EXPOSITION ON THE RUN
Ralph
explained the coasters and their use to his companion; and after they had put
them on by means of an ingenious clutch, whereby the coaster could be snapped
onto the shoe in less than five seconds, they both went out into the street.
From each coaster, a thin insulated wire led up the wearer’s back to the hat or
cap. Here it was attached to the collector, which was a stiff pin about eight
inches long, projecting half-way out from the hat or cap. This pin sucked up,
as it were, the high-frequency electricity and carried it to the small motors,
which later propelled the coaster.[i]
If Hugo
Gernsback’s account of electric-powered roller skates (er, Tele-motor-coasters)
in Ralph 124C41+
(1911-12) doesn’t strike you as particularly funny, check out the dead-on
parody of Gernsback’s style of technical exposition in Lin Carter and Randall
Garrett’s “Masters of the Metropolis” (1956):
The
Bus, or Omnibus, was a streamlined, self-propelled public vehicle, powered by
exploding gases of distilled petroleum, ignited in a sealed cylinder by means
of an electrical spark. The energy thus produced was applied as torque to a
long metal bar known as the “drive shaft,” which turned a set of gears in a
complex apparatus known as the “differential housing.” These gears, in turn,
caused the rear wheels to revolve about their axles, thus propelling the
vehicle forward.[ii]
“Masters of the Metropolis” could put
old-time sf fans in stitches, but chances are today’s readers wouldn’t get it.
Nobody would read Ralph today, except for historical research, and it’s hard to
fathom why anyone ever did – much less considered it the fountainhead of modern
science fiction. Yet in Gernsback’s day sf fans were evidently as oblivious as
their mentor to the clumsy style of what we now call information dumps. Or
perhaps they were so carried away by the ideas (which could be a lot more
ingenious than Tele-motor-coasters) that neither the story nor the style of its
telling mattered to them. Eventually they learned better, which is more than
Gernsback ever did. In Ultimate World (1971, but written around 1958-59),[iii]
this was his idea of a hot sex scene involving a powerful aphrodisiac brought
to Earth by alien invaders:
Duke
immediately divined its purpose. It had an extremely powerful effect on his
spinal nerves and erotogenic centers. The tumescent effect was overpowering and
within seconds he as well as Donny dismissed their recent experiences and
everything else from their minds except animal passion. Duke ripped off his abrijamas
and flung himself passionately at the nude form of his wife in a marital union
such as humanity had never experienced.[iv]
Besides
being atrocious writing, Gernsback’s scene is bad exposition: Duke and Donny
are going at it in a zero-gravity environment, but we never get a sense of
their experience being any different from what we are used to under normal
gravity. Exposition in sf has changed a lot since then. Having begun with an
imaginary development in transport in Ralph124C41+, let’s see how other writers
since Gernsback have tried to create the illusion of reality in stories that
involve means of transport unfamiliar to us.
In “The
Roads Must Roll” (1940), Robert A. Heinlein wants to communicate essential
information about a system of moving highways that have replaced conventional
highways as a result of an oil shortage. Since ordinary Americans in Heinlein’s
future are already so familiar with them that it would destroy any illusion of
reality to have them talk about what they already know – under ordinary
circumstances. Heinlein thus contrives to have Larry Gaines, chief engineer of
the Diego-Reno Roadtown, escort the Australian transport minister on a guided
tour. It may all be second-nature to Gaines, but it’s new to Mr. Blekinsop (“I
am not a technical man,” he confesses. “My field is social and political”).[v]
What follows is a cross between learning by experience and a more natural form of
narration.
They
threaded their way through homeward-bound throngs, passing from strip to strip.
Down the center of the twenty-mile-an-hour strip ran a glassite partition which
reached nearly to the spreading road. The honorable Mister Blekinsop raised his
eyebrows inquiringly as he looked at it.
“Oh,
that?” Gaines answered the unspoken inquiry as he slid back a panel door and
ushered his guest through. “That’s a wind break. If we didn’t have some way of
separating the air currents over the strips of different speeds, the wind would
tear our clothes off on the hundred-mile-an-hour strip.”[vi]
While
Heinlein integrated exposition and storytelling, he still found it necessary to
resort to digressions to explain the origins of the moving roads and of the
Functionalist movement that threatens them by instigating a strike. Even so, he
pioneered a natural, even folksy style of sf storytelling that set a standard
for an entire generation and remains influential today. In contemporary science
fiction, however, there is room for the novel of
character, in which the sf invention recedes into the background, and style is
seen as part of the expression of character, rather than of the exposition of
subject matter – here, the almost generic style of a Heinlein or an Asimov will
no longer do.
Kim Stanley
Robinson’s The Gold Coast
(1988) is one such novel. Set only a few decades from now in an Orange
County, California, that has been completely overrun by development, it centers
on Jim McPherson, an alienated youth who, in the tradition of all alienated
youths, is trying to make sense of the world and his place in it. As it happens,
the most important technological innovation in his world involves
transportation: streets and highways with electronic guides, which both power
electric cars and keep them on track; “tracking” has replaced “driving.” But
McPherson and his friends have nothing to do with the operation of the system;
they are just along for the ride:
Night
in Orange County, here, and the four friends are cruising in autopia. Stars of
their high school championship wrestling team, ten years past that glory, they
roll over the seats of the Volvo and try to pin Tashi Nakamura, to keep him
away form the eyedropper of Sandy Chapman’s latest concoction. Tash was their
Heavyweight and the only one still in good shape, and they can’t do it; Tash
surges up through their arms and seizes the eyedropper, all the while singing
along with one of Jim’s old CDs: “Somebody give me a cheeseburger!” The onramp
bends up, curving more sharply, the contacts squeak over the power-and-guidance
electromagnetic track in the center of the lane, they’re all thrown into a heap
on the backseat. “Uh-oh, I think I dropped the dropper.” “Say, we’re on the
freeway now, aren’t we? Shouldn’t someone be watching?”[vii]
From a
single paragraph, we know what kind of people Tash and his friends are, we know
that recreational drugs of their near future are taken through the eyes, and we
know that their cars do not necessarily need drivers at the wheel (off the
freeways, at least). But what was central to Gernsback, or even Heinlein, is
peripheral here. True, Jim McPherson’s friend Abe Bernard is a paramedic, who
responds to occasional accidents on those freeways – “This time, one of the
lane-changing tracks appears to have malfunctioned,” we learn during a call.
“It’s rare, but it happens.”[viii]
But for the
most part, the technological discourse is completely submerged in the story –
in the restless tracking of McPherson and his friends, or in his arguments with
his father over keeping his car’s contacts adjusted. The story is about the
young McPherson and his relationships. We see him as part-time word processor
at a real estate firm, part-time teacher at a junior college, and even
part-time terrorist against the very military contractor who employs his
father. We read his precocious poetry, experience his failed love affairs. Yet
even as we are immersed in his story, that story is itself immersed in the
reality of its time – a time of endless freeways, shopping centers and
condominiums that have overwhelmed open spaces once the domain of ranchers, and
before them the Spaniards, and before them the Indians. Monumental and
disturbing, it is pure science fiction in a style all its own.
Recalling
Gernsback’s Duke and Donny, we can find examples of how styles in sex scenes
have also changed for the better. In Walter Jon Williams’ Angel Station (1990), lovers Kit and
Maria have to cope with the problem of making love in the weightless
environment of a starship’s cargo hold. It is not mere pornography; we have
come to know these lovers and the circumstances (also science fictional) that
have brought them together. Still, Williams appeals to the prurient interest in
all of us, while developing the seriocomic potential of a scene in which two
lovers eager to do what lovers have always done find it difficult – even with
an elastic-strap harness to hold them together – to maintain the leverage
needed to make them one flesh:
Kit
cupped her hips in his hands, tried to drive himself far into her; but he was
weightless, floating in a tangle of her hair and limbs and his own blazing
desire, and his lunge went nowhere. Maria kept him at bay, her pelvis stirring
lightly, maddening him. The air in his lungs turned to fire. She leaned back,
holding his body firmly between her thighs. The improvised harness bit into his
flesh. He could see the pulse beating in her throat. The cargo bay began to
turn lazy, gentle circles.[ix]
Neither
transport nor transports, of course, exhaust the possibilities of style in
science fiction. As in other types of fiction, exposition in sf can be at the
same time highly functional and highly individual. Here, for example, is the
opening passage of William Gibson’s Count Zero (1986), which reveals
at once what kind of story we’re in, while conveying some scary details about
near-future society and technology:
They
set a slamhound on Turner’s trail in New Delhi, slotted it to his pheromones
and the color of his hair. It caught up with him on a street called Chandni
Chauk and came scrambling for his rented BMW through a forest of bare brown
legs and pedicab tires. Its core was a kilogram of recrystallized hexogene and
flaked TNT.
He
didn’t see it coming. The last he saw of India was the pink stucco façade of a
place called the Khush-Oil Hotel.
Because
he had a good agent, he had a good contract. Because he had a good contract, he
was in Singapore an hour after the explosion. Most of him, anyway. The Dutch
surgeon liked to joke about that, how an unspecified percentage of Turner
hadn’t made it out of Palam International on that first flight and had to spend
the night there in a shed, in a support vat.[x]
We never get
any further description of a slamhound, but we get the sense of it, and of the kind
of world Turner inhabits. Conveying a sense of things, is also the point of the
Joycean prose Brian W. Aldiss uses to convey the end of Western civilization in
Barefoot in the Head (1969), in which followers of the mad prophet Charteris in
a future Europe devastated by Psycho-Chemical Aerosol (PCA) bombs have taken to
wandering in search of some refuge, after their cars have all broken down:
So
as the Pleonastocene Age curtled to a closure the banshee [the prophet’s car]
crumbled under the chunderiing glearbox to grow up into deeply scarlet peony by
the sacred roadslide where they finally went on foot with Anjie meandering
through the twilicker her golden grey goose beside her in its beak holding
gently to her smallest twigged finger with Charteris choked in his throat’s
silence.[xi]
Barefoot
in the Head
also employs fractured poetry and word diagrams to convey the madness unleashed
by PCA bombs. Alfred Bester used analogous devices in The Stars My
Destination
(1956) to convey the experience of Gully Foyle, whose senses have been
scrambled by the shock to his nervous system from an explosion of the secret
weapon PyrE:
Sound
came as sight to him, as light in strange patterns. He saw the sound of his
shouted name in vivid rhythms:
FOYLE
FOYLE FOYLE
FOYLE
FOYLE FOYLE
FOYLE
FOYLE FOYLE
FOYLE
FOYLE FOYLE
FOYLE
FOYLE FOYLE
Motion
came as sound to him. He heard the writhing of the flames, he heard the swirls
of smoke, he heard the flickering, jeering shadows... all speaking deafeningly
in strange tongues:
“BURUU GYARR?” the steam asked.
“Asha.
Asha, rit-kit-dit-zit m’gid,” the quick shadows answered.
“Ohhh.
Ahhh. Heee. Teee,” the heat ripples clamored.[xii]
The radical
styles of Aldiss and Bester seem to have no more in common with the
straightforward prose of Heinlein, Williams or even Gibson than that of James
Joyce himself has with, say, Jane Austen’s. Yet they share a common purpose:
They are means of inventing reality, as opposed to simply representing it.
In
Bruce Sterling’s Islands in the Net (1988),
we first meet the heroine, Laura Webster, jogging across a beach on the Texas
coast. It seems like a perfectly mundane scene out of our own present, even when
she trips over an old cable half buried in the sand. When she hauls the cable
out, along with an obsolete VCR attached to it, the whole character of the
scene changes:
It was an
old-fashioned unit. Heavy and clumsy. Limping, Laura dragged
to behind her by its cord. She looked up the beach for the local trash
can.
She spotted
it loitering near a pair of fishermen, who stood in hip boots in the gentle
surf. She called out, “Trash can!”
The can
pivoted on broad rubber treads and rolled toward her voice. It snuffled across
the beach, mapping its way with bursts of infrasound. It spotted Laura and
creaked to a stop beside her.
Laura hefted
the dead recorder and dropped it into the open barrel with a loud, bonging
thump. “Thank you for keeping our beaches clean,” the can intoned. “Galveston
appreciates good citizenship. Would you like to register for a valuable cash
prize?”
“Save it for
the tourists,” Laura said.[xiii]
That
scene has nothing to do with the plot, but it tells us we are in a relatively
near future, where consumer technology and public amenities have improved
significantly, but ordinary life and common pastimes remain the same.
Sterling’s scene setting is at once informational and atmospheric; giving us a
glimpse of everyday life in a world not quite like ours, it prepares us for the
actual story, which involves data piracy and terrorism directed at a new world
order that has supposedly put such threats behind it.
In “The
Star Pit” (1967), Delany similarly evokes the everyday reality of an alien
planet in a similar piece of literary stage setting:
The kids
would run out before dawn and belly down naked on the cool sand with their
chins on the backs of their hands and stare in the half-dark till the red mill
wheel of Sigma lifted over the bloody sea. The sand was maroon then, and the
flowers of the crystal plants looked like rubies in the dim light of the giant
sun. Up the beach the jungle would begin to whisper while somewhere an aniwort
would start warbling. The kids would giggle and pike each other and crowd
closer.
Then
Sigma-prime, the second member of the binary, would flare like thermite on the
water, and crimson clouds would bleach from coral, through peach, to foam. The
kids, half on top of each other, now lay like a pile of copper ingots with sun streaks
in their hair—even little Antoni, my oldest, whose hair was black and curly
like bubbling oil.[xiv]
As with
Sterling’s passage, this tells us nothing of the story to come, but we know we
are on a planet of a double star – the kind of setting that became familiar to
moviegoers after George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), with its double sunset on Tatooine. We are thus prepared for a
story with an interstellar background; yet as it unfolds, Delany’s world is
revealed on deeper levels. Vyme, the narrator-protagonist, is Antoni’s father –
but not the kind of father we are familiar with. And that opening scene turns
out to be a memory of a long-ago idyll on a homeworld since destroyed in an
interstellar war. Delany thus works with such familiar human experiences as nostalgia
and grief, while at the same time evoking the wonder and terror of a time and
place we have never experienced. This is what the literary experience of
science fiction is all about.
Delany
argues that style and content are inseparable. In a hypothetical example, which
doubtless inspired or was inspired by “The Star Pit” – “The red sun is high,
the blue low,”[xv] – the first
part could refer to a hazy day on Earth, but the second instantly transports us
to alien world light-years away. Yet most readers and writers still make some
distinction, which they might articulate by asking whether a new translation of
the Bible, even in a radically different style, changes its meaning completely.
Comparing
translations of Dmitri Merezhkovsky’s The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci (1896), Delany shows that one is clear and readable
(“Grey smoke rose and curled from the slate chimney”), whereas the other is
practically unreadable (“Billows of smoke, grey and gloomy, elevated and
contorted up from the slates of the chimney”).[xvi]
Not all translations offer such stark contrasts, of course; moreover, one can
still argue that – at least in original works – writers must have their content
in their heads; that they must think
of that blue sun before setting it down on paper or typing it into their Word
documents. Still, for sf as it is actually published and read, Delany may be
right on target.
In most
fiction, there are common referents outside the text. Readers can rely on
everyday experience, the news media or history books for whatever background
information is not made explicit by the story itself. But in science fiction,
what you see on the page is what you get. The text must both advance the story
and create the background in which the story takes place, in order to evoke what
Delany calls “possible images of the impossible.”[xvii]
Fans of
Star Trek know that transporters
can sometimes create duplicates of the same individuals, a rather far-fetched
idea exploited for morality tales, as when Captain Kirk is split into good and
evil twins in “The Enemy Within” (1966). Six years before the series debuted,
however, Algis Budrys had used a similar idea in Rogue Moon (1960), but to an entirely different end.
Edward
Hawks, head of a project to explore a deadly alien artifact on the Moon, has
the actual explorers scanned and turned into raw data – destroying them in the
process. Duplicates are created from that data, one on the Moon and the other
back on Earth in a state of sensory deprivation so that he can telepathically
share the experience of the his lunar double – until that double is killed.
Hawks uses thrill-seeker Al Barker as a sacrificial victim over and over, until
he manages to find a way to get through alive. But for a final journey through
the now-tamed artifact Hawks has himself copied – both see things through on
the Moon before they lose contact with their counterparts back on Earth. Hawks
L tries to explain it all to Barker L, but Barker L, a man of action rather
than a man of thought, still doesn’t quite get what has been happening:
Barker
laughed again. “You’re a peculiar duck, Hawks.”
Hawks looked
at him sidelong. “That sums me up, does it? Well, I’m not Hawks. I remember
being Hawks, but I was made in the receiver some twenty-five minutes ago, and
you and I have never met before.”[xviii]
No
morality tale here, at least not the kind familiar to Star Trek fans; rather a simple statement of “fact” in the context of an imaginary
reality – a sort of reaction shot to Delany’s “possible images of the
impossible.”
In Roadside
Picnic (1972), Arkady and Boris
Strugatsky use the context of a near-future visitation of Earth by aliens to –
among other things – invest familiar words with new meanings or connotations.
The visitors have left behind discarded artifacts, much as we might discard
junk by the side of the road. For humans, the refuse is strange, even deadly –
lives are often lost among the stalkers and their clients, who scavenge the
Visitation Zones in hopes of finding valuable technology. But the deadly
effects of the alien devices remind experienced sf readers of Budrys’ alien
artifact on the Moon. Meanwhile, the Strugatsky brothers play with the language
of sf: “Stalker” is a word that has taken on a
new meaning; another is an “empty:”
It’s just
these two copper disks the size of a saucer, a quarter inch thick, about
eighteen inches apart, and not a thing between the two. I mean, nothing
whatsover, zip, nada, zilch. You can stick your hand between them—maybe even
your head, if the thing has unhinged you enough—nothing but empty space, thin
air. And despite this, there must be something there, a force field of some
sort, because so far no one’s managed to push these disks together, or pull
them apart, either.[xix]
Even in
early American pulp sf, there were innovations in sf language – when Wilma
Deering tells Buck (well, in that version, Anthony) Rogers, “This looks like business,”[xx]
in “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” (1928), “business” has come to mean warfare. And
while early genre sf was full of awkward neologisms, it also contributed at least
a few words to our common language.
“Android,”
for example, first used in its present sense by Jack Williamson in The
Cometeers (1936) for an artificial
man made from organic material, as opposed to “robot,” which had come to mean a
mechanical man, even though Karel Capek had a synthetic man in mind when he
coined it for his play R.U.R. (1921).
Heinlein’s “Waldo” (1942) gave its name to the remote control devices used to
handle radioactive materials, and it is still used by genre sf writers, for
example, by Laura Mixon in Glass Houses (1992).
“Tractor
beam,” coined by Edward E. “Doc” Smith in Spacehounds of IPC (1931) and later used in his Lensman saga, eventually
made its way into Star Trek and Star
Wars; it’s practically self-defining.
“Tightbeam,” a Smith coinage from Skylark Three (1930) for a means of beaming messages so narrowly
they can’t be intercepted, isn’t familiar to movie fans but still crops up in
genre sf, as witness Lois McMaster Bujold’s Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance (2012). “Conapt,” Philip K. Kick’s term for
apartments of urban arcologies in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), has found a home elsewhere, as in L.E.
Modessit in Archform: Beauty
(2003). So has “ansible,” a term introduced by Ursula K. Le Guin in The Left
Hand of Darkness (1969) for an
instantaneous message communicator – not bound by the speed of light – in her
Hainish cycle. “Com-link,” a piece of sf shorthand in the works of C.J. Cherryh
and others, spread beyond genre sf when romance novelist Jayne Ann Krentz
picked it up for an imaginary sf story being written by the heroine of The
Devil to Pay (1985, as by Stephanie James).
Some sf
coinages, such as “organlegger,” from Larry Niven’s “Jigsaw Man” (1967) for
criminals who deal in black market transplant organs, remain identified with
particular authors. Other examples include “QX” (“OK” in Edward E. Smith’s Lensman
saga), “pinlighter” (a specialized warrior in the future history of Cordwainer
Smith) and “lighthugger” (a starship that travels close to the speed of light
in Alastair Reynolds’ Revelation Space universe). In any case, borrowed words
should keep their original meanings; it was a mistake for Delany to adopt
Cordwainer Smith’s “planoforming” (a kind of faster-than-light travel) and use
it as an alternative to “terraforming” (without reference to Terra) in Stars
in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984).
“Terraforming,” the process of altering environments of other worlds to produce
Earth-like conditions, was itself coined by Jack Williamson in “Collision
Orbit” (1942), and has since been embraced by many other genre writers.
For
longtime fans, going beyond such inventions, there is a sort of collective sf
background, running from text to text that can imply a background for a
particular story – that is another aspect of Delany’s “reading protocols”[xxi]
and Thomas J. Roberts’ “thick reading.”[xxii]
Readers of New Space Opera by writers like Gregory Benford and Alastair
Reynolds, for example, will hear echoes of both the old space operas of Edward
E. Smith and the cosmic mythology of Olaf Stapledon. Fans of subgenres like
military sf and alternate history will be familiar with their tropes, and the
variations on those tropes.
Veteran sf
writers have shared the tricks of their trade in such forums as Harlan
Ellison’s Medea: Harlan’s World (1985), a symposium-anthology on the creation
of alien worlds. But how they convey their imagined realities is an important as
what they convey. As a contrast to infodumping, Jo Walton has coined the term
“incluing,” which she defines as “scattering pieces of information seamlessly
through the text to add up to a big picture:”
The
reader has to remember them and connect them together. This is one of the
things some people complain about as “too much hard work” and which I think is
a high form of fun. SF is like a mystery where the world and the history of the
world is what’s mysterious, and putting that all together in your mind is as
interesting as the characters and the plot, if not more interesting. We talk
about world building as something the writer does, but it’s also something the
reader does, building the world from the clues. When you read that the clocks
were striking thirteen, you think at first that something is terribly wrong
before you work out that this is a world with twenty-four hour time—and
something terribly wrong. Orwell economically sends a double signal with that.
Because
there’s a lot of information to get across and you don’t want to stop the story
more than you can help, we have techniques for doing it. We have signals for
what you can take for granted, we have signals for what’s important. We’re used
to seeing people’s names and place-names and product-names as information. We
know what needs to be explained and what doesn’t. In exactly the same way as
Trollope didn’t explain that a hansom cab was a horse-drawn vehicle for hire on
the streets of London that would take you about the city but not out into the
countryside, and [A.S.] Byatt doesn’t explain that the Northern Line is an
underground railroad running north south through London and dug in the early
twentieth century, SF characters casually hail pedicabs and ornithopters and
tip when they get out.[xxiii]
Orson Scott
Card, in How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy (1990, later
republished as The Writer’s Digest Guide to Science Fiction & Fantasy), one of a number of
how-to books by genre authors, cites the first sentence of Octavia Butler’s Wild
Seed
(1980) as a classic example of another genre sf basic principle – and reading protocol
– that he calls “abeyance:”
Doro
discovered the woman by accident when he went to see what was left of one of
his seed villages.[xxiv]
From that
opening we know that Doro is the name of the viewpoint character, and that he
is going to meet a woman who will doubtless be
important to the story. But what the hell is a seed village?
We
don’t know what a seed village is. And Butler doesn’t tell us—because Doro, who
knows perfectly well what a seed village is, wouldn’t stop and think about that
information right now. But in due time we will find out what a seed village is.
So we hold that question in abeyance. We have a hook with the label “seed
village” over it; we trust that the author will let us know in due course what
information should be hung on that hook.[xxv]
But even
though Butler doesn’t clue us in at the outset, we can trust her to inclue the
background for us in due course; not just about seed villages and the selective
breeding Doro fosters there, but the very nature of Doro and his antagonist
Anyanwu. Both are seemingly immortal – he a telepathic energy being who can
switch bodies, she a shapeshifter – and are pursuing rival agendas for the
evolution and perfection of the human race. Moreover, Wild Seed is part of Butler’s
epic Patternist series, which carries the conflict from the 1690’s into the
distant future and to other worlds.
Genre sf
readers take abeyance for granted. In Frederik Pohl’s All The Lives He Led (2011), there are
references early on to the “stans” that facilitate terrorism in an apocalyptic
future; only later do we learn that these are former Soviet Asian republics. Writers
from outside the genre have picked up that trick. In Nick Harkaway’s The
Gone-Away World
(2011), we learn in the first few pages that the Livable Zone in an apocalyptic
world is threatened by a fire that has broken out on the Jorgmund Pipe:
It
was on fire in a big way, The Pipe was burning powerful white, magnesium,
corpse-belly, nauseating white, and beside it were buildings and fences, which
meant this wasn’t just the Pipe, but something even more important: a pumping
station or a refinery.[xxvi]
As in
Henri-George Clouzot’s film classic The Wages of Fear (1953), a band of
volunteers is recruited to deal with the disaster. But it is more than halfway
through Harkaway’s nearly 600-page novel that we learn just what the Livable
Zone and the Jorgmund Pipe are, and how they came to be. Talk about abeyance!
Along the way, as we follow the lives of the heroes, we are also inclued that
we are in an alternate history rather than the future, for a kung fu master who
was born in China some time in the 1920’s is not only too hale to be anywhere
near 100, but discourses facetiously on why the Americans will probably beat
the Chinese to the Moon. Harkaway has still other tricks up his sleeve,
involving a global conspiracy behind the Jorgmund Pipe, and the identity of the
narrator in what seems at first to be a solid reality but turns out to be as
surreal as anything in the works of Philip K. Dick.
Within genre
sf, we can see how Cordwainer Smith employs Card’s principle of abeyance in
“Scanners Live in Vain” (1950). The opening paragraph tells us that the
protagonist, Martel, is a Scanner, and that he is so angry about something that
he doesn’t adjust his blood away from anger and has to scan himself after
running into a table to make sure he isn’t injured. Only later do we learn that
he is a member of a guild of cyborg pilots called Scanners whose every sense
but sight has been surgically disconnected in order to protect them from
something called the Great Pain of Space.
But that
story is also notable for violating what was already a nascent taboo on
infodumps by casting the background information in the form of a ritual the
Scanners go through at their meetings. Only in this case, Martel, who comes to
an emergency meeting “cranched” – that is, restored for a time to normal
sensation – can actually hear the words of Senior Scanner Vomact and the
chorused response:
“How,
O Scanners, are habermans made?”
“They
are made with the cuts. The brain is cut from the heart, the lungs. The brain
is cut from the ears, the nose. The brain is cut from the mouth, the belly. The
brain is cut from desire, and pain. The brain is cut from the world. Save for
the eyes. Save for the control of the living flesh.”
“And
how, O Scanners, is flesh controlled?”
“By
the boxes set in the flesh, the controls set in the chest, the signs made to
rule the living body, the signs by which the body lives.”
“Scanners
Live in Vain” is part of a cycle of stories set in different periods of a
future history in which the affairs of mankind on Earth and elsewhere are
governed by an elite called the Instrumentality of Mankind. Only what is the Instrumentality?
Smith could scatter hints here and there, but also use an infodump as a form of
incluing, as in “Drunkboat” (1963):
The
Instrumentality was a self-perpetuating body of men with enormous powers and a
strict code. Each was a plenum of the low, the middle, and the high justice.
Each could do anything he found necessary or proper to maintain the
Instrumentality and keep the peace between the worlds. But if he made a mistake
or committed a wrong—ah, then, it was suddenly different. Any Lord could put
another Lord to death in an emergency, but he was assured of death and disgrace
himself if he assumed this responsibility. The only difference between
ratification and repudiation came in the fact that Lords who killed in an
emergency and were proved wrong were marked down on a very shameful list, while
those who killed other Lords rightly (as later examination might prove) were
listed on a very honorable list, but still killed. With three Lords, the
situation was different. Three Lords made an emergency court; if they acted
together, acted in good faith, and reported to the computers of the
Instrumentality, they were exempt from punishment, though not from blame or
even reduction to civilian status. Seven Lords, or all the Lords on a given
planet at a given moment, were beyond any criticism except that of a dignified
reversal of their actions should a later ruling prove them wrong.
What this
inclues us about is that “Drunkboat,” set about 15,000 years hence, is being
told from the viewpoint of more remote future, where the Instrumentality no
longer exists and the ostensible reader would not be familiar with its workings.
Smith used other variations of the same technique, and a variation of abeyance
in cross references. In “The Burning of the Brain” (1958), for example, an
emergency during a journey on an interstellar planoforming ship – designed to
look like a Southern mansion of ancient times – is signaled thusly: “A strange
figure appeared on the verandah. It was a pinlighter in full fighting costume.”
To understand that, the reader has to have read “The Game of Rat and Dragon”
(1955), in which we follow the story of a pinlighter – a warrior who fights
monsters of space in telepathic partnership with a cat.
These
examples and others are all means of creating “possible images of the
impossible,” and also of telling possible stories of the impossible. The
possibilities of literary invention in science fiction, and the uses of that
invention (even if never realized in most sf) are what has convinced Delany
himself that “the science-fictional-enterprise is richer than the enterprise of
mundane fiction.”18 But Walton reminds us
that reading protocols are not only about the images and the word coinages and
incluing the background, but about how we read the stories – how we know what’s
important and what isn’t:
My
ex-husband once lent a friend Joe Haldeman’s The
Forever War. The friend couldn’t get past chapter 2, because there
was a tachyon drive mentioned, and the friend couldn’t figure out how that
would work. All he wanted to talk about was the physics of tachyon drives,
whereas we all know that the important thing about a tachyon drive is that it
lets you go faster than light, and the important thing about the one in The
Forever War is that the characters get relativistically out of sync with
what’s happening on Earth because of it. The physics don’t matter—there are
books about people doing physics and inventing things, and some of them are SF (The Dispossessed...) but The Forever
War is about going away to fight aliens and coming back to find that home
is alien, and the tachyon drive is absolutely essential to the story but the
way it works—forget it, that’s not important.[xxvii]
Walton also
has also weighed in on the literary delights – going beyond the kind of
incluing that The Forever War represents – of Rosemary Kirstein’s Steerswoman
series, which has been in the works since 1989 when The Steerswoman appeared. Kirstein has
driven fans crazy with the slow pace of sequels to that first novels, but she
has a devoted following because she has mastered a new way of writing sf, in
which the reader has a better idea of what’s going on than her protagonist:
The
world of the Steerswomen looks at first glance like fantasy. It’s low tech, and
there are wizards. The Steerswomen are an organization of people, mostly women,
who go around charting the world and inquiring into the nature of things. At
the beginning of the first book the heroine, Rowan, is in a tavern trying to
find out about some mysterious jewels. Fantasy, fantasy, fantasy. But it's all
a cunning illusion.
As
is slowly revealed over the course of the series so far, there’s a science
fictional explanation for everything. The wizards are using science that they
keep secret, the world they live in is an alien world in the process of being
terraformed, and wider things are going on. The reason it is, as Andrew Plotkin
put it a long time ago, more science fiction than anything else, is because
it's about the scientific method and how to use it to discover the world.
It’s
a very difficult trick to have revelations within a story that mean different
things to the reader and the characters, but Kirstein dances over this constant
abyss with delicate grace. The books are more than anything about the process
of Rowan figuring things out – some of them are familiar to us from our lives,
or from science fiction, and that only makes it better. These books really are
terrific fun to read.[xxviii]
Here’s just
one example, which doesn’t give away too much, but shows a lot about how
Kirstein works. Rowan and her friend Bel have come across what they take to be
an odd sort of string or cord with a “gleaming central core” surrounded by
something faintly resembling “the gum used to coat the boot soles of
steerswomen and sailors.”[xxix]
What is Rowan to make of it, even recognizing that the core is copper?
“It
might have any number of uses. It’s thin, it’s very tough, it holds a shape,
and it’s probably impervious to weather … “It would be excellent for tying
things. Sailors would love it.”[xxx]
What we can make of it, besides
seeing (as Rowan can’t) that she is looking at electric wire, is that there’s a
real art to science fiction, as Nalo Hopkinson (whose own specialty is
postcolonial fantasy) has found, based on her experience of teaching Creative
Writing at the University of California-Riverside. Students who want to write
mimetic fiction or creative non-fiction have an easier time of it, she told Locus in 2013, because
“science fiction and metafiction is a metagenre. Not only are you writing the
plot of what happens, you are creating a world as you go.” Would-be sf and
fantasy writers have to master that, and the literary essentials of style and
characterization. “I love the moment when that clicks. When they get it, boy do
they get it.”[xxxi]
Contact:
pierce07446@outlook.com
[iv] Ibid., p. 23
[vi] Ibid., p. 34
[viii] Ibid., p. 47
[xvi] Ibid., p. 42
[xix] Strugatsky, Arkady, and Boris
Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic, trans. Olena Bormashenko (Chicago Review Press, 2012), p.
8
[xxi] Delany, Starboard Wine: More
Notes on the Language of Science Fiction (Dragon Press, 1984), p. 201
[xxii] Roberts, Thomas J., An
Aesthetics of Junk Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 1990), p. 205ff
[xxv] Card, Orson Scott, The Writer’s
Digest Guide to Science Fiction and Fantasy (Writer’s Digest Books, 2010), p. 92
[xxvii] http://www.tor.com/home/58637
[xxviii]
http://www.tor.com/blogs/2008/10/not-only-science-fiction-but-more-science-fictional-than-anything-else-rosemary-kirsteins-steerswoman-books,
retrieved Sept. 16, 2013
[xxx] Ibid., p. 207
