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OtherRealms Issue 25 Part 07
Electronic OtherRealms #25
Summer/Fall, 1989
Part 7 of 17
Copyright 1989 by Chuq Von Rospach
All Rights Reserved
OtherRealms may not be reproduced without permission from Chuq Von Rospach.
Permission is given to electronically distribute this
issue only if all copyrights, author credits and return
addresses remain intact. No article may be reprinted or re-used
without permission of the author.
Much Rejoicing
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Copyright 1989 by Dan'l Danehy-Oakes
Episode 10: The Dream Machine
Virtual Reality Arrives! VPL Research, Inc. and Silicon Graphics, Inc.
are showing the worlds first Virtual Reality (VR) product, called the
RB2, or Reality Built for 2. -- Advertising flyer circulated (among
other places) at SIGGRAPH '89.
Friends and neighbors, the above is from a real advertising flyer. If
you have read Stewart Brand's excellent volume The Media Lab, you know
what VR systems are: a means of inducing three-dimensional interactive
pictures by mechanical means. You choose your own hallucination.
Of course, some of us have been messing with the ideas behind virtual
reality for a long time. Centuries. There's one very effective VR
technology that's been with us since the days of Babylon, and probably
much, much longer.
It is called storytelling. Come with me to the caves of our earliest
human ancestors. See them, around the fire, as Thog the Bold, son of
Thud the Dead, tells the story of the great mammoth hunt. The flames
leap and crackle as he raises his hand to cast the first virtual spear,
and the people gasp when he tells them how he missed his cast. He moves
so they see him only through the smoke.
The people listen raptly as he tells how the angry, wounded mammoth
turned to charge. He cringes, imitating his own terror. Suddenly he
lets out a horrible trumpeting cry -- it is the sound of the mammoth
itself! The people are terrified! The meat makes a crackling sound and
a greasy smell, roasting on the spit; the people know he lived, but how?
They are caught up in the spell of his story, a virtual reality
machine, and if you look carefully you can see them looking off to the
side when he points -- that is where his son Thok the Crafty was
hiding. When he tells how Thok leapt out and plunged his spear deep
into the mammoth's belly, the people grin with expectation of the blood
that flowed out; and they drool a bit at the thought of the mammoth
meat to come. They can almost taste it already.
They jump, a little, when he tries to make with his mouth the sound of
its massive body hitting the ground.
There. If I was at all successful, there, your sensorium was briefly
caught up in my VR device, my story about Thog. If not, at least you
can see what I mean by imagining his tribes' reactions; and you can
undoubtedly think of some author who has been successful for you --
some author who made you see his world, taste the food his characters
ate, feel wind on your face or pain in your gut.
That is virtual reality at its low-tech finest. Someday a machine may
be able to do it better; I suppose it's inevitable. But for now and for
some time to come there's no machine that can give you the sense of
reality a good storyteller makes part of his routine. A book is a
little dream machine, a guided hallucination, a virtual journey through
the kingdoms of another person's mind.
From the sublime...
Storytellers who can create and sustain such dreams at novel length are
too rare, and their appearance on the scene should be greeted with
shouts of joy and dancing in the streets. Let me then add my voice to
those who have sung Hallelujah to the appearance on the SF scene of
David Zindell and his first novel, Neverness (Bantam 0-553-27903-3,
$4.95). The names appearing on the cover range from Orson Scott Card to
Michael Bishop to Ed Bryant to Gene Wolfe.
It is this last name I'd invoke most in looking for comparisons for
Zindell: he seems to be the first "post-Wolfean" science fiction
author, in that he's managed to capture some of Wolfe's technique. His
richness of creation is superb; his characters, fully-fleshed. The
narrator, like Severian and to a lesser extent Latro, pauses to
ruminate on the deep questions of existence. The plotting is heroic;
things you barely notice at first take on considerable significance,
and the book's parts reflect each other like the facets of an
inside-mirrored Fuller dome.
Zindell doesn't have the stylistic facility of Wolfe, perhaps, but
neither did Wolfe when he began. I've rarely read a first novel that
came this close to perfection.
So someone out there says: "Oh, shut up with the praise, already, and
tell us what the goddamn thing is about."
What it's about is the quest for meaning in life. Mankind has been a
starfaring race for twenty thousand years, and is still questing for
the secret of existence. Who are we, why are we born to suffer and die,
that sort of question. Star travel is ruled by a rigid "Order of Mystic
Mathematicians and Other Seekers of the Ineffable Flame."
Mystical, yes, but this is applied mysticism. They include Pilots, who
prove the theorems that let ships fall between stars; Akashics, who can
read the information in a human brain; Scryers, who can see the future
through their blinded eyesockets; Remembrancers, who follow the trail
of genetic memory through their ancestors; and many more. Over all
rules the Lord Timekeeper (shades of the Ticktockman!).
Mallory Ringess, a young Pilot of doubtful origins, becomes a Journeyman
at a most propitious time: the Lord Pilot, his uncle, has returned with
a message from the mysterious Ieldra. Mallory makes a rash vow to
invade the nebula known as the Solid State Entity, one of the so-called
Silicon Gods, to search for the meaning of that message -- which
promises an answer to the great question of life.
In the course of Neverness, Mallory meets a collection of strange
beings, from the Entity itself to the Alaloi, who have mutated
themselves to resemble Neanderthals. From each he learns an important
piece of the truth about himself, and, finally, decodes the message of
the Ieldra. The imponderables are pondered and even answered; and,
while the answers may not be right, they are satisfying.
On the way there is blood, death, birth, pain, suffering, and
occasional joy. On the way there is love, hate, and conflict between
son and father. On the way Mallory becomes nearly godlike, a condition
that is almost a cliche in science fiction, but which is carried off
with such skill and freshness that you don't even notice the cliche
while you're reading, because it isn't a power fantasy. Not at all.
Do I rave? Do I babble? Very well, then; I rave and babble. This is a
book to rave and babble about, as fresh and important as Life During
Wartime, or Dhalgren, or Neuromancer were when they appeared.
...To the ridiculous...
I must have done something really awful in a previous life. I don't
know what it is, but I know it must have earned me some really bad
karma, because Chuq, now and then, is the instrument of my punishment.
He sends me some amazingly good books (there are a few of them coming
up in this column), but he also sends me some...things.
The latest, um, gift was a set of galley proofs for a book claiming to
be the first in a new series about Bill the Galactic Hero. It was
called Planet of the Robot Slaves, by Harry Harrison. (Avon,
0-380-75661-7, $3.95)
This fascinated the hell out of me. If Robot Slaves was the first in
the series, what was the book called Bill the Galactic Hero, which I'd
read some years ago and enjoyed? And where did it fit in?
Answer: it was a victim, as are we all. Bill the Galactic Hero was a
moderately funny satire on militaristic space operas, from Starship
Troopers to the Foundation books. This series, if Robot Slaves is any
indication, is a travesty.
The humor ranges from third to fifth grade in its maturity. At its very
best, it is redolent of MAD magazine crossed with Sam J. Lundwall; at
its worst, it is unreadable. The story picks up where Bill left off,
and ends in pretty much the same place. In between, Bill and a set of
poorly-concocted supporting characters have some pointless adventures
on a planet full of robotic creatures. All the simpleminded jokes are
there, from drinking oil to... Well, you get the idea. Things aren't
helped by the intrusion, for no apparent reason, of a pathetic parody
of John Carter of Barsoom.
The lowest point on the sagging hyperbole, however, is the techie
character introduced so that his memories can serve as a jab at William
Gibson. His name, believe it or not, is Cy berPunk. It goes downhill
from there.
I don't know whether Harrison has lost all semblance of taste, or if
this was a quick for-the-money knock-off, but the word "Sophomoric"
springs to mind, and then recoils in horror. Don't touch this one with
a ten foot Czech.
...To the Professional and Competent
Q: What's bigger than a ringworld and has a sequel?
A: I don't know, but there's one crawling up your back.
Actually, it's not only bigger than a ringworld, it's a better book.
It's called Orbitsville, and Bob Shaw wrote it, which is why it's a
much better book. (Baen, 0-671-69816-8, $2.95)
It is better because it has characters, and a plot. In Ringworld, as
you may recall, Louis Wu goes to the Magic Place with a bunch of people
and aliens and says ooh and ahh and has some adventures and comes home,
essentially unchanged. It's a wonder-journey and, as far as it goes, a
pretty neat one, but its isn't much of a story.
Now Orbitsville is a story in the classic mode of Faerie. Our Hero
steals a starship, complete with crew, to take his family and escape
from the Evil Witch Who Rules Earth, who hates him for something he
didn't even do. Searching for a safe place he finds the Magic Place.
The Magic Place is bigger and scarier than the Ringworld: it's a Dyson
sphere, the artifact proposed by Freeman Dyson for a Stage III
civilization, using the full resources of a sun. What's scarier about
it is that Shaw has a real, gut-level feeling for how &#!! BIG the
thing is, and how small people are. And, most important, he has come up
with the most frighteningly plausible reason I've ever seen for why a
culture powerful enough to build one would bother.
Recommended, as is the sequel, Orbitsville Departure. Neither is the
Second Coming of Heinlein, but they're both good reads. Hey, what do
you want for under five dollars?
Sex and drugs and wrack and ruin
Then there's this guy name of John Shirley. He looks and talks like an
overage hippie, but I wouldn't want to get him mad at me. He might put
me in one of his stories. If you don't know what that means, you
haven't read the bizarre A Splendid Chaos, or the odd City Come
A-Walking, or the chillingly savvy but rather dull Eclipse Penumbra.
But, like William Gibson, like many of the c-word writers, he really
shines like a polished pinball at the short lengths. He specializes in
an intensity of imagery and weird that is damn near impossible to
maintain at novel length. (His only total success in that line has been
Chaos; Gibson hasn't had one yet.) So why only now, after ten years,
that we are finally getting a collection of his short stories?
I don't know: but Heatseeker (Scream/Press, 0-910489-26-2, $25.00) was
worth the wait. And then some.
Lavishly (and strangely) illustrated in glorious black-and-white by
Harry O. Morris, Heatseeker contains some of the most gutwrenchingly
peculiar fiction I've ever read. It also contains an excerpt from
Eclipse Penumbra, but that holds up surprisingly well when it's taken
out of its context of political lecture.
The book opens with a barrage of images called "What Cindy Saw." This
is essentially Heinlein's "Them" updated and upscaled -- the heroine is
a mental patient who suffers delusions of seeing what's behind ordinary
reality -- only they aren't delusions. But where Heinlein was satisfied
with the little frisson of discovery, at the predictable end, that the
shrinks are part of the conspiracy, "Cindy" begins when her belief-
system is confirmed in the living room. (This last sentence contains
one (1) grotesque pun, but you won't get it unless you read the story.)
The second story, "Under the Generator," is equally unsettling. After
"Cindy" I knew I would have to put this book down between stories; by
the middle of "Generator," I had to recover in mid-story. You know how
old science fiction movie folks would discover the secret... of
life... itself, nyaaahhaaahhaaah? Well, these people have discovered
the secret of death itself, and they're using it to run the nation's
power grid. And then Shirley manages to pull an upbeat ending out of
this... No, I won't tell you how.
I'm sorely tempted to go through story-by-story; it's that good. But
that would take too much space, and I can probably do better by listing
a few of the titles: "Tahiti in Terms of Squares." Or "I Live in
Elizabeth," and he doesn't mean New Jersey. Or, my favorite, "Recurrent
Dreams of Nuclear War Lead B.T. Quizenbaum Into Moral Dissolution." Now
that's a title.
Don't hold your breath for a paperback edition of this one. It wasn't
just worth the wait, it's worth the 25 smackers.
They Came to... party!
Yow! Aliens invade Earth! Party all night! Film at 11.
It sounds like a combination of Zippy the Pinhead and Philip K. Dick.
And maybe that's what it is. Or maybe not.
The guy who sold me Michael Kandel's Strange Invasion (Bantam/Spectra,
0-443-28146-1, $3.95) told me it was a first novel. I had trouble
accepting this; his name seemed so damn familiar. The reason is
simple: for years, he's been the best translator of Stanislaw Lem in
the field, a man who could translate successfully a sonnet where every
word began with an "S" (see The Cyberiad).
Strange Invasion shows that he's learned something, at least about
style and idea, from laboring in the fields of Lem. It's a witty and
vicious and very, very funny book about the end of civilization as we
know it. Our Hero is a recently-released mental patient, who still
hallucinates regularly. (He's also, uh, not too bright.) This tends to
make him a bit dubious about the aliens who tell him he's the only hope
for mankind to survive the coming alien invasion.
But, it appears, he is. They come in strange droves -- the first arrive
in South America, where Wally (the hero) must defeat a bunch of gourds
who want to party, with only a Marxist toucan to help him. Others, with
equally unlikely physiologies, want to sleep, or to study. All are
dangerous beyond belief -- not because they are destructive per se, but
because humans exposed to them tend to contract their obsessions.
And, remarkably, he succeeds. For a time. But the successive gangs of
aliens get tougher and more insidious, and Wally is only one man... and
he gets tireder and tireder.
Will Wally save the earth? Will mankind survive the last and most
hideous invasion?
Of course not. But, frankly, who cares?
I don't know why the ending of Strange Invasion isn't depressing. It
has all the earmarks of New-Wave-post-holocaust-everything's-gone-to-hell-
in-a-handbasket fiction, but I kept giggling right down the the last
line on the book. Perhaps it's because Wally keeps hallucinating weird
shit right to the end. Or perhaps its because the survivalists get theirs.
Great art it isn't, exactly, but in a field where humor is generally
measured by merde like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and "The
Trouble with Tribbles" and Planet of the fergodssake Robot Slaves, the
intrusion of the genuinely funny is a welcome relief.
The Happy Hooker?
When I was a kid, we had this poem. It went like this:
"Spider, spider, on the wall,
ain't you got no sense at all?
Can't you see the wall's been plastered?
Get off the wall, you little bastard?"
Somehow that came to mind when I read Spider Robinson's newest
"Callahan's Place" book.
I'm really sad to be saying that, because I like Spider's work. I even
liked the third "Callahan's" book, which everyone yelled at for being a
"betrayal" of the Callahan's principal. (I disagree vehemently.)
Well.
In the intro to that book, Robinson observed regretfully that he seemed
to have committed a trilogy (the "t-word," was how he put it). In a
world full of such, I guess I can understand how he'd feel that way,
but he made a boo-boo. You don't cure a trilogy by making it four
books.
Especially when the fourth book is a travesty.
But guess what Spider did...?
Sigh.
See, it's called Callahan's Lady (Ace, 0-441-09073-7, $16.95), and it's
about Lady Sally's, the whorehouse run by Callahan's wife. Instead of
Jake (who does put in a token appearance), it's narrated by Sherry, one
of Lady Sally's hookers. It begins with Sherry's escape (with her life,
barely) from her pimp and her entree to Sally's, a place where
prostitution is an art rather than a degradation.
Okay: I'll accept that it's conceivable that sex-for-money might be an
art. In some culture. I've heard some pretty convincing reports about
the geisha of medieval Japan, for example.
But, no, I'm sorry, I do not believe that, in the culture of the United
States as it is today, prostitution can ever be anything but the crass
and dehumanizing use of one person as an object by another. That may be
a prejudice, but it's one that's so strong in me that I can't discard
it even for the length of a few stories disguised as a novel.
I give Spider credit for this: he does, in the first story, ("A Very
Very Fine House") portray real American prostitution for the ugly thing
it is. But for the rest of the book, Sherry is a happy hooker in a
happy hook-joint where the customers are all pleasant and the sex is an
art form and everyone goes away happy.
Sorry, Spider, but the place would be out of business in a week.
Perhaps, says the nitpicker in the back row, the place is subsidized by
the same odd arrangement with the future that gets Callahan his glasses
so cheap. Well, maybe. But I don't like it.
There's a fundamental difference between Callahan's and Lady Sally's
Places: drinking is a vice whereby, as long as you don't get drunk, you
aren't hurting anyone. With prostitution, a person is used. Period.
Prettying it up, as is done here, doesn't make it better.
The second story, "The Revolver," I'm afraid, is even worse. It's just
an extended dirty joke of the "Cuban Superman" variety.
The third and fourth are better, and would in fact have been very good
stories in the "Callahan's" setting (if they could be transplanted: I
suspect they could with very little trauma). The third, "The Paranoid,"
has the same odd combination of science fiction and psychological
pathos that makes the best of the "Callahan's" stories so good; it
deals with a woman who can make you do anything she tells you to.
The fourth, "Dollars to Donuts," is a "scam" story whose plot would do
Donald Westlake (The Hot Rock, Dancing Aztecs) proud. Indeed, some of
the humor is Westlakian to the extreme.
All in all: if you're a Robinson addict (as I am) and can stomach the
sanitized image of prostitution presented here (as I couldn't), you'll
probably enjoy the book. I don't like to judge a book on its political
rectitude or lack thereof; that leads to Heinlein-bashing and other
fannish social sports I'd rather eschew. The issue of prostitution is,
to me, not a fundamentally political one at all; it's an issue of
failing to grant one's fellow-humans the dignity of personhood. Spider,
clearly, doesn't feel that that's (necessarily) the case. So I'll agree
to disagree, and neither recommend (because I can't) nor pan (because
it goes against my ethics to pan a book for that kind of reason)
Callahan's Lady.
Nonfiction corner
Alan started this, but I like it. The idea is to point out books that
accurately reflect the way the world is, or is going. He's reviewed
important books like The Media Lab and Engines of Creation.
Well, here's one you'd do best not to miss if you really want to
understand how things work in the Happening World: Kathleen Meyer's How
to Shit in the Woods (10 Ten Speed Press, 0-89815-319-0, $5.95). This
is about precisely what it says, a no-nonsense book about sanitation
and waste disposal in the Great Outdoors.
This may sound silly or facetious to some of you, but consider. We are
living in a world where more and more waste is being dropped into our
air, our land, and our drinking water every year; an intelligent
approach to all this is a must for continued existence on this planet.
How to Shit is short (76 pages) and clearly written. It approaches its
subject with respect and dignity, but also with humor. Trust me.
Who's afraid of the big bad wolfe?
Well, big, anyway. Bad only if you think it means "good," as Michael
Jackson apparently does.
Here we have not one, but two batches of short stories.
The first batch is Endangered Species, his newest collection. Some of
you will go out and buy it right away when you learn that it contains
two by-blows of The Book of the New Sun: not excerpts, but separate
short stories that sorta wandered out of the same world. One, "The
Map," is particularly interesting as a fable on greed. Others won't
touch it no matter what I say, which is a pity, but for those people
there's always Planet of the Robot Slaves, and more power to them.
But for those of us who want something a little more from our fiction,
there's Wolfe.
The collection also contains my all-time favorite Wolfe short, "The
Detective of Dreams," which is a unique and lovely allegory cast in the
mode of a hard-boiled detective story. It first appeared in an
anthology with Stephen King's The Mist, where it was sadly overshadowed
by the more spectacular horrors therein; in Endangered Species, it
risks being overshadowed by Wolfe's own more pyrotechnic works.
Wolfe's range of technique is well-served by the form of a collection;
he can range from an introspective first person, to a very
phenomenological and action-oriented third, to a near-second person in
which the protagonist and "Mr. Wolfe" discuss the action to take place
and their part in the creation of the story.
I'm not going to attempt a detailed critique of all this -- for one
thing, there is now an entire 'zine devoted to Wolfeology (The Book of
Gold, available from Jeremy Crampton), and for another, there isn't
space. So leave it at this: Wolfe knows short stories as well as he
knows four-volume novels.
Closet classic
Which is why my close classic this time is also a Wolfe, Gene Wolfe's
Book of Days. A lot thinner than Species, this is a "theme" collection
on a very odd theme.
Wolfe selected a largish number of holidays -- Christmas, Opening Day
(of hunting season), Arbor Day (Arbor Day? Yeesh), Lincoln's Birthday,
and so on -- and picked a story that was thematically associated in
some way with that day. A few of them, such as "La Befana," the story
for Christmas, have been collected elsewhere (like in the collection
The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories), but
most of these are generally not available; and generally, they are
quite good. None are as stunningly brilliant as New Sun or "Detective
of Dreams," but all are engaging and thought-provoking.
While the theme is a bit more artificial than that of most theme
collections, this is actually a strength rather than a weakness; theme
anthologies tend to develop a sense of sameness, and one-author theme
collections are often positively flat. Because the theme of Days is
really a collection of different themes, it allows the range of Wolfe's
interests to play freely.
This had a single hardback edition nearly a decade ago, and hasn't seen
print since. Some paperback publisher would do very well to pick up the
rights to Gene Wolfe's Book of Days.
------ End ------
