Odd Jobs (124 page)

But we are in the hands of a loving expert, and his thousand-plus chosen pages constitute an excellent text to have in hand while asking oneself
the crucial question: “What keeps science fiction a minor genre, for all the brilliance of its authors and apparent pertinence of its concerns?”

The short answer is that each science-fiction story is so busy inventing its environment that little energy is left to be invested in the human subtleties. Ordinary, “mainstream” fiction snatches what it needs from the contemporary environment and concentrates upon surprising us with details of behavior; science fiction tends to reverse the priorities. The crew of the spaceship of John Berryman’s classic “Special Flight” could come from the mixed ethnic bag of the war movies that Hollywood, in 1939, was poised to crank out. Stoic, jokey, constantly puffing cigarettes, these spacemen seem to be in a rusty tough old tanker, dodging icebergs instead of meteors. They do not feel perilously poised within the extreme thinness of space; they never confront the real practical problem of space flight—weightlessness. Of course, we know from newspapers and television what space travel is like, and Berryman did not. The Soviet brothers Strugatsky, as of 1959, knew a thing or two, yet their space travellers in “The Way to Amalteia,” amid all the beautifully worked-out technicalities of extricating themselves from the grip of Jupiter’s gravity, and the titanic scenic effects its heavy atmosphere would likely make, are shopworn Socialist heroes, a touch too good to be true. Announcing their apparent doom, Captain Bykov bluntly tells them, “We’ve lived well, and we’ll die well.” They are heroes in a very special can—“a first-class photon freighter with a parabolic reflector that resembled a skirt, with a round living gondola and a disk-shaped freight section, with cigarlike emergency rockets on long supports”—but it is canned heroism nevertheless. The captain, our gruff but friendly Soviet superhero, will predictably pull us through, land the damaged ship, and save the population of J-Station on the planetoid Amalteia from famine, declaring with gallant understatement, “Comrade Kangren, the spaceship
Takhmasib
has arrived with its cargo.”

Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth” (1947) and Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s “The Lineman” (1957) offer American versions of good guys getting the dirty job done. It is perhaps not entirely accidental that a Czech, from a nation long subject to larger nations’ heroisms, contrived, in Josef Nesvadba’s “Captain Nemo’s Last Adventure” (1964), an ironical version of the rocket hero. This tender parody, whose central adventure has a giant spaceship of protozoalike extraterrestrials frantically demanding of our aging, hag-ridden hero an “answer to the fundamental
question of life,” finds its resolution in poetry and music and an end of technical progress: rocketry and exploration are carried on in the new world by robots indistinguishable from flesh-and-blood heroes. It is true, many of the characters in science fiction might as well be robots.

And, of course, many are. In this anthology, robots figure as servants (“The Golem,” by Avram Davidson), tutors (“The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” by Gene Wolfe), constant companions and enforcers of social order (“Codemus,” by Tor Åge Bringsvaerd), sexual partners (“Pairpuppets,” by Manuel van Loggem), and implacable warriors (“Second Variety,” by Philip K. Dick). Robots rebel against their human masters (“The Proud Robot,” by Lewis Padgett) and fall in love with them (“Stranger Station,” by Damon Knight). The uncertain line between men and machines, one of our century’s philosophical sore spots, fascinates science fiction. In Arthur C. Clarke’s “A Meeting with Medusa,” the hero is revealed to be a formerly human pilot so badly damaged in a crash that his body was almost entirely replaced with mechanical elements. In John Varley’s “The Phantom of Kansas,” human identities are preserved in recording cubes; an often-murdered woman is just as often reprogrammed into a new body and, discovering that her assailant is a male incarnation of herself, makes mad love with him: “We were made for each other, literally. It was the most astounding act of love imaginable. He knew what I liked to the tenth decimal place, and I was just as knowledgeable.… Call it masturbation orchestrated for two.” In Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives,” workers are cloned in multiple teams, with sex differences only; they make love as part of their pooled activity, and can hardly function apart from one another. In “The New Prehistory,” by the Colombian René Rebetez-Cortes, a movie line becomes a kind of centipede, and urban clusters of people merge into giant organisms. The narrator protests in vain, “I don’t want to find myself transformed into something shapeless like an amoeba or a glob of spittle, nor to become the last segment of a gigantic worm. I cling to my human identity, my own individual and separate personality.” In Robert Bloch’s “I Do Not Love Thee, Doctor Fell,” a press agent who feels his head invaded by others’ phrases—“I’m losing myself. There’s no real
me
left”—becomes, or already is, his own psychiatrist, a certain Doctor Fell.

The alterations that psychiatry, geology, astronomy, evolutionary biology, anthropology, microscopy, theoretical physics, and computer technology have worked upon Man’s self-image: science fiction is willing to face these head-on. Man inhabits history; human nature changes.
“Advancing technology, fashion, frontiers, taste, or morals can make the best of us obsolete overnight,” says the heroine of “The Phantom of Kansas.” If a number of these hypothetical tales seem populated by old-fashioned characters, other stories do attempt to show humanity transformed, as well as the furniture of technology. Joanna Russ’s “Nobody’s Home” makes the point, with a Chekhovian casualness, that in the improved future there may be no place for the ordinary human being. A stocky, self-confessedly “stupid” female called Leslie Smith is assigned to an ethereal, playful commune in the Himalayas, a heightened version of the counterculture still thriving in 1972, when the story was written. This outsider’s docile but unmistakable ordinariness is like a crack in a perfect crystal, leading the heroine, the lovely and brilliant Jannina, to tears:

In “Vintage Season,” by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, the people of the future, clad in their “incredibly flawless” garments, have discovered the secret of time travel and become tourists in time, on a package that includes Chaucer’s Canterbury in 1347, a cataclysmic meteor in the United States any day now, and the coronation of Charlemagne in Rome at Christmastime in 800. Forbidden to tamper with the past and thus possibly spoil their own pleasure-seeking present, they are as basically vapid and cruelly removed as geographical tourists now. Two separate stories, C. M. Kornbluth’s “Two Dooms” and Keith Roberts’s “Weihnachtsabend,” portray a grim future in which the Axis powers triumphed in World War II. Gene Wolfe’s “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” and Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry” immerse us in futures of a medieval eeriness, of looming castles and riddling foreordinations. More regressive still, Boris Vian’s “The Dead Fish” presents a glutinous future so degraded that nothing makes sense, at least to me; Vian, a French translator of A. E. Van Vogt, is likened by the editor to William Burroughs, and seems to take us into the savage world of Jarryesque farce:

The hallucinatory transformations in Anthony Burgess’s “The Muse” are rooted, it would seem, in a slight unsteadiness whereby the past expresses its resentment at being invaded from the future. Paley, a Shakespeare scholar visiting the Elizabethan era, feels that even the stars “had done a sly job of refiguration, forming fresh constellations like a sand tray on top of a thumped piano.” Shakespeare himself is the Droeshout engraving, with moving lips and then worse: “The face grew an elephantine proboscis, wreathing, feeling; two or three suckers sprouted from its end and blindly waved towards Paley.”

The presence in the volume of such thoroughly literary imaginers as Burgess, Calvino, and Borges, with the faintly but distinctly different flavor their contributions afford, points up a qualitative limitation. In confronting Man’s transformation by accumulating technology, and in enlarging upon such striking developments as the atomic bomb and computerization, science fiction makes us stop and reflect and identify theoretical issues but it rarely penetrates and involves us the way the quietest realistic fiction can. The writer of non-fantastic fiction, wishing to pique his reader’s interest, naturally gravitates to “news,” to incidents and details that seem novel. These details unprogrammatically trace the changes in the human condition from one generation to the next. The pieties that bind up the universe of Dickens and Trollope dissolve around the characters of Henry James, to their dismay and ours. Hemingway’s hero discovers that
gloire
and other patriotic catchwords mean nothing to him, and that after a loved one dies one merely walks back to the hotel in the rain. Conventional morality, conventional propriety, conventional feeling are always being outgrown, and, with them, artistic conventions. “The writer,” Edmund Wilson wrote, “must always find expression for something which has never yet been expressed, must master a new set of phenomena which has never yet been mastered.” Those rhapsodies, for instance, which Proust delivered upon the then-fresh inventions of the telephone, the automobile, and the airplane point up the larger relativities and magical connections of his great novel, as well as show the new
century breaking upon a
fin-de-siècle
sensibility. The modest increments of fictional “news,” of phenomena whose presentation is unprecedented, have the cumulative weight of true science—a nudging, inching fidelity to human change ultimately far more impressive and momentous than the great glittering leaps of science fiction.

Speculative leaps, the spectacle of the never-seen: these are what attract and dazzle and in the end weary us in science fiction. Aristotle placed spectacle last in his list of the components of poetic representation, saying, “The Spectacle has, indeed, an emotional attraction of its own, but, of all the parts, it is the least artistic, and connected least with the art of poetry.” What we tend to remember of science fiction is its amazing, astounding scenery. Slowly sinking into Jupiter, the heroes of “The Way to Amalteia” cannot but marvel at what they see:

and

On Arthur C. Clarke’s pre-
Voyager
Jupiter, envisioned in 1972, giant living forms adorn the vaporous vastness—mile-wide floating medusas and herds of arrowhead-shaped cattle browse upon “the cloud pastures … the dark, red-brown streaks that ran like dried-up river beds down the flanks of the floating cliffs.” In Gérard Klein’s “The Valley of Echoes,” a smaller, harder planet is evoked: “The Martian sky was always like itself, very pure, a very dark blue with an occasional hint of gray, and with admirable pink efflorescences at sunrise and sunset.” Horizons seem “short, curtailed,” as tractors traverse the monotonous “gray sand and scattered lichens.” Then: “Suddenly, we saw surge up and grow on the horizon translucent needles of rock, so thin and so high, with such sharp contours, that we did not believe our eyes.” The human scenery, too, in science fiction strains optical belief; in “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” prostitutes of the future parade

And when we come to extraterrestrial life-forms, the sky is the limit. Near to
Homo sapiens
, only a mutation away, is a comely female in Brian Aldiss’s “A Kind of Artistry”: “She was a velure, born of the dense y-cluster worlds in Vermilion Outer, and her skin was richly covered with the brown fur of her kind.” In the middle distance, picturable in cartoon fashion, are Josef Nesvadba’s macro-microscopic truth-seekers: “One was almost the size of a whale and looked something like a swollen ciliaphore; another was covered with flagella, while another featured eight feet. They were all transparent, and he could see a strange liquid pulsating through their bodies.” At an extreme of strangeness, so strange that sheer proximity mutually gives man and creature a killing psychic pain, is the giant alien of Damon Knight’s “Stranger Station,” visible only in televised glimpses:

The seriousness of such conjurations rests upon the possibility that they are not impossible—that they might, somewhere, sometime, exist. But our improved knowledge of the solar system and beyond offers no confirmation; we seem to be stunningly alone. Science fiction finesses the paradoxical gap between the infinity and the vacuity of extraterrestrial space. Feasible travel to all but the nearest stars, even granting spaceships a speed near that of light, would consume human lifetimes. Robot exploration of the solar system has discovered no life, not even on Mars, with its polar frosts and ancient traces of a watery atmosphere. The astronomical facts, since the days of H. G. Wells’s marvellously populated planetary fantasies, add up to chemical bleakness. Yet fantasy
fiction wishes to provide escape into plenitude, wherein the dreadful thinness of space is magically enriched. Nathalie-Charles Henneberg, in “The Blind Pilot,” unveils, in the visions of a hero bewitched by a manateelike alien, “the star spirals and the harmonies … oceans of rubies, furnaces of emeralds, dark stars, constellations coiled like luminous dragons. Meteorites were a rain of motionless streaks. Novas came to meet him; they exploded and shattered in sidereal tornadoes, the giants and dwarfs fell again in incandescent cascades. Space-time was nothing but a flaming chalice.” Alas, the chalice appears empty, except for what we put into it. Stanislaw Lem, in his fairy tale “How Erg the Self-Inducting Slew a Paleface,” parodies the universe as adventure site; his hero is lying when he tells of