Mandates? What Mandates?

Two years ago, John Kasich promised to “break the back of organized labor” in the Ohio school system. A year ago, he was elected governor, and pushed through legislation to end collective bargaining for public employees. Just a couple of weeks ago, Ohio voters overturned the law in a referendum.

Has Ohio suddenly gone liberal? Not exactly. At the same election in which they vetoed the anti-union legislation by a 61-39% margin, they also supported a proposition to block Obamacare, with its requirement for people to buy health insurance, by a 65-35% margin. Meanwhile, voters in Mississippi, the most conservative state in the nation, rejected by a 58-42% margin a constitutional amendment to define life as beginning at fertilization – but you’ll never see Mississippi support Obama in the next election.

You can’t have helped noticing that American politics are more combative than ever, with the Tea Party at one end at Occupy Wall Street at the other. Right now, a special committee created by Congress to resolve the debt crisis is deadlocked, with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats willing to give an inch on either new taxes or entitlement reform. But what you may not have noticed is that the left and the right suffer a common delusion: that the people are behind them 100%, and that if they win an election, voters are giving them a mandate to turn their agendas into law.

As it happens, Kasich was elected governor of Ohio by only a plurality, 49%. Not much of a “mandate.” And yet he was convinced he had one – “Le people, c’est moi.” But few if any elections are actually unconditional mandates. Presidential landslides, like those of Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1972, are rare indeed. Johnson parlayed his mandate into pushing through Civil Rights legislation, but his popular support sank into the Vietnam quagmire. Nixon… well, you know what happened to him.

The Republicans are convinced they have a mandate now, because they won the mid-term elections. But Ohio shows how ephemeral a seeming a mandate can be. The fact of the matter is that most voters were simply expressing their disappointment with Barack Obama – as Bill Clinton once said, “It’s the economy, stupid.”  Obama himself thought he had a mandate for what became Obamacare, but the fact of the matter is that people in 2008 were voting against the Republicans in the wake of the economic meltdown as much as they were voting for him. Ohio’s vote on Obamacare was all the more stunning rebuke for him, paired as it was with the rejection of the GOP anti-union agenda.

Some elections are decided on single issues, but not necessarily those in party platforms. In both 2008 and 2010, the big issue was still the economy. But even if voters studied the party platforms in detail, it is virtually impossible that they would embrace or reject them on an all-or-nothing basis. Maybe they’d agree with six out of ten positions of one party, and only four out of ten of the other’s – and vote accordingly. But the winners would take this as a “mandate” for all ten of their positions, even if the election margin was close – which it usually is.

No time or space right now to get into the specifics of political issues, or the greater issue of political corruption. But even if all our leaders were as honest as the day is long in the usual sense, and absolutely sincere in their positions on the issues, they would still suffer the hubris of imaginary mandates.

Contagious Music

Brazilian composer Heitor Villa Lobos (1887-1959) has been one of my favorites since childhood. My introduction to him came at age 10 or 11, I think, with a record sent by my Aunt Liz for my birthday.

One of the pieces on it was Choros No. 10, part of what I later learned was a series of 12 pieces – one each for guitar and piano, one for horns and the rest for chamber ensembles and full orchestra. On the same record were two movements from Bachianas Brasileiras No.2; the Bachianas comprised nine pieces combining the method of Bach with native Brazilian music; they are probably Villa Lobos’ best known works. The toccata from No. 2 is a stunt piece, inspired by a narrow gauge railroad in the Caipira – the remote back country. Somebody created an appropriate video; it isn’t the railroad, or even the right country, but it’s the right vintage:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjDZUetrDCM

"Yes, I’m Brazilian – very Brazilian. In my music, I let the rivers and seas of this great Brazil sing. I don’t put a gag on the tropical exuberance of our forests and our skies, which I intuitively transpose to everything I write."

That’s how Villa Lobos is quoted at the head of an article for an online journal called Guitarra:

http://www.guitarramagazine.com/villaloboschoro

Although its focus is on guitar music, the article touches on the Choros in general. And of the tenth, it remarks:

Considered to be one of his masterpieces (if not his greatest work), Choros No. 10 utilizes the forces of an orchestra augmented with native Brazilian instruments and chorus to create a monument of nationalistic Brazilian music.

Villa Lobos’ Wikipedia entry has it that “The first European performance of Chôros No. 10, in Paris [1927], caused a storm: L. Chevallier wrote of it in Le Monde musicale, "[…it is] an art […] to which we must now give a new name." Be that as it may, the choral section of Choros No. 10 (Its subtitle, “Rasga o Coracão,” or “Tear the Heart,” is taken from a popular ballad) is certainly one of the most infectious pieces of music ever. Just look at how the singers, especially the women, are getting into it in this performance at São Paulo three years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UnVmG-DDhY

I’ve been infected for close on 60 years now. I hope I can spread that infection!

Transience

The magnificence of the Ambersons began in 1873. Their splendor lasted throughout all the years that saw their Midland town spread and darken into a city. In that town in those days, all the women who wore silk or velvet knew all the other women who wore silk or velvet and everybody knew everybody else's family horse and carriage. The only public conveyance was the streetcar. A lady could whistle to it from an upstairs window, and the car would halt at once, and wait for her, while she shut the window, put on her hat and coat, went downstairs, found an umbrella, told the "girl" what to have for dinner and came forth from the house. Too slow for us nowadays, because the faster we're carried, the less time we have to spare.

The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles 1942 movie version of Booth Tarkington’s 1918 novel, is widely regarded as one of the 100 or even the ten best movies of all time, if not quite as good as Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941). Much of the discussion about it has centered on cuts made by RKO, which also tacked on a happier ending, after Welles’ original version drew a poor response in previews; and such innovations as the credits being spoken by Welles, and his then-startling cinematography. I don’t want to rehash all that here; Wikipedia gives the basics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Ambersons_%28film%29

What particularly interests me is that the film, like the book but more dramatically, has a peculiar resonance with science fiction. Like the novel, it is on the surface a story about Old Money versus the New Money. But beneath the surface that, it has a science fictional sense of transience. My father once pointed out to me that in most mainstream fiction, the people change but the world remains the same. Here, the people remain the same, but the world changes around them. This is foreshadowed in a scene where Eugene Morgan, a pioneer automobile manufacturer, is a dinner guest at the Amberson mansion, and has a set-to with George Minafer, the grandson of Major Jack Amberson, who built the family fortune:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTTF2QIHDCM

Not just Old Money versus New Money, but an old culture versus a New Technology. We are reminded of the changes automobiles brought that nobody anticipated at the time, such as their impact on sexual behavior. As an entry at one cultural history site puts it, “Cars are also credited with or blamed for loosening sexual morals.  Young men and women could go off in cars and have more privacy than they were able to have before. Overall, cars helped loosen up American culture in the '20s, making it freer and more focused on fun and entertainment.”

Georgie Minafer has been obnoxious since childhood, the spoiled only child of Wilbur Minafer and Isabel Amberson. “He’ll get his comeuppance,” many of the townspeople whose own children he’d ridden roughshod over predicted – or perhaps only wished. For him, they were only “riffraff.” Born with a silver spoon in his mouth, he disdained the idea of ever working for a living – his ambition, he tells Eugene’s daughter Lucy, is to be a yachtsman. When his father dies, his mother Isabel longs to reconnect with Eugene, an old flame from before he left town to seek his fortune; but George cruelly keeps them apart – supposedly to save the family honor, even though he himself has a thing going for Lucy.

Although he isn’t generally considered an archetype, he may indeed be one, and with a contemporary resonance. Marcia and I read a piece a while back, I think it was in The New York Times, about proper of discipline for children. Corporal punishment is now almost universally condemned, but somebody was arguing that even punishments like time-outs should be prohibited – children should not only be loved unconditionally but indulged unconditionally. Marcia’s reaction: “That’ll get you a Georgie Minafer!” If we are raising a new generation of Georgie Minafers today, they will be no more suited to cope with the challenges of life, especially in a changing world, than the Tarkington-Welles character, who is helpless and hopeless – and forgotten – after the loss of the Amberson fortune:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DFpfNFvnfM

In that scene, we get the sense that the city (never named, but based on Indianapolis) has itself become alien to Minafer, something ominous and incomprehensible. It’s what Alvin Toffler would later call Future Shock. It draws our attention back to the earlier scenes, set in the 1890’s, when life seemed more genteel – at least for the likes of the Ambersons – and the automobile could be seen as a joke rather than as a token of the end of one age and the beginning of another:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJxgrxl5BRM

The year before The Magnificent Ambersons was released, Robert A. Heinlein was the guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Denver. Taking his cue from a catchphrase (“There’ll always be an England”) popular at a time when the United States hadn’t yet entered World War II, but many if not most Americans were sympathetic,

We know better. There won’t always be an England—nor a Germany, nor a United States, nor a Baptist church, nor monogamy, nor the Democratic party, nor the modesty tabu, nor the superiority of the white race, nor aeroplanes—they will go—nor automobiles—they’ll be gone, we’ll see them go. Any custom, technique, institution, belief or social structure that we see around us today will change, will pass, and most of them we will see change and pass.

Heinlein was obviously wrong about the specifics, at least in his (and our) own time – we still have cars, planes, the Baptist church, the Democratic party and, of course, the United States. Monogamy? Well, it’s more and more like serial polygamy – and not just with the Kardashians. And, despite the uproar over Janet Jackson’s 2008 Wardrobe Malfunction, the modesty taboo sure isn’t what it used to be. Yet there have also been epochal changes that Heinlein did not foresee, from personal computers to gay marriage. We have seen the rise of China and India on the world stage, global terrorism, and even the threat of global economic collapse. But unlike George Minafer, we know that we live in uncertain times and face an uncertain future. That much has changed since his day.

Getting Lucky

I was just checking for online scenes from one of my very favorite comedies, Lucky Jim, a Boulting Brothers movie (1957) based on the 1954 novel by Kingsley Amis about a young professor at one of the redbrick universities in England. I’ve read the novel, and it’s funny, but not as rip-roaringly funny as the adaptation. Much to my surprise, I discovered that the entire film had been uploaded just last month:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrNLq0ikwjE

Of course, this may not be authorized; it’s hard to imagine that the copyrights have expired. So catch it while you can. It’s a riot all the way through, but some of the best bits are:

• History professor Jim Dixon (Ian Carmichael) at a weekend gathering at the country home of his department head John Welch (Hugh Griffith) – especially when he inadvertently climbs into the bedroom of ex-girlfriend Margaret Peel (Maureen Connell).

• The way Welch answers the phone.

• The understated false modesty with which Welch’s son Bertrand (Terry Thomas) describes his unwritten novel.

• The ceremonial procession and the potted plants,

• Jim’s drunken delivery of the lecture he’s been forced by Welch into writing about Merrie England.

• His race to the railroad station, stealing Welch’s car (a star in itself!) to catch a girl he loves, Christine Callaghan (Sharon Acker) – and a future.

Cherryh Picking

Most science fiction readers aren’t even aware of science fiction critics, although they may check out the reviews at Amazon.com. Those involved in science fiction fandom will follow reviews, interviews and other features in Locus. And scholars or would-be scholars of the genre will be familiar with such highly regarded critics as Darko Suvin and John Clute, whose mission is to cherry pick the genre and winnow the wheat from the chaff.

But I’m not here to talk about them, at least not today, as I mark my 70^th birthday by getting The Seventy Year Itch going in earnest. I’m here today to talk about one of my favorite writers, C.J. Cherryh. By way of introduction, here’s a recent review posted by Jo Walton at Tor.com on Cherryh’s Forty Thousand in Gehenna (1983):

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2011/09/qmans-more-like-to-change-than-dieq-cj-cherryhs-forty-thousand-in-gehenna 

Walton is herself an sf and fantasy author to be reckoned with. Her Tooth and Claw (2003) is a hoot: a send-up of the Victorian sentimental novel set on a world populated by dragons. Farthing (2006) is a marvelous country house mystery, set in an alternate history where England made peace with the Nazis, and leads into a trilogy about the rise and eventual fall of a fascist regime in England itself. But in her reviews and commentaries, she reads science fiction and fantasy the way I do – as a kind of literature that can be enjoyed as literature.

Critics tend to see a great divide between “serious” and “popular” fiction, between heavyweight and seemingly lightweight sf. When they think of literary sf, they tend to think of writers from outside the genre like Aldous Huxley, or anoint a select few from within the genre like Ursula K. Le Guin. But you can tell that Walton takes Cherryh seriously, and regards her work as having literary value. I agree, and without giving away any more essentials than she does about the plot and characters of Forty Thousand in Gehenna, her review dovetails with what I’d written for Odd Genre (1994), in a chapter about the generational saga in sf:

Forty Thousand in Gehenna, part of Cherryh’s Alliance-Union future history, also takes on elements of the science fictional robinsonade because the forty thousand of the title are castaways on an alien planet. But they are not the usual sort of castaways; virtually all are azis, products of the Brave New World-like birth labs of Union. Azis serve Union as loyal soldiers and workers; their loyalty is built into their psych-sets even as their capabilities are built into their genesets. Now a new task has been set for them, and none of them know any more about its true purpose than Jin 458-9998:

They had taken him into the white building on the farm and given him deepteach that told him the farm was no longer important, that he would be given a new and great purpose when he got where he was going, and that there would be other tapes to tell him so, very soon.

But if Jin is a slave, he and his kind are about to discover a strange sort of freedom on their own brave new world because Gehenna is a colony intended to fail, planted within Alliance space as part of a campaign to create problems for Union’s rival. The promised resupply ships will never come, and the azi, pawns in a cynical power game, are left to become masters of their own fates.

Although he has never been deeptaught anything about sex or reproduction, Jin looks forward to both; he even has his eye on Pia 89-687: “He and Pia would make born men together and the tape said this would be as good as the reward tapes, a reward anytime they liked as long as they were off duty.” And so it happens, but there are things for which the tapes have not prepared them: the abandonment of the colony, as well as the discovery of the ariels and calibans, which are a bit like dragons, but not like those legend or such mythologically based sf as Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern series. The ariels and calibans build mounds, and they may be intelligent, but little is known about them. Union’s research was so cursory it didn’t even get the number of species/varieties right. Jin and Pia carry out their deeptaught roles, as do the other azis – building homes and planting crops and having children – it is all they know how to do. But Gehenna does not conform to their programming; the calibans wreak havoc by tunneling under the settlement, and citizens as well as azis are killed (a new experience to Jin and his kind). There are no more tapes, and the other comforts of civilization are gradually lost as machines break down and supplies run out. As for the children, who are born men, they never have known and never will know tape; their makeup is a scrambling of the gene-sets of their parents.

The discomfort of parents over the rebelliousness of their children is an old and familiar one in family sagas; however, in Forty Thousand in Gehenna, it takes on a whole new dimension. In the third year of the colony, Jin finds his son, barely a year old, playing – or is it communicating? – with an ariel: “little Jin sat in the dirt taking leftover bits of stone and piling them. An ariel assisted, added pebbles to the lot.” A few years later, Little Jin ignores his father’s entreaties to return home; the elder Jin feels helpless for the first time. And this is only the beginning; a whole new generation is adapting to Gehenna in ways unfathomable to the parent generation. The children and grandchildren of Jin and Pia, who abandon the settlement to live and farm in the wild, are deaf and uncomprehending as the elder Jin tries to recall them to their “duty:”

“We have to keep this place,” Jin said, all the same. “They gave us orders.”

“They’re dead.”

“The orders are there.”

“Why should we listen to dead people?”

“They were born men; they planned all this.”

“So are we,” said his eldest grandson.

But at least Jin 3 will talk to his grandfather; Green, last of the sons of Jin and Pia, has long since disappeared into the warrens of the calibans. He and those like him go native completely, learning the language of the dragons and ceasing to communicate in human terms at all.

In the generations that follow, other descendants of Jin and Pia enter into symbiotic relationships with the dragons. The calibans begin to raise towers instead of the traditional serpentine mounds, and humans dwell in these towers with the ariels, calibans and grays (the type unrecognized by Union). Fields are interspersed among clusters of towers to provide food for the human inhabitants, who also do some fishing. Yet they are still flesh of their ancestors’ flesh, and remote descendants of Jin and Pia rule rival tower clusters on the Styx and Cloud rivers. But does “rule” mean what it would in a purely human society? Elai, ruler of the First Tower (and apparently recognized as paramount ruler of the other towers on the Cloud), owes her status at least as much to acceptance by her mother’s caliban Scar as to her descent from Pia 2 or “Ma Pia,” as she was known. Her distant cousin, Jin 12, who rules the Styx Cluster, is preparing to conquer Cloud Cluster as a research team from Alliance tries to make sense of it all. Just as the Kents were divided by the Civil War in John Jakes’ series, the ninth generation of the kin of Jin and Pia is divided by conflict. Some of the terms are familiar: Under the Jin dynasty, the Styx cluster has become patriarchal and aggressive; under Eliai’s branch of the family, the Clouds are more peaceful and decentralized. But human concepts—even human concepts of family—no longer really apply. What was familiar has become alien; even the conflict between the Styx and Cloud clusters is fought, and decided, on issues and in a manner, that remain elusive to Alliance observers.

Walton makes note of the connections between Forty Thousand in Gehenna, Cyteen (1988) and Downbelow Station (1981) in regards to the azi. The idea of creating specialized human beings in hatcheries and conditioning centers goes back to Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), but until Cherryh, nobody had really done anything further with the idea. Cyteen is the story of Ariane Emory (and her clone, after the original is murdered), the brains behind the azi program and a mover-and-shaker in Union politics. Not to give away any more of the plot, I can say that we learn therein that the promiscuous use of azis as a ready-made soldiery and working class has nothing to so with their true purpose: the conservation of humanity’s genetic diversity, which might otherwise be lost in the small population base of born men scattered among the far-flung colonies of Union. Of one genotype of azi, Emory remarks in a taped interview:

We do not create Thetas because we want cheap labor. We create Thetas because they are an essential and important part of human alternatives. TheThr-23 hand-eye coordination, for instance, is exceptional. Their psychset lets them operate very well in environments in which CIT geniuses would assuredly fail.

Ideally, only one generation of each type is needed; in interbreeding with other types, even with born men, each will contribute its characteristics to the wider gene pool. Azis themselves can become citizens; their offspring surely will. Emory has also been working on the problem of sociogenesis, which she considers vital to human survival as a species. If mankind is not to end in the universe as it began on Earth—‘scattered tribes of humans across an endless plain, in pointless conflict”—it must be educated, on a fundamental level, in all the wisdom gained from millennia of racial experience. As she puts it in one of her secret memos to her daughter to come, “Ultimately, only the wisdom is important, not the event which produced it.”

A cold-hearted view, but a chillingly plausible one. Yet in both Cyteen and Forty Thousand in Gehenna, we get inside the heads of the azis themselves – something Huxley never attempted to do with the products of his novel’s hatcheries. In Downbelow Station, we get into the head of Joshua Talley, a highly trained azi, whose mission is to sabotage remote Earth Company space stations (Alliance has yet to be born), to deny the Company fleet safe haven before the Union fleet arrives (hopefully) to finish it off.

Only he doesn’t know it, for he has been given false memories of an idyllic childhood on Cyteen as a born man, later recruited to serve as an armscomper for a Union ship. Captured or rescued (so it seems) by one of the Earth Company ships after the destruction of Mariner, the last station out, he is taken on by Signy Mallory, captain of the Norway, as a sexual convenience; when the retreating Company fleet arrives at Pell Station, she abandons him there as casually as she had embraced him. At Pell he undergoes partial mindwipe for the post traumatic stress of what befell at Mariner, having no idea of his own part in that. He is taken in by the family of Damon Konstantin, leader of Pell’s ruling council, treated with kindness and decency; he can feel as if he has finally begun to live again. And then a fellow Union agent, Gabriel, approaches him on the sly, and reveals the truth – which leaves him a broken man, but a man who desperately wants to be a true human, one who will not betray those who have sheltered and trusted him.

Cyteen was a lie. He was. Part of him functioned like the automaton he reckoned himself bred to be… he acknowledged instincts he had never trusted, not knowing why he had them — drew another breath, trying to think, while his body navigated its way across the corridor and sought cover.

Only when he had gotten back to his cold dinner on the back table in Ngo’s, when he sat in that familiar place with his back to the corner and the reality of Pell came and went at the bar in front of him, the numbness began to leave him. He thought of Damon, one life, one life he might have the power to save.

He killed. That was what he was created to do. That was why the like of himself and Gabriel existed at all. Joshua and Gabriel. He understood the wry humor in their names, swallowed at a knot in his throat. Labs. That was the white void he had lived in, the whiteness in his dreams. Carefully insulated from humanity. Tape-taught… given skills; given lies to tell — about being human.

Only there was a flaw in the lies… that they were fed into human flesh, with human instincts, and he had loved the lies.

And lived them in his dreams.

That’s as moving a literary passage as you’ll find anywhere. Another literary gem is a crucial scene involving Mallory. She is but one of many captains under Conrad Mazian, commander of the Company Fleet. Reeling from defeat, its collective morale is breaking down; its troopers are already turning to brigandage – in Merchanter’s Luck (1982) and other novels set later in the Alliance-Union series, we learn that they have indeed taken to piracy after having been sold out to Union by envoys from Earth itself. As has been said, Mallory is but one captain among many. We have no particular reason to believe that she will behave any differently from the rest, and yet she has become familiar to us – we have an emotional stake the choice she must make. Which way will she jump? We find out in a deliciously dry, just-the-facts, man, report she makes to Mazian and the other captains after she and her troopers intervene in a nasty incident on the station:

“On 11/28/52 at 2314 hours I entered number 0878 blue of this station, a residential number in a restricted section, acting on a rumor which had reached my desk, having in company my troop commander, Maj. Dison Janz, and twenty armed troops from my command. I there discovered Trooper Lt. Benjamin Goforth, Trooper Sgt. Bila Mysos, both of Europe, and fourteen other individuals of the troops in occupancy of this four-room apartment. There were drugs in evidence, and liquor. The troops and officers in the apartment verbally protested our entry and our intervention, but privates Mila Erton and Tomas Centia were intoxicated to such an extent that they were incapable of recognizing authority. I ordered a search of the premises, during which were discovered four other individuals, male aged twenty-four; male aged thirty-one; male aged twenty-nine; female aged nineteen, civilians; in a state of undress and showing marks of burns and other abuses, locked in a room. In a second room were crates which contained liquor and medicines taken from the station pharmacy and so labeled; along with a box containing a hundred thirteen items of jewelry, and another containing one hundred fifty-eight sets of Pell civilian ids and credit cards. There was also a written record which I have appended to the report listing items of value and fifty-two crew and troops of the Fleet other than those present on the premises with certain items of value by the names. I confronted Lt. Benjamin Goforth with these findings and asked for his explanation of the circumstances. His words were: If you want a cut, there’s no need for this commotion. What share will it take to satisfy you? Myself: Mr. Goforth, you’re under arrest; you and your associates will be turned over to your captains for punishment; a tape is being made and will be used in prosecution. Lt. Goforth: Bloody bitch. Bloody bastard bitch. Name your share. At this point I ceased argument with Lt. Goforth and shot him in the belly.”

In Merchanter’s Luck. Cherryh tells the story of a down-on-his-luck independent trader, in desperate search of a crewman, who strikes up a relationship in a space station bar with the proud daughter of a wealthy merchanter clan – eager for a chance to pursue the kind of work denied her on her own ship because there are so many ahead of her in line for helm postings. Here’s how Cherryh sets up the first encounter between the seemingly mismatched Sandor Kreja and Allison Reilly:

Their names were Sandor and Allison. Kreja and Reilly respectively. Reilly meant something in the offices and bars of Viking Station: it meant the merchanters of the great ship Dublin Again, based at Fargone, respectable haulers on a loop that included all the circle of Union stars, Mariner and Russell's, Esperance and Paradise, Wyatt's and Cyteen, Fargone and Voyager and back to Viking. It was a Name among merchanters, and a power to be considered, wherever it went.

Kreja meant nothing at Viking, having flourished only at distant Pan-paris and Esperance in its day: at Mariner, under an alias, it meant a bad debt, and the same at Russell's.

Sandor has had bad luck nearly all his life; his entire family was wiped out by Mazianni pirates, but the ghostly voice of his brother Ross still haunts his shipboard computer, offering recorded advice when needed on how to deal with trouble. Yet we sense from the get-go that his luck is about to change; as we gradually learn more about his life and Allison’s and their contrasting yet complementary backgrounds, we come to understand that they’re actually a perfect match. We can see them for who they are and we can see what they see in each other, and that’s essential to any love story.

Science fiction writers, and their readers, think differently, Cherryh argued in a 2010 appearance at Condor XVII, an sf convention in San Diego.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rh3c92Y8Dxs

We can see that kind of thinking, the thinking of a science fiction mind at work, throughout her sf, including the Allliance-Union history. Future histories are part of the fabric of the genre, and writers as varied as Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson and Ursula K. Le Guin have all had their own interpretations of history, their own ideas of history. In histories of the future, as in all things, science fiction can and should be a literature of ideas. But it should never forget to be a literature of ideas, with all the sensibility that implies. Only thus can it hope to capture the experience of history – its trials and tribulations, its triumphs and tragedies and, yes, its consolations.

Cherryh shows that she understands that in an epilogue to Forty Thousand in Gehenna, set nearly a century after the culmination of the story itself, after all the sufferings of the settlers and the strange adaptation of their progeny. The Gehennans have gone through hell, as the very name of their world implies; yet something new and good and even wondrous has come of it. Union has given legal status as humans to the calibans. And at Fargone Station, it has found a use for Marik, a remote descendant of the original settlers, and his caliban partner Walker.

There was a problem, they said, a world that they had found. There was life on it, and it made no sense to them.

A Gehennan sees things a different way, they said. Just go and look—you and Walker.

So they would go and see.

But that is one of the foundations of science fiction: seeing things a different way.

A Different Kind of Profile

For some reason, I’ve had trouble posting a personal profile for this blog. Whenever I fill in the blanks on the form and try to post it, Google tells me I have to correct “errors” in it, but without telling me what the “errors” are. But perhaps it’s just as well.

I have a profile at my Facebook page that ticks off the usual stuff: marital status, occupation, favorite books and music and movies. But that doesn’t give friends and potential friends a clue as to why I like what I like, or why I would recommend it to anyone else. So I’m going to take my own approach here, just as in my writings on science fiction.

To start with the basics, I’ve been married since July 3, 2005, to Marcia, née Feinbaum, a widow who has two married children, David and Karen, by her first husband, Arata Suzuki, and three grandchildren. So I have a ready-made step-family. Technically, I’m a grandfather, but I think of myself as more of an eccentric uncle as far as the grandchildren are concerned. How can I be a grandfather without ever having been a father?

I won’t go into any great detail as to why it took me so long to find the love of my life, except to say that it was mostly my own fault. I made just about every mistake a man could make in my relationships with women. It should have made me bitter, but somehow it didn’t. I made a life for myself with a number of good friends, with work I could enjoy, and interests I could be passionate about. Looking back now, that has been for the best; if I had married younger, there would have been children, and I’m really not good with children; I have neither the knowledge nor the patience. If I had had children, I might have done them ill, without ever meaning to. With an extended step-family instead of a biological family (my only immediate blood relative is a sister), I have the joys without the responsibilities.

In Marcia herself, I’ve found that perfect other. It wasn’t long after we met that we began completing each other’s sentences, or having the same thought at the same time. One recent example had to with a sign in front of a nearby plant that makes “futuristic bolting.” It wasn’t a psychic thing; it was just that we were both familiar with a genre called futuristic romance, and came up with the idea of the boyfriend in such a novel bolting. A lot weirder was what happened when I showed her an episode of The X-Files, “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” in which an insurance salesman played by Peter Boyle can tell when and how a person will die. Fox Mulder figures maybe Bruckman can give him a reading on a crystal ball holder that belonged to a fake psychic who has been murdered. To his annoyance, Bruckman can tell him only what the guy who cast the mold for it is going to die of. “Can you give me any further impression of this object?” Mulder presses him. “It’s ugly!” Marcia shouted – a second before Bruckman himself said the same thing onscreen.

Marcia and I share a lot of tastes, and think in a lot of the same contexts, and that means we’ll usually appreciate the same books and movies and music and TV shows – one shared favorite on TV just now is The Mentalist. But we’re different enough to have tastes and interests that we don’t share, even after we’ve tried our best to introduce them to each other. She’s my best critic precisely because she has a mind of her own; she’s been a great help in the process of editing and updating Imagination and Evolution, my sf history, and will probably play an increasing role in shaping some of its coverage and arguments.

One signal example: having convinced me that Lois McMaster Bujold, author of the popular Vorkosigan saga, is not a lightweight. Back in 1991, ten years before 9/11, Bujold had Cordelia, the mother of her series hero Miles, declare: “Any community’s arm of force—military, police, security—needs people in it who can do the necessary evil, and yet not be made evil by it. To do only the necessary, and no more. To constantly question the assumptions, to stop the slide into atrocity.” Would that those in charge of the War on Terror had taken heed! Bujold also has a definition of “genre” that I have embraced for I&E: “any group of works in close conversation with one another.” She made a point of it in her Guest of Honor speech the 2008 World Science Fiction, but I might never have looked for anything she had to say about the sf genre without that nudge from Marcia.

As for work, I’ve been a writer since I was nine or ten years old, with handwritten newspapers in grade school. In high school and college, I put out mimeographed newspapers (Does anybody here remember what a mimeograph was?), The Weekly Moon and The Williams House Word. I attended the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri, and afterwards pursued a career as a journalist, with several real newspapers in northern New Jersey and, since 1979, trade magazines for the frozen food and private label industries. For a year in between, I was editor of Galaxy science fiction magazine, which would have been a dream job if the publisher hadn’t been impecunious and incompetent. Having a secure day job pays the rent, and affords me the luxury of working on my sf history projects, and sundry other indulgences – such The Children of Levi Peacock (2002), a history of my mother’s branch of the Southern Peacock family.

My father, John R. Pierce, was a researcher and research director at Bell Laboratories back in its glory days, when a team working under him invented transistors – he gave the new devices their name. He went on to promote the idea of communications satellites, which his friend Arthur C. Clarke (once a visitor to our home), had thought up in 1945. In 1987, he won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his work in that and other fields. Here’s part of the ceremony: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_axcsnHgQxk

By that time, he had long retired from the Bell Labs, done a teaching stint at his alma mater, Cal Tech, while also serving as chief engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and retired again to work at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) at Stanford University. He co-conceived a 13-note scale there, and wrote a book called The Science of Musical Sound. Both are too technical for me, despite my love of music – which developed independently, and along different lines, from most of what he was interested it I never got interested in electronics, either, and could never settle down in any particular science. So I am a son unlike my father in many ways.

We were estranged for some years after he divorced my mother when I was still in college; we got together again after Mother died. It was always a bit awkward, because we didn’t know quite what to make of each other; but we still had some good times together – a road trip through the Pacific Northwest (I’ll never forget how, at 82, he’d pass slow camper vans on winding roads in the mountains of Idaho!), and a Christmas holiday in Hawaii with the family of his third wife (His second had died; he’d really been broken up about that.). My sister Liz and I got together with his widow Brenda for a private memorial at a local park in 2002.

Well, that’s enough, or perhaps more than enough, for the personal profile. Posts on my favorite things and essays (some rants) on one thing or another will follow.

Turning 70

"I hate being 70," H.G. Wells said on the occasion of his 70th birthday in 1936. Wells was a very famous man, and at his birthday party he was surrounded by other famous men like Bernard Shaw.

I'm not famous and never will be, but I still enjoy life, and there are things I want to accomplish before I reach the finish line, now that I'm in the home stretch, so to speak. One of them is to pay my debt to Wells and all the other science fiction writers who have shaped my imagination over the decades. I've actually been working on this for some time, ever since I became involved in science fiction fandom in 1966. I was an Angry Young Man then, fulminating against a movement called the New Wave that was assailing traditional sf. The New Wave proved to be so ephemeral that when a leading sf academic a couple of years ago wanted to devote a special issue of Science Fiction Studies to the movement, he couldn't find anybody who wanted to contribute to it.

Science fiction is a remarkably resilient genre, and it has survived entire waves of waves of one kind or another. Yet it is a much misunderstood genre. Most people today think of it in terms of movies, TV shows and even computer games. Magazines with "Sci-Fi" in their titles focus almost entirely on the media; the same is true of a Science Fiction Museum in Seattle. But even in the chain book stores -- only Barnes & Noble and Books-a-Million now, Borders having bit the dust -- the "Fantasy and Science Fiction" section seems to be dominated by epic fantasy (George R.R. Martin has achieved fame and fortune there) and urban fantasy (Stephanie Meyer and all the other purveyors of vampire, zombie and werewolf novels).

Some years ago, when Earth 2 was running on TV, TV Guide ran a piece on its creators -- whose names I have mercifully forgotten -- and they explained that they had scrupulously avoided reading or watching any science fiction in order to avoid the clichés of the genre and make their show better than anything done before. If that doesn't strike you as arrogance combined with stupidity, imagine the same people saying they had never watched a cop show or a situation comedy and that this would ensure that their cop show or situation comedy would be better than anything ever seen before. In theory, science fiction gets more respect in Academia today, but in practice it too often gets buried in Theory with a capital T -- Critical Theory, Culture Theory and others -- that seem determined to pound a square peg into an ideological round hole.

My own approach developed over several decades, culminating in a four-volume history of the genre: Foundations of Science Fiction, Great Themes of Science Fiction, When World Views Collide and Odd Genre. These were published by Greenwood Press between 1987 and 1994, and got some respect -- the first three (the fourth was an afterthought five years after the others) especially from Mark R. Hillegas, author of a study called The Future as Nightmare: H.G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians, that I admired greatly:

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/birs/bir53.htm#j53

Hillegas was one of my models, as was the late I.F. Clarke, author of The Pattern of Expectation and Voices Prophesying War. Clarke revised and updated his works several times. I'm taking the same liberty. A lot has happened in the genre over the past two decades, not only in terms of recent works by new writers that break new ground, but in our understanding of the past – POD reprints and online files have made a lot of early utopias and travel tales that prefigure science fiction proper a great deal more accessible. There is a growing number of translations of classic French and modern Japanese sf, and there may be more to come from China, Latin America and elsewhere.

This is just a warm-up. I'm going to start commenting on specifics Nov. 3, the day I actually turn 70. Bear with me!