Black Gate

A few posts ago, I asked if, given current economic and political conditions, the next thematic trend in SF and fantasy will be a return to woeful tales of doom and disaster. Sure enough, lately I’m coming across signs that the zeitgeist might be finding a warm place in Cold War era end-of-the-world narratives.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal there’s a short review of Genesis by Bernard Beckett.  Yeah, I know, the title is cringe-inducing, but it actually fits (both the title and the author’s surname), at least according to writer Jeffrey Trachetenberg’s description:

…survivors in a world destroyed by nuclear and biological weapons are forced to re-think what makes the human species special…the issue of machine self awareness emerges as pivotal.

Not exactly original, but, then again, “nothing is new under the sun” as Ecclesiastes noted back in antiquity and, as Trachetenberg notes, revisiting this time honored trope is in part a result of “deep-rooted international concerns about such issues as global warming and the 9/11 attacks.”

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While public health officials and the vice president fear for the worst, I haven’t started wearing a face mask. If there’s anything that looks to me like something out of a sci-fi movie, it’s people going about their daily business with those things on. Can designer face masks be far behind, maybe just the sort of thing to stimulate consumer spending and get the economy going again?

In any event, Steve Carper has devised a particularly ironic solution to the problem in A Kiss is Just a Kiss, which is a sample of his tales collected in Tyrannosaur Faire. You can buy his book here as either a downloadable PDF or good-old fashioned print. The collection includes Steve’s “Pity the Poor Dybbuk,” which first appeared in Black Gate’s second issue, back in the Summer of 2001, when everyone was breathing easier.

Courtesy of Locus comes this link to James Lovegrove’s Review of the cover — not the book itself — of PS Publishing’s reissue complete with original artwork (hence the review) of Ray Bradbury’s 1966 short story collection S is for Space, a sequel of sort to R is for Rocket, which also featured a cover by Joe Mugnaini. Lovegrove says that a first edition copy is a rare find. It just so happens that I have one. My parents weren’t book people, but my neighbors across the street were. Mr. Heinholdt worked for The New York Herald (for you youngsters out there, that was a fairly reputable newspaper in its day) and Mrs. Heinholdt (further note for you youngsters: in those days, kids had no idea that adults had first names) worked at this marvelous used book store of cavernous dimensions infused with the smell of old paper stored for way too long where for hours I’d thumb through poorly filed carboard boxes of Astounding magazines from the 1940s  stuffed in tight spaces beneath groaning bookshelves. Knowing of my enthusiasm for Bradbury and science fiction, for Christmas of 1966, Mr. and Mrs. Heinholdt gave me a hardcover of S is for Space. I thought it was the first hardcover of a “real adult” book of literature  I was ever to own.

But it would seem my memory is faulty. It wasn’t a “real  adult” book, after all. Lovegrove notes that the book was aimed at what today is called the young adult market.  And, sure enough, there are cover flap blurbs from the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books and a notation that the book is recommended in the H.W. Wilson Standard Catalog for High School Libraries.

Sigh. Another childhood illusion shattered.  Funny thing is, I was flipping through the stories, and for the most part they strike me as stronger — as well they should, this is, after all, Bradbury in his prime — than his latest We’ll Always Have Paris that I recently reviewed. Even from my adult perspective.

I don’t know if I’d assign Bradbury to a high school audience, these days. I don’t think they’d get it. Too many anachronisms. Can the iPod and Facebook generation relate much to boys who thrill to the night carnival?

Oh, in case you were going to ask, no, my copy is not for sale, whatever it may be worth as a first edition in very good condition. Some things you just can’t put a price on.

A brief and imprecise history of 20th century SF (with a bit of fantasy) into the 21st:

Back in the so-called Golden Age, it was about rocket ships and blasters and the possibility of an atomic bomb.
Possibilities became reality, and post World War II writers were obsessed with the prospect of nuclear annihilation. Along came the sixties and the New Wave and rather than celebrate technology, feared its dehumanizing potential; mind altering drugs were okay, though. Then it got kind of boring, Tolkien was rediscovered by middle school kids and the fat fantasies started to take off. The cyberpunks depicted technology as neither good nor bad, just something that humans could use for good or bad and was, like it or not, a fact of reality. Then along came things like slipstream, New Weird, New Space Opera (meanwhile, the old space opera and golden agers were light speeding about the galaxy all this while people were accusing the genre of becoming too literary for its britches), Interstitial Fiction and what have you.

So what’s next? Tales of economic doom and environmental disaster? (But wait, wasn’t J.G. Ballard doing that a long time ago?)

I don’t know how people blog on a regular daily basis (well, actually I do, maybe that’s why I don’t read many blogs). I only have to do this once a week, and this week I really can’t think of anything to say that might be of interest to anyone, let alone me. So, here’s a link to someone who actually has something of interest to say about the concept of “The Other.”

Speaking of encountering the other in literal terms, as some efforts of NASA purport to do by sending Elvis Presley recordings out into the cosmos, I highly recommend Stanislaw Lem’s Fiasco, which satirizes the whole notion of alien contact as encountering people from other star systems who are more or less just like us, but maybe with pointy ears.

I live about a half hour from the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia, where the spring season opens with interrelated performances of Hamlet and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead, which features two minor characters from Shakespeare in Godot-like circumstances. If you’ve never seen the Stoppard, there’s a movie version from 1990 featuring Gary Oldman, Tim Roth, and Richard Dreyfuss. (and if you’ve never seen Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet, get thee hither to Netflix.) Shakespeare, of course, was a great fantasist, and is himself sometimes a character in  reimaginings of his historical period, if not outright fantasies involving a cast of faeries and ghosts.  Harry Turteldove, he of vast historical reimaginings, has a story up at Tor.com which imagines a future acting troupe that is somehow transported to Shakespeare’s time and puts on a performance of Rosencratz and Guildenstern are Dead. It’s an amusing tale that sets you up for a half-expected punchline, but anyone interested in Shakespeare or theater or absurdism will appreciate the jokes.  And, since it is a fantasy, I won’t even complain that Shakespeare would no more understand modern English than the players from the future would be able to converse with true Elizabethan accents.

The March/April Intertzone has a short interview with Bruce Sterling in promoting his latest novel, The Caryatids (haven’t read it yet, but sounds intriguing). Here’s one question: “Couldn’t it be argued that SF itself is a long running ‘War on Wonder’? Is our tolerance for spectacle increasing with each passing year — we’re demanding more eyeball-kicks for the bucks?” To which Sterling replies: “If that were the case, why would anybody read Verne, Wells, Orwell or Huxley? Yet they do.”

Now, I’m not all together certain I understand either the question or the response. I think the point is that people who watch SF-inspired movies may not read SF because it isn’t as exciting. Well, maybe, but those folks don’t read in the first place. I suspect readers are, for the most, disappointed in most cinematic SF, Battlestar Gallactica, notwithstanding. Of course, I’m guessing that’s the case based on my own perception as a reader of SF.

But as far as Sterling’s response goes, I wonder if people still read Verne and Wells. Orwell and Huxley are typcially assigned in school (and I once assigned The Time Machine to an eighth grade English class), but do people still read these guys for entertainment, let alone to consider their ideas, outside of  academia or people who really care about SF as a genre and seek to be knowledgeable about its historical development?

And my guess is that most people who went to see the Tom Cruise version of War of the Worlds (a flick I never bothered with) didn’t pick up the source material. Or, if they did, wouldn’t have finished.

Or am I just being a snobbish elitist?