Three In
Space: Classic Novels of Space Travel:
The Voyage of the Space Beagle, by A. E. van Vogt
Galaxies, by Barry Malzberg
The Enemy Stars, by Poul Anderson
Selected by Jack Dann, Pamela
Sargent and George Zebrowski
A White Wolf Rediscovery Trio,
565pp, 1998
Sf's stylistic trajectory, as
mapped by this odd troika, echoes shocks of change and repetition, from the
start of global war to the end of the Vietnam conflict. Its span stretches from
six years before the first atomic bomb to six years after the first moon
landing. Each of these remarkable but utterly disparate novels is introduced by
an sf connoisseur, after a foreword by Arthur C. Clarke--plus two afterwords to Galaxies,
one a 1980 retrospective appreciation from Marta Randall, the other Malzberg's
despairing reflections, in 1997, on Galaxies: `What a remarkable novel
this is: of life and science fiction it says nothing but of its
thirty-five-year-old author it says as was meant nearly everything. BUT IT
DOESN'T SAY WHAT THE AUTHOR THOUGHT HE WAS SAYING.' White Wolf's handsome
packaging will enthral genre newcomers, its targeted audience (but I'd recommend
they postpone Malzberg to last), while fetching a nostalgic tear to old-time
fans. Certainly each of these books was significant in my own life.
Dann, Sargent and Zebrowski, upmarket denizens of sf's generic ecology,
retain a warm fondness for the wonderful pulp dreams incubated by generations of
John W. Campbell's famous magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. Nearly 60
years ago, in the shadow of World War Two and without anyone noticing, modern
science fiction burst into squalling life. In 1939, Robert Heinlein, Isaac
Asimov and A. E. van Vogt published their first stories there. Van Vogt, chosen
1995 Grandmaster by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, is the
only one still alive--and perhaps the least known, out of fashion. Yet his
influence remains visible everywhere, from Star Trek and Star Wars
to the most surrealist slipstream sf. His first stories, `Black Destroyer' and
`Discord in Scarlet', became the closely reworked heart of his classic Space
Beagle fix-up novel (the locus classicus of that narrative patchwork
device, and van Vogt's own term, adopted by Nicholls and Clute in their SF
Encyclopedia). It is a superb choice to open this `Rediscovery Trio'.
The very language of each novel tells us a lot about these consecutive
generations of wonder-weavers. Van Vogt's space opera is as primal and menacing
as any Alien movie: `On and on Coeurl prowled. The black, moonless,
almost starless night yielded reluctantly before a grim reddish dawn that crept
up from his left.' By turns, four terrifying aliens disrupt this intergalactic
expedition: Coeurl, the hypnotic birdlike Riim, terrifying Ixtl who lays eggs in
human bellies (van Vogt won $50,000 recompense from the makers of Alien),
and a vast gas intelligence, the Anabis, that infests our neighboring Andromeda
galaxy. Gluing the episodes together is the patient missionary work of Elliott
Grosvenor, the ship's Nexialist, an interdisciplinary holistic thinker and
forerunner of van Vogt's classic supermen and perhaps L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics
and scientology. As a dumb kid, I gulped down van Vogt's wonderful novel, and
dreamed of being a Nexialist.
Two decades after that tale of an almost indestructible alien loose among
scientists on a starship eerily like the Enterprise, a second generation
of Campbell's children was peaking, more fluent and often better trained in the
sciences. Poul Anderson, still writing today and 1997's Grandmaster, offered a
poignant hard-sf novel about the quest for knowledge--of the human heart, and a
dark star that smashes an expedition but yields first contact with alien minds.
Serialized under the haunting title We Have Fed Our Sea, it closes this
volume, its physics revised in 1979, as, thuddingly, The Enemy Stars. (I
wish Poul had taken the chance to reinstate the title borrowed from Kipling.)
In the era of Sputnik and the other early satellites, Anderson was more
solemn than van Vogt, confident yet incantatory: `They named her Southern
Cross and launched her on the road whose end they would never see.' After
ruinous wars, space exploration is renewed. Mattercasting allows crew and
supplies to be teleported instantly by tachyon beam, but a receiver must await
them. Starships plunge into the void at nearly the speed of light, temporary
shells for international technicians who watch over them during short tours of
duty. A remnant black sun smashes Southern Cross's engines and 'caster
web, and the aghast crew must struggle to rebuild their link to Earth. What they
find is the price in blood of admiralty, and community with a people utterly
unlike themselves. Anderson's melancholy, stodgy, somewhat sexist poetry moved
me deeply in my late teens.
Tucked between is a text tagged sf only by twisting the genre's
definition to breaking point, as its audacious author surely intended. At the
terminus of this 36-year narrative arc, Malzberg is shamelessly in-your-face:
`To define terms at the outset, this will not be a novel so much as a series of
notes toward one. Nevertheless pay attention, for it will cease to become a
novel exactly at the point where it seems to be at last gathering force.'
Clearly this was not a story serialised by John W. Campbell, who would have
detested it. Ironically, though, its source was several Campbell Analog
articles about black holes, as it tells us almost at once, but Malzberg folds,
spindles and mutilates every fact and surmise he found there.
Galaxies seems no less radical today, in its taunting,
metafictional way. In 1975, six months after Joanna Russ's equally transgressive
feminist novel The Female Man finally appeared, it marked an end to
innocent sf tale-telling. The book brandishes its contrivances, forces us to
slog through Malzberg's own mocking meltdown as a highly self-aware artist
toiling in the humus of a medium he genially despises, satirizes without mercy,
and perhaps loves.
Solo pilot Lena and her cargo of 515 frozen dead plunge into a black hole
(variously and characteristically misidentified as a `white dwarf', `neutron
star', and `galaxy') and torment themselves with elegant futility, fetching up
at last in Ridgefield Park, New Jersey, 1975. Sounds as much fun as a bowel
re-section, yet Malzberg's bleak realism about life and text deconstructs sf's
melodrama into something vehement, painful, extraordinary. In maturity, Malzberg
teased and confronted me with mysteries of narrative deeper, in their way, than
deepest space. His narrator observes: `A writer who could combine the techniques
of modern fiction with a genuine command of science could be at the top of this
field in no more than a few years.' Malzberg himself has now fallen almost
silent, but two decades on, writers such as Kim Stanley Robinson and Greg Egan
and Greg Benford and Greg Bear and Paul McAuley have proved him right, even if
in his `Epilogue Again' he declares bleakly that since Galaxies appeared
`twenty-three wonderful years have come and (almost) gone and the work seems to
have survived not only the state of science fiction which motivated its
composition but science fiction itself.'
What possessed Dann, Sargent and Zebrowski to yoke these quite different
texts into a single volume? They had previously produced Three In Time,
an effective omnibus containing novels at once less famous and formally less
confronting than these: Anderson's There Will Be Time, Wilson Tucker's
rather dated The Year of the Quiet Sun and anthropologist Chad Oliver's The
Winds of Time. Their brief was to bring `enduring classics of science
fiction to a new generation of readers', which presumably accounts for the
explanatory apparatus fore and aft--that, and the obdurate taste of sf
enthusiasts for camp-fire gossiping, time-binding memorials in a culture where
memory is shockingly fleeting and the constituency in ceaseless flux. Malzberg
might be right: if science fiction is a sub-culture built on the foundation of
books such as these, and their active engagement, perhaps it has already passed
away. `Who killed sf?' is a theme, after all, regularly rehearsed in these
pages.
Let us say that White Wolf and the editors are at least trying their
damnedest to pummel the dying creature's breast, shouting its name in its
Walkman-plugged ear. I don't think happy campers in Franchise-land will embrace
Malzberg's chilly pomo demolition of tropes already sublimed (one way or
another) in the hot media sun, especially not jammed between van Vogt's gaudy
oneiric sleepwalking into genre bliss and Anderson's glum epiphanies of duty in
chill heaven. Better, perhaps, to have preserved the chronological arc. But such
a natural conclusion must have seemed altogether too minatory. White Wolf wish
to sell more anthologies, after all, so they can hardly send away their young
readers bruised, wandering eyeless in Gaza. But I might be wrong about that.
People don't always start at the front and trudge or bound onward to the back
cover. The street has its own uses for rediscovered history. I hope it finds joy
here, and illumination, and frustration, and that White Wolf, next time, pokes
deeper into the dusty archives of other far-flung corners of the sf main. There
is no lack of half-forgotten treasures to be unearthed and buffed up. I fancy a
trio of books containing strange children: George O. Smith's The Fourth R,
let's say, and Wilma Shiras's Children of the Atom and Edgar Pangborn's A
Mirror for Observers, or one where the cognitive arc itself turns around and
bites you on the ass: Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration (or, if that
superb jeu is back in print, as it deserves to be, then Lewis Padgett's Chessboard
Planet) and Ian Watson's The Embedding, and The Dreaming Dragons,
by a writer whose name I am too modest to mention.
by John Barnes
New York: Tor, 1999, 303 pages
John Barnes is the end-of-century
equivalent to those reliable craftsmen (and a few women) at the end of the
Campbell Golden Age of sf and the mid-century: an entertainer who hardly ever
lets you down, a writer with literary ambitions beyond the confines of genre
restrictions but happy to work at their boundaries, schooled in at least the
elements of the sciences and prepared to do the hard slogging needed to get it
right within the limits of the game, blessed as well with an edge of humor and
that mysterious bubbling imagination which flows across the terrain of formula
and renews it, if only for a moment, while leaving it formulaic. Think of Poul
Anderson in the fifties and early sixties, or Harry Harrison, perhaps even
Sturgeon and Heinlein, inexhaustible, various, often delightful, sometimes just
cranking the pages out to pay the bills. Of course, because they worked the seam
when it had just been opened up, their work carried an additional frisson of
shock, novelty, unrepeatable pleasure. We can't get that any longer, half a
century on. We have to make do with the pleasures of repetition and
recombination, with Varley's deliciously exfoliating Eight Worlds and Heinlein
remixes (The Golden Globe with its astonishingly rich, detailed tapestry
in themes out of Double Star and the psychotic heroism which ends The
Puppet Masters: `the free men are coming to kill you! Death and
destruction!'), with Vance striking endlessly variant droll postures in the
pastures and canyons and sourly suspicious marketplaces of the sky, with John
Barnes and his pleasing engagements on fields long since surveyed and pegged by
pioneers: here, Fritz Leiber and Keith Laumer and all the other warriors
sidewise in the big time, stretched out and echoed in every possible variant
across the probability landscapes of the Many Worlds hypothesis like a metaphor
of sf's burden of memory and repetition.
Finity has the look to me of a confection built on the
run, if that makes any sense, ingredients grabbed from whatever shelf comes to
hand, stirred and heated and cooled as the winds of chance carry the chef one
way and other, in the confidence (Barnes is a professional, he can keep his
nerve even when a scarf flies up and covers his eyes) that the tale will evolve
to a good-enough conclusion, that the telling itself is where we find our
satisfaction. Not that he didn't set out with a nifty notion or two. I have the
suspicion that this one struck him one day after the third dickhead incapable of
reading eight or nine numerals in a row called his phone in error and hung up in
his ear. Where are those wrong numbers coming from? Can the world really
be so stupid? What if--
A lovely and satisfying part of Finity, for a certain kind of
reader (there might not be many of us around, though), is Barnes's borrowing of
the logic of abduction, a topic explored by the great American
semiotician and pragmatist Charles Sanders Peirce, pronounced `Purse'.
Abduction, or retrodiction, is his stab at an explanation for how, when faced
with startling facts, we crystallize some single hypothesis out of the myriad
possible. Peirce hoped it would take its place in the armamentarium of logic,
alongside deduction and induction. In the event, Karl Popper arrived to throw
induction out the door as well, although it seems to be creeping back in again
lately. Abduction never really took off, perhaps because its method is
impossibly hard to specify. (I suspect that what Peirce mistook for the activity
of an abductive logic is actually one or more cognitive templates kicking in at
a level inaccessible to scrutiny, the kind of painfully evolved filter that
matches language's universal grammar to those aspects of the world salient to
human survival.)
Barnes gives a charming account of the idea, which makes his bland
protagonist Lyle Peripart special; he's an abduction theorist and New Zealand US
ex-pat, in a 2062 world partitioned a century earlier after the victory of the
German Reich. So at once we have a pleasing conjunction: the trope of parallel
worlds (or `counterfactuals', as they are termed modishly today in an academy
which knows nothing of sf's exhaustive exploitation of the idea) and a logic of
seizing or constructing a true description out of the infinite seething
combinations of the world's plenty.
Can Barnes carry off this narrative abduction, to our insight and
gratification? Can his cast of miscast operators, abducted from any secure
premises, carry the tale forward to some happy syllogistic conclusion? That is
his modest goal, curiously enough, declared in advance: `Just once,' a loyal
reader asked him, `would it kill you to write an adventure story, with a
reasonably happy ending, only a little weird?' A sophisticated and witty
fellow, Barnes does just that in a suitably unexpected way. Weirdness drenches
his tale, but by the standards of a Phil Dick dislocation it's only a little
weird after all. Perhaps sf has suffered too many torsions by now, perhaps the
demands of excess have spoiled its infinite possibilities.
Still, there is a cosy enjoyment to be had in the re-mixing. And Barnes
does have a neat gadget for stirring up the Many Worlds, for shoe-horning you
out of one reality and into its neighbor. If anything, the gadget is too neat,
and the insights at the narrative's heart too grand, for the implied weight of
the shocking stuff we fetch up in or surf across. (`Shocking' only in a rather
remote intellectual sense, however. The only event to ruffle a maiden aunt is a
scene of don't-hurt-me-I-love-it rough sex that recalls Barnes's taste, which
worries me a bit, for sadistic infliction in his recent three-part parallel
worlds `Timeline Wars' template series starting with Patton's Spaceship.)
The same defect of narrative disproportion somewhat spoiled Greg Egan's far more
spectacular novels Quarantine and Distress, where moral choice and
cosmological grandeur/grandiosity crunch into the final pages with an inevitable
and dizzyingly paradoxical sense of cheated disappointment: is That all
there is?
I'm not going to tell you anything much about the plot (where's America
gone? why can't I remember the question I just asked?), because the propulsion
of the book is confusion, bumbling accommodation, hugger-mugger, moments of
tenderness, lots of talk, lots of action (of an effective if routine kind). The
bond between Peripart and his gal, a historian with the oddly similar name Helen
Perdida, has something of the pleasing asperity and fondness of the best
Heinlein couples. The fate of this team is a rebus of the fate of the novel. The
book will do, in the way of a solid H. Beam Piper or Murray Leinster serial in Astounding,
but I'm hanging out for another Mother of Storms.
edited by David Pringle, New
York: St Martin's Press, 1997
First the science: this Best
selection has 29 stories and an introduction, by 31 writers, 27 men, 4 women, 21
Brits (including the editor and magazine's proprietor), 6 North Americans, 2
Australians, one New Zealander-Australian-German, 1 published in 1990, 5 in '91,
5 in '92, 2 in '93, an impressive 10 in '94, and 4 in '95, 2 undated.
Then the fiction: this Best of Interzone--actually, I gather, the
sixth in a series of anthologies that began in 1985, three years after the
magazine itself--draws its stories, as noted, from the period 1990-95.
Curiously, editor Pringle makes no bones about this titular discrepancy: `more
accurately titled "Some of the best from Interzone's Past Five Years"
' (xvi), but it's just good ole American parochialism at work, since the
previous five volumes didn't made it across the Atlantic.
Britain is another country; they do things differently there. No, really.
Unless you live in the UK, of course, as I certainly don't and neither do most
of you. But my oblique angle to the science fiction and fantasy of the United
Kingdom is different from that of American readers, even though I share with
Brits a preference for saying, as I just did, `different from' instead of
`different than'. For Australian colonials in the late '50s and early '60s
(which Americans might be inclined to think of as the 50's and the 60's, to my
uncomprehending horror), sf arrived in the text-only pages of John Carnell's
largely stumble-tongued Nova Publications magazines New Worlds and Science
Fantasy and Science-Fiction Adventures, and a few dog-eared copies of
the even more woeful Scottish magazine Authentic. Well, that's not true,
because you might also find copies of the British reprint editions of Astounding
and Galaxy, and the odd F&SF. Paperback sf books were rare,
until the classic novels of Heinlein and Asimov and Clarke and Bester finally
arrived from Corgi and Panther Books.
A decade earlier, as David Hartwell has noted, US kids imprinted on
wonderful surreal covers by Richard Powers and the rich odours of Ballantine
paperbacks, and all those gaudy, delirious, pulpy dreams of magazines monthly
and secondhand or found piled in attics. British readers and their Commonwealth
colonials read some of the same words but they arrived otherwise, behind the
excitingly lurid mock-Max Ernst cover art of Brian Lewis and the real Max Ernst
art of Penguin sf paperbacks, when snooty Penguin finally got into the game with
Pohl and Ballard. All of this is the unconscious humus of difference, the soil
in which the odd little plant of Interzone grew and at last, in 1995,
home team at a non-North American Worldcon, took a Hugo at last.
But the differently they do is a differently we know already, up to a
point, because they do, after all, speak and write in various forms of, well, English,
the international language or lexical-cultural matrix of science fiction. And
leaving aside Jules Verne (whose progeny--I suppose there must be some--failed
to conquer the galaxy despite flying to the moon first), it's still H. G. Wells,
British to the bootstraps for all his internationalism, who created sf from a
handful of beans. And it was surely James Ballard and Brian Aldiss and those
lunatics who swarmed around under Moorcock's broad-brimmed hat who dislodged the
bone-headed space captains and led sf by the hand into a larger, more nuanced
world where Flaubert had climbed pyramids before us, and Burroughs the
mad-tongued junkie might be mined, Nova Publications jumping the Nova Express,
and a jaundiced left-wing take on the global condition might speak of the future
in ways startling, pessimistic and abominable by the yardstick of Campbellian
capitalist-feudal can-do.
Or so it seems, in memory. Nostalgia is a machine for casting runes,
cruelly dichotomising even as it soaks reality in perfumed shadows that blur
boundaries.
Anyway, it's clear that the fruit of the humus that grew Interzone
the magazine and its six (I think) anthologies to date is a fruit with a tang
distinctly alien to the tongue weaned on American flavours. (And alien is
something, as we know all too bitterly, that commercial stories about aliens
ought not be.) Me, a child of both traditions, I find it less alien than you
will, most of you, but slightly woody here and acrid there, oddly gauche rather
often and charmingly feral just when you're yearning for the smooth
professionalism of Swanwick and Wolfe and Le Guin and Sterling and Disch. But
hang on a tick, isn't this, right here, seventh from the end, a merry little
classic mordant thing from Disch: `The Man Who Read a Book'? And doesn't the
volume open, as so many anthologies do these days, if they don't close that way,
or both, and rightly so, with a Greg Egan piece? But he's an Aussie, too,
although a generation later than my kind, so it's not surprising that he fits in
like a snake in a pipe to a magazine grown out of the humus of Nova Publications
but inclining, in its way, toward the same American sun we all yearn for.
There's a metamorphic yarn by Eric Frank Russell using that trope, isn't there,
back in the dawn of time, in 1946? He was British, Russell was, and yet somehow
the quintessential Campbell sardonic comedian. So yes, generalisations have
holes in them, or maybe, like string vests, they're made of holes.
Here's another: science fiction is at its best in small, pungent
concentrations. Perhaps this theorem appeals to most of us because we first had
our imaginations ignited in this special way by stories suitable to the limited
attention span, the modest cultural capital, of childhood. The inestimable Brian
Stableford made this heterodox point nicely in the October, 1997 NYRSF:
`When science fiction was a magazine-based genre it was often argued that the
"natural" form of sf was the short story or the novella--a bizarre
contention, given that every sf story has to construct and adequately specify
its own world-with-the-text, if not its own universe-within-the-text' (4). Just
so. These abbreviated forms `provide narrative spaces so narrowly confined as to
asphyxiate any sustained attempt to design and characterize a single
hypothetical world, let alone a galactic culture' (ibid).
True, not all sf has ambitions so grand. What's more, several solutions
emerged spontaneously among the narrative strategies evolving inside magazine
space. One was the serial novel, unusually modular by design. Another was the
series, in which a common assumed background grew and densified from tale to
tale. Perhaps the first real glory of this method was the Instrumentality
universe of Cordwainer Smith, but that was really just an efflorescence of more
ancient non-European methods grafted to the invention of link-chained stories
familiar from Asimov's robot and Foundation tales, through Herbert's grand Dune
elaboration, to Fred Pohl's Hee-Chee, Steve Baxter's Xeelee and even Kurt
Vonnegut's marginal and self-imbricated Hi-ho. In its most general form, this
solution is the sf mega-text proper, the sprawling, matted and never altogether
consistent set of shared tropes, working assumptions, shorthands, blocked byways
contained in all those comic strips, short stories, novels and nowadays movies
and multimedia that comprise the corpus of the instantiated mode.
Somehow the British slice through sf's mega-text remains stubbornly
oblique, at least in places, to the US arterial. They drive on the other side of
the road, their stories contain homely references to oddities such as `fish 'n'
chips' (at least two instances here), they are given rather more to Tell instead
of Show. Or at any rate many of the writers are Tellers not Showers in this Interzone
gathering. But that might be due to the large number of tyros: `In the 110
issues to August 1996,' Pringle tells us, more than 200 writers contributed,
about two-thirds of them British, over half of them `new writers; that is to
say, they have published their first or second stories with us, and we feel they
are our discoveries--or, at any rate, that we have helped nurture them from
early points in their careers' (xv). The roll-call is impressive, and we are
grateful--Egan, Geoff Ryman, Molly Brown, Paul McAuley, Ian MacLeod, Michael
Blumlein, Nicola Griffith, Stephen Baxter, Rachel Pollack... Some of them flew
swiftly to Asimov's or to novel-writing, but it is a splendid achievement
that Interzone's particular quirkiness and openness to genuine novelty
hatched such oddly feathered birds.
But because these 29 short stories are largely not portions of a
series, because each stands alone for its 10, 15, 20 pages, and offers its
satisfactions in a form skewed to the shock pay-off or the intense epiphany,
there's not a whole hell of a lot more that I can tell you about them without
spoiling the experience of reading the book.
Some highpoints, as a celebration (although, because I'm such a grump,
most of them have their smudgy lowpoints built in). Egan's intellectually
sinuous `Mitochondrial Eve', a typical ideational escapade in which a bombastic
hightech bid to rid the earth of traditional racisms backfires, of course, and
spawns a brand-new fire-flickering, bloody means to bolster old tribalisms and
new. Stableford's neat faux-Poe ode, `The Unkindness of Ravens', on the
installation of speech and sharp-beaked intellect into ravens by unkind men.
Eugene Byrne's rather Ben Elton-like `Cyril the Cyberpig', a rollicking tale
about the installation of speech and gun-equipped intellect into a pig, with a
London accent, by unkind men. Mary Gentle's ferocious and thrillingly horrible
`Human Waste', a vivid conte cruel about the uses of a nano-engineered
child by an unkind woman. Richard Calder's stylish take on cyber-wearables, `The
Allure', in which smart clothes are, inevitably, the man, the woman. Brian
Aldiss's `The Eye-Opener', a Jungian sardonic-maudlin blend of Woody Allen and
the Big Giant Head. Cherry Wilder's (typically) enigmatic, expertly crafted
`Bird on a Time Wire', on the ambivalence of escape. Geoff Ryman's humanized
Sladek take on the robot nurse and her sorrowing child, `Warmth'.
And there are duds (well, I thought so--you might love the bloody
things): MacLeod's `The Family Football', which does the we-all-mutate-every-day
trope in working class accents, thuddingly. New writer Chris Beckett's lame
parable of the evils of Thatcherism, `The Welfare Man', which did not wring my
heart, even though I remember being in a version of it. Ballard's self-parody,
`The Message from Mars', which archly blends a Thirties' version of NASA Goes to
Mars with his patented world-weary Sees-Through-the
Corporate-Technology-Bullshit bit, the continuous play of Ballard's keen and
amused intelligence, doncha know, to a noxious phoney sting. Ian Lee's awful
blundering recension of a gestation technology already the stuff of
light-hearted TV series drama--in fact, I saw this one in `Picket Fences'
several years ago, rather more entertainly done.
And a bunch in between: Kim Newman's rather mechanical take on John Major
(I assume) as a lacklustre Nazi stooge in a world where the Brits lost the War
(as they have subsequently lost the peace, yes, yes). Sean McMullen's odd
fantasy that opens rather as it goes on: ` "As I was travelling through
Westbury forest, I met a man with a ring of green fire around his penis,"
Avenzoar's visitor said casually".' Nicola Griffith's smooth tale, suitable
perhaps for an up-market women's magazine, about the end of humankind in a
global exhaustion of Yuppie Flu. Paul Di Filippo's expertly handled Pynchon tale
of the world where a nuke-sickened time traveller murdered the atom scientists
and achieved... just another variety of screaming across the sky.
Really, though, there's a lot to be said for a book that includes
Gentle's tale of a genetically engineered future with nano fixes: `My child is a
pet substitute... I lift Thomas by his little romper-suit collar, pivot in the
swivel chair, draw my foot back, and kick... The small body impacts with the
floor on the far side of the room. I can see at a glance that he has broken his
neck, and that the downy hair on his skull is matted with blood where he has
fractured the fragile bone plates. I lean my elbows on the desk and watch.
`Nanoscopic structures scurry across the body of my baby...
`Little Thomas, stiff-armed and stiff-legged, pushes himself up onto his
feet and patters back across the floorboards.
` "A'gen!" he demands. Breathy. "Gen! Do it 'gen!" I
didn't say I designed him to be bright' (477).
I leave you to find for yourself the horrid, plausible impact of the story's final line.