Part 20 (1/2)

Often we even find ourselves light-years ahead, in danger of losing sight of science all together.

The distance that separates the dreamers and the facilitators hardly matters. What matters is our role in this relations.h.i.+p. And the part we have chosen to play is that of prophet. With our stories, we walk before science with a metaphorical lantern, guiding, inspiring, illuminating the possible destinations. And then, spurred by these seductive vapors, science does go on, choosing some of our possible futures to make real, discarding others as-at least for now-either impossibly ridiculous or sadly out of reach.

Some of the paths turn out to be dead ends. But others lead to the Moon.

How the world loves science fiction at times such as those, when we turn out to have been right! The world sure does love its winners, and we've hit the bull's-eye many times. Hugo Gernsback would have been proud of us. But to be embraced only when science delivers on science fiction's predictions seems a little hollow to me, as if the general public needs to be bribed with successes in order to give us their love. In literature, as in life, I'd prefer my love to be a little less one-sided and a little more unconditional.

I don't want science fiction to be loved only when we look forward with it, before we can possibly know which stories got it right and which did not, but also when we're looking back at it from a further future.

But how can we create a work that is not just for its own time but also for all time, when so many generations have gotten it wrong? At one time, phlogiston was widely believed to be the true matter of the universe, and atomic theory was seen as just a myth. How are we to know at any given moment whether, by arming our futures with technological and scientific details, we will be seen by later generations as prescient-or just plain silly?

We can't. As much as we dream of time machines, we are too much of our own time. Which means that like it or not, some of our hardest science fiction will ooze to mere putty in the hands of the future.

Some will call it heresy, but I've come to see that the only futures that the future will be able to stomach will be the soft ones. Rigorous, but soft nonetheless.

So I say, All hail the black box. What powers the s.h.i.+ps hurtling across the galaxies, the engines that keep towering cities floating high above the alien seas below, or the mechanical brains that motivate a race of robots? Does it truly matter? The hardest of SF writers want to worry about how they and other miracles work. But those who worry instead about how what works affects us are likelier to last into the future as more than museum curiosities. That is why though I enjoy hard SF, and have certainly bought much of it as an editor, I worry that it can only be written for the writer's generation alone, and so I do not practice it when I wear my own writer's hat.

That is why I choose the black box. What's inside? Who knows? Each generation will choose differently in filling it. Sometimes there have been wires inside, or vacuum tubes, or printed circuitry. Who knows what the future will bring and with what technology our descendants will choose to inhabit the black boxes that we build in our stories? That is why I only need to be made to believe. I do not need so much information as to be capable of building it. Verisimilitude should be enough, for, after all, we do not seek out reality itself in fiction but rather the semblance of reality.

We cannot truly blueprint the future, only dream it. And that in itself should be enough of a reward. Or else we will end up speaking a language that will be coherent only to the people already in the room.

There is, of course, a downside for those who choose to write other than the hardest sort of SF. Thispitfall comes from certain subsets of our audience and of our peers. There are those who will say that by focusing on the affect rather than the effect, we are embracing ignorance, that we are ”less than,” or indeed, not writing science fiction at all.

But that is a small price to pay for the accompanying joys.

This I know: The future will bring miracles, and the world will change because of it. And the world will change whether those miracles come powered by steam or electricity or atomics or some method as yet unknown. The miracles themselves are only the catalysts for the sense of wonder that future folks will feel. And it is that which we must examine.

Or else we shall suffer as most of our spiritual forebears have done, and our ghosts will watch as all the fruits of our field turn into artifacts that to our children are nothing more than quaint.

SF HUMOR: A LOOK AT THE NUMBERS.

(condensed fromWriters Bootymagazine)

Terry Bisson Terry Bisson is a multiple award winner for his quirky, intelligent SF.

For only pennies a day, you can be writing and selling SF humor from your own home. Sound too good to be true? Read on! A necessarily partial phone survey (11.43 percent don't have working phones, and 8.54 percent don't answer intelligibly) of SFWA's humor writers shows the top five earning considerably more than a dollar a day (how does $1.39 sound to you?) while the average ($0.39) still holds a comfortable lead over the related but low-paying genres of Industrial Erotica, Adventure Travel, and Trash.

SF is unique among America's low-flying lits in that it is almost one-fourth humor: 23.45 percent funny, to be precise. This is considerably less than Romantic Sports which is almost 30 (29.23) percent funny, but well above both Romance (18.24) and Sports (15.32). Humor itself, the flags.h.i.+p as it were, is only 51.76 percent funny, and that average is artificially inflated by Mark Twain, who would be a SFWA member if he weren't so dead.

Much of SF's considerable smile factor is due to the high-spirited young writers it attracts. SF and Fantasy together induct an average of almost sixteen new scribblers a year (15.42), of whom more than six (6.19) are funny. Let's look at a typical year-2001. Nationally, 118 writers went pro that year, an above-average eighteen of whom were picked up by SFWA, which handles the draft for the related fields of SF, Fantasy and Low Slipstream. Of these rookies, seven were funny, four almost funny, and two were just weird. By way of comparison, the mainstream gained forty-one new pros, of whom only six were a little funny and two were actually depressing.

Who says you can't tell a book by its cover? The high risibility-index of SF is due in large part to appearances. Many (254 total) SF writers dress funny, often intentionally. There are no gender distinctions here with the women being fully (99.44 percent) as funny-looking as the men. Author photosare of course the ”wings” that bring these laughs to the readers, which is why trade books are not as funny as hardcovers, and ma.s.s market paperbacks get less funny every day.

It's not all personnel, however. The impressive display of humor in modern SF is due in large measure to tradition. From the high comedy ofFrankenstein to the rollicking chase scenes ofDune (who can forget those goofy worms?), humor has played an important role in SF. And it's becoming more rather than less important: of the 1,786,873 dialogue interchanges added to the literature sinceApollo 11 , fully 987,543 have contained puns, jokes, or wry rejoinders, and this is discounting the narrative drollery (more troublesome to quantify) that is a staple of the field.

But tradition, though honored, can play only a supporting role in an innovative genre. Many of the laughs in SF (33.78 percent of the total) have to do with the material itself. SF is quite correctly considered a literature of ideas, and ideas are funny, at least some of them; and even the ones that aren't funny are funnier than manners, morals, or money, the mainstream obsessions that still (go figure!) account for 64.87 percent of America's printed matter.

It must be noted that within the linked fields of Fantasy and SF, the playing field is far from level. Robots and rocket s.h.i.+ps are almost always funny (68.98 percent of the time), but monsters? Not! Elves are not funny at all (perhaps because they try so hard). Aliens are funnier than unicorns by a factor of ten, and castles are funny only to those who have not lived in them for five or more consecutive days.

Of course, a career in SF doesn't automatically bring laughs, except from the immediate family. If a robot whines in the forest and no one laughs, is it funny? The SF humorist needs an agent, and SF agents are a special breed (65.67 percent special, in fact) known for their ability to laugh at as well as with their clients. The best of them (32.65 percent) actively seek sarcastic rejections, and the worst (27.87 percent, allowing for overlap) like to receive small dead animals in the mail.

These agents can't afford to waste their time on the trade mags likeLocus andSF Chronicle , which rarely print humor (1.456 laughs per page, not counting ads), nor on the all-humor mags likeThe New Yorker anda.n.a.log , which are written in-house by lunatics. For speedy, top-penny sales, SF deal-makers go straight for the prestige 'zines likeAsimov's ,F&SF , andSciFiction, whose editors are so eager to please that they have been known (987 doc.u.mented incidents) to laugh at their own jokes.

Agents can't do it all, though, which brings us to the most powerful weapon in any SF writer's a.r.s.enal: the personal touch. Successful SF and Fantasy pros understand that the best time to make an editor laugh is after midnight. Between ten and two a.m. is best, when all but the most hopeless (three at last count) are home in bed. Remember to keep it light: the last thing an editor wants is a collect call from a writer who runs out of funny stories after only twenty minutes on the phone!

So now you know the ropes. Isn't it about time you put on your funny hat, powered up your word processor, and joined the ranks of the SF pros who are turning laughs into dollars at the rate of pennies a day?

CONTEMPORARY FANTASY.

Andy Duncan Andy Duncan's story ”The Chief Designer” won the 2002 Sturgeon Award.

For me, the great lure of fantasy as a reader and as a writer, is the chance to explore the trulyweird -weirder even than the most way-out science fiction stories, which must necessarily ride, in relativecomfort, the rails of scientific, technological, and social extrapolation. By contrast, the fantasy story is free to set off on foot without a map, whistling a jaunty tune as dark clouds roll in from the west, shadows reach out from alleyways, street signs become few and far between, and the first fat drops splash down the back of the neck: unnerving, yes, but exhilarating, too.

The two great fantasy magazines of the early twentieth century got it right in their very t.i.tles:Weird Tales andUnknown . The t.i.tles of three terrific recent collections nail it, too:Stranger Things Happen, Tales of Pain, andWonder, andMagic Terror . And all of the above exemplify a relatively new approach to fantasy, finding the uncanny not just in the pastoral long ago and far away but also next door, down the street, around the corner, the day before yesterday.

Today, the field of contemporary fantasy is full of wild talents, visionaries, writers of the marvelously and necessarily weird-and in lo, what numbers!Never before have first-rate contemporary fantasists so many and so varied written at the peak of their powers simultaneously . To name a few favorites among them is to leave out too many, but even the most preliminary list indicates that these are extraordinary times in the field of contemporary fantasy, as in the world at large.

Consider the past few years. Kelly Link's marvelous and indescribable collectionStranger Things Happen declares a new genre, one so far occupied only byStranger Things Happen and perhaps by nothing else, ever, at least until Link's next book comes along. FromThe Sandman throughAmerican G.o.ds , Neil Gaiman has demonstrated an uncanny ability not only to channel and revive old myths but to create new ones. The novels of Jonathan Carroll-The Wooden Seabeing a recent example-never stop opening doors in the reader's head, not even after the book itself is closed.

The artists, aesthetes, and angst-ridden adolescents who compellingly people Elizabeth Hand'sBlack Light andLast Summer at Mars Hill are as fabulous as gryphons and as timely as the tabloids. John Crowley, who tempts even the hardheaded to retrieve the wordgenius from the dustbin, wroteLittle, Big and then, instead of resting on the seventh day, just kept going, into the majestic series that includes, most recently,Daemonomania . Tim Powers'sDeclare reads like an Indiana Jones vehicle written by John Le Carre or, in other words, like nothing else in this world, but it also manages to be an epicZhivago -style love story chockablock with jaw-dropping notions, my favorite being the revelation of a sinister second Ark that shadowed Noah's. How's that for High Concept?

Peter Straub is the best horror writer since Herman Melville. ”Mr. Clubb and Mr. Cuff,” the highlight of his collectionMagic Terror , demonstrates anew that fantasy need not include a single supernatural element. Don't ask me; askhim . Caitlin R. Kiernan, author ofTales of Pain and Wonder , is a mesmerizing stylist with an unerring sense of place;Anne Rice's New Orleans has nothing on Kiernan's Birmingham, Alabama. Kiernan is also a Goth queen and a mosasaur expert. How cool is that? Another prose magician is Jeffrey Ford, who managed to get his collectionThe Fantasy Writer's a.s.sistant and Other Stories and his novelThe Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque published at the same time, the show-off.

See what I mean? I'm running out of s.p.a.ce, and I haven't even mentioned Graham Joyce, Nalo Hopkinson, Ray Vukcevich, Glen David Gold, Philip Pullman, China Mieville, Ted Chiang, Alan Moore, Louise Erdrich, Steven Millhauser, Lisa Goldstein . . .

(many more names go here) . . . or J. K. Rowling, whose multivolume Harry Potter saga, when complete, will make all the grumblers, potshotters, and naysayers look even sillier than they look now.

Whence this explosion of cutting-edge contemporary fantasy, this embarra.s.sment of riches? Well.

Tolkien famously argued that a chief function of ”fairy-stories” was Escape, which he both lauded as aheroic act and capitalized, as he did ”its companions, Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt.” Most of us don't share Tolkien's Disgust at the modern world; he went on, in the next paragraph of that famous essay, to Condemn electric streetlamps. But as I write this in summer 2002, I can think of any number of things we writers and readers might justifiably be Escaping from these days-into the pastoral long ago and far away, no doubt, but also into more contemporary realms: our world, straight up, with a twist. The long-term benefits of this literary and psychological trend, if it continues, are interesting to contemplate, but it's late, and I'm sleepy. After a good night's rest and a great many dreams, informed by all those writers named above, I will rise and mow the lawn, and then come inside and do my part: I will write a fantasy story.

TRADITIONAL FANTASY.

Mindy L. Klasky Relative newcomer Mindy L. Klasky has been making a splash in fantasy with herGla.s.swright series.

”Traditional fantasy”: Readers outside of the speculative fiction crowd often regard the phrase with suspicion, their reactions ranging from polite confusion (from people who have no idea what is included in the genre) to knowing leers (from people who a.s.sume that ”fantasies” are hidden in plain brown wrappers, available only behind the sales counter). Nevertheless, the past few years have introduced millions of people to traditional fantasy through the cinematic blockbusters ofHarry Potter andThe Lord of the Rings . As if in reaction to those media visions (and, in some cases, the traditional novels on which they were based), written traditional fantasy has pushed new boundaries, exploring intimate relations.h.i.+ps between characters and focusing on s.e.xual ident.i.ty and power as major tools of storytelling.

The juggernaut of traditional fantasy rolls onward, continuing to appeal to children (both chronological youngsters and nostalgic adults). The first four books in theHarry Potter series proved so popular that theNew York Times Bestseller list created a new category of ”Children's Literature” to open up slots for some other-any other-novels.The Lord of the Rings and its prequel,The Hobbit , have occupied four of the top ten slots onLocus magazine's ma.s.s market paperback bestseller list for the majority of the past few years. People who have never dreamed of reading in the speculative fiction ghetto have proudly boasted of their literary excursions into cinematic ”novelizations”-novels that have, in some cases, been available for more than half a century.

The public seems to embrace these media fantasies for the archetypes they present-the struggles of good against evil, the stories of growth from childhood to adulthood, the hope of magic in our daily affairs. And yet many adults have a desire to push beyond those childhood dreams, to edge past the old struggles. There is a movement in print fantasy to confront new challenges, to address more complex problems, to create new solutions. Many of these novels address the uniquely adult world of complex s.e.xuality to explore their new parameters.

Anne Bishop'sBlack Jewels Trilogy exemplifies the new, adult aspect of traditional fantasy. The dominant race of her world, the Blood, are virile vampires, humanlike creatures whose s.e.xuality is central to their means of communication. Women often control men, holding them as s.e.xual slaves and forcing them to serve as unpaid gigolos. Men can be controlled by magical rings-channels that convey great pain-placed directly on their genitals. Witches-the strongest and most dangerous of women-can be destroyed if they are deflowered by brutal or careless men. Throughout the novels, s.e.xuality is the currency of power, a driving force that sweeps up characters, the plot, and the author's themes.