Flux (27 page)

I notice now, however, that some later interests of mine were already cropping up in “I Put My Blue Genes On.” For one thing, I actually put Brazilians in space. I was not the first to do it, but it was the beginning of my deliberate effort to try to get American sci-fi writers to realize that the future probably does
not
belong to America. Science fiction of the pre-World War I era always seemed to put Englishmen and Frenchmen into space; now, in this post-imperialist world, we think of that as a rather quaint idea. I firmly believe that in fifty years the idea of Americans leading the world anywhere will be just as anachronistic, and only those of us who put Brazilians, Thais, Chinese, and Mexicans into space will look at all prescient.

Of course, maybe I'm wrong about the specific prediction I'm making. But there's another reason to open up science fiction to other cultures, and that is that science fiction is the one lasting American contribution to prose literature. In every other area, we're derivative to the—well, not to the core, because in those areas we
have
no core. Nobody in other countries aspires to write Westerns, and nobody in Russia or Germany or Japan looks to Updike or Bellow to teach them how to write “serious” fiction. They already have literary traditions older and better than our so-called best. But in science fiction, they
all
look to us. They want to write science fiction, too, because those who read it in every nation see it as the fiction of possibility, the fiction of strangeness. It's the one genre now that allows the writer to do satire that isn't recognized as satire, to do metaphysical fiction that isn't seen as philosophical or religious proselytizing. In short, it is the freest, most open literature in the world today, and it is the one literature that foreign writers are learning first and foremost from Americans.

Why, then, do science fiction writers persist in imagining only American futures? Our audience is much broader than these shores. And there are countries where our words are taken far more seriously than they are here. If we actually aspire to change the world with our fiction—and I can't think of any other reason for ever setting pen to paper—then we ought to be talking to the world. And one sure way to let the world know we are talking to them is to put them—citizens of other countries, children of other cultures—into our futures. To do otherwise is to slap them in the face and say, “I have seen the future, and you aren't there.” Well, I
have
seen the future, and they
are
there—in great numbers, with great power. I want my voice to have been one of the voices they listened to on their way up to be king of the hill. And, in “I Put My Blue Genes On,” I took my first step along that road.

“IN THE DOGHOUSE” (with Jay A. Parry)

What if the aliens don't come to us in alien form? What if they come in a form we already recognize, that we already think we understand? Jay Parry and I toyed with the idea of telling this story differently—with the aliens coming in the form of an oppressed minority. American Indians or blacks, we thought. But the problems at the time seemed insurmountable—particularly the political problems. It's a very tricky business, for a white writer to try to express the black point of view without being politically incorrect. It seemed to me then that there were things that black writers could say about and on behalf of blacks that white writers couldn't, not without the message being taken wrong. In the years since then, I've learned that a writer of any race or sex or religion or nation can write about any other race or sex or religion or nation; he only needs to:

1. Do enough research that he doesn't make an ass of himself.
   
2. Tell the truth as he sees it without pandering or condescending to any group.
   
3. Have a thick enough skin to accept the fact that he'll be impaled with a thousand darts no matter how well he does at 1 and 2.
   

Being timid, Jay and I worked out the plot using animals that have been as firmly pegged in our human prejudices as any human group. Faithful, beloved dogs. Man's best friend. All the same possibilities were there—the White Man's Burden, the condescending affection (some of my best friends are dogs), and, above all, the rigid determination to keep them in their place.

“THE ORIGINIST”

In my review column in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
, I wrote a diatribe deploring the 1980s trend of trying to turn sci-fi authors' private worlds into generic brand name universes where other writers can romp. It began with
Star Trek
, and it was not part of anybody's grand design. There were these
Star Trek
fans, you see, who got impatient with Paramount's neglect of their heroes and began to write their
own
stories about the crew of the starship Enterprise. (In a way this was singularly appropriate: The original series was written and performed like somebody's garage production anyway, so why not continue the tradition?) Legend has it that Paramount at first intended to sue, until it dawned on them that there might be
money
in publishing never-filmed stories about Kirk, Spock, and the other crew members of
Wagon Train among the Cheap Interplanetary Sets
. They were right, to the tune of many readers and many dollars. A new industry was born: Science fiction written in somebody else's poorly imagined but passionately studied universe.

I suppose it was inevitable that publishers who weren't getting any of those
Star Trek
bucks would try to turn other successful imagined futures into equally lucrative backdrops where one writer's work would be as good as any others'. There ensued in the late 1980s a spate of novels set “in the world of———,” in which journeyman writers who often didn't have a clue about the inner truth that led the Old Pro to create his or her world tried to set their own stories in it. The result was stories that nobody was proud of and nobody cared about.

What was unspoken (I hope) was the true premise of all these worlds-as-brand-names books: The readers won't be able to tell the difference. Here's what they found out: Unlike the
Star Trek
audience, the readers of most science fiction
can
tell the difference and they care very much. Written science fiction has an author-driven audience. The
real
science fiction audience doesn't want to read John Varley's Dune novel or Lisa Goldstein's Lensman novel or Howard Waldrop's Dragonworld novel. (Well, actually, I would
love
to read Howard Waldrop's Dragonworld novel, but not for any reason I'm proud of.)

So I laid down the law in my column: Writers should not waste their time or talent trying to tell stories in someone else's universe. Furthermore, established writers should not cooperate in the wasting of younger writers' talent by allowing their worlds to be franchised.

As soon as that column hit print, Martin Harry Greenberg mentioned to me that he was preparing a festschrift anthology commemorating Isaac Asimov's fiftieth year in publishing, a book called
Foundation's Friends
. And for this one anthology, Dr. Asimov was allowing the participants to set stories within his own closely-held fictional universes, using his own established characters. We could actually write robot stories using the three laws and positronic brains and Susan Calvin. We could actually write Foundation stories using Hari Seldon and Trantor and Terminus and the Mule.

Suddenly I was sixteen years old again and I remembered the one story I wanted so badly to read, the one that Asimov had never written—the story of how the Second Foundation actually got started in the library at Trantor.

Did I forget that I had just gotten through banning the franchising of universes for all time? No. I simply have a perverse streak in me that says that whenever somebody lays down a law, that law is meant to be broken—even when I was the lawgiver. So I wrote “The Originist” as both a tribute to and, perhaps, a sidelight on Asimov's masterwork.

This doesn't mean that I think the law I stated isn't true. In fact, I stand by it as firmly as ever. It's just that, like all laws, this one
can
be circumvented if you work hard enough. The reason why franchised worlds generally don't work is because the junior writers don't understand the original world well enough, don't know what it is about the original writer's work that made his stories work, and don't feel enough personal responsibility to do their best work under these circumstances. Well, in my arrogance, I thought I
did
know the Foundation universe well enough—not in the trivial details, but in the overall sweep of the story, in what it
means
(Yes, I've read
Decline and Fall
, too, but that isn't the foundation of Foundation, either.) Also, I thought I understood something of how the stories worked—the delight of discovering that no matter how many curtains you peel back, you never find the
real
curtain or the
real
man behind it in Asimov's Oz. There are always plans underlying plans, causes hidden behind plausible causes.

And, finally, I had a compelling story of my own to tell. I had already made a stab at it, with a fragment of a novel that was to be called
Genesis
—a book I may still write someday. In it I was trying to show the borderline between human and animal, the exact comma in the punctuational model of evolution that marked the transition between non-human and human. For me, that borderline is the human universal of storytelling; that is what joins a community together across time; that is what preserved a human identity after death and defines it in life. Without stories, we aren't human; with them, we are. But
Genesis
became impossible to write, in part because to do it properly I had to visit Kashmir and Ethiopia, two places where it is not terribly safe to travel these days.

But I
could
develop many of the same themes, though at a greater distance, in my story of “The Originist.” Moreover, Asimov himself had broached a related question in
Foundation
, when he presented a character who was searching through libraries in order to find the planet of origin of the human species. I was able to take a purely Asimovian point—the futility of secondary research—and interlayer it with my own point—the fundamental role of storytelling in shaping human individuals and communities. I went further in my effort to make “The Originist” a true Foundation story. I also used a form that Asimov has perfected, but I had never tried before: the story in which almost nothing happens except dialogue. Asimov can make this work because of the piercing clarity of his writing and the sublime intelligence of his ideas—it is never boring listening to his characters discuss ideas, because you are never lost and the ideas are always worth hearing. The challenge was to come as close as I could to matching that clarity; I had to trust that others would find my ideas as interesting as I had always found Asimov's.

So it was that, even though I knew “The Originist” would never be received as standing on its own, I poured a novel's worth of love and labor into it. In the long run, I proved my own law—I wrote this story at the expense of a purely Orson Scott Card novel that will probably never be written. Yet I think it was worth doing—once—partly to prove it could be done well (if in fact I did it well), and partly because I'm proud of the story itself: because of the achievement of it, because of what the story says, and because it is a tribute to the writer that I firmly believe is the finest writer of American prose in our time, bar none.

“We're dead,” says Doggy.

“Give them time to cool,” says I.

“They'll never cool,” says he. “There's no chance they'll forgive this even if they know the whole truth, because look at the names they give the cards to, it's like they got them for the biggest boys on the borderline, the habibs who bribe presidents of little countries and rank off cash from octopods like Shell and ITT and every now and then kill somebody and walk away clean. Now they're sitting there in jail with the whole life story of the organization in their brains, so they don't care if we meant to do it or not. They're hurting, and the only way they know to make the hurt go away is to pass it on to somebody else. And that's us. They want to make us hurt, and hurt real bad, and for a long time.”

I never saw Dog so scared….

—from “Dogwalker”

Plus many more science fiction stories by Orson Scott Card
.