Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (639 page)

I abandoned my car and wandered along the highway until I found an off-ramp. I walked for hours, passing people who were crying, people who were screaming, people who, like me, were too shocked, too dazed, to do either of those things.

I wondered if there was an entry in the Encyclopedia Galactica about Earth, and, if so, what it said. I thought of Ethan McCharles, swinging back and forth, a flesh pendulum, and I remembered that spontaneous little eulogy Chiu, the security guard, had uttered. Would there be a eulogy for Earth? A few kind words, closing out the entry on us in the next edition of the encyclopedia? I knew what I wanted it to say.

I wanted it to say that we mattered, that what we did had worth, that we treated each other well most of the time. But that was wishful thinking, I suppose. All that would probably be in the entry was the date on which our first broadcasts were detected, and the date, only a heartbeat later in cosmic terms, on which they had ceased.

It would take me most of the day to walk home. My son Michael would make his way back there, too, I’m sure, when he heard the news.

And at least we’d be together, as we waited for whatever would come next.

* * * *

Copyright © 2006 by Robert J. Sawyer.

Canadian science fiction has been around since the end of the nineteenth century, but it is only recently—since the 1970s—that it has become a burgeoning field with ever-increasing popularity. Writers of the genre (both French and English) have been strongly influenced by the works of fellow science fiction writers in the United States particularly Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Judith Merril (who eventually lived and wrote in Canada) and in Britain especially Aldous Huxley, H. G. Wells, and Arthur C Clarke. Early Canadian science fiction writers (such as A. E van Vogt and Frederick Philip Grove in the 1940s) began to write their own brand of science fiction. The founding of Amazing Stories in the United States in 1926 gave Americans protagonists who—as in Western movies—were heroic figures battling successfully alien forces, saving their homelands or allied planets, and vanquishing enemies against all odds. Canadian science fiction writers on the whole seldom wrote then or now about heroes with such sweeping powers. Their works tend to focus more on social communication among peoples and though they use scientific advances and technology, they tend to avoid extensive use of technology for war, suppression, or large scale annihilation. Most Canadian science fiction writers show “a Canadian concern for the fragility of political and cultural institutions” (Clute 24). The heroism of the protagonists in Canadian science fiction novels tends to be very low key. Concerned with ethics and accommodating others, they tend to seek moral victories, and find fulfillment in merely saving individuals, families, or a communities, not the world at large. Less flamboyant, but more practical than their US counterparts, Canadian science fiction protagonists often opt for negotiation and fair play rather than confrontation and war; and they seldom aim at destroying the world or obliterating enemies.

James De Mille’s (1833–1880) novel A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, published posthumously in 1888, is considered to be the first Canadian work of science fiction. A strange tale of a fantastic voyage (in the manner of Jules Verne’s voyages) set in a lost land in the Antarctic it is different from modern Canadian science fiction. A story within a story, it relates how four men on a yacht find a copper cylinder floating in the ocean which contains a manuscript of the adventures of a ship’s captain named Adam More (deliberately evoking both the archetypal and the utopian). The men take turns reading the chapters, commenting on what they are reading. Vividly written, funny, and readable, detailing narrow escapes from human sacrifice, it has no real scientific extrapolation. Another early work of science fiction is The Electrical Kiss (1896) a novel by Ida May Ferguson from New Brunswick (written under the pseudonym Dyjan Fergus). Set in Montreal, it relates the story of a Chinese scientist who pursues and eventually marries a Canadian woman by using his “electrical kiss.”

A noticeable aspect of early Canadian science fiction is the number of mainstream Canadian writers who wrote science fiction novels. Stephen B. Leacock (1869–1944) is a prominent example. He is best known for Sunshine Sketches of a little Town (1912), a gentle portrait of a fictional little Canadian town called Mariposa. But he also wrote “The Man in the Asbestos Suit: An Allegory of the Future” (1911) in a collection of stories he called Nonsense Novels. This futuristic story offers observations on human nature which are as refreshing today as when they were written in 1911. It describes a world in which the inhabitants are clad in long-wearing suits of asbestos and in which death has been eliminated. Here, only a vestigial memory of actual labor remains. Things requiring effort were all accomplished centuries ago, so now people have all necessities. They have, in fact, achieved utopia. Leacock also wrote The Iron Man and the Tin Woman with Other Such Futurities (1929) and Afternoons in Utopia (1932). Two mainstream poets who published early speculative fiction include the prominent Confederation poet Charles G. D. Roberts (1860–1943) who in 1919 wrote In the Morning of Time, a story about life in prehistoric days, and the early modern poet E. J. Pratt (1882–1964) who wrote a narrative poem set in prehistoric days in Australasia called “The Great Feud,” found in his collection of poems Titans and Other Epics of the Pilocene (1926).

Frederick Philip Grove (1879–1948) known for his realistic prairie novels depicting the life of early settlers in the west such as Fruits of the Earth (1933), published Consider Her Ways (1948), a science fiction novel about a group of ants that travel from Venezuela to the Public Library in New York, looking for a human researcher who has telepathic communication with one of the scientist ants. The ants in the book talk and read books from the library. Grove sustains a tone that is rational and analytical, exhibiting a vast knowledge of the ant world, of their behavior and their habitat. The novel is a satiric look at man from the view of the ants, who see man as a degenerate type of creature.

With limited avenues for publication in Canada, Canadian writers contributed to the pulp magazines which were being produced since the 1920s in the US. Among the most notable is A. E. van Vogt (1912–2000), whose science fiction stories (about 35) appeared in Astounding Science Fiction and several other pulp magazines. He wrote often of violent planetary destruction, perhaps reflecting a post-World War II syndrome. His first story “Black Destroyer” (1939) portrays the Coeurl, an alien race of predators; his first novel, Slan (1939) features a mutant protagonist whose physical superiority and ESP capability enable him to survive. Van Vogt wrote these and many other stories before moving to the US in 1944, where he continued his writing career with his popular Weapon Shop books. In 1996, he was recognized for six decades of golden age science fiction; he was presented with a special award at the World Science Fiction Convention. Critical reception of his work has been divided, but writers such as Philip K. Dick acknowledged unabashedly his influence on their writing. And the critic Fredric Jameson affirms that van Vogt prepared the way for Dick, the “greatest of all science fiction writers…whose extraordinary novels and stories are inconceivable without the opening onto that play of unconscious materials and fantasy dynamics released by van Vogt” (315).

In 1979, John Robert Colombo (1936– ) edited the first Canadian anthology of science fiction, Other Canadas: An Anthology of Science Fiction and Fantasy (1979). This influential book inspired many budding writers of the genre and made the public aware of the vast range of speculative fiction in Canada. The World Science Fiction convention held in Toronto in 1973 was very well attended, and brought together readers and writers of science fiction including such notables as Judith Merril and Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens. The first Science Fiction and Fantasy Achievement Awards (now the Auroras) for 1980 was presented at the first National Canadian science fiction convention in 1981. This event confirmed for many readers and writers outside the genre the respectability of speculative fiction. The poet Phyllis Gotlieb (1926–2009) of Toronto began writing science fiction novels. David Ketterer has called her the voice of Canadian science fiction from 1960–1980. Her first novel Sunburst (1964), for which the Sunburst Award is named, has relevance today given its focus on a nuclear accident and its effect on humans. The book was predictive of nuclear accidents in Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, reminding us that we can be victims of advances in technology if we use it without fully understanding the benefits or the dangers of such use. Gotlieb wrote many other novels, winning the Aurora Award for the best novel in 1982 for her novel A Judgment of Dragons, a series of linked novelettes. Many of her short stories have been anthologized, especially those in her collection Son of the Morning and Other Stories (1983).

Judith Merril (1923–1997) was a strong voice in Canadian science fiction. She, like the science fiction writers William Gibson, Spider Robinson, and Robert Charles Wilson, was born in the US and like all of them became prominent in Canada. Since her arrival in Canada in 1968, she promoted the genre, focusing the attention of readers on feminist issues and the need for the evaluation of ethical concerns in scientific experimentation. Her most influential short story, “That Only a Mother,” published in 1948 in Astounding Science Fiction, is a moving account of the reluctance of a mother to see and accept the genetic mutation that has occurred in her child because of her husband’s exposure to nuclear radioactivity. Merril’s impressive body of writing includes Daughters of Earth: Three Novels (1969). She began editing anthologies in 1950 with Shot in the Dark. She is also known for her series of twelve “year’s best” anthologies which started in 1956. She deliberately included stories by lesser-known writers in her anthologies, and continued this practice when she edited the influential Tesseracts (1985) a continuing anthology of Canadian science fiction writing which became a series, with prominent science fiction writers such as Robert J. Sawyer, Robert Charles Wilson, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Nalo Hopkinson as guest editors. Merril’s book collection forms the core of The Merril Collection of Science Fiction, Speculation, and Fantasy, which was founded in 1970 by the Toronto Public Library in Canada. This collection of more than 26,000 books includes 18,000 noncirculating periodicals and about 8,500 paperback books, which can be loaned and circulated. This collection is an indispensable one for readers and researchers of science fiction.

Judith Merril has influenced many science fiction and fantasy writers; Candas Jane Dorsey (1952– ) and Nalo Hopkinson (1960– ) are two of them. Dorsey, a writer, journalist, and social worker, co-edited Tesseracts 3 with Gerry Truscott in 1991. Her science fiction and fantasy stories in Machine Sex & Other Stories (1988) rework science fiction tropes from a feminist viewpoint. Nalo Hopkinson immigrated to Canada in 1977 from Jamaica, where she was born. She won the Warner Aspect Prize in 1998 for her first novel Brown Girl in a Ring (1998), a fantasy-horror novel set in a futuristic Toronto. Her next novel, Midnight Robber (2000), is a science fiction novel written (as is her first) in the demotic language of the Caribbean. It depicts a technologically advanced planet called Toussaint colonized by Caribbean people, an advanced people who have their own AIs linked to a worldwide web Granny Nansi’s web. Humans who live here are slaves to advanced technology. Juxtaposed with this world is the nightmarish world of New Half Way Tree, in which the outcasts and criminals of society live. Thrust onto this planet, the protagonist battles violence, oppression, and sexual abuse before she can regain her independence and safety. Hopkinson’s collection of stories, Skin Folk (2001), won the Sunburst Award in 2003. It contains a science fiction story, “A Habit of Waste,” set in a futuristic Toronto where humans have the ability to replace their original bodies with a new ones from a “MediPerfection catalogue” (183). Hopkinson edited with Geoff Ryman Tesseracts 9 in 2006. Her fantasy novel, The Salt Roads (2003), spans time and place jumping from Egypt in 345 CE to Haiti of the 1800s to Paris of the 1840s. The stories of three women are linked by the voice of a goddess, Ezili. Her latest novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007) is another fantasy which portrays an “aquaboy” who is searching for his family. In 2008 Hopkinson received the Aurora Award and The Sunburst Award for this novel. She is currently residing in the US and continues to write and teach there.

Many of the contemporary Canadian science fiction writers exhibit an apprehension of environmental destruction. They create pessimistic worlds, restrictive, totalitarian futuristic societies, and societies unable to control scientific experiments such as mutated viruses released into the atmosphere by negligent scientists or corporations. Such dystopic novels have been published in the last two decades by William Gibson and Robert Charles Wilson. The dystopic novel has attracted the attention of mainstream Canadian writer Margaret Atwood (1939– ), who creates an alternative version of the future in The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). The novel, which won the Arthur C .Clarke Award in 1987 and was made into a movie in 1990, depicts a world in which some women are reduced to the status of breeders and are denied the most basic human rights, a prophecy that became true not so much in the West, where Atwood’s novel is set, but in countries like Afghanistan under the Taliban. If this novel is a warning about an anti-feminist backlash, Oryx and Crake (2003) is about another set of dangers facing the human race. It cautions against developments in science and technology such as genetic engineering and xenotransplantation, detailing the disturbing social and ethical consequences of such experimentation.

One of the most influential novels of dystopian science fiction in the cyberpunk genre is Neuromancer, a novel by William Gibson (1948– ), published in 1984, which won the Hugo, Nebula, and the Philip K. Dick awards. Gibson was born in the US, immigrating to Canada in 1968 to escape the draft during the Vietnam War. He later became a Canadian citizen. Gibson has been credited with coining the term “cyberspace,” and is been seen as the writer who predicted the growth of virtual environments and the Internet. By employing neural implants, cowboys in this novel, such as Case, the protagonist, attempt to pirate information by “jacking” or plugging themselves into the matrix, which is a virtual world simulated by a globally linked computer database. The novel examines the relationship between humans and technology, and reveals a futuristic world where humans rely on computer programs for their very existence. The two other books in the Neuromancer trilogy are Count Zero (1986) and Mona Lisa Overdrive (1988). Though Gibson has written numerous other novels and stories, it is Neuromancer that has propelled him to fame.

Like William Gibson and Margaret Atwood, Robert Charles Wilson (1953– ) also creates dystopic worlds in his fiction. Born in the US, he has lived in Canada since 1962. He began publishing science fiction and fantasy stories in Astounding Science Fiction in 1974. His first novel, A Hidden Place (1986), is a work of fantasy which deals with an alternate world, as does his The Memory Wire (1987), and Darwinia (1998). He won two Aurora awards for Darwinia and Blind Lake (2003) and a Hugo award for his novel Spin (2005), the first book of his trilogy that continues with Axis (2007) and concludes with Vortex (2011). Blind Lake is a science fiction novel that takes place in a government laboratory where scientists observe sapient life on a planet fifty-one light years away, using telescopes powered by quantum computers that have advanced beyond human understanding. A sudden and unexplained facility lockdown extends into a long-term quarantine which leads to unexpected results for the protagonist and her daughter. Spin is a science fiction thriller and an ecological warning, but it is also a deeply moving book about the capacity of humans for faith and hope. In Axis, humans are colonizing a new world, and exploiting its rescouce, large deposits of oil, which makes it a familiar story today.