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OtherRealms Issue 21 Part 09
Electronic OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Part 9
Much Rejoicing
Episode 6: Sturgeon's Lawyer
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1988 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Bio of an Ogre
Piers Anthony
Ace, $17.95
0-441-06224-5
The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
Thomas M. Disch
Doubleday, $11.95
0-385-24162-3
Camp Concentration
Thomas M. Disch
Carroll & Graf, $3.95
0-88184-386-5
Clan Ground
Clare Bell
Dell Laurel Leaf, $2.95
0-440-91287-3
High Rise
J.G. Ballard
Carroll & Graf
0-88184-400-4
Last and First Men
Olaf Stapledon
Jeremy P. Tarcher, $10.95
0-87477-471-3
The Motion of Light In Water
Samuel R. Delany
Arbor House, $18.95
0-87795-947-1
Resurrection, Inc.
Kevin J. Anderson
NAL, $3.50
0-451-15409-6
Portal
Rob Swigart
St. Martins Press, $18.95
0-312-01494-5
Seventh Son
Orson Scott Card
TOR, $3.95
0-812-53353-4
Space War Blues
Richard A. Lupoff
Dell, $1.95
0-440-16292-0
The Motion of Light in Water
All of you. Yes, you, and you, and even you in the green shirt
pretending to read the new GOR book. Especially that one, in fact. Go
buy Samuel R. Delany's The Motion of Light in Water.
Many of us have come to greet the announcement of a new Delany with
anticipation; book after book, for over two decades, has been filled
with astonishing language, brilliant imagery, and shattering analogies
to the real world.
But who would have expected the same of an autobiographical memoir?
Motion is the story of Delany's late youth and early manhood. He tells
how he discovered, in parallel, his identity as a black man, a gay man,
and a science fiction writer, in no particular order. The three chains
of discovery are woven into a network of language, imagery, and
insights that will keep anyone even slightly interested in any of these
three elements of Delany's identity sitting up until all hours, turning
pages until their fingers bleed from paper cuts and their eyes grow
bleary from staring at black on white.
I know. I did.
If that isn't enough, there's the "bits." Bob Dylan, Albert Einstein,
W.H. Auden, Cab Calloway, and other folks with nothing at all to do
with one another wander in and out of the book (and Delany's life),
each a relatively minor encounter, but each of them in that brief
moment illuminated from an entirely new angle. At a glance, this might
look like name-dropping, but Delany's attitude toward these incidents
keeps them from ever quite reaching that level.
Though it deals heavily with sexual matters and sexual politics, this
isn't a "sex book" by any means. A significant part of the book deals
with Delany's wanderings through the gay demimonde of early '60s New
York City, a world that seems totally alien and terrifying in the age
of AIDS. Delany paints a culture -- really, almost a non-culture -- of
casual and purely physical encounters that from a middle class
perspective may appear perverse, but he paints it as it had to be to
survive at all. It appears, at least in my eyes, strangely and
beautifully innocent. In that sense, this may well prove to be a
seminal work indeed.
Delany-as-writer develops more slowly. He wrote a variety of things for
years before he sold his first SF novel, The Jewels of Aptor. But the
simple fact that Jewels was his first sale may have turned his career
to SF as much as any intent on his part. The roots of Jewels, and other
early novels, appear in Motion almost in passing; it is only at the end
of the period the book covers that Delany seems to begin thinking of
himself as "a sf writer." (This alone will probably be a shock to any
number of people who think of themselves as sf writers long before
their first story is completed, let alone published; to such people,
the idea that one might fall, almost accidentally, into that Blessed
State will be nearly unthinkable.)
Finally, we see Delany-as-black-man. As a child, he lived in Harlem.
His neighbors were almost exclusively black, but he was sent to a
private school where his friends and classmates were almost exclusively
white. Some of Delany's most powerful social insights, in Motion and
throughout his work, arise from this daily displacement between
subcultures, and his attempts to see the larger whole of which they
were parts.
Given his early life, Delany could easily have been a bitter man. The
most astonishing thing about The Motion of Light in Water is the love
with which it is written. He has nothing mean, and almost nothing
angry, to say about anyone. Delany seems to have a good word for
everyone; even when describing those who hurt him in some way, he
spends more time speaking of their feelings than his own, and not one
is painted as a villain or sadist.
I can only repeat what I said when I began this review: go out and buy
this book. Don't wait for a paperback; you can't afford to wait that long.
It really is that good.
Bio of an Ogre
There's something about Piers Anthony that fills me with the urge to
make invidious comparisons. It really isn't fair of me; last time, I
stacked a Xanth novel up against Lucius Sheppard's incredible Life
During Wartime; now I'm about compare him with Delany.
But, hell, he invites it. Anybody who writes an autobiography -- and
they've been endemic in SF since Asimov's two gargantuan tomes fell
into our hands in the late '70s -- is setting themselves up as a
target, Delany as much as Anthony.
Anthony might well be expected to write an entertaining autobiography.
I often enjoy the author notes at the ends of his novels more than I do
the novels themselves (which is not a slight on the novels; the author
notes have been known to be longer than many of the novels' chapters);
with Bio of an Ogre, I was looking forward to an extended author note.
Nor was I disappointed. If Delany's book concentrates on three aspects
of his life, Anthony's concentrates on two, and one is his writing. Bio
would be a much more appropriate book than Motion to give a young
person asking how you become a writer; Anthony describes many of his
lessons, artistic and business, in great detail.
The other principal focus of Anthony's book might be called "How I came
to be an Ogre." He calls himself this, perhaps in jest, referring to
some of his more difficult-to-get-along-with personality traits.
Considering the image the fan press has given Anthony as a monster of
conceit, this book comes as a surprise. He does, indeed, hold a high
opinion of his own writing and his own integrity. But it may well be
that within the quite legitimate definitions he uses, that opinion is
justified.
I treading carefully here: I want to say that Anthony comes across as
being incredibly honest and honorable. But I have to include the caveat
that this is his story, told from his point of view. When he describes
how he dealt honorably, and others did not, we are not given both sides
of the story. (In one of the more serious cases, actually, he goes out
of his way to give his opponent's side of the story: but in general, no.)
The problem is this: he feels he has the right to judge everyone else
by the same standard of integrity he has, apparently, chosen for
himself. His standard is such that (he says) he will take pains to
avoid telling even a "white lie."
Very well, that is an honorable standard indeed, and I would never
criticize him for it. But is it reasonable, is it even "fair"
(whatever that means), to hold his own standards as a measurement for
others? Honesty is a fine principle, but others may choose other,
perhaps equally valid, principles for their lives: principles like
"don't hurt others." Or other principles which don't seem so lofty, but
may be legitimate in their way, like "bravery" or "success at any cost."
Because he does hold his standard as a measurement for others, Anthony
feels he has been wronged, repeatedly. The fourth of the book's five
parts is in large proportion a catalog of wrongs done to him by fans,
publishers, critics, and even other writers (notably SFWA, Gordon
Dickson, and Robert Silverberg) during the covered segment of his life.
It is here that I want to draw the aforementioned invidious comparison.
Delany seems to be laying the facts before us: "This is what happened
to me, and what I did, and what I felt about it." He goes out of his
way to make us understand the other people in his life, as human as himself.
Anthony does not. His book seems to be "Here is what everyone has done
to me, and what I have done in return, and why it screwed me up so badly."
The people he comes into contact with, both friends and opponents, and
even his wife, seem to exist only with respect to himself; there is no
attempt to understand why they treat him the way they do.
I submit that this egocentric (and I mean this word in the most literal
meaning; not that Anthony has an unduly high self-opinion, but that he
views reality only with respect to himself) attitude is a large
influence on Anthony's fiction. He is capable of creating fascinating
and well-rounded protagonists, such as "Death" of On A Pale Horse or
Hope Hubris of the Bio of a Space Tyrant series.
But his supporting characters, even in his most "serious" fiction,
always seem hollow, existing only to give his protagonists something to
interact with. The villains, even in his more "serious" fiction, seem
uniformly villainous; they are seeking power, or wealth, or some other
simple goal, with no more complex needs or feelings. They might as well
be Snidely Whiplash or Boris Badinov.
I don't want to belabor the point. Let me conclude by observing that
Bio is an entertaining book, detailing the life of a man I find
fascinating and in many ways admirable. If you are at all fond of
autobiographies, this is one of the more enjoyable products of the "SF
Bio glut."
High Rise
Publishers sometimes do things that deserve special notice. Carroll &
Graf have been doing something, recently, that deserves to be
recognized: putting some of the best SF of the '70s back into print.
The two latest before me are J.G. Ballard's High Rise and Thomas M.
Disch's Camp Concentration.
I've discussed Ballard before in this space. Most of his works from the
'70s have an extremely unusual flavor that leads some to doubt that he
was even writing SF during this period: his novels dealt with the
psychosexuality of car crashes, the violence of American society, and,
in High Rise, the breakdown of civilization in a modern apartment
building.
The building in question is a huge towering edifice of the sort to be
found in most major urban areas. People park beneath the building and
ride or walk up dozens of floors to reach their homes.
The inhabitants of such a building always live in an uneasy sort of
truce -- the existence and habits of each are always an inconvenience,
if not an outright annoyance, to some of the others.
Ballard simply allows some of that underlying energy to run amok. It
begins with small acts of violence and vandalism, and quickly escalates
into a full-scale guerrilla war between the floors of the building.
What makes the book work is the protagonist, who finds himself drawn
into the urban barbarism, and even coming to love it.
Is such a book SF? I say yes. Ballard does with psychology and
sociology what a Clement or a Forward does with physics and biology; he
is the first "hard science" writer of the soft sciences.
Camp Concentration
Disch's Camp Concentration is a late-Vietnam-period nightmare.
The story is set in a turn-of-the-century Fascist America similar to
the one Disch later envisioned so well in 334 and On Wings of Song, but
from a very different point of view: the hero, Louis Sachetti, is a
poet, a conscientious objector, and, thus, a political prisoner.
He is taken from his cell to the underground Camp Archimedes. Here
political prisoners are being used in intelligence-increasing
experiments, and Sachetti is told that his skills as a writer are
wanted -- he will chronicle the experiences of the prisoners.
They are fearsomely intelligent -- and doomed. The agent that increases
their intelligence, a mutant strain of Treponima pallidum, is also
killing them.
And, of course, Sachetti is himself infected.
Disch's political satire is painful; his observation of character
detail is precise. But the greatest success of Camp Concentration is in
Disch's portrayal of a man gifted and cursed with a growing, superhuman
intelligence. It's hard to adopt the point of view of someone much
smarter than yourself; Disch pulls it off. This takes my highest
recommendation -- but it's not for the easily depressed.
The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars
As long as I'm on about Thomas Disch, let me mention -- briefly -- that
the sequel to The Brave Little Toaster is out. It's called The Brave
Little Toaster Goes to Mars, and it's all about a fiendish plot to
destroy human life, foiled by the Toaster's pluck and optimism.
I don't know how Disch pulls off stories like this, or the classic
"Dangerous Flags." Nobody in his right mind would tackle them; they're
so inherently "cutesy" that Beatrix Potter would die of diabetic shock.
But, somehow, Disch gets away with it. They're tight,
beautifully-written stories that leave you feeling good.
Hmmm... maybe that's how he gets away with it...
Last and First Men
Another publisher that deserves our gratitude is Dover. For years,
they've kept good "trade paperback" editions of classic works in print
when nobody else would.
Some of the SF/fantasy writers kept available to generations of fans in
this way are Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Taine, James Branch Cabell,
Jules Verne, and H.G. Wells. All of them have otherwise been in and out
of print -- in some cases, mostly out -- over the decades.
Oh, and one more: W. Olaf Stapledon.
Dover has kept his work alive through two omnibus volumes containing
four books: Last and First Men paired with Star Maker, and Odd John
with Sirius.
Now Stapledon seems to be coming back into fashion. A little while
back, Jeremy P. Tarcher, Inc., issued a lovely edition of Star Maker.
Now they've reprinted Last and First Men.
Now, mentioning Dover first may sound like a slight to Tarcher. I don't
mean it that way, honest.
But Dover has stood by Stapledon for years, and now Tarcher reissues
him with a fair bit of ballyhoo (foreword and afterword to L&FM by
Gregory Benford and Doris Lessing); I want to know why.
The claim of this volume is that it is the first complete edition ever
published in the U.S. I haven't compared it word-for-word with the Dover
edition, but in a quick skim I don't see anything I haven't seen before.
Still, it is a classic of SF, and, more, a damn fine book, presented
beautifully. Stapledon was at his best here. It's a travelogue of
time, detailing the "future history" of intelligence on Earth and
beyond through no less than nineteen sentient species, and hinting at
greater things beyond.
Pick up Last and First Men, and Star Maker, in whatever edition you can
find them. More I cannot say.
Disclaimer: The next two books reviewed here were written by friends. I
think I'm capable of being reasonably objective about them, but you may
want to take what I say about them with a grain of salt.
Clan Ground
Clare Bell writes juvenile novels for rather advanced juveniles. Her
first book, Ratha's Creature, dealt with the discovery of fire by a
clan of sentient smilodons in an alternate pre-history where the
smilodons were sentient. I enjoyed the book, but probably wouldn't have
given the sequel a second look had I not met the author.
Which would have been my loss. Clan Ground is a damn good novel. It
picks up some time after the events of Creature . The Clan, who exist
by herding game animals, have established local dominance by use of fire.
They think it's alive. After all, it moves and eats and possesses some
unusual power -- and dies if not fed. Many primitive humans have felt
the same way. (In fact, some very civilized humans have thought of fire
as a living thing; Olaf Stapledon wrote an entire novel about sentient
flames. Jeremy Tarcher, are you listening?)
Certain of the Clan cats are designated as "firekeepers;" their life's
work is to tend the fires that protect the Clan and the herd from marauders.
Enter, then, Shongshar, a non-Clan cat. He's the villain of the story;
he comes to the Clan and begs to serve the fire. Problem is, he wants
to serve it more than necessary. In fact, he goes about instituting a
fire-worship religion that nearly destroys the Clan.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course; Shongshar is not an
unmitigated villain; a different turn of events might have made him a
fascinating hero. (I've always had a soft spot for likeable and
well-defined villains. Shongshar made the book for me.) And there's a
wonderful solution to the problem of manipulating fire and tools when
one doesn't have hands.
Clan Ground isn't a perfect book. The genetics of feline sentience
seem more than a little confused. There's a tendency to fall into the
"Jean Auel" syndrome -- too much invention and discovery happening in
too short a historical period. And some of the "mysteries" of the
novel are just too damn obvious to hold any suspense.
But in all, I'd happily give the book to my kids to read -- when
they're fifteen or so.
Resurrection, Inc.
Kevin Anderson is about to become an overnight success after years of
obscure toil. His short fiction has appeared in most of the major
semi-pro magazines in the horror/dark fantasy field, in Amazing and
F&SF, and in last year's Best Fantasy Stories.
Now his first novel is coming out; it should hit the stands about when
you read this. It's called Resurrection, Inc., and it squats firmly on
the boundary between SF and horror, in a way that should appeal to some
readers from each genre.
A company known as Resurrection Inc. fits dead humans with electronic
devices that make them perfect slaves -- they never question, are not
able to question, their owner's orders.
They've put a lot of people out of work. The workers aren't thrilled by
this, and a variety of social oddities result: most notably the
Neo-Satanist church, the fastest-growing religion of the century.
In this future, a man is murdered -- sacrificed by the Church of Satan.
He is made into a Servant, one of the zombie slaves sold by
Resurrection, Inc. But he's different. He keeps having flashes of
memory from his first life...
I recommend Resurrection Inc. to you. I'd like to recommend it
"highly," but I can't, quite. There are a number of irritating
problems: a fascinating subplot that vanishes (by the "they all got run
over by a train" method) about a third of the way through the book; a
number of characters who seem to exist solely to fill their functions
in the plot; and a rather cliched "the underground resistance movement
strikes the Bad Guys down" ending.
Contrariwise, it's full of beautiful stuff, from the Servants
themselves to the image of San Francisco Bay completely built over; and
it's well-written and engaging. You care about the characters. So I can
hardly pan it either.
All I can do is say, check it out for yourself. If your tastes are even
vaguely like mine, you'll probably like, but not love, it. Which is,
after all, more than most first novels ever deliver.
Portal
Something appeared in my mailbox a little while ago. Something called
Portal, by Rob Swigart.
It's not a novel. Richard Lupoff praises it extravagantly on the back
cover, but he's quick to point out that it's not a novel. And he's
right, for reasons that bear some looking at.
Portal has two main plot lines. The outer "framework" is the story of
an Intrepid Starship Explorer, who returns to Earth and the place is
closed. Well... deserted. No signs of destruction, war, plague, or
anything else greet him; there just isn't anyone around.
So the nominal "plot" of Portal is the story of this man's efforts to
find out, through a still-functioning worldwide AI network, what
happened to all the people.
The second plot, of course, is What Happened To All The People. This is
the story of a doomed love and the extraordinary lengths a boy goes to
to redeem it and meet his girl. He ultimately opens the Portal for
mankind, about which I will say no more because it would spoil much of
the story's ending.
Either of these would have made an exceptional novel. (So, for that
matter, would the story of the AI's, abandoned and without purpose, not
knowing where their masters have gone or why they have been left
behind: and then this sole human appears from space...)
Unfortunately, none of these stories is told. Instead, they are mished
and mashed together by the presentation of small chunks from here and
from there that, hopefully, add up to the story: a technique borrowed
from Dos Passos by way of John Brunner.
This technique is tremendously demanding of both reader and writer.
When both put the effort into it, it can be incredibly rewarding. In
this case, however, it simply isn't worth the reader's effort because
Swigart does not know how to handle it.
With the "Dos Passos presentation mode," every section is in some sense
a scene, and each scene must count, must have emotional impact. Many of
Swigart's sections are recitations of fact, as dry as a passage from
Asimov's "Encyclopedia Galactica:" fascinating ideas, but not scenes by
any stretch of the imagination. After a few of these, the going bogs
down; after enough, the story grinds to a halt. Nor is it at all
helpful that some of the information in these sections is presented
several times from different perspectives.
I suspect that some of the problem stems from Portal's unusual genesis.
It has been released simultaneously as a computer game where the player
takes the part of the returning astronaut, and has to interrogate the
AIs to find out "what happened to the humans." If the game is designed
at all well, there are numerous paths to the same ultimate end, and
some vital information would have to be planted in different forms
along all those paths.
Many of the expository sections of Portal-the-book seem to be dumps
directly from the computer game, with no editing.
All in all, Portal is a book of fascinating ideas and characters, and
several brilliant plots hidden among the clumsy exposition. Swigart
shows ability to plot, and to write, throughout. One can only hope his
next book is a novel. It should be pretty damn good.
Closet Classic
Sherman, set the Wayback machine for...1978. No, make that 1967. Or...?
In '67, Harlan Ellison's incredible Dangerous Visions anthology
appeared, and sold so well, and was so acclaimed, that he was pressured
by the publisher into doing a sequel. The sequel, you may recall, was
Again, Dangerous Visions.
A,DV contained a story by Richard A. Lupoff, called "With The Bentfin
Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." This was one of the two or
three most dramatically experimental pieces in a huge book that was
noted for experimentation, during a period noted for experimentation.
That was published in 1972, after several delays. The delays cost
Lupoff dearly.
You see, Dell Books had wanted Lupoff to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a
novel. Lupoff wanted to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a novel. Ellison
wanted Lupoff to expand "WtBBBoLONA" into a novel.
But time got messed up, and by the time A,DV was published, Dell was
not as interested as they had once been.
In fact, it took them until 1978 to publish the book, which had been through
several metamorphoses and finally emerged under the title Space War Blues.
This is the novel, then, that a young Dan'l Danehy-Oakes set his
sweating hands on in that summer of 1978 and was lost in for days. I
must have read it three or four times before I could bring myself to
read anything else; it impressed me that much.
What is it? It's a spacegoing Catch-22 with voodoo; it's a space opera
with yuks; it's one of the funniest, saddest, baddest, and maddest books
I've ever read, and easily the best (if last published) product of the
late '60s/early '70s "New Wave" in science fiction. For one thing,
unlike some of the books of the period, it's actually about something.
Man finally got to space, and it wasn't occupied, so he took it.
Unfortunately, he took everything with him: his hatreds, his
prejudices, his stupidity, and his infinite capacity for screwing
things up. SWB is about a few of those screwups.
Surn (that's "southern" to y'all) whites from worlds like N'Alabama and
N'Jaja (sound it out) still hate the "cruvvelin black animan nigras"
who've colonized N'Haiti and N'Ghana and so forth. One of these fine
surn worlds (N'Ala, that's right from the original title) wishes to
teach them uppity nigras a lesson once and for all.
The black citizens of New Haiti, in the meanwhile, do not wish to be
taught a lesson; they wish to be left alone by the bigots of N'Ala.
Both sides have plenty of technology; what they lack is manpower.
N'Haiti finds a solution that simply must be read to be believed, and
the war gets very very strange indeed.
Nor should the Australian theme be ignored. If there is a lingering
image anywhere in the book, it is the Yurakosi "sky hero" who sails the
beautiful ships from world to world. He can walk naked to the stars
where other races cannot; his unusually deep melanin protects him from
the worst of the cosmic radiation, and he needs only a skintight suit
to keep him from decompression and suffocation.
Dell published it once and dropped it; the "New Wave" was no longer
marketing magic.
Gregg Press picked it up for one of their fine hardback reprints, but
who can afford those?
So this column concludes with a call to the folks at Dell: I know it
wasn't you, back then, but it was your company that sat on that book
for six years, my friends, and that finally released it with nearly no
publicity. I strongly urge a reissue, with the ballyhoo needed to bring
it to the public's eye.
I don't speak of justice to Dick Lupoff; he has made it clear that
Space War Blues is, to him, a thing of the past, and this is as it
should be. But Dell Books owes a debt to the book itself, and nothing
will pay that debt but that you bring it to the pubic eye. Do it.
OtherRealms #21
Summer, 1988
Copyright 1988
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 not be reproduced in any form without written
permission from Chuq Von Rospach. The electronic edition may be
distributed or reproduced in its entirety as long as all copyrights,
author and publication information remain intact.
No article may be reprinted, reproduced or republished in any way
without the express permission of the author.
