This essay was commisioned for the annual SFWA Nebula anthology, Nebula 26, published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich and appeared there in slightly longer form.
The 1990 World Science Fiction Convention in Holland was the first Worldcon that East Bloc SF professionals attended in force. Many were experiencing their first trip to the West, and their excitement was contagious. One Rumanian SF reader, dropping by a panel in honor of Joe Haldeman, informed Haldeman that he was his favorite author; the Rumanian revealed that Haldeman's books had been translated and were circulating in the form of typed manuscripts, passed hand to hand. A Soviet science-fiction editor told of publishing an anthology, The Green Book of Science Fiction, filled with stories using the word 'green' in the title. It seems that the publisher had located a stock of green paper -- Soviet publishing has been continually plagued by paper shortages -- so the editors fashioned an anthology to match. The creators of the Polish SF magazine Newa Fantastika explained that their enterprise had just gone private, and they were no longer required to be Party members. Toward the end of the convention, there were many invitations: if you're ever in Leningrad ... in Warsaw ... in Leipzig...
Although science fiction is now a world literature, to my knowledge
no Nebula Award has ever gone to a work in translation. The Nebula
process celebrates an essentially American vision of what the
field is all about, generally bypassing the Continental product
and treating British SF only as a particularly promising colony.
When SFWA members say, for example, that British SF exhibits an
unnatural fascination with disaster, the implicit comparison is
always with the good old upbeat American variety. David Brin,
who during his stay in England is said to have impressed the natives
with his Americanness, embodies this stance in the preface to
his 1990 novel, Earth:
As writers go, I suppose I'm known as a bit of an optimist, so it seems only natural that this novel projects a future where thereÌs a little more wisdom than folly . . . maybe a bit more hope than despair.
In fact, it's about the most encouraging tomorrow I can imagine right now.
What a sobering thought.
Like the hero of James Patrick Kelly's fine novella, "Mr. Boy," in which for those who can afford it all manner of physical and genetic alterations are available, American science fiction is a boy who's always twelve no matter how old he gets. And yet, for all its traditional callousness and native hopefulness, the field has darkened of late. Brin isn't the only author to entertain a sobering thought or two. Most American SF writers don't expect to ever go to the moon, nor do they imagine their grandchildren living there, nor do they necessarily feel it's a good idea for humans to move into space. These days, travel to other planets is seen as a retreat from the crises unfolding right here on Earth. And while nobody hesitates to concoct even the most implausible nightmare scenarios, the average writer would be embarrassed to extrapolate anything resembling a healthy and functional future. As one of Kim Stanley RobinsonÌs characters observes in Pacific Edge, "utopia is increasingly difficult to imagine". check this out American SF, it seems, is losing its American optimism.
Although our Bicentennial seems to have occurred eons ago, the founding of the American Republic is (still) only about two hundred years old. On May 29, 1790, Rhode Island, the last of the thirteen states, ratified the Constitution. Once political independence was won, Americans also sought intellectual independence. Thus, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution empowers Congress to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
This is a passage to gladden the heart of any SFWA president. Article II of the SFWA bylaws seems a mere corollary to it:
The purpose of (SFWA) shall be to promote the furtherance of the writing of science fiction and related genres as a profession. In doing so, its activities shall include, but not be limited to, informing science-fiction writers on professional matters, protecting their interests, and helping them deal effectively with their agents, editors, anthologists, and producers in non-print media. . .
One imagines the SFWA Grievance Committee pasting this passage above their computers right before drafting particularly assertive letters to those whores of the entertainment conglomerates, publishers. What better mission in life than to enforce the will of Thomas Jefferson on Gulf & Western or Mitsubishi? As practitioners of an art that aims to "promote the progress of Science," science-fiction writers might even be the very folks the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created Article I, Section 8. And so it is perhaps no coincidence that in 1990, on the two hundredth anniversary of the final ratification of the Constitution, SFWA, with considerable help from the enthusiastic young staff at Pulphouse Publishing, put out a worthy book, the new incarnation of the legendary Science Fiction Writers of America Handbook: The Professional Writer's Guide to Writing Professionally.
As both John Clute and Brian Stableford have pointed out, the SFWA Handbook vibrates with anxiety. "The writer who only does the things he does well is dead," Frederic Pohl explains in his essay. And after all the un-indexed chitchat about contracts, copyrights, payment, editing, promotion, reselling your work, agents, packagers, "how to make a short story long" and"writing a series," the reader may very well envy the dead. Is this what it means to be a "professional writer"?
To answer this question, we should perhaps return to the origins of our young republic. The American novelist Charles Brockden Brown looms large in that post-revolutionary era from which we glean so many of our heroes. Brockden Brown is often credited with being America's first professional fiction writer, although this is not, strictly speaking, true. (The first American novelist to really support himself by writing was James Fenimore Cooper, who reaped his profits by having his books privately printed and selling them himself.) But despite its falsity, the legend of Charles Brockden Brown, First Professional Writer in America, cultural patriot and patron saint of commercial authors, has special meaning for SFWA members.
Without sponsorship, Brockton Brown realized, or sinecures from the Academy, the American writer must live from the sales of books, a prospect even more terrifying in post-revolutionary America than it is today. Brown wanted none of it; he would have been appalled to learn of his incipient reputation for professionalism. In an 1803 essay entitled "Authorship," published in The Literary Magazine and American Register, he meditated upon the distinction between the "poor author, " who writes to support himself (a trade which is "the refuge of idleness and poverty, " definitely to be avoided if one can get work as, say, a carpenter or a blacksmith), and the "author, " a literary aristocrat who writes for the sheer joy of writing. Brown explains, " (As) there is nothing I should more fully deprecate than to be enrolled in the former class, so there is nothing to which I more ardently aspire, than to be numbered among the latter. To write, because the employment is delightful, or because I have a passion for fame or usefulness, is the summit of terrestrial joys." Thus, when we experience discomfort at the SFWA Handbook's grim enumeration of the "professional" author's burdens and at the absence of any comment on the joy of writing, we feel echoes of BrownÌs own quandary: how, he wondered, could one become an "autho" rather than a "poor author" in a country lacking the necessary economic infrastructure? While today we have the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, state arts councils, and faculty positions in university creative writing departments, notably lacking from the SFWA Handbook is a chapter on how to get arts grants, or one on how to secure a tenure-track teaching job: the science-fiction writer is a descendant of Brown's "poor author, " and must therefore coax pennies from the pockets of the Philistines.
And whom did the Philistines want in 1990? As the voices of the masses, the Waldenbooks and B. Dalton best-seller lists tell us that they wanted Piers Anthony, David Eddings, Margaret Weis & Tracy Hickman, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, and Terry Brooks. What did they want? Magic Kingdoms, Forgotten Realms, almost anything with "dragon" in the title, books based on games, and sequels that authors too weary to write themselves were able to provide with a little help from their friends.
When we stand way back and look at the Publishers Weekly lists, in 1990 the masses wanted Stephen King, Stephen King again, V.C. Andrews (even though she's one of those fortunate dead authors I mentioned earlier), and Jean Auel. This pantheon won the award that Judy-Lynn del Rey once referred to as the only one that matters: the ringing of the cash register. Meanwhile, the rest of SFWA torments itself with the question posed by the hero of "Bestseller," Michael Blumlein's fascinating yet repellant story: "What the hell do I have to do to write a book that sells?"
Blumlein's hero barters away his own body parts to make ends meet. In Rudy Rucker's delightful novel The Hollow Earth, an alternate-universe Edgar Allan Poe whose manuscripts keep getting rejected comes up with a plan even bolder than self-cannibalization: "I was dazzled by the sheer effrontery of Eddie's scheme! Counterfeiting the money of a non-existent bank!" Joe HaldemanÌs novella "The Hemingway Hoax" turns on an equally audacious plan: forging a new work by one of the greats of American Letters. In the SF world, it seems, the "poor author" will try anything.
At one point Haldeman's hero, a college English professor and minor writer, jokes, "If you recognized my name from the Iowa Review you'd be the first person who ever had. " But while most authors crave more attention, the successful ones sometimes wish it were lonelier at the top. In an essay entitled "Xenogenesis" (Asimov's, August 1990), Harlan Ellison chronicles the atrocities perpetrated by readers against established writers. While I donÌt doubt that the bulk of the horror stories he recounts are true -- rude and possibly deranged people selecting authors as the targets for practical jokes, unsolicited familiarities, and worse -- it's not easy to see how, given the pluralism of the SF readership, things could be otherwise. Whatever the answer, Ellison evidently does not side with Brockden Brown; he never implies that authors should avoid the public, secluding themselves in the palaces of the literary aristocracy. Significantly, Ellison addresses his long complaint not to his fellow writers but to the very fandom from whence the abuses spring: ìAnd those of you in the sane, courteous ninety-five per cent ... well, perhaps this concentrated jolt of nastiness will alert you to the other five percent who roam and foam among us."
When Random House's literary trade paperback line brought American Psycho out at the end of March, 1991, it immediately made the best-seller list, thus sparking a rash of articles in Newsweek and elsewhere on America's disturbing taste for gore. But does the consumption of trash necessarily imply a trashy consumer? Journalists these days seem bound to characterize the mass audience as fundamentally degenerate. When this country was founded, however, popular culture was not seen as ipso facto corrupt. As Joseph J. Ellis explains in After the Revolution: Profiles in Early America Culture, "There was no presumed tension between artistic values on the one hand and ... the values of the marketplace on the other. The market, in fact, was regarded as a benign environment in which the unrestricted movement of men and ideas would create exciting new cultural possibilities." Furthermore, early Americans regarded corporations as operating for the benefit of the public, and they had more faith in the benign nature of the marketplace than they did in the benign nature of the arts. The arts were associated with the decadent aristocracy against which America had just rebelled. These days we tend to trust the arts more than the marketplace, while simultaneously retaining an almost religious awe of popular choice, especially when sanctified by formal democracy. It's a contradiction not easily resolved.
Literary awards, the Nebula among them, are intended to correct the errors of marketplace democracy. Awards make us appreciate that which might otherwise escape our notice. Article XI of the SFWA bylaws states: "The Corporation shall present annual achievement awards to honor outstanding creative performance in the science fiction field. The award winners ... are to be chosen by a vote of the active members under procedures established by the Nebula Rules..." A vote of the active members: a quasi-elite remedying the defects of mass taste. This compensating function is not one with which the Science Fiction Writers of America feels wholly comfortable. In its heart, the organization is torn between being an academy and being an democracy; more specifically, SFWA wants to be respected like an academy but to function as a democracy. An academy defines aesthetics, handing down rules from on high; any discussion of the relation between the academy and aesthetics is tautological: A=A; the academic is the aesthetic. But SFWA also contains a bedrock of populism. As anyone who's ever tried it knows, the single most effective way to incur the organization's wrath is to suggest new ways to limit active membership.
Like major science-fiction conventions, SFWA has undergone considerable expansion in the last five to ten years. It's gotten big. And like the major conventions, SFWA now contains diverse constituencies. It is any wonder that so many of the 1990 Nebula nominees can be understood as appeasing particular factions? Should we for example be surprised to hear people talk of John Stith's nuts-and-bolts novel Red Shift Rendezvous 'representing' hard SF on the final Nebula ballot?
When members vote a work onto the Final Ballot, they are ostensibly honoring "outstanding creative performance in the field." But behind these choices lurk political blocs and implied party platforms. And what are the contents of these tacit platforms? Essentially, each bloc is saying how it thinks the audience at large should behave. Theyre saying that readers ought to prefer social comment over military adventure, or rigorous extrapolation over social comment, or medieval world-building over quantum-mechanical speculation, or satire over sorcery, or a "good read" over just about anything else. Implicit in this process is the assumption that the ideal audience for science fiction is SFWA itself -- a notion that Pulphouse has been pursuing with great success. We attempt to re-create the audience in our own image.
SFWA used to be interested in its bestselling authors: the Heinleins, the Herberts, the Bradburys. No more. Weis & Hickman occupy a very different niche; they keep the ravenous masses at bay so we can calmly analyze and endorse the serious trends in the field. Through its direct mail campaigns to SFWA members and its publication of professional self-help books, Pulphouse appears to be making a healthy profit by exploiting the fieldÌs New Intimacy. Similarly, Bantam recently tried packaging novels so that we, the elite, would recognize them as books for us: the Spectra Special Editions. (Most publishers dont attempt this, counting on the fact that even the most sophisticated SF readers generally scorn literary respectability; upscale packaging slips right by them.) To paraphrase Pogo, "We have met the audience and he is us." Indeed, if SFWA could get just a little larger, and hardcover print runs just a little cheaper, no one outside the organization need ever actually buy a book. Things haven't gone quite that far, of course, but at the moment we seem to be experiencing a quiet crisis of faith in the marketplace.
Kelly's "Mr. Boy" offers the years most explicit platform. The hero's mom is very rich and uses her money to transform herself into the Statue of Liberty while keeping her son perpetually twelve years old. At the end of the novella, the hero sees that staying twelve forever isn't such a hot idea and maybe it's time to grow up. Read allegorically, the story suggests that science fiction's golden age is showing a little tarnish and perhaps some outright corrosion -- it's time to grow up and write for sophisticated readers like ourselves.
As the fiction editor for Omni, Ellen Datlow cannot buy material that would bewilder the magazine's large audience. Lately, she's turned to exercising her editorial creativity by compiling anthologies. Like Kelly, she seems to want to help SF grow up a bit, in this case by increasing the range of its sexual expression. She begins the introduction to her 1990 anthology, Alien Sex, source of Murphy's "Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates," by observing, "Sexuality, human or otherwise, has not traditionally been a major concern in science fiction -- possibly because the genre was originally conceived for young adults."
There is a mood of frustration in SFWA these days, a despair over the incongruity between the requirements for bestsellerdom and what we would actually like to be writing. But is the customer always wrong? The best-seller syndrome may be a force for conservative publishing and hack writing, but perhaps the real fault lies in our techniques for comprehending the mass audience, rather than in the mass audience itself. Interestingly enough, many of 1990Ìs fictional offerings point the way toward this kind of understanding.
Gene Wolfe and Ursula K. Le Guin are two of the most literary writers the SF field has to offer. Yet if we heed the message of Le Guin's Nebula-nominated novelette "The ShobiesÌ Story" and Wolfe's novel Castleview, we shall begin exhibiting more curiosity about the readership for Terry Brooks and David Eddings and Weis & Hickman. Eschewing elitism, we'll ask ourselves what the science-fiction and fantasy audience is reading, why they're reading it, and what they're getting out of it.
"The Shobies' Story" describes a society in which consensus matters more than individual viewpoints. As the narrator puts it:
A chain of command is easy to describe, a network of response isn't. To those who live by mutual empowerment,"ìthick" description, complex and open-ended, is normal and comprehensible, but to those whose only model is hierarchical control, such description seems a muddle, a mess, along with what it describes. Who is in charge here? Get rid of all these petty details. How many cooks spoil a soup? Let's get this perfectly clear now. Take me to your leader!
The term thick description was conceived by the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, whose 1973 book The Interpretation of Culture ends with a long, rich, riveting account of Balinese cock-fighting. (Because that sample is so well written, some detractors have suggested that the only true practitioner of thick description is Geertz himself.) In a nutshell, Geertz proposes that meaning emerges from the total social context; thus, many of the details heretofore discarded by scientists as irrelevant should be included in ethnographic observations. To illustrate this claim, Geertz catalogues the possible meanings of a person closing and opening one eye. (He could have an involuntary twitch; he could be winking; he could be parodying someone winking.) Le Guin uses the example of not breathing:
"I can't breathe," one said.
"I am not breathing," one said.
"There is nothing to breathe, " one said.
"You are, you are breathing, please breathe!" said another.
"The Shobies' Story" posits a reality that emerges as the sum of what all the participants say: a meta-narrative, a democratically constructed myth. Le Guin tells us that the Einsteinian observer, the Beobachter of Gedankenexperiments, is part of the reality he's trying to describe. Every observer sees things differently, and the melding of those interpretations becomes the world.
Castleview, a postmodern anti-novel which is also an Arthurian fantasy epic, has similar implications. The beginning is simple and concrete: Illinois, real estate, cookbooks. But to make sense of Castleview, we must discard the idea that our identification with the viewpoint character, Mr. Shields, will make what's going on explicit. The solution to the puzzle lies not in a single viewpoint but in an aggregate of many viewpoints. Castleview challenges its readers to absorb all its Wolfean thick description so thoroughly that the narrative become coherent. Some reviewers threw up their hands, implicitly saying, "ItÌs Greek to me!" If what Le Guin gives us in"The Shobies' Story" is a single Greek lesson, Wolfe provides a complete course.
In his visionary novel Pacific Edge, Kim Stanley Robinson addresses the issue of consensus more directly than either Le Guin or Wolfe. RobinsonÌs hero, Kevin Clairborne, is a town council member in an environmentally blessed community. Even in ecotopia, life goes on: boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. (There's also a techno-thriller plot.) But because Robinson has created a society that works by consensus, he cannot give us a satisfying, "novelistic" conclusion. We want the hero to force his will upon the majority -- a logical impossibility here. But despite our frustration at the hero's ineffectiveness, this is a better world: RobinsonÌs lovely descriptions of the California settings add up to a persuasive paradise.
Nancy Kress's powerful novel Brain Rose posits a new surgical procedure that allows patients to remember their past lives. As in various "documentary" accounts of past-life channeling, it turns out that many of these subjects knew each other in a previous existence, a circumstance that coincidence alone cannot explain. While Kress ultimately offers up a cosmic answer to the riddle, the novel emerges as something of a critique of New Age theology. For if the reports of all these time-trippers are accurate, and they really did hang out with earlier incarnations of each other, then the universe makes no sense. Far from bringing us to some higher anthropological truth, the Geerztian collective narrative here leads us into absurdity.
Thomas LigottiÌs novelette "The Last Feast of Harlequin," dedicated to the memory of H. P. Lovecraft, at times reads like a parody of Geertz, with a perverse Lovecraftian twist:
He was a fieldworker par excellence, and his ability to insinuate himself into exotic cultures and situations, thereby gaining insight where other anthropologists merely gathered data, was renown ... There were hints, which were not always responsible or cheaply glamorized, that he was involved in projects of a freakish sort, many of which focused on New England. It is a fact that he spent six months posing as a mental patient at an institution in western Massachusetts, gathering information on the ìcultureî of the psychically disturbed. When his book Winter Solstice: The Longest Night of a Society was published, the general opinion was that it was disappointingly subjective and impressionistic, and that aside from a few moving but ìpoetically obscureî observations, there was nothing at all to give it value... Those who defended Thoss claimed he was both less than an anthropologist, in the sense that much of his work emphasized his own mind and feelings, and more than one, meaning that his experience penetrated a rich core of hard data which he had yet to disclose in objective discourse.
Unlike Le Guin, who champions "thick description" for its political idealism, Ligotti loves the technique because it so thoroughly dislocates the reader. His is the kind of Lovecraftian antiquarian prose you want to read aloud. ("My emotional instability, however, was exactly what qualified me most for the particular field work ahead, though I did not take pride or consolation in the fact.") He sends up Geertz to marvelous effect, giving us a whole series of unreliable narrators, a process that culminates in one lunatic reporting upon the bizarre scientific paper of another. The winter solstice ritual recounted by LigottiÌs mad anthropologist echoes Geertz's Balinese cockfight, but in the end Lovecraft's horror of the masses wins out over Geertz's cultural pluralism.
Geertz and Lovecraft offer two different paradigms by which we may try to comprehend the SF audience. Geertz would have us go out and gladhand mass-market paperback consumers, insinuate ourselves into their society, and eventually learn the secrets behind their book buying habits. Lovecraft would have us avoid such knowledge: the mass audience is profane, and excessive contact with it will almost certainly cause contamination. Before you know it, you will find yourself squirming on the floor, a spineless worm or worse, consuming Harlequin romances. Alexander Hamilton would seem to side with Lovecraft. In "Federalists and Republicans" he remarked, "The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body." But can mass choices never be considered valuable choices? Can we celebrate popular taste without murdering aesthetics? Geertz invites us to suspend judgement until we understand the alien culture's consciousness, but begs the question of why we instinctively prize some works over others. Is a synthesis possible?
Dafydd ab Hugh's liberal-libertarian fable "The Coon Rolled Down and Ruptured His Larinks, A Squeezed Novel by Mr. Skunk" explores the tension between the ideals of democracy and the achievements of elites, or, more pessimistically, the Hobson's choice between democracy's leveling effect and elitism's oppressiveness. The style evokes Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories. In ab Hugh's future, "democrazy" is a disease that makes animals smarter and people stupider, until a kind of parity is achieved. The story centers upon a talking skunk and his friends, who want to spread the plague. At the end, Mr. Skunk glances backwards, as the gifted animals undergo a Lovecraftian slide down the evolutionary scale and become more like pigeons and less like people: "I confess that sometimes I wonder: have we lost something urgent? But I do not think wondering should be a crime against Democrazy."
Lucius Shepard's compelling noir adventure novella, "Skull City," implicitly expresses a fear I've heard voiced by other writers: we're on the verge of a "post-literate culture." Shepard's hero, a young heroin addict, is enticed by a sophisticated older man to become a guinea-pig in experiments worthy of Lovecraft himself. The addictís seeming benefactor is the author of CDs providing virtual-reality experiences complete with the same wish fulfillments and circumscribed choices one finds in Dungeons and Dragons and its spin-offs. Our hero assassinates the "author" of his fantasy world and finds himself under the thumb of a Mafia heavy not unlike certain publishing magnates.
Metaphorically, the assassination of the author is already in progress: fantasy role-playing games, hypertext, and virtual reality all usurp the writerís traditional control over structure, chronology, and plot. The "reader" is now assembling the narrative. One criticism of these new forms is that the resulting "art works" are meaningless. Traditional narrative forms derive their significance from the choices made by characters, not from those made by consumers. In Tom Godwinís 1954 story "The Cold Equations," for example, the hero decides to shove the girl stowaway out the airlock after the cold equations of the title reveal that many deaths will otherwise result; were he to cut off his legs and put them out the airlock instead, the story would not mean the same thing. But if we grant the possibility of significance to the new flexible-narrative forms, then this virtue will inhere not in decisions, as in the past, but in decision trees -- the full spectrum of choices that the consumer can make through the course of the "story." At present, the market and not aesthetics seems to be determing the structure of flexible-narrative media. It remains to be seen what standards will emerge to guide us in awarding a Nebula for Best Virtual Reality.
Is it naive to embrace the flexible-narrative media as the harbingers of a superior sort of democracy? Though the options offered by these new forms may seem as trivial as the choice between Coke and Pepsi, perhaps the selection process itself educates people for a freedom we cannot yet comprehend. And when, later, authorship returns, it may be more meaningful than ever.
With a bit of tongue-in-cheek extrapolation, John Kessel offers a rationalization for stupidity in his novelette "Invaders." When the highly advanced aliens land, they turn out to be post-literate:
"Sepulveda swallowed. "O. K. You need to read and sign these papers."
"We don't read."
"You don't read Spanish? How about English?"
"We don't read at all. We used to, but we gave it up. Once you start reading, it gets out of control. You tell yourself you're just going to stick to non-fiction -- but pretty soon you graduate to fiction. After that you can't kick the habit. And then there's the oppression."
"Oppression?"
"Sure . . . Literature is a tool used by ruling elites to ensure their hegemony. . ."
We, the SF insiders, make a pretty shabby ruling elite, but we still face a nagging question: to what extent are our aesthetics really just a screen for our politics? When we vote for "art," are we really voting for some unarticulated notion of justice? And what's the point of clinging to any ideals, aesthetic or political, if the market is moving in the opposite direction? Would the future of Analog look brighter if its editor, physicist-writer Stan Schmidt, were replaced by marketing wizard and book packager Byron Preiss? Isn't it worth a try? Come walk with me, Young Goodman Brown!
"Invaders," a marvelous deconstruction of the tropes of SF, does not stop with allegory. Kessel addresses his audience directly: "Like any drug addict, the SF reader finds desperate justifications for his habit. SF teaches him science. SF helps him avoid 'future shock.' SF changes the world for the better. Right. So does cocaine." Kessel aspires to lift his addicted readers to a condition of enlightened introspection, a state in which they'll have no illusions about their vice, science fiction.
In "Walking the Moons," a story reminiscent of Philip K. Dick, Jonathan Lethem takes a different but equally bleak look at the dilemma of today's science-fiction writer. Like Shepard in "Skull City," he explores the symbolic connotations of "virtual reality." Space travel is no longer affordable, so people use computer simulations to conquer the moons of Jupiter. The space adventurer is really just a guy in his underwear in a garage: in his mind he may be out there, but he's actually marooned in some seedy suburb. Lethem's hero, whom we might be inclined to interpret as an SF writer, is at once cheerful and pathetic. Virtual reality, Lieblingstechnik to the technologically hip, is in the end as ridiculous and self-deluding as the personal planetarium from Science Made Stupid that you cut out and wear on your head. By extension, SF is made to seem equally silly.
Did any positive, upbeat views of the field appear in 1990? If we read Ted Chiang's hard-fantasy novelette, the Nebula-winning "Tower of Babylon," as an allegory on science fiction, it tells us that when SF goes way out there, exploring the very fringes of the cosmos, we cut through to inner space, to the collective unconscious, to truth.
Geoffrey A. Landis's story "Projects" features a couple of guys sitting around an institute very like M.I.T., just inventing stuff. And although they despair at ever being listened to, they all turn out to be wonderfully right. Landis captures the spirit of hard SF, and returns to one of the archetypes of the genre: the basement inventor. But even the optimism in Landis's story seems hard-won. One of the basic tenets of SF, that technology is power, seems to be undergoing a revision. In its place stands a different totem -- money. Technology is simply one form of power at money's disposal; fantastic amounts of money beget the fantastic. Landis's basement inventors haven't the resources to do their own R & D. They must steal.
The power of money emerges again in Ian MacLeod's "Past Magic,"
in which a rich woman resurrects her drowned daughter and, realizing
the child needs a daddy, proceeds to clone her estranged husband.
McAllister's "Angels," Blumlein's "Bestseller,"
Kress's Brain Rose, and Kelly's "Mr. Boy" all
involve people using their wealth to modify the human body. Mr.
Boy explains, "We're rich ... We can afford to hate ourselves."
Arthur C. Clarke's maxim that any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic seems to have been replaced with
a new one: any sufficiently large amount of money is indistinguishable
from magic.