such as "I Called for Help on My CB...and Got a Rapist
Instead." In an introductory note in Fire Watch, Willis says that she
still enjoys writing confessions when she gets the chance.
Whatever, Willis writes some nicely crafted adult-centered science
fiction. Give her a try.
Footnotes:
* Shifgrethor -- From Ursula LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness, an
elaborate social game governing all important relationships,
taking into account fine points of etiquette, protocol, and
"face."
** Quotes from Joe Haldeman and Ben Bova reprinted from the Spring 1987
issue of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of
America, by permission of the authors.
*** Quote from John Kessel, reprinted from The Humanist Manifesto,
published in Science Fiction Eye, Volume 1, Number 1, by
permission of the author.
Plugs
Some sources for this Column
Science Fiction Eye
Box 3105
Washington, DC 20010-0105
$7.00/year semi-prozine devoted to cyberpunk. First issue includes
interviews with Gibson, transcript of panel discussion including
Spinrad, Shirley, Benford, Brin, et al.
The SFWA Bulletin
Box H
Wharton, NJ 07885
$10/year to non-SFWA members. Includes articles, reviews of
non-fiction, market reports.
A User's Guide to the Postmoderns
Michael Swanwick.
Published in Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, August, 1986.
Excellent article on the two current "literary camps."
OtherRealms #18
Fall, 1987
Copyright 1987 by Chuq Von Rospach.
All Rights Reserved.
One time rights have been acquired from the contributors.
All rights are hereby assigned to the contributors.
OtherRealms may be reproduced in its entirety only
for non-commercial purposes. No article may be reprinted
without the express permission of the author.
