Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (423 page)

In more recent years, controversy has often accompanied young adult science fiction that explores these themes. Philip Pullman’s
His Dark Materials
trilogy (
The Golden Compass
,
The Subtle Knife
,
The Amber Spyglass
) explores theological issues through the inter-dimensional explorations of its protagonist Lyra and her “demon” (her embodied soul), calling into question organized religion, a theme that has led to large-scale outcry from some Christian groups. Sexual content has provoked calls to ban Garth Nix’s
Shade’s Children,
a 1997 young adult novel, set in a dystopian future in which adults have disappeared and the children who remain are confined in dormitories until the age of 14, when they are “harvested” for raw materials. While these kinds of topics have become more widely accepted in adult science fiction, the perceived influence of these texts on younger readers has led many of the same arguments of earlier decades to be revisited in this more restricted arena.

Science fiction authors are unlikely to stop pushing and crossing social boundaries in their attempts to explore human potential. Although the “blasphemous and sensationalist” ideas of Wells and the “scandalous” sexual content of Huxley have become relatively commonplace, texts that lead us to question our beliefs and attitudes in new ways continue to create controversy. What has changed from the days of Wells or Huxley, however, is that these explorations are, in the wake of the New Wave, more likely to be heard and seriously considered as the dangerous, but exciting, visions that they are.

* * * *

Works Cited

Anthony, Piers. “Ogre’s Den: From the Desk of Piers Anthony.” Piers Anthony, February 2006. Web. February 22, 2011.

Ellison, Harlan.
Dangerous Visions
. Garden City, NY; Doubleday and Co., 1967.

Hillegas, Mark R.
The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-utopians
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Wells, H.G.
The Island of Dr. Moreau
. 1896. New York; Bantam, 2005. Print.

* * * *

Liberty Stanavage
is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Potsdam. Her research focuses primarily on English drama from the late Medieval era through the Restoration, but her broader teaching and research interests include science fiction, textual studies, gender and popular print.

(1935– )

While I don’t think you can be too talented or too prolific, Bob Silverberg has pushed the envelope, writing literally hundreds of books and burning out repeatedly only to come back to the field an even stronger writer. He’s best known for a tremendous run of brooding science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s and for the lavish fantasy series begun with Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980, but he was already a prolific SF writer as a twenty-year-old in the mid-1950s, and he continues to write stories and edit anthologies today.

As a student at Columbia, Bob rented an apartment that turned out to be next door to SF writer Randall Garrett, and in the same building as Harlan Ellison. Garrett mentored Bob and introduced him to other writers and editors; they ended up collaborating on a number of works as well, usually writing as Robert Randall. Writing more than a million words a year, Bob published (using various names) more than 220 short works and 11 novels, most notably
Recalled to Life
(1958).

He then retired from SF until 1966, when the combination of editor Fred Pohl and the New Wave emphasis on the craft of writing lured him back. In the next five years he wrote dozens of dark-edged stories and 25 novels, including the Hugo winner
Nightwings
(1969), Dying Inside (1972), Tower of Glass (1970), Thorns (1967), Downward to the Earth (1970), and The Book of Skulls (1971). He also served a term as president of SFWA, moved to California, and suffered a series of personal disasters. Not surprisingly another burnout and retirement followed.

Since his return to the field he’s written at a more sustainable pace, remarried (to author Karen Haber), and done some terrific writing and editing. He’s won five Hugos, five Nebulas, and in 2004 was presented with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

First published in
Orbit 4
, December 1968

There are only fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always
like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces,
the imprints.

Like sand clinging to an ocean-tossed bottle. Like the throbbings of amputated legs.

I rise. I collect myself. My hair is rumpled; I comb it. My face is creased from too little sleep. There is sourness in my mouth. Has my Passenger been eating dung with my mouth? They do that. They do anything.

It is morning.

A gray, uncertain morning. I stare at it awhile, and then, shuddering, I opaque the window and confront instead the gray, uncertain surface of the inner panel. My room looks untidy. Did I have a woman here? There are ashes in the trays. Searching for butts, I find several with lipstick stains. Yes, a woman was here.

I touched the bedsheets. Still warm with shared warmth. Both
pillows tousled. She has gone, though, and the Passenger is gone, and I am alone.

How long did it last, this time?

I pick up the phone and ring Central. “What is the date?”

The computer’s bland feminine voice replies, “Friday, December fourth, nineteen eighty-seven.”

“The time?”

“Nine fifty-one, Eastern Standard Time.”

“The weather forecast?”

“Predicted temperature range for today thirty to thirty-eight. Current temperature, thirty-one. Wind from the north, sixteen miles an hour. Chances of precipitation slight.”

“What do you recommend for a hangover?”

“Food or medication?”

“Anything you like,” I say.

The computer mulls that one over for a while. Then it decides on both, and activates my kitchen. The spigot yields cold tomato juice. Eggs begin to fry. From the medicine slot comes a purplish liquid. The Central Computer is always so thoughtful. Do the Passengers ever ride it, I wonder? What thrills could that hold for them? Surely it must be more exciting to borrow the million minds of Central than to live awhile in the short-circuited soul of a corroding human being!

December fourth, Central said. Friday. So the Passenger had me for three nights.

I drink the purplish stuff and probe my memories in a gingerly way, as one might probe a festering sore.

I remember Tuesday morning. A bad time at work. None of the charts will come out right. The section manager irritable; he has been taken by Passengers three times in five weeks, and his section is in disarray as a result, and his Christmas bonus is jeopardized. Even though it is customary not to penalize a person for lapses due to Passengers, according to the system, the section manager seems to feel he will be treated unfairly. So he treats us unfairly. We have a hard time. Revise the charts, fiddle with the program, check the fundamentals ten times over. Out they come: the detailed forecasts for price variations of public utility securities, February-April 1988. That afternoon we are to meet and discuss the charts and what they tell us.

I do not remember Tuesday afternoon.

That must have been when the Passenger took me. Perhaps at work; perhaps in the mahogany-paneled boardroom itself, during the conference. Pink concerned faces all about me; I cough, I lurch, I stumble from my seat. They shake their heads sadly. No one reaches for me. No one stops me. It is too dangerous to interfere with one who has a Passenger. The chances are great that a second Passenger lurks nearby in the discorporate state, looking for a mount. So I am avoided. I leave the building.

After that, what?

Sitting in my room on bleak Friday morning, I eat my scrambled eggs and try to reconstruct the three lost nights.

Of course it is impossible. The conscious mind functions during the period of captivity, but upon withdrawal of the Passenger nearly every recollection goes too. There is only a slight residue, a gritty film of faint and ghostly memories. The mount is never precisely the same person afterwards; though he cannot recall the details of his experience, he is subtly changed by it.

I try to recall.

A girl? Yes: lipstick on the butts. Sex, then, here in my room. Young? Old? Blonde? Dark? Everything is hazy. How did my borrowed body behave? Was I a good lover? I try to be, when I am myself. I keep in shape. At thirty-eight, I can handle three sets of tennis on a summer afternoon without collapsing. I can make a woman glow as a woman is meant to glow. Not boasting; just categorizing. We have our skills. These are mine.

But Passengers, I am told, take wry amusement in controverting our skills. So would it have given my rider a kind of delight to find me a woman and force me to fail repeatedly with her?

I dislike that thought.

The fog is going from my mind now. The medicine prescribed by Central works rapidly. I eat, I shave, I stand under the vibrator until my skin is clean. I do my exercises. Did the Passenger exercise my body Wednesday and Thursday mornings? Probably not. I must make up for that. I am close to middle age, now; tonus lost is not easily regained.

I touch my toes twenty times, knees stiff.

I kick my legs in the air.

I lie flat and lift myself on pumping elbows.

The body responds, maltreated though it has been. It is the first bright moment of my awakening: to feel the inner tingling, to know that I still have vigor.

Fresh air is what I want next. Quickly I slip into my clothes and leave. There is no need for me to report to work today. They are aware that since Tuesday afternoon I have had a Passenger; they need not be aware that before dawn on Friday the Passenger departed. I will have a free day. I will walk the city’s streets, stretching my limbs, repaying my body for the abuse it has suffered.

I enter the elevator. I drop fifty stories to the ground. I step out into the December dreariness.

The towers of New York rise about me.

In the street the cars stream forward. Drivers sit edgily at their wheels. One never knows when the driver of a nearby car will be borrowed, and there is always a moment of lapsed coordination as the Passenger takes over. Many lives are lost that way on our streets and highways; but never the life of a Passenger.

I begin to walk without purpose. I cross Fourteenth Street, heading north, listening to the soft violet purr of the electric engines. I see a
boy jigging in the street and know he is being ridden. At Fifth and Twenty-second a prosperous-looking paunchy man approaches, his necktie askew, this morning’s
Wall Street Journal
jutting from an overcoat pocket. He giggles. He thrusts out his tongue. Ridden. Ridden. I avoid him. Moving briskly, I come to the underpass that carries traffic below Thirty-fourth Street toward Queens, and pause for a moment to watch two adolescent girls quarreling at the rim of the pedestrian walk. One is a Negro. Her eyes are rolling in terror. The other pushes her closer to the railing. Ridden. But the Passenger does not have murder on its mind, merely pleasure. The Negro girl is released and falls in a huddled heap, trembling. Then she rises and runs. The other girl draws a long strand of gleaming hair into her mouth, chews on it, seems to awaken. She looks dazed.

I avert my eyes. One does not watch while a fellow sufferer is awakening. There is a morality of the ridden; we have so many new tribal mores in these dark days.

I hurry on.

Where am I going so hurriedly? Already I have walked more than a mile. I seem to be moving toward some goal, as though my Passenger still hunches in my skull, urging me about. But I know that is not so. For the moment, at least, I am free.

Can I be sure of that?

Cogito ergo sum
no longer applies. We go on thinking even while we are ridden, and we live in quiet desperation, unable to half halt our courses no matter how ghastly, no matter how self-destructive. I am certain that I can distinguish between the condition of bearing a Passenger and the condition of being free. But perhaps not. Perhaps I bear a particularly devilish Passenger which has not quitted me at all, but which merely has receded to the cerebellum, leaving me the illusion of freedom while all the time surreptitiously driving me onward to some purpose of its own.

Did we ever have more than that: the illusion of freedom?

But this is disturbing, the thought that I may be ridden without realizing it. I burst out in heavy perspiration, not merely from the exertion of walking. Stop. Stop here. Why must you walk? You are at Forty-second Street. There is the library. Nothing forces you onward. Stop a while, I tell myself. Rest on the library steps.

I sit on the cold stone and tell myself that I have made this decision for myself.

Have I? It is the old problem, free will versus determinism, translated into the foulest of forms. Determinism is no longer a philosopher’s abstraction; it is cold alien tendrils sliding between the cranial sutures. The Passengers arrived three years ago. I have been ridden five times since then. Our world is quite different now. But we have adjusted even to this. We have adjusted. We have our mores. Life goes on. Our governments rule, our legislatures meet, our stock exchanges transact business as usual, and we have methods for compensating for the random havoc. It is the only way. What else can we do? Shrivel in defeat? We have an enemy we cannot fight; at best we can resist through endurance. So we endure.

The stone steps are cold against my body. In December few people sit here.

I tell myself that I made this long walk of my own free will, that I halted of my own free will, that no Passenger rides my brain now. Perhaps. Perhaps. I cannot let myself believe that I am not free.

Can it be, I wonder, that the Passenger left some lingering command in me? Walk to this place, halt at this place? That is possible too.

I look about me at the others on the library steps.

An old man, eyes vacant, sitting on newspaper. A boy of thirteen or so with flaring nostrils. A plump woman. Are all of them ridden? Passengers seem to cluster about me today. The more I study the ridden ones, the more convinced I become that I am, for the moment, free. The last time, I had three months of freedom between rides. Some people, they say, are scarcely ever free. Their bodies are in great demand, and they know only scattered bursts of freedom, a day here, a week there, an hour. We have never been able to determine how many Passengers infest our world. Millions, maybe. Or maybe five. Who can tell?

A wisp of snow curls down out of the gray sky. Central had said the chance of precipitation was slight. Are they riding Central this morning too?

I see the girl.

She sits diagonally across from me, five steps up and a hundred feet away, her black skirt pulled up on her knees to reveal handsome legs. She is young. Her hair is deep, rich auburn. Her eyes are pale; at this distance, I cannot make out the precise color. She is dressed simply. She is younger than thirty. She wears a dark green coat and her lipstick has a purplish tinge. Her lips are full, her nose slender, high-bridged, her eyebrows carefully plucked.

I know her.

I have spent the past three nights with her in my room. She is the one. Ridden, she came to me, and ridden, I slept with her. I am certain of this. The veil of memory opens; I see her slim body naked on my bed.

How can it be that I remember this?

It is too strong to be an illusion. Clearly this is something that I have been
permitted
to remember for reasons I cannot comprehend. And I remember more. I remember her soft gasping sounds of pleasure. I know that my own body did not betray me those three nights, nor did I fail her need.

And there is more. A memory of sinuous music; a scent of youth in her hair; the rustle of winter trees. Somehow she brings back to me a time of innocence, a time when I am young and girls are mysterious, a time of parties and dances and warmth and secrets.

I am drawn to her now.

There is an etiquette about such things, too. It is in poor taste to approach someone you have met while being ridden. Such an encounter gives you no privilege; a stranger remains a stranger, no matter what you and she may have done and said during your involuntary time together.

Yet I am drawn to her.

Why this violation of taboo? Why this raw breach of etiquette? I have never done this before. I have been scrupulous.

But I get to my feet and walk along the step on which I have been sitting, until I am below her, and I look up, and automatically she folds her ankles together and angles her knees as if in awareness that her position is not a modest one. I know from that gesture that she is not ridden now. My eyes meet hers. Her eyes are hazy green. She is beautiful, and I rack my memory for more details of our passion.

I climb step by step until I stand before her.

“Hello,” I say.

She gives me a neutral look. She does not seem to recognize me. Her eyes are veiled, as one’s eyes often are, just after the Passenger has gone. She purses her lips and appraises me in a distant way.

“Hello,” she replies coolly. “I don’t think I know you.”

“No. You don’t. But I have the feeling you don’t want to be alone just now. And I know I don’t.” I try to persuade her with my eyes that my motives are decent. “There’s snow in the air,” I say. “We can find a warmer place. I’d like to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Let’s go elsewhere , and I’ll tell you. I’m Charles Roth.”

“Helen Martin.”

She gets to her feet. She still has not cast aside her cool neutrality; she is suspicious, ill at ease. But at least she is willing to go with me. A good sign.

“Is it too early in the day for a drink?” I ask.

“I’m not sure. I hardly know what time it is.”

“Before noon.”

“Let’s have a drink anyway,” she says, and we both smile.

We go to a cocktail lounge across the street. Sitting face to face in the darkness, we sip drinks, daiquiri for her, bloody mary for me. She relaxes a little. I ask myself what it is I want from her. The pleasure of her company, yes. Her company in bed? But I have already had that pleasure, three nights of it, though she does not know that. I want something more. Something more. What?