Genetically-Modified Lit

A story in the Wall Street Journal today tells me that Tor Books (part of Macmillan now) has established a collaboration with NASA to produce science fiction. To quote: “The partnership pairs up novelists with NASA scientists and engineers, who help writers develop scientifically plausible story lines and spot-check manuscripts for technical errors.”

“Aha,” I thought. “Genetic modification in literature has now reached visibility.” Such things, of course, go back a long time. Writers who produce books based on publishers’ tightly written formulae are as old as certain popular romance fiction series. I recall once seeing very elaborate specifications—up to some 12 or more points described as “must” contents—for each of some five different sub-categories of romance fiction by one publisher. The process also began in science fiction much earlier. At least twenty years ago, one publisher approached me to write sci-fi novels for them based on specific content. I turned them down.

Consider the parallels. Literary talent is clearly in-born, present early. It is shaped by the person’s family and life experiences and indirectly by his or her times and circumstances. The works produced echo their producers and their times. Now to modify this natural talent from the outside artificially so that it will produce a uniform “fruit” matched to “market demand” in look, feel, sound, and smell is quite the same thing as genetically modifying all manner of agricultural products so that they will appeal to the Kroger and Safeway shopper instantly. The taste is sometimes off. Just recently Brigitte said something rather startling—quite spontaneously. She was eating an oddly shaped strawberry and said: “Amazing, actually. It almost tastes like a strawberry.”

Almost. Yes. Almost.

Full disclosure. Long ago Tor turned down my Ghulf Genes (the novel), despite efforts by my agent to get it read. I never imagined that, at some future time, I might be glad that they did.

Benson’s Apocalypse

About a month ago we learned, on Siris (link), that Pope Francis had made reference to a science fiction work, Lord of the World, written by Robert Hugh Benson, a British Catholic priest. The book was published in 1907! Well, that was irresistible. We had a copy of it within the week, and since then Brigitte and I read it together in daily segments right after lunch; Brigitte did the reading. We finished yesterday—and indeed, it was a tour de force.

Benson was a quite prolific and popular writer. He wrote science fiction (3 works), historical novels (7), contemporary novels (10), children’s books (3), devotional works (8), apologetics (10), plays (4), and other books (4) including biographies and a book of poems.

Lord of the World is a profoundly philosophical work—its story being the ultimate victory of absolute materialistic secularism the world over. That might suggest slow, weary reading. But the book was intensely suspenseful, quite a thriller, and we had a real job keeping from reading on and on, as rapidly as possible, to discover what happens next—although we already knew the end before we even began.

Benson was born in 1871 and died in October 1914, thus three months after World War I began. He’d lived intensely and had died young of heart failure. His prophetic gift was significant—but muted. He saw the future clearly in its essence, but not its tawdry nature. The future’s technology is smooth, clean, silent, and pleasing to the eye. He projected the triumph of materialism in every category—except the spiritual. The few great outbreaks of disorder that he shows carry powerful premonitions of, say, Nazi mobs. There is no sense of what we see now, the “war of all against all,” disguised as markets, free speech, and competition. The world’s a kind of physical paradise, its air-traffic almost silent, its ground-traffic underground, its surfaces soft and sound-absorbing. The conflict is all in the “sky”—as in Dürer’s image (shown elsewhere here). Nor does he recognize that everything constellates its own resistance—in reality—so that the great tendencies he saw have not yet, and never shall, actually achieve victory. The reason for this, however, is explained in Benson’s brief prefactory paragraph:

I am perfectly aware that this is a terribly sensational book, and open to innumerable criticisms on that account, as well as many others. But I did not know how else to express the principles I desired (and which I passionately believe to be true) except by producing their lines to a sensational point. I have tried, however, not to scream unduly loud, and to retain, so far as possible, reverence and consideration for the opinions of other people. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt is quite another matter.

At the same time, the book has extraordinary insights into spiritual life—at the collective as well as at the individual levels. These passages in no way interfere with, indeed they heighten, the story-telling tension. Surprising subjects are touched upon, like the post-death vision of one of our favorite of four major characters that carry this story, Mabel Brand.

A most unusual book—weirdly modern, weirdly out of this world. The book produced some widespread reactions—because of its gloomy ending. This impelled Benson later in his life to write a kind of utopian work, Dawn of All. Needless to say, Amazon is flying it to us now—not yet on Benson’s famous volors nor yet on Bezos’ future drones—just by plane and UPS truck. We can hardly wait.

Committing Futurism

In the 1950s (I’m talking about a narrow slice of fantasy and science fiction) our genuine futurists projected two kinds, one aggressively primitive, the other aggressively progressive. The first envisioned worlds where Conans the Barbarian dwelt, the other a world were all of us commuted in fancy little flying machines and the post-war bureaucracy of the 1950s had morphed into an oppressive ant-heap challenging real heroes to revolt.

My own instincts were in the primitive direction. The scientific stuff essentially bored me. Jules Verne had already done that in the nineteenth—projecting technology. And technology, per se, does not a story make. Conan had seen the light of publication in 1931, a bit later. But that projection, rooted in human behavior, promised more fruit. SF, strictly speaking, was not imaginative enough. I never encountered a story in the 1950s, for example, projecting a future in which young people—and the not so young—would expend their free moments staring into tiny mirror-like objects, all alone, isolated by togetherness, as it were, indeed even when with others, even in crowds. Naw. Instead of that writers improved big outer things (transport, city scapes) and dangerous things like weapons.

But there is a reason for all this. It is extraordinarily difficult to imagine radical shifts in the river of existence that carries us in time. The motion is forward. In the 1950s the technologically New was still spreading. Air travel was taking off. Plastics. I still remembered a family transition where horse-drawn carriages moved our furniture. I still remember heating with wood. Experiences of progressive change had a grip on writers of hard SF. The other side, informed by intuition, had more history to look back upon—in which cycles displaced each other, and after the glories of Greece and Rome, Conans did, again, ride their steeds through overgrown countryside. And looking at the social, rather than the physical landscape, the early signs of trouble were already there. Even the primordial science-science fiction writer (after Jules Verne, of course), Isaac Asimov, saw this himself—when he shifted his view to society—through the eyes of his character, Hari Seldon. Seldon, the psychohistorian, foresaw the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire too (Foundation).

All this by way of saying that it is extremely difficult for us to imagine, staring at a five-inch flicker of a feed, how the world is likely to change when the oil finally runs dry. I pondered some of the basic on a humid August walk and offer some here for would-be SF writers. But before I do, what about the timing of that drastic change? Maybe not in fifty years, but certainly in seventy or eighty. And writing stories about the 2180s, 2190s would be science fiction. The alternative, fusion energy, certainly still is fiction, and if it ever comes to be, it won’t be a solution; if you don’t mind some technical detail, here are the reasons as I summarized them a while back. Now some notes.

It is said that the world is getting smaller. When oil runs out it will magically become enormously large again. Distances, as measured in time and cost, will become very much greater. Transatlantic travel, except for the super-rich, will be long, tedious, and done under sail again.

A correlate of that is that large institutions (private, public, government) will become small. Centralized powers will lose power, decentralization will be the new New. Anticipate initially de facto, later de jure break-up of the United States. Regions will assert themselves defensively—say California its agriculture, the Great Lakes region its water—to protect themselves from redistribution, by a higher level, of their core wealth to others.

Naturally fertile, naturally moistened land will become the greatest single object of value—and society will arrange itself to hold and guard it. Various forms once known, now considered forever gone, will come back: centrally ruled river systems, forms of feudalism.

Careers like mine—functionally centered on working with symbols—will be very rare, poorly compensated, and possibly, as in the Middle Ages, celibate. Symbol manipulation will have lost most of its economic value; it has it now because we’re operating at a great distance from physical reality—and able to do so by symbolical commands.

Most people will once more work with their hands because an absolute die-off of machines is in the offing—unless they’re smart enough (the machines, I mean) to run on water or the energy of wind.

When my grandchildren are raising their children, it will be well for them to insist that their offspring acquire high skill in crafts along the lines of carpentry, iron work, leather tanning, weaving, and the like. Want to be in advertising? Learn to paint or carve attractive signs. We must remember that in those times things as simple as nails will be hard to get, and skills to build things without them will be prized. No oil, disappearing coal—where’s the fuel to smelt ore or melt down the corpses of machines?

Rare the panel on C-Span that discusses such eventualities seriously. When we occasionally see one, the participants talk about planning for that future, arranging things, changing current institutions. No way, José. In the run-up to that future, conflicts will mushroom. Indeed we may be in that time already, unknowingly. In the turmoil of those times such words as planning and societal change will no longer carry any meaning.

But, living as we do in the Age of Flickr, I’ve written too much. Virtually no one will read this far down, so I ought to bring this to a close.

They Bended the Light

The trials and traumas of being a science-fiction writer? There are plenty, let me tell you. How do you reconcile the following, for instance: Newton believed that light was made of tiny little particles with mass—but that gravity did not affect them. But Einstein believed they had no mass, but gravity pulled them nevertheless!

Fortunately SF-writers have a kind of license, like court jesters used to have. The latter could speak truth to power and still stay out of dungeons. In our more commercial times, SF-writers don’t aspire to publication in peer-reviewed journals. They worry more when Marvel Comics frowns.

My problems have been with gravity bending light. A writer needs light to fly in straight lines to produce decent space tales. If massive things bend light, even if ever so slightly, and if dark matter is as prevalent as science tells me that it is, how do I know that a star I see at night is actually where it is? It might be somewhere quite different, hiding at the tail end of a million-light-year-zigzag course and not be rotating where it seems to. There may in fact be a huge body entirely obscuring the star I see, but the light from it has managed, by Einsteinian assists, to curl around this obstruction. To illustrate this hide and seek, I provide a graphic I made myself, but the inspiration for it was Jeffrey Reynolds’ here.

The way science explains the dilemma is to say that photons “follow the geodesic” and their mass-less nature does not guarantee straight paths. But what does such phraseology mean? By “geodesic” scientists refer to the curvature of space, more correctly of space-time. It isn’t as if gravity affects a mass-less particle. No. It is that great masses cause space-time to curve. And once that space-time has curved, light follows it. Self-evident, isn’t it? Or is it? Well, let me not try to explain that to a science-fiction reader. Space-time exists (in the sense of really being there) largely as a mathematical conception. And if it exists in reality, there is no actual physical description of how this “whatever” tangibly influences things we can actually see (like light) or touch and feel (like matter). It’s a muddle. I can fill whole walks just pondering how space-time knows to straighten itself out again after a big bad ball has caused it to curve. Or is it just displaced? Like water by a sinking ball of lead? But if so, it must be something. Is there a Theory of the Elasticity and Fluidity of Space-Time? I wonder.

The trigger for these thoughts? Well, in today’s paper I came across a front page story on a discovery, by Takahiro Sumi and team, at the Osaka University, that hundreds of billions of gigantic planets, gas giants like Jupiter, clutter-up our galaxy, none of which is associated with a solar system—orphans, in other words. There are supposed to be twice as many of these orphans as there are suns in the Milky Way—thus around 400 billion of them. Okay. But the interesting thing, for me, is that this discovery is based not on actually seeing these giants in their enormous numbers but by a method called microlensing. And what is microlensing based on? Why, the ability of big heavy objects to bend light. Now we have yet another marvel to add to black holes (that relentlessly suck everything in but, no surprise, sometimes let things escape), the curvature of the universe into a self-contained sphere (what is outside that sphere?), the blackness of space (why isn’t space brilliantly lit when light cannot escape the sphere?), the perpetual expansion of the universe (into what? the as yet undiscovered Cosmic Container?), the big bang before which there was, what? nothing? And finally the energy-death of reality when every last hydrogen has been burned up? Lordy. I sometimes think that treating science as if it were immune to the current philosophical and cultural meltdown is actually a mistake. But not a mistake we have to make in fiction. Those 400 billion lonesome giants might one of these days come in quite handy. And soon there might even be a country-song about them…

Vanished Author Hasn't Quite

I just became aware that a one time reader of my novels has put a post on his blog today titled “Another quest to find a seemingly vanished author of my youth ends.” The post is here in its native form. In days to come it will wander deeper, I suspect. I would point to the single post itself, but when I isolate it, it causes my machine to hang. Suffice it to identify the blog. The blogger styles himself pyropyga and lists the Chicago Speculative Fiction Community as his website. That site is here. Now while all that follows is available on this site, I am indeed eager to be known to exist, what with two new novels out and a third about to issue. Therefore I will repeat here that more is to be learned about me at Dwarf Planet Press. And my Amazon.com author page is here. Amazon also lists my two latest novels. I’ve been submerged, to be sure, but now, in the Chicago community, evidently, I’ve been found. And delighted to be found!

ADDED LATER: Thanks to James Davis Nicoll's tip—he is the author of the actual post mentioned above—I now know that the post is available directly here—and without hangs of any sort. The blog is called More Words, Deeper Hole. James Nicoll's base is in Canada, but the blog platform he uses, livejournal.com, permits the sharing of entries between friends. The Chicago linkage I discovered and reported on above turns out to have been one of Nicoll's friends. The mysteries of the Internet deepen. In any case, thanks to one brief post yesterday, Ghulf Genes had an unaccustomed surge of traffic. What Me Worry? Among the visitors was David Dyer-Bennet of the Minnesota Fantasy and SF community. David wondered about rumors that I'd once been a Minnesota author. The list he maintains is here. Yes to that question too. Ah, those crisp Minnesota winters, and the crunch of the cross-country skis over snow...

Attention Seekers, Value Seekers

I’d like to round out my reactions to the New Age/Paganist convention we attended this past weekend, ConVocation. Convocation is sponsored by The Magical Education Council in Michigan; the 2010 event was the organization’s sixteenth. According to the MEC’s mission statement, “This organization is established for the following purpose: to create community by promoting the sharing of knowledge, experience, and fellowship among people who follow mystical and esoteric traditions.”

As I’ve noted in earlier posts, we’ve recently also attended a science fiction convention called ConFusion just a couple of miles from ConVocation in Detroit’s convention alley, you might say, along I-75 in the metro’s northern suburbs. Structurally the two conventions were very similar, but the interesting contrast for me was a seemingly different internal structure. While attending the last three sci-fi conventions over a period of about six years, it became ever more clear to me that the audiences were shrinking and that at least half of those attending were present (as we were present at the last ConFusion) with the agenda of self-promotion. We were there to sell my novels. This became very obvious in those sessions where I was a panelist and could therefore, from the front table, see the nametags of the audience. Many—and in some panels most—of those attending had panelist ribbons under their nametags. We were addressing insiders who would later address us… Among these some of those simply attending (no ribbon visible) revealed themselves in commentary and questions posed to be would-be artists, writers, or musicians. We were among Attention Seekers. The audience—those seeking values, had greatly diminished.

I must not generalize, of course, but experience is experience. Working our booth in the Vendor room, the same pattern emerged even more sharply. ConFusion is an entertainment venue, but far too few of those who stopped to chat were present for entertainment. They were all selling or promoting something.

Now for the contrast. I mentioned in the last post that ConVocation had a much larger audience; insiders in that audience, however, were the exception. Most of those attending—and eyeballing them they matched ConFusion’s audience in demographic and income characteristics—were present because they sought something of value. A snapshot. I arrived quite early on Friday morning not wishing to miss the single session on publishing. As I entered the lobby and went down the halls to find registration, I saw six different women each sitting on a chair, alone. Each was absorbed in the reading of a book.

This got me thinking in the days that followed. Attention seeking, value seeking. Lots of food for thought there as we look out into the world—especially the cybernetic world of information overload. But the sorting of these thoughts is still in progress.

Interesting Contrasts

We are attending ConVocation, a New Age/Paganist convention just a hop and a skip from the location where we attended ConFusion, the science fiction convention.  We is Dwarf Planet Press. We did not manage to get a vendor spot ahead of time. Had we done so, our tidy, elegant, industrial style booth, used by Editorial Code and Data for a decade at reference publishing conventions (at which we thought we looked  daring) would have looked at ConVocation like a Puritan at a cocktail party. Jewelry, textiles, and magical implements dominated the vendor space, although we glimpsed a book or two for sale at nearly every booth. The contrast between the sci-fi and the pagan event was startling. The differences?

• Attendance: ConVocation was/is crowded, masses of people.
• Content: More than a hundred lectures, presentations, and classes—all of them full.
• Quality: We attended four sessions yesterday, and three of the four were superb.
• Audience Participation: Much more active and lively. In fairness to ConFusion, the few participants there were as well-informed as at ConVocation.

Our first and challenging session yesterday was a presentation by Llewellyn Worldwide, the leading New Age Publisher. I confesss that I'd never heard of them before. Llewellyn publishes 135 books a year. One of their acquisitions editor and a promotional executive gave a fascinating presentation aimed at new writers, but what we heard and understood from comments on the margins, from anecdotes illustrating good advice, and from the context is how one really goes about promoting books in the modern day. Awesome, brother, awesome. But more later, not least some comments on what the contrast tells me. Must run to attend ConVocation's second day—and this conference is good enough so that we must be there at 9 am sharp!

Elusive Culture

Over roughly a decade I’ve attended four science fiction conventions in Michigan, two called ConClave and two ConFusion, my last, this past weekend, one of the latter. Before that time I’d attended one in Minneapolis, one in Chicago, and a WorldCon in Kansas City—that one because I was one of the Hugo nominees and invited to attend. Despite this very limited sample, I drove home from my last ConFusion spontaneously forming, in my thoughts, a strong convictions about the changes over time in SF culture—until I stopped myself dead.

In every earlier case as also in this one, I spent three days in a hotel, attended five or six sessions, talked to two- or three-score people through the noise and the turmoil, watched oddly costumed people, garish goods and strange art on display, listened to prominent figures most of whose books I’d never read—and marveled at it all. And the residual impressions of this activity, filtered through my own accumulated life’s memories, is what I call culture?

No, nothing of the sort. But then, come to think of it, my views of Culture writ large—American culture, Western culture—are built up much the same way: that of the greater culture strongly influenced by a relentless stream of newsprint and media images, mixed with the residues of contacts with real people, problems in business, annoyance in travel, the contents of books read, films seen, art beheld, music heard. And this huge but not systematically studied mélange, synthesized in the endlessly fluctuating cauldrons of emotion into a single impression, that is my own subjective sense of culture. Not that I’ll avoid the word in the future. Such habits are hard to break. But at least today I realize the oddity of speaking of a subjective assessment of reality (or a part of it) as if it had a hard, independent existence, a singularity and stability, outside of myself.

Having said all this, some of the things I noted at ConFusion 2010:

• The paranormal in one special form—vampirism, zombies—played a major role at this convention, and not at all because it was the convention’s theme. It wasn’t. I heard no references to the paranormal as normally understood, the real thing as it were.
• I had a sense that many fans and panelists spontaneously used television series as the central points of reference when wishing to appeal to common knowledge—along with a few well-known fantasy-style books (Tolkien’s, for instance—rather than the science fiction greats).
• The prominent philosophical or sociological issue was feminism, perhaps because most of the authors present were women.
• The economic shadow that now weighs down on Michigan was obvious and tangible, many people suddenly opening up and relating their own woes at great length when asked about themselves. We heard many and very strange tales about the difficulties of getting by. And going to an SF convention was evidently a temporary escape into a better world for many—despite its growing population of blood-sucking mirages made modern, slender, sexy, and immortal.

A Novella Online

The first story I ever published was entitled The Splendid Freedom. It ran in one of the 1974 issues of Galaxy magazine. Some time later (1980) it lent its name to a story collection of mine (shown to the left), which, in addition to that tale, also had two of my then most popular shorter pieces, The Eastcoast Confinement and Plutonium.

I have put up the text of Splendid Freedom on what I call my literary (or more humbly, my writing) site (Ghulf Records) accessible here. It is in PDF format. Some readers of this blog, suddenly seeing me revealed as an author of fiction, can now read one of my pieces and see for themselves what I sound like in another of my personae. In a way it pleases me that this novella, although now three decades old and counting, has not lost its meaning or relevance; nor am I tempted to make excuses for it. If you don’t have an Adobe Reader, send me e-mail and I’ll give it to you as an MS Word document. The e-mail address is accessible through my profile.

One additional comment. While the illustration of the story collection (shown) is actually drawn from the story, my own approach to science fiction—however artfully I deal with science and technology in these accounts—is never about whizz-bang. But then regular visitors here will already know that. Meanwhile I always insist that the science part of my sci-fi apes reality much better than many others’ efforts manage the job.

Science Fiction - Looking Back

Like virtually all people with my kind of gift, I was writing from childhood onward, entirely conscious both of the pleasure of this activity and the feeling that it was something I was meant to do: a calling, in other words. Later, when time came to carry this activity into the public square and I looked around, to be sure from a pretty shaded and obscure position in a vast jungle, the ant looking up into the canopies, the only visible markets for short fiction that I saw were romance, crime, and science fiction magazines—or general circulation periodicals that carried the occasional story in a genre. There was the New Yorker, to be sure. The Saturday Evening Post still published a little fiction. I also discovered other publications of either a modernistic or academic sort that published fiction of a peculiar flavor. Indeed I thought that the fiction in the New Yorker would also be described by that adjective: it had a certain audience and, in a way, it excluded large groupings of humanity by its very mannerisms and its sophistication. Yes, occasionally, I heard an authentic voice there too. I read what I saw about me or came my way by accident (but what others consider accident I sometimes see in quite another light).

Science fiction pleased me most because, oddly, it was the most general, the most inclusive. Under this narrow label, I discovered, lived all kinds of writers. The designation was often coupled with the word fantasy. There was—and I note that there still is—a magazine called Fantasy & Science Fiction. The stories ranged from hard to soft to transcendental. In a way it was a genre where you could say that “Everything goes,” and, indeed, everything went. Here, for instance—and this is a genuine random sample—is the first paragraph on a page of F&SF that I opened just now, at random, the magazine itself plucked, also at random, from a stack on the top of a tall bookcase in my attic. It happens to be a poem by R.A. Lafferty:

The handsome stranger cast his eye
On Shirley-girl and gave a sigh.
“Oh talk a while,” he said, “with I.”
She liked his noble knobby dome.
They dinnered at the Hippodrome.
She fell for him, she brought him home.
“Oh, mother see this guy of mine,”
She said. “He’s from a noble line.
His I.Q. soars to 9-9-9.”

And so on. An amusing poem with a cultural message, it turns out. Try to find that sort of thing back in those days, in the Saturday Evening Post. Long story short, I began to write short fiction and sent it to sci-fi magazines. Total failure. Then I went off to serve in the military, got married, had children. But I was still just a kid. The writing continued, but always in private. Then Brigitte said one day: “Stop writing those tomes and write something short. Try to get it published.” I was off on a trip the following morning, a very early start, like out of bed a 5 a.m., Boston bound. I started a story on the airplane, “A Splendid Freedom,” it was called. I wrote throughout the flight, throughout the flight home again, and I finished this novella later that week, at home, working at the ping pong table in the basement. I had no desk in the house. I sent this story to Galaxy magazine. I frankly expected exactly the same result I’d already experienced in high school and college—the rejection slip. Instead I got a letter of acceptance; and the editor, Jim Baen, added an invitation. He wondered if I’d written anything else—he said he’d like to see it if so. Lordy, lord, lord. Letter in hand I shyly approached Brigitte and said. “Well, dear, I think that was a pretty good suggestion…”

For the would be author—the kind for whom literature is a universe rather than a ladder into an enclave, a cosmos rather than a billboard, an atmosphere in which to breathe, a dimension in which to thrive—throughout the twentieth century, perhaps continuing to this day, science fiction, a genre entirely misnamed, a genre that outgrew its origins rapidly—with a hard-core of grumblers at its center who wished it would still be hard-core science fiction—was the homeland of the free.

One of the pleasing oddities of reality is that the really vital element refuses to be contained and suffocated by convention that, with equal ferocity, attempts always to fossilize around it. Real literature broke away from its encrustations somewhere along the line and made a new home for itself, indeed glorying in its tawdry reputation and laughing at the dour faces looking down from the proud tower of the past, the faces that dismissed it and did not deign to call it literature.