Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (367 page)

The fish prised wave from white wave in the white water.

The boats came together. The amphimen had all climbed up. Ariel was across from us, holding a flare that drooled smoke down her arm. She peered by the hip of the fisherman who was standing in front of her.

Juao and Tork were hauling the rope. Behind them I was coiling it with one hand as it came back to me.

The fish came up and was flopped into Ariel’s boat, tail out, head up, chewing air. More hics.

I had just finished pulling on my trousers when Tork fell down on the seat behind me and grabbed me around the shoulders with his wet arms. “Look at our fish, Tio Cal! Look!” He gasped air, laughing, his dark face diamonded beside the flares. “Look at our fish there, Cal!”

Juao, grinning white and gold, pulled us back into shore. The fire, the singing, hands beating hands—and my godson had put pebbles in the empty rum bottles and was shaking them to the music—the guitars spiraled around us as we carried the fish up the sand and the men brought the spit.

“Watch it!” Tork said, grasping the pointed end of the great stick that was thicker than his wrist.

We turned the fish over.

“Here, Cal?”

He prodded two fingers into the white flesh six inches back from the bony lip.

“Fine.”

Tork jammed the spit in.

We worked it through the body. By the time we carried it to the fire, they had brought more rum.

“Hey, Tork. Are you going to get some sleep before you go down in the morning?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Slept all afternoon.” He pointed toward the roasting fish with his elbow. “That’s my breakfast.”

But when the dancing grew violent a few hours later, just before the fish was to come off the fire, and the kids were pushing the last of the sweet potatoes from the ashes with sticks, I walked back to the lifeboat shell we had sat on earlier. It was three-quarters flooded.

Curled below still water, Tork slept, fist loose before his mouth, the gills at the back of his neck pulsing rhythmically. Only his shoulder and hip made islands in the floated boat.

* * * *

Where’s Tork?” Ariel asked me at the fire. They were swinging up the sizzling fish.

“Taking a nap.”

“Oh, he wanted to cut the fish!”

“He’s got a lot of work ahead. Sure you want to wake him?”

“No, I’ll let him sleep.”

But Tork was coming up from the water, brushing his dripping hair back from his forehead.

He grinned at us, then went to carve. I remember him standing on the table, astraddle the meat, arm going up and down with the big knife (details, yes, those are the things you remember), stopping to hand down the portions, then hauling his arm back to cut again.

That night, with music and stomping on the sand and shouting back and forth over the fire, we made more noise than the sea.

IV

The eight-thirty bus was more or less on time.

“I don’t think they want to go,” Juao’s sister said. She was accompanying the children to the Aquatic Corp Headquarters in Brasilia.

“They are just tired,” Juao said. “They should not have stayed up so late last night. Get on the bus now. Say good-bye to Tio Cal.”

“Good-bye.” (Fernando.)

“Good-bye.” (Clara.)

But kids are never their most creative in that sort of situation. And I suspect that my godchildren may just have been suffering their first (or one of their first) hangovers. They had been very quiet all morning.

I bent down and gave them a clumsy hug. “When you come back on your first weekend off, I’ll take you exploring down below at the point. You’ll be able to gather your own coral now.”

Juao’s sister got teary, cuddled the children, cuddled me, Juao, then got on the bus.

Someone was shouting out the bus window for someone at the bus stop not to forget something. They trundled around the square and then toward the highway. We walked back across the street where the café owners were putting out canvas chairs.

“I will miss them,” he said, like a long-considered admission.

“You and me both.” At the docks near the hydrofoil wharf where the submarine launches went out to the undersea cities, we saw a crowd. “I wonder if they had any trouble laying the—”

A woman screamed in the crowd. She pushed from the others, dropping eggs and onions. She began to pull her hair and shriek. (Remember the skillet of shrimp? She had been the woman ladling them out.) A few people moved to help her.

A clutch of men broke off and ran into a side street. I grabbed a running amphiman, who whirled to face me. “What in hell is going on?”

For a moment his mouth worked on his words for all the trite world like a beached fish.

“From the explosion…” he began. “They just brought them back from the explosion at the Slash!”

I grabbed his other shoulder. “What happened!”

“About two hours ago. They were just a quarter of the way through, when the whole fault gave way. They had a goddamn underwater volcano for half an hour. They’re still getting seismic disturbances.”

Juao was running toward the launch. I pushed the guy away and limped after him, struck the crowd and jostled through calico, canvas, and green scales.

They were carrying the corpses out of the hatch of the submarine and laying them on a canvas spread across the dock. They still return bodies to the countries of birth for the family to decide the method of burial. When the fault had given, the hot slag that had belched into the steaming sea was mostly molten silicon.

Four of the bodies were only slightly burned here and there; from their bloated faces (one still bled from the ear) I guessed they had died from sonic concussion. But several of the corpses were almost totally encased in dull, black glass.

“Tork—” I kept asking. “Is one of them—?”

It took me forty-five minutes, asking first the guys who were carrying, then going into the launch and asking some guy with a clipboard, and then going back on the dock and into the office to find out that one of the more unrecognizable figures was, yes, Tork.

* * * *

Juao brought me a glass of buttermilk at the cafe on the square. He sat still a long time, then finally rubbed away his white mustache, released the chair rung with his toes, put his hands on his knees.

“What are you thinking about?”

“That it’s time to go fix nets. Tomorrow morning I will fish.” He regarded me a moment. “Where should I fish tomorrow, Cal?”

“Are you wondering about…sending the kids off today?”

He shrugged. “Fishermen from this village have drowned. Still it is a village of fishermen. Where should I fish?”

I finished my buttermilk. “The mineral content over the Slash should be high as the devil. Lots of algae will gather tonight. Lots of small fish down deep. Big fish hovering over.”

He nodded. “Good. I will take the boat out there tomorrow.”

We got up.

“See you, Juao.”

I limped back to the beach.

V

The fog had unsheathed the sand by ten. I walked around, poking clumps of weeds with a stick, banging the same stick on my numb leg. When I lurched up to the top of the rocks, I stopped in the still grass. “Ariel?”

She was kneeling in the water, head down, red hair breaking over sealed gills. Her shoulders shook, stopped, shook again.

“Ariel?” I came down over the blistered stones.

She turned away to look at the ocean.

The attachments of children are so important and so brittle. “How long have you been sitting here?”

She looked at me now, the varied waters of her face stilled on drawn cheeks. And her face was exhausted. She shook her head.

Sixteen? Seventeen? Who was the psychologist, back in the seventies, who decided that “adolescents” were just physical and mental adults with no useful work? “You want to come up to the house?”

The head shaking got faster, then stopped.

After a while I said, “I guess they’ll be sending Tork’s body back to Manila.”

“He didn’t have a family,” she explained. “He’ll be buried here, at sea.”

“Oh,” I said.

And the rough volcanic glass, pulled across the ocean’s sands, changing shape, dulling—

“You were—you liked Tork a lot, didn’t you? You kids looked like you were pretty fond of each other.”

“Yes. He was an awfully nice—” Then she caught my meaning and blinked. “No,” she said. “Oh, no. I was—I was engaged to Jonni…the brown-haired boy from California? Did you meet him at the party last night? We’re both from Los Angeles, but we only met down here. And now…they’re sending his body back this evening.” Her eyes got very wide, then closed.

“I’m sorry.”

I’m a clumsy cripple; I trip all over everybody’s emotions. In that mirror I guess I’m too busy looking at what might have been.

“I’m sorry, Ariel.”

She opened her eyes and began to look around her.

“Come on up to the house and have an avocado. I mean, they have avocados in now—not at the supermarket. But at the old town market on the other side. And they’re better than any they grow in California.”

She kept looking around.

“None of the amphimen get over there. It’s a shame, because soon the market will probably close, and some of their fresh foods are really great. Oil and vinegar is all you need on them.” I leaned back on the rocks. “Or a cup of tea?”

“Okay.” She remembered to smile. I know the poor kid didn’t feel like it. “Thank you. I won’t be able to stay long, though.”

We walked back up the rocks toward the house, the sea on our left. Just as we reached the patio, she turned and looked back. “Cal?”

“Yes? What is it?”

“Those clouds over there, across the water. Those are the only ones in the sky. Are they from the eruption in the Slash?”

I squinted. “I think so. Come on inside.”

* * * *

“Driftglass” by Samuel R. Delany. Copyright © Galaxy Publishing Corporation, 1967. Reprinted by permission of the author and his agents Henry Morrison, Inc., Bedford Hills, New York.

The British SF writer J. G. Ballard, whose work overlaps well with the mainstream literary community (Kingsley Amis highly valued his work), often wrote about apocalypse and, in fact, much like Toqueville 150 years earlier, envisioned America as the catastrophic future already realized. This vision invites analysis, criticism. Further, SF always seems positioned right at the edge of the idea extravagance and semiotic overload that we call modernism and postmodernism. It has attracted other brilliant mainstream writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth. So it is not surprising that there should be a rich tradition of literary criticism and literary theory surrounding the stories and filling the pages of several scholarly journals now as well as many reference books, monographs, and even lately literary biography. This richness of meaning, also, derives partly from the way the genre mixes with several successful popular culture genres and modes such as movies, cowboy western adventure, detective fiction, and cyberpunk—itself a nice mix of cultural materialism.

The Marxist critic Raymond Williams, who also invented the postmodern discipline of cultural materialism, coined the label “space anthropology” to describe the alien encounter and world building stories that he liked to write about in his own SF criticism. Such descriptions require a language complexity far beyond the “Newspeak” that Williams himself cited often as George Orwell’s pointed literary satire of the future in 1984—a specialized mode of criticism that stretches back to Jonathan Swift’s use of speculative fiction. Also, I think the complexity itself in an anthropology or critique of SF calls for the comic tone that we often sense in the massive works of critics such as Darko Suvin and that I refer to in my early book Comic Tones in Science Fiction (1982). Like Williams, Suvin is dead serious about his Marxist theory of the truth and yet, in his massive arguments, comic at the same time. Another Marxist theorist, China Mieville, has filtered out this practice of complexity into the dictum that, since we are not ready for the rigors of the inevitable truth in any political theory, we must clothe the theory in fantasy stories. Mieville writes theory as well as popular fantasy that depicts the theory and shows how out-of-reach it is at the same time in a nicely ironic and comic manner. The most recent collection of essays that Clyde Wilcox and I have edited, New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction (2008), includes two fine essays on this element in Mieville.

Along with the pressing inevitability, or dialectic, of political ideas in critical discussions of SF, some of the best and most energetic non-fiction work in the genre and about the genre has been feminist criticism. This begins with the work of Joanna Russ and is now carried on brilliantly by Marleen Barr and others in many books, both monographs and essay collections, and even in veiled criticisms that are primarily fictions such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969). In addition to the pressure of political ideas and the pressure of gender politics also in critical discussions about SF, utopian theory permeates much of the non-fiction work that appears in the journals and books after first being tried out often in papers at conferences. On the model of the Modern Language Association, academics who liked SF began academic conferences some forty years ago with the founding of the Science Fiction Research Association. Several other academic groups have spun off from the SFRA. These conferences and associations, also, have been modeled on conventions run by fans that go back to the Golden Age of SF in the 1930s. Another avenue for this academic growth of work on SF is through the study of science and literature and the academic associations that treat that topic. For example, I came to the study of modern SF through my doctoral work on Erasmus Darwin and ideas about evolution and discovered the real link to stories through these historical ideas. But now, resembling almost an embodiment, in fact, of the utopian dream theory of Ernst Bloch in which we can dream our future, SF and utopian studies criticism has recently emerged from the stories as a growing, mature body of work.

In addition to this most important and growing academic attention to literary criticism and scholarship on SF, some genuinely valuable work has emerged and continues to emerge from the writing of fans and, especially, from book reviewing. In fact, David Hartwell started two decades ago the monthly publication of the New York Review of Science Fiction that now is producing serious literary criticism and non-fiction essays that approach the level of scholarship in the work mentioned above. Similarly, Locus magazine, which began as a mimeographed fan publication in the 1950s, now regularly produces long author interviews that eventually ought to result in more literary biography of writers of SF. I think the most important book to come from fan writing is The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977) by Samuel R. Delany, who now regularly teaches university courses on SF and SF criticism. Other fans and writers in this category are Damon Knight and Brian Aldiss. Further, the several good “encyclopedia” of the genre and other reference books include valuable critical contributions by both academic and fan writers. This fascinating symbiosis itself is sometimes written about in criticism of the genre.

In its July 1999 issue,
Science Fiction Studies
published a four-part set of essays titled “Towards a History of SF Criticism.” It was accompanied by a massive chronologic bibliography of the literary criticism and scholarship to that date. Since then, the primary journals that a student might look at where citations to the many books and collections and reference works can be found, published before and after that key 1999 date when a “history” of the criticism was attempted, are
Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Foundation, FEMSPEC, and Utopian Studies, the Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies. Clearly, the field is growing; and I believe that H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert A. Heinlein, even Jonathan Swift, would be pleased to see the criticism and scholarship that has grown up around their stories.

* * * *

Donald M. Hassler
has published studies on Hal Clement (1982) and on Isaac Asimov (1991). The latter won the Eaton Award for best SF criticism of the year. He published the monograph
Comic Tones in Science Fiction
(1982), and edited with his wife a set of letters by the fantasy writer Arthur Machen in 1993. He edited with Clyde Wilcox two collections of essays on politics and SF. From 1989 until 2007, he served as the prime editor of the journal
Extrapolation.
And he has held several offices in the Science Fiction Research Association. He teaches at Kent State University.