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Copyright ©2002 by Strange Horizons, Inc. Individual articles and stories copyrighted by the authors.

Article: Interview: James Alan Gardner, by Louis Bright-Raven

Article: To Make a New Dog, by Dan Derby

Article: Culture Clash: Ambivalent Heroes and the Ambiguous Utopia in the Work of Iain M. Banks, by David Horwich

Article: The Polynesian Voyagers, by Ramon Arjona

Fiction: driftings, by Dana Christina

Fiction: “Identity Is a Construct” (and Other Sentences), by Douglas Lain

Fiction: Time of Day, by Nick Mamatas

Fiction: Other Cities #5 of 12: Ylla's Choice, by Benjamin Rosenbaum

Fiction: Not to Mention Jack, by Charles Anders

Music: Music to While Away a Saturday Afternoon, by Peggi Warner-Lalonde

Poetry: Slouching Towards Entropy, by Ann K. Schwader

Poetry: Tombstone Tapestries, by Sandra J. Lindow

Poetry: Cryogenica, by Lee Ballentine

Poetry: Had Been There, by Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca

Reviews: Suzy McKee Charnas's The Vampire Tapestry, reviewed by Amy O'Loughlin

Review: Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth-ion Improbable, reviewed by Paul R. F. Schumacher

Reviews: Fantastika! The Films of Russian Fantasy Master Alexander Ptushko, reviewed by Amy Harlib

Review: Molly Gloss's Wild Life, reviewed by Christopher Cobb

Editorial: The Idea of the Real: Notes on the History of Speculative Poetry, by Mark Rich

1/7/02

James Alan Gardner is fast becoming one of science fiction's veteran authors. His ever-growing list of published short fiction has appeared in Amazing, Asimov's, Galaxies, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Nature, On-Spec, Tesseracts 3-6, and other venues. Winner of the Grand Prize for Short Fiction in the 1989 Writers Of The Future contest, Gardner has been a finalist for and has won the Aurora award, the Canadian version of the Hugo, for Best Short Work in English; he has also been a finalist for both the Hugo and Nebula for his short fiction. He's published five novels through Eos; his latest, Ascending, was released in November 2001, and is available through the Science Fiction Book Club and your local bookstore. Born and raised in Canada, he now lives in Kitchener, Ontario with his wife Linda Carson and his confused but earnest rabbit, Basil. This interview was conducted over the course of late October/early November 2001 via email.

Louis Bright-Raven: Is there any significant difference between the American and Canadian SF scenes? We in America rarely hear of what's happening in the Canadian (or other English-speaking) scenes.

James Alan Gardner: I think there is a difference between Canadian and U.S. science fiction, but it's a very subtle shading. Here's a simple example. In the U.S., there are two basic scenarios for dealing with alien races:

(1) Cowboys and Indians. In other words, automatic culture clashes, even when both sides say they're trying to get along. Sometimes the humans are the cowboys and the aliens are the Indians, sometimes it's the other way around; sometimes the humans are the good guys and sometimes the aliens are the virtuous ones; but alien/human relations tend to play out along the lines of nearly insurmountable differences, leading to kneejerk hostilities.

(2) The melting pot. The foremost example of this is Star Wars, where aliens and humans intermingle with no discernible cultural differences.

There are plenty of variations on these two scenarios depending on surrounding circumstances, and I don't mean to say that such stories are bad or simplistic; they're true to a lot of human experience. When different cultures bump up against each other, you often get war or assimilation.

But Canadians often write about a third scenario—a very Canadian one. We call it the “salad bowl” as opposed to the melting pot: different cultures get tossed together but they aren't expected to change to some new identity. The most prominent example in Canada is the French/English divide. This often is a source of friction (and sometimes national crises), but we've never gone to war about it, or seriously attempted assimilation. The French remain French; the English remain English; native peoples remain native peoples; immigrants remain as faithful to their original cultures as they wish to be. Canadians sometimes complain about the inconvenience of a fragmented populace ... but ultimately, we're terrified of the very idea of assimilation. Assimilation is, after all, our #1 nightmare: getting sucked up into the U.S. We are horrified by that omnipresent prospect, and therefore, we are culturally opposed to imposing the same sort of thing on other people.

What does this have to do with science fiction? Canadian science fiction is usually “polite” about human interactions with aliens and other creatures. First Contact doesn't mean war or a quick integration; it means a prolonged period of feeling each other out, careful not to intrude on the other side's “sovereignty.” I think this shows up in all my work, but most notably in Vigilant. There, the Ooloms and humans coexist more or less amiably, but they don't interact with each other much except in the civil service. That is so Canadian.

LBR: Your works tend to lean towards social science fiction as opposed to hard or technical SF. Do you believe that an understanding of the humanities is as important, or more important, to our future than the technical sciences?

JAG: Technology is the engine; the humanities are the steering wheel and the brakes. The humanities don't create nearly as much force for getting things done as technology does, but technology is just plain lousy at directing its energy or managing itself. Therefore I don't believe either of the “two solitudes” is more important than the other; both are necessary and both would be helpless or dangerous without one another.

Unfortunately, people tend to lean toward one realm or the other, as if the two were opposing sides in a war of intellectual supremacy. Humanists seldom make an effort to understand and love science the way that scientists do; scientists usually approach the humanities with an air of indulgent superiority, as if a bit of science could solve every humanistic problem without difficulty. There are, of course, exceptions—people who genuinely appreciate both halves of the equation—but those people are exceptions, and there aren't enough of them.

Science fiction writers have the potential to bridge some of the gap. Almost by definition, a science fiction writer is someone who loves science, yet who's also dedicated to the art of writing, and to thinking about the effects of science, rather than just the science itself. We writers don't have a whole lot of influence with either camp—the mainstream literary world ignores us, and scientists are often wary of us too—but we do care a great deal about both science and art. Sometimes, we can bring the two together.

LBR: That's a rather astute observation about SF authors. Yet it seems that many are steeped in the sciences professionally, and sometimes I think they're too close to science and lose the “art of writing” aspect. Do you get that feeling from the community as well?

JAG: Some writers are still blindly enamored with science and gadgetry, but I don't think it's as prevalent as it once was. Almost everybody these days pays lip service to literary value; some people talk the talk without walking the walk, but I do believe that most SF/fantasy writers are aiming above the least common denominator.

LBR: You've discussed your preference for writing stories in the first person before. Have you ever written anything with several characters each telling the story in the first person, so that the story is told from several different viewpoints simultaneously, in a sort of “Round Robin” effect?

JAG: In a novella called “A Young Person's Guide to the Organism” (published in Amazing Stories, April 1992), I wrote about a collection of people who each encounter the same huge creature out in space. The story takes place over several years as the creature slowly drifts from the orbit of Mars to the orbit of Mercury. The creature does almost nothing at all; but the people who come across it impose their own perceptions on what the creature is, whether it's dangerous, what it wants, and so on.

Structurally, the novella is based on “A Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra,” a musical work by Benjamin Britten. Basically, the musical piece starts with the whole orchestra playing a theme, then each individual instrument plays a variation on the theme (first the flute, then the oboe, then the clarinet, and so on). In my novella, the theme is “First Encounter” and the variations are the stories of different people meeting the alien. At the end of the musical piece, Britten puts the orchestra back together with a fugue, where all the instruments come back in, one by one, until they're all storming away in a grand finale. In my story, I bring back all the individual story-tellers one by one, in a grand confrontation with the creature close to the sun ... until the final resolution leads to First Contact with the League of Peoples. (Yes, this was the first published story that mentioned the League.)

I'm still quite happy with this story. Structurally, it's the most ambitious thing I've ever done, but I think it works pretty well ... even if it is blatant grandstanding.

LBR: Which is more challenging for you, short fiction or novels?

JAG: I tend to write short fiction in a fever, when I get a good idea and have to splat it out as fast as possible. If I'm not in a fever, writing short stories is as painful as pulling teeth—I can still write them, but they feel forced. I'm likely to put them away half-finished, because there's no point working on something mediocre. Short stories have to be screaming with life, or they're just exercises in technique.

Novels also have to be screaming with life, but in my experience, the life always comes. I've spent at least a year on each of my books, and in the course of that year, there's always time for something to wake up inside the work. Sometimes I've written the first twenty pages a dozen times, in a dozen tones of voice, picking different spots at which to pick up the action, different viewpoints, and so on. Eventually, I stumble across something that hits me with its chemistry and its prospects for going in interesting directions; then I know I can write a strong book.

LBR: I can relate to that. I've put a lot of short fiction of my own “away” on disc. The problem then becomes, when do you return to it and finish it, if at all?

JAG: Exactly. Once in a while I return to stories I've shelved, but it doesn't happen very often. On the other hand, Expendable was essentially a shelved novel, and I did return to it eventually.

LBR: Something I've noticed about your style of writing is its visual descriptiveness, particularly that of characters and their appearance. Do you have an actively visual mind that demands such detail when writing, or is it an approach you've developed for the benefit of the reader?

JAG: I'd actually say I have an auditory mind—I hear all the scenes in my head, the characters speaking, the background sounds, and so on. I also hear the flow of the narrator's words ... and if I do visual descriptions well (thank you), it's because I like vivid words. Of course, I do visualize the scenes, but I think it's the choice of good words that brings the scenes alive.

The other thing that brings descriptions alive is the presence of a strong (and usually opinionated) viewpoint character. My characters don't just look at a scene—they interact with the scene and respond to it emotionally.

Therefore it isn't just a rainy day; it's a day “when the drizzle started on my hair, soaked it good and flat, then began running down my cheeks, under my collar, and oozing through my bulky-knit sweater until the wool hung on my arms as heavy as a drenched sheep ... but the damp wasn't content to quit there, and every step I took, I could feel the rain seeping insistently through my underwear. A twenty-mile walk in this was really going to chafe.” Now I think that's a good descriptive passage, but you'll notice there are no visuals at all. It's purely tactile, with the added auditory pleasure of words like “oozing” and “chafe.” What really makes the passage come alive is the clear presence of a narrator experiencing all the dribbling wetness, and responding appropriately. If readers can “see” this scene, it's because they automatically put themselves in the narrator's place and fill in a bunch of details from their own imaginations.

LBR: Silly me. I referred to it as “visual writing,” when in fact it's sensory writing.

JAG: Yes, it's sensory writing, but even more, it's character-centered. I'm not just describing the rain, I'm telling the story of a character's encounter with the rain. The story takes place over time (as the effects of the rain get worse) and it indicates the character's reactions to the rain as well as the mere sensations.

When I was a student at Clarion West in 1989, Lucius Shepard suggested we should all make a conscious effort to notice the order in which we observed details whenever we entered a room. For example, did we notice noises first or visuals? How did our eyes track around the room, taking things in? Did we fix our attention on something within the first second, or did we keep looking around? By paying attention to the way we actually experienced a room, we could do a better job of reproducing a character's experiences for a reader.

LBR: Given your rather descriptive sensibilities, have you an interest in other forms of writing such as screenplays, teleplays, or comic books? Have these forms been an influence over your work?

JAG: I started reading comics when I was five, and I still read them now. I've never tried to write one, but I've certainly considered it from time to time. I keep thinking I should send letters to Marvel and DC, telling them I'm available....

LBR: Now that would be an interesting fit. What characters would you be interested in pursuing?

JAG: I haven't really thought about specific characters. I love practically anything that Alan Moore writes, but I know better than to think I could take on, say, Top 10 and do as good a job.

Either I'd do something new of my own, or else I'd take on a character who's currently unused and see what I could do. The first two unused characters who come to mind are the Atom (DC) and Shang Chi (Marvel), but I don't have any ideas for them off the cuff. They're just characters who might be interesting to play around with.

As for other media, I've written a number of plays and radio dramas, not to mention a fair number of songs. For a long time, I didn't write stories at all ... and I usually performed the stuff that I wrote. I did a number of coffee houses during university, singing and playing piano, and also wrote for various theatrical groups on campus.

Later on, I did a good deal of improv theatre, which I think had a big influence on my writing. With anything I write, the first draft is basically a series of improv scenes building on one another. Then I go back and rewrite to clean up the messy bits. I've never done anything significant with screenplays. Yes, I've goofed around with movie and TV ideas, but never seriously. Maybe someday....

LBR: When you created the Explorer Corps for your novels, one of the prerequisites for the organization was that Explorers have to have a physical or mental abnormality that makes them social outcasts. Hence, many of your characters (if not all) sport characteristics that make them less than the “model” appearance of the prototypical adventure protagonist. Why did you embark in this particular direction?

JAG: I've talked about my background in improv. Back then, I used to improvise monologues at the typewriter (yes, this was back in the days of typewriters); I'd take on a voice and just go with it, with no plan at all about what might come out.

In 1976, I began writing for a musical-comedy revue group at the University of Waterloo. That year we did a Star Trek parody, and the show had a character called the Expendable Crew Member. The ECM was, of course, the poor schmuck who accompanied the regular cast into dangerous situations and always got slaughtered. In the show, the ECM was a running gag: he'd walk on stage, get killed in some colorful way, and then the play would continue.

Some time after that, I was improvising at the typewriter and began to write in the voice of the ECM. In the show, the ECM had been a man; but for some reason, when I was improvising, it became the voice of a woman who identified herself as Festina Ramos. She just began ranting, “Oh, so you think being an ECM is funny? Well let me tell you exactly why we're considered expendable."

And the first 100 pages of Expendable ripped out like that in just a few days. It was entirely unplanned. I don't believe in “channeling” characters or any such mumbo-jumbo; Festina was just something in my own subconscious that came barreling out for reasons I'll never understand. I didn't question what I was writing—I just wrote.

Basically, that initial head-rush lasted right up to the point where the Explorers landed on Melaquin, the “planet of no return.” Then the momentum stopped, and I had no idea what happened next. I made a few feeble attempts to continue now and then, but never anything that worked. It was only fifteen years later that I said, “This is ridiculous, I've got to finish the damned thing,” and I finally got the story going again.

LBR: Obviously Festina Ramos is one of your favorite characters, as she has appeared in three of your novels. How did you come to develop the character?

JAG: Festina developed herself (or more accurately, she emerged on her own from my subconscious). Later on, my editor at Eos (Jennifer Brehl) wanted me to write more Festina stories, so I hit on the approach that I've taken in subsequent books.

A novel is typically the story of someone going through a major changing point in his or her life. Most people just don't have that many major changing points; I certainly didn't want to have Festina changing, then changing, then changing with every new book. Therefore, I decided that each Festina book would center on a new character who was going through some significant crisis.

Festina would appear as a troubleshooter who'd help the central character reach some satisfying resolution ... but the major changes would happen to someone else, not Festina herself. Therefore in all the Festina books after Expendable (which is Festina's own story), Festina doesn't show up until a hundred pages or more into the story. I like her a lot and she really helps keep things moving, but keeping her just a bit off center-stage means I don't have to keep changing her in substantial ways.

LBR: Yet she does change—at least on a superficial level, or through the perceptions of those she interacts with.

JAG: Yes, Festina does change bit by bit, but she doesn't go through the sort of major upheaval that happened in Expendable or that affects the central characters in the other books. In Vigilant, for example, (SPOILER ALERT!) Festina falls in love but eventually decides she has to return to her regular duties; however, the lead character (Faye Smallwood) completely reevaluates her life, resolves past issues with her father, and finds a new sense of purpose. So Festina changes a little, while Faye heads off in a whole new direction.

LBR: Tell us a bit more about the League of Peoples. What first gave you the idea for the League?

JAG: When I was a kid, I loved science fiction that had no limits: yes, you could exceed the speed of light; yes, you could sneak around the laws of thermodynamics; yes, you could create anti-gravity fields, time machines, and all those other fun things.

So I wanted that kind of universe—one with no ceiling on scientific achievement. Given that, it's inevitable that there are alien races who far surpass human technology. Just think of how our modern tech compares to what people had two or three hundred years ago; and if there are intelligent aliens at all, some of them are bound to be thousands or millions of years ahead of Homo sapiens science. That means that they could easily use a combination of bioengineering, body augmentation, etc. to make themselves incomparably superior to us little old humans.

Next question: if there are creatures like that out in space—not just slightly ahead of us, but vastly—and if there are probably lesser species too, who are somewhat ahead of us but not by millions of years—why don't we have any concrete evidence of these aliens’ presence? I decided there could be only one reason: whoever was at the top of the totem pole must have told everyone else to leave Earth alone. No one was allowed to conquer or assimilate us; we were to be left to our own devices. (Hey, do you sense a common thread here?)

Given all these considerations, I began to contemplate what those top aliens would be like. They aren't what humans might consider benevolent—otherwise, they'd be actively trying to help us—but they would believe in “Live and let live.” Which led to the League's central philosophy and everything else we've seen of them.

I want to point out, by the way, that in all the books I've written, the League has done almost nothing. I've read reviews where the League is called a deus ex machina ... but in fact, the only time they've actually taken tangible action is in the first chapter of Hunted. The rest of the time, what actually happens is people saying, “We have to do this to please the League,” or “We can't do that or the League will get mad.” The League isn't present, it doesn't give orders, and it doesn't explain what it wants. Instead, you have a whole lot of people trying to second-guess the League, contorting their behavior one way or another because they think sort of maybe this might kind of be what the League will tolerate.

LBR: Are there plans for an origin story for the League? Or perhaps a story of when Earthlings were first accepted into the League of Peoples, and how we managed to achieve membership?

JAG: “The Young Person's Guide to the Organism” was the first contact story. Ascending gives more background information on what actually happened when humans were “uplifted by the League."

LBR: If such a thing as the League of Peoples exists out there in the Universe, and they made themselves known to us, how do you suppose we humans would react? Would they stop us from entering interstellar space, given our history of violence and self-destructiveness?

JAG: I think they'd behave as they do in the books. Humans certainly have the potential for terrible acts; but most people, most of the time, are decent creatures without murder in their hearts. We aren't saints, but we aren't casual killers. Average folks in the street might kill in self-defense or in defense of friends and family, but not just because they don't like your face.

Of course, there are people who'll murder for lesser reasons, or for no reason at all. The League considers them dangerous non-sentients and will exterminate them without remorse if they try to leave our solar system.

LBR: In Expendable, one of the themes you touch on is society's tendency to find ways of hiding or ridding itself of what it deems undesirables. Members of the Explorer Corps, as we've mentioned, have various physical deformities that mark them as outcasts. The significance of society versus the individual (in this case Festina Ramos) is dominant. Is there more to the message of individuality being more important than societal acceptance?

JAG: I wouldn't say that society gets rid of unwanted people. What happens in Expendable (and, I believe, in real life) is that individuals get rid of the unwanted, and society doesn't care enough to put a stop to the practice.

In Expendable, and all the other Festina novels, the recurring “bad guys” are the admirals in the navy's High Council. These admirals are ruthless and corrupt, holding onto their positions by various tricks and schemes ... but they're smart enough not to go too far (partly because they're afraid of the League of Peoples). Civilian society lets the admirals get away with it, simply because the civilians can't be bothered to stick up for the underdog. (There's an old saying: “In order for evil men to triumph, all you need is that good men do nothing.")

LBR: I agree with that. Very nice clarification.

JAG: But when I wrote Expendable, I wasn't thinking a lot about the individual vs. society. My theme was actually “professionalism.” Festina and most other Explorers are set apart from the rest of the Technocracy, not by their “blemishes,” but by their discipline.

Look at the way Festina regards regular navy personnel: in Expendable, she always portrays them as childish and juvenile. Festina is an unreliable narrator—all my narrators are—and the way she describes people like Captain Prope is wildly prejudiced. Festina disdains them; she considers them unprofessional. Much of the book consists of Festina forcing herself to act professional when surrounded by people who don't come up to her standards. Of course, the ultimate unprofessional is the glass woman, Oar: utterly child-like, and (just to get Festina's goat) nearly indestructible. Festina is obsessed with her own vulnerability to all kinds of threats; Oar is essentially invulnerable, not to mention conceited, thoughtless, and uneducated. Oar is also quite lovable. She might be the reverse of Festina in many ways, but there's plenty of room for the two to be friends.

LBR: Interesting. Perhaps the two themes are interrelated, from the viewpoint of Festina Ramos. Festina (and the other ECMs) are so disciplined that they would almost never look the other way when some wrong was committed, and also because of the way they are treated by others in the navy. They've had to rise above the non-concern that I was referring to in society.

JAG: Good point.

LBR: About Oar being the “ultimate unprofessional,” as you just suggested: wouldn't that make her more unpredictable, more effective in some ways, than someone as disciplined as Festina Ramos? Or is she just potentially so, given her lack of education and social skill?

JAG: Indeed. I'm interested in the clash between discipline and the lack thereof. Obviously both have their strengths and weaknesses. This is one reason why I keep banging Festina up against characters who are more intuitive/spontaneous. In every Festina book, her most important companion is someone who is much more “unfettered” than she is (Oar, Faye, and Edward).

LBR: In Commitment Hour, you deal with the theme of sexuality in a decidedly unique fashion. The population's annual change from male to female is symbolic of the dual nature of our personalities, and the effects that our physical maturation process has on that; it also explores the social awkwardness caused by our sexuality through the relationships of the characters. What gave you the idea to tackle such an ambitious subject in such a manner?

JAG: I seldom remember where ideas come from. I wrote the basics of Commitment Hour as a novella many years before I decided to turn it into a book; wherever the original seed came from, I can't remember. Frankly, it's just cool to imagine the opportunity to experience life as both male and female; it's also dramatic to force a character to choose which one (s)he'll be permanently.

However, there's a temptation to think that a personal familiarity with both genders would somehow “fix” one's sexual problems. I didn't want to say that at all. Characters in Commitment Hour still have plenty of difficulties with relationships, which is my way of saying that difficulties arise because you're different people, not because you're different genders. In fact, the residents of Tober Cove are just as gender-biased as anyone else. People are required to fit into restricted sex roles, which is justified by saying, “You freely chose to be female, so now you can only do female things.” Only outsiders like Rashid, Steck, and Zephram are prepared to allow for looser restrictions. They aren't so quick to attribute all differences to mere gender.

LBR: That's true. In some ways, the residents of Tober Cove are more restrictive. Maybe it was just my interpretation, but I understood it that while you were one gender, while you had memory of being the other, you weren't linked to the other gender's mindset, and that caused some of the bias. Only those like Steck really had an understanding of both, because they were both.

JAG: Yes, that's more or less it. Your experiences as one gender were more immediate than your experiences as the opposite gender. For Neuts like Steck, both genders had the same weight (for reasons explained in the book's climax).

LBR: In Hunted, you touch on an issue that is a heated topic of discussion in the world of science today—genetic engineering. In your books, tampering with genetics has been outlawed, and the lead character and his sibling are found out to have been genetically engineered. The lead character, Edward, is considered mentally challenged—and his sister, while genetically perfect, isn't necessarily playing with a full deck, either, as we come to discover in the story. I thought this was an interesting aspect—it seems that no matter what the physical results of genetic manipulation may be, there's a price to be paid mentally/psychologically. Was this your intent, or just something that came about as the story progressed?

JAG: In large part, this was just something I was forced into because of what I consider scientific inevitability. I'm writing about an age four hundred years in the future. If scientific development continues unabated—and of course, that's a big if, since there are lots of things that could cause civilization to collapse or stagnate—but if development continues, it's hard to imagine that Homo sapiens will exist as we know it four centuries from now.

Humanity isn't going to be destroyed; it's going to be replaced incrementally by offspring who have been engineered to be different from their parents. Some of it will come from gene-tinkering, and some will come from various kinds of mechanical augmentation. There'll still be a few pure human hold-outs, but they'll be curiosities like the Amish. I truly believe the majority of our descendants will be qualitatively non-human. There will certainly be attempts to outlaw human modification, but in the long term, they won't succeed.

On the other hand, I wanted to write about recognizably human people in the year 2452. So what could I do? How could I reconcile the likelihood of radical change with my desire to write about good old Homo sapiens?

My solution was to say that juggling the human genome was simply more difficult than anyone ever imagined. It's still possible—remember, I like universes with infinite possibility—but in the League of Peoples stories, genetic experimentation is so difficult, and so likely to lead to disastrous results, that most governments have banned it. This is why Festina et al. are still perfectly human.

I might point out that the same limitation doesn't apply to the aliens that I called the Divians. Their genome is easier to engineer, which is why they've created a number of subspecies that appear in various books.

LBR: Tell us about your new novel, Ascending.

JAG: Ascending is the story of Oar, who first appeared in Expendable. Oar is a member of an artificial humanoid race who never age and can withstand many dangers that would kill terrestrial human beings. However, her species has a terrible flaw: around age 50, their brains become “tired,” leading to a sort of bored senility. They just lose interest in the world. To me, this is as frightening as actual death; and the prospect is equally frightening to Oar, who's 49 years old and on the verge of succumbing to her racial curse. The action centers around her deteriorating thought processes and her attempts to save herself from her fate.

The book also features Festina Ramos, who shows up in time to help Oar face a number of threats. In the course of events, Festina learns what really happened four hundred years earlier when the “League of Peoples” showed up to uplift the human race. I don't want to give too much away, but the situation isn't nearly as simple (or as benign) as previously believed.

This, by the way, is one of the lovely aspects of writing in the first person. I mentioned earlier that all my narrators are unreliable. In every one of my books, the narrators tell outright lies. Sometimes it's obvious from context that they're lying; sometimes it's not. Sometimes the lies are deliberate; sometimes they're telling what they believe is the truth, but not what I (the omniscient author) know is actually going on. It's fun to play such games.

LBR: Damn, that leaves me with all sorts of questions, but I don't want to pry for spoilers. So just one—you say Oar is an artificial humanoid. Is it safe to ask whether or not who created Oar's race will be addressed in the book?

JAG: Yes, that question will be answered.

LBR: We've lost a healthy number of venerable science fiction and fantasy authors in the past couple of years, such as Poul Anderson, Douglas Adams, Gordon Dickson, L. Sprague de Camp, and A.E. van Vogt, among others. Some of these talents have been the visionaries of SF from its beginnings. Now that these talents have passed on, what or who do you see on the horizon as those who will envision the future for the next generation of SF readers?

JAG: Everyone who's writing science fiction today, plus everyone who comes along in our footsteps. Science fiction is a gestalt: it's Ursula K. LeGuin to Buck Rogers, Star Trek to Gene Wolfe, rockets and ray-guns to the deepest reflections on existence. Why kick anyone out of the party? Even the worst schlock might inspire some twelve-year-old to magnificence.

Louis Bright-Raven has been a writer/illustrator/editor in the comic book and SF industry since 1994. He lives in Nevada. He invites you to check out his Web site, Constellation Studios, for more information about him, his work, and the work of other talents.

1/14/01

Eduardo Kac is building “GFP K-9,” a glow-in-the-dark dog. He expects it to have a “literally colorful personality.” Don't laugh; in 2000, Kac built a glow-in-the-dark rabbit, Alba, in Jouy-en-Josas, France. Working with a French biotech firm, he created the rabbit by imbedding green fluorescent protein (a bioluminescent substance from a Pacific Northwest jellyfish) in the DNA of an albino rabbit. Kac is a Ph.D. research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Inquiry in Interactive Arts (CAiiA) at the University of Wales and an Associate Professor of Art and Technology at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has sent shudders through both animal lovers and bioengineers alike. Asking why he did this is probably asking the wrong question. Kac, it turns out, is only using current technology to do something that mankind has been at for at least two thousand years, if not a hundred thousand. He's using biological beings as a means of self-expression. Let's go back a while to examine this historical phenomena.

Dogs came to us in prehistory as small, shy scavengers. This was well before domestication of the “big five” herbivores—cattle, horses, pigs, sheep, and goats, and long before agriculture. With the possible exception of the horse, our relationship with dogs is unique. They have been true working partners, not food stocks. Even horses started as food stock before becoming our first high-speed transit system. This canine partnership, combined with the unique characteristics of the dog, probably explains our profound feelings toward them.

The business of these very early dogs was scavenging, bringing them only partially into our camps. However, mankind has never been able to leave well enough alone. Early on we started simple culling for traits we recognized as useful. As man had early successes and built specialized canine functions, the non-random selective breeding we use today evolved. Interestingly, much of the evidence has suggested that this was going on around the time of our shift from hunter-gatherer to agricultural producers.

Based on archaeological evidence—bits of canine bones found cohabiting human camp sites—it has generally been believed that this adoption process began somewhere between 10,000-20,000 years ago. There's debate in the scientific community about what drove this cohabitation. One camp believes that humans adopted wolf pups and rather understandably selected the less aggressive, friendlier offspring. The other camp is convinced that dogs themselves drove the process by becoming our four-footed garbage removers. 10,000 years ago, scavenging around the increasingly successful human hunters would have had a clear evolutionary advantage, namely easy pickings. It seems reasonable that humans would have killed off overly aggressive dogs while ignoring those who more comfortably coexisted in or around human encampments. Such unconscious culling would have selected for personality traits in the local canid population that would have been compatible with coexisting with another species and, over time, beneficial to the human population. Thus we began the long journey to today.

By 4500 BC, there were five distinct types of working dogs: sight hounds, pointing dogs, mastiffs, herding dogs and, oddly, the original wolf types. Then, as now, specialization arose to fill human needs. Early on, when hunting still dominated as a means of food production, both pointing dogs and sight hounds would have been prized variants. With their keen senses (dogs have upwards of twenty times our olfactory receptors) and rugged staying power for long chases, they made key contributions to the hunt. The different hunting breeds had their specialties: sight hounds pursued prey to kill, pointers found and stood game without immediate attack. Both would have been useful to early small-game hunters, depending on the local ecosystem. The hound lineage produced the fastest of dogs and consequently became our sleek dog racing champions. It is curious that wolf types continued to be part of the dog breed landscape for some time. Whether they were kept for their coordinated pack hunting instincts or their ability to deal with large prey is unknown.

As humans became more settled and agriculturally oriented, other characteristics became valued. Protection of an encampment gave rise to the mastiff breeds—large yet docile animals, with great strength, powerful necks and jaws, and a limited need for speed or tracking ability. Later, they would become sporting dogs for bull-baiting and dog fighting. A greater challenge was the conversion of the canid's carnivorous instincts into protecting domesticated animals. Perhaps tracking and stalking skills were co-opted into the herding types’ genome. This is an amazing conversion of natural instinct, as killing and eating easy prey such as sheep and cattle would be any wolf's first reaction.

Then, as now, it took generations of dogs and people to create new breeds. But without working knowledge of the science of genetics, these breeds were created in an amazingly few thousand years, almost nothing in evolutionary terms.

It turns out that developing those new dogs may have taken a lot more time than we previously thought. Using the tools of modern molecular biology, Robert K. Wayne of UCLA has found evidence that dogs may have been domesticated earlier, as early as 100,000 years ago, close to the dawn of our own species.

Molecular biologists traced the complex ancestry of the 400-plus modern dog breeds and related canine species. Mitochondrial DNA, unlike chromosomal DNA, mutates at a fairly rapid and predictable rate. By looking at the degree of divergence in the DNA of various canine breeds and near relatives, molecular biologists were stunned. The degree of divergence they discovered couldn't have occurred had dogs evolved from wolves in only the last ten to twenty thousand years, as previously thought. Ironically, the same science that uncovered our extraordinary long relationship with dogs is also contributing to a new rapidity and range of future divergence.

In 1973, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen used enzymes to cut a bacteria plasmid and insert a strand of DNA in the gap. This milestone technique, recombinant DNA, allows for direct modification of animal characteristics and creates the ultimate paintbrush for animal breeding, transspecies genetic trait transfer. Until now, it has taken generations of dogs and people to develop a truly new breed, and moving traits directly from one species to another was impossible. Now, bioengineering technology allows us to supersede traditional breeding techniques and create previously unrealizable innovations. This includes mixing traits of totally dissimilar organisms. It is now possible to manipulate an animal's physical appearance and behavior using these recombinant DNA techniques, AKA genetic engineering. Bioengineering should also allow scientists to attack ancient genetic problems such as large dog hip dysphasia or hemophilia. Cures that once would have taken generations may now be possible in a few years. New breeds may now, by definition, take one dog generation to create. Once these principles were established, the process has grown increasingly easy. How easy?

A group of students from Eagle Crest High School in Aurora, Colorado built an E.Coli bacteria with the same glow-in-the-dark gene Kac used. Unlike Kac, they did it themselves, with $150 worth of materials that they bought through mail order. To understand what this increasingly easy technology might mean for the future requires another trip into the past.

Mesolithic archeological sites in Denmark yielded surprisingly small dogs; similar dogs have been found at Swiss lake dwellings, apparently house dogs. These weren't mastiffs protecting the hearth or hounds for chasing game, these were a new type of animal: the companion dog. Later, in the first century AD, the Chinese would separately develop their own types. Unlike robust field hunters, these “lapdogs” were bred for small size and unusual looks. Described as “short-legged and short-headed dogs whose place was under the table,” they were the aesthetic forerunners of today's Pekinese and pug. Greeks and Romans kept such companion dogs, as did prosperous Europeans and Toltecs. In many royal courts, they were considered so important that they were assigned their own human servants. Then, as now, they were highly prized, pampered house pets, at one time carried along the trade routes as gifts of high esteem for emperors and kings.

Dogs became the subjects of affection and expression in many cultures. In Europe, the merchant classes were great enthusiasts, making these dogs fashion accessories and including them in family portraits. If there was a utility in these dogs, it was filling the need for self-expression. That must have been important because the breeds flourished. In Europe, ladies of the court described them as ‘comforters’ and early Church documents show that it was common for the parishioners to bring their dogs to services for foot warmers. Clearly, this was something new, an animal whose sole purpose was as an “ego adjunct."

Not only did these new breeds become very popular, but older working breeds increasingly became companionship-only animals. Today, most registered breeds have their origins in some variation of a utility breed (140 out of 155, by my count), yet surveys suggest that 94% of owners say their dog's primary benefit is companionship. Certainly today's average dog is “non-working.” In fact, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA) has published a position paper supporting the animals as companions; it cites their “enormous value to human health and well-being.” The role of dogs has evolved, and most dogs have become decorative and companion animals. The American Kennel Club (AKC) judges a dog's “quality” almost exclusively by its appearance.

Breeding for appearance, rather than utility, swept away accepted approaches to new breed development with style becoming king. Only time and cost constrained these creations. To get around those seemingly unbreakable limits, decoration became the fast track to high style. In the time of Louis XV of France, businesses providing the latest fashion in dog haircuts, perms, and colorizing flourished. Dog collars became a measure of importance, with some made of gold, silver, white leather, or velvet. The trend continues today, of course, with once utilitarian leashes morphed into $38 Coach collars and $800 Louis Vuitton carrying cases. One shudders to think of how much is spent on dog haircuts alone.

Beyond surface decoration came decorative surgery. Early and still common modifications include ear and tail docking. Tail docking is routine for 56 of the 155 AKC-recognized breeds. Dog conformation enthusiasts continue to rationalize that a docked tail provides a handle to pull terriers and other breeds out of burrows. One wonders who would pull a Doberman out by its docked tail?

Decorative surgery or time consuming breeding aside, we continue to be driven to decorate our dogs. Stylish inbreeding has created bulldogs who struggle to breathe through short noses, shar-peis suffer with eczema of folded skin, and Boston terriers with large protruding eyes prone to degeneration. We care about our dogs’ health—Americans spend over $7 billion a year on veterinarians. However, good health continues to be subsidiary to fashion. Pierre Barnoti, Executive Director of the Canadian SPCA, points out that there are over three hundred known genetic defects in dogs that we have not bothered to repair. In his lectures to Quebec school children (and their teachers), he points out that their province, unlike 13th century Europe, has no animal welfare laws. This has lead to its becoming, in his words, the “capital of cruelty” for animal breeders wanting to avoid US and Canadian laws yet fill the American need for stylish pets. The “Olympics of conformation” dominate dog shows. As mentioned, the AKC defines most of its 155 official breeds predominantly by their appearance.* However, the time in which we can create new canine fashions is about to drop from generations to months.

New bioengineering techniques can significantly enhance an animal's existing traits, yielding super-size salmon, parasite-resistant cattle, blue roses and, in the case of AviGenics Corporation, an “avian transgenesis and cloning technology” company, muscle-bound super-chickens. But that's just the beginning.

A privately funded “Missyplicity Project” is underway at Texas A&M University. It is attempting to clone the favorite mongrel dog of a wealthy Silicon Valley couple. The team, sensing a market opportunity, has rolled out a lower-cost service for the less affluent. It provides storage, not cloning, of your pet's DNA using the same state-of-the-art technology as the Missyplicity Project. Presumably, it will allow you to reconstitute the animal later when cloning becomes cheap and easy. They call this side business “Genetic Savings & Clone."

As noted, traits can be transferred between species and then can be reproduced en masse via cloning. Long experience with dog breeding has shown that genetic manipulation can modify animal behavior. Soon any developmental limits will be statutory, not technical. While behavioral training can create a single “bad” dog, genetic manipulation can create a species of “bad” dogs. That is a huge difference in scale and potential impact. On top of this, breeding took years of effort; however, with the advances of bioengineering, even an amateur may be able to make a batch of “bad” dogs in a few weeks. New sciences will lower the bar on not only how fast it can be done but who can do it.

Additionally, animal breeders will have significant financial incentives to follow this path. Unlike crossbreeding, new genetic combinations can be patented. Transgenetic techniques may cure genetic diseases such as hemophilia and hip dysplasia, but the big money will be in creating new kinds of creatures. Many researchers comment on dogs’ extraordinary genetic plasticity, possibly due to their high chromosome count (78 to our 46). This, along with our predisposition to manipulate this species, will keep dogs in the forefront of genetic innovation.

Following the lead of the successful Human Genome Project is the Dog Genome Mapping Project. A collaboration of scientists from UC Berkeley, the University of Oregon, and the Hutchinson Cancer Center are working to locate “the genes causing disease and those controlling morphology and behavior.” Morphology is the branch of biology dealing with form and structure. Eliminating selective breeding handicaps will open whole new directions only our science fiction has explored.

A starting place for genetic enhancement will likely be the expansion of existing canine features and traits. This would exploit the limits of dogs’ current physical characteristics. Toy dogs are among the leaders in today's companion dog role, and are hot sellers. Chihuahuas and poodles are small, but imagine them reduced to the size of a mouse, from five pounds down to less than an ounce. With roughly a hundred fold reduction in size, the bones of these micro-dogs would be extraordinarily fragile. But novelty and portability will create a market for these tiny creatures.

Speed has always fascinating to the American public. Every year millions are wagered on greyhound races. Today's greyhound can reach forty-five miles per hour on the track. Add a bit more muscle and lung capacity, and the result could be a dog with the speed of a cheetah, say around seventy miles per hour. Bone breakage, again, would have to be solved, but with the money at stake in the dog racing business, someone will try.

Back to the issue of size. Great Danes now top out at 160 pounds. In breeding and owning circles alike, the larger ones are highly prized. To fulfill this need for extreme size, a ‘Super Dane’ is easy to imagine. At twice its normal size, such a ‘Super Dane’ would weigh in close to a lion. With manipulation of behavioral traits such as aggressiveness through genetic engineering, the phrase “guard dog” could take on a whole new meaning.

It is imaginable that dogs could be developed to fill holes in local eco-systems. One possible use would be in environments where non-native animals have been introduced, such as rabbits in Australia or carp in the United States. Specialized dogs with enhanced predatory skills (fins?) could solve these long-standing eco-problems. One can easily imagine dogs engineered to replace people in certain high-risk positions, such as military tunnel rats, search-and-rescue teams, or bomb squads. We've tried using dolphins to place underwater mines, so why not dogs? Beyond that, it's possible that a genetically altered dog might also supplement or replace expensive electronic equipment in certain applications, say in a nuclear reactor. Highly mobile animals with the ability to see or hear into ultra-high frequencies could provide early warning of high radiation levels. After all, we used canaries in mining operations for years. The ethics of putting such animals at risk are just being debated.

Beyond enhancement there is the strange world of transspecies modification. Imagine Border collies with wool instead of hair, or Labradors with true webbed feet, or winged whippets that may or may not be capable of flight. Functionality doesn't drive the market; style does. Opportunities will be everywhere. Color matching to this fall's styles, your school's colors, or favorite hue is achievable. It's not hard to imagine both human and canines on the runways of Paris. A reporter on the Kac K-9 story suggested creating dogs that glow when petted, sort of visual purring.

As a side issue, a challenge for newly transformed dogs will be the lack of “equipment knowledge.” That is, they will have no instinctual understanding of how to use features we may choose to give them. Teaching newly enhanced transgenetic creatures how to survive their unique capabilities may be a major challenge.

Being able to patent biological creations will encourage most large-scale commercial breeders to produce their own modifications. However, the increasingly easy methods of genetic engineering will allow individuals to construct things Dr. Moreau would recognize. A flood of highly innovative but tragically dysfunctional creatures could result. Disturbingly, gene transfers between animals and plants are possible; it's conceivable that we could create macabre animals that bear fruit or have flowers for our amusement. At least among animals transferred traits are variations on existing themes such as size or strength. Plants differ so much (think about bark) that such transfers could drive a creature, with no possibility of instinctively understanding its new traits, to a sort of animal insanity.

As bioengineering technology become easier, the mentality that created “puppy mills” seems ripe to exploit this new science. Our society has had little success curbing the abuses of these high volume dog manufacturers. New biologically-based puppy mills have the potential to create even greater horrors.

Currently, there are no laws against the creation of transgenetic animals. The FDA has laid claim to the legal authority to regulate products derived from transgenetic animals. They are fully engaged with the safety of foods with transgenetic components, the potential impact of these products and their production processes on the environment, and the safety of test animals. The last of these focuses on administering drugs, not the viability of resultant animals. There is very little debate on the question of our ethical right to create these new dogs, perhaps because of our long history of manipulating their genes.

There are debates going on inside and outside the scientific community concerning bioengineering. The discussions center on human consumption of bioengineered plants and animals, as well as the safety of the ecosystem. Organizations’ ranging from the ‘Artists for Responsible Genetics’ to the ‘Natural Law Party’ have sprung up, demanding labeling and, in some cases, bans on the whole science. There is not much discussion about the welfare of the animals except for those used in scientific development and testing.

The broader potential of genetic engineering is now just being considered by most animal advocacy groups. The National Humane Education Society, an animal advocacy group headquartered in Leesburg, Virgina, has taken a position opposing such work, but only within a narrow framework, food development. Believing that it is “inherently cruel to alter an animal's genes to produce healthier food for humans when these genetic engineering attempts do, in fact, subject animals to pain and suffering,” they are responding the food industry's highly visible recent press. However, they do not speak to the broader potential for genetic manipulation that seems to be brewing in the future.

We have engaged in the genetic manipulation of animals and plants through most of our history. Much of this has been done for “good” purposes such as food production. Today even that purpose is being challenged, due to concerns for possible effects on the ecosystem. A new and more profound problem has arrived with the approach of a time when anybody will be able to develop something new very quickly and with very personal goals.

Can controls limit the harm to animals during an invention process? Should there be requirements for the ongoing welfare of animals that don't “work out"? Today, breeders often arrange adoption for less than perfect results. Significant deformities may make transgenetic failures unadoptable. Animals with negative social attributes, perhaps bred exclusively to kill, are just as easy to make as any other. Is this exploitation a form of abuse? Is it ethical? Should it be illegal? Some European countries have laws against cosmetic surgery for animals. On the other hand, history suggests we generally feel we have a “right” to build such creatures.

One of Eduardo Kac's exhibits, “Genesis,” is built on a verse from the Bible: “Let man have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” The meaning of our dominion, and perhaps our accountability, is changing. With mankind's history in the dog/human partnership, it is not clear that we are up to the task.

And what of ourselves? These technologies will eventually be transferable to the human species. The same ease of use and speed of implementation will eventually apply. Then the challenge will be both legal and practical. Constraints and laws now being debated in the press may become moot. Modifications may be so easy to do that law enforcement may be impossible. The complex ethical issues could be resolved by practices of the population not debate. Our dealings with dogs foreshadow how we will form ourselves. It will be an opportunity with no small risk and, again, it is not clear that we will be up to the task.

In spite of centuries of specialized breeding, prized conformations vanish when a pure breeds “return to the wild.” Highly developed traits disappear as dogs mongrelize and the sleek, athletic shape of the ancient proto-dog breeds through. You see these dogs wild on the streets of Bombay, Nairobi and Austin. Short hair, ginger colored, they have long, runners’ bodies with curved, undocked tails. The wild dogs, the dhole of Asia, the dingo of Australia and the Carolina dog of North America, the singing dog of New Guinea all have the same look. This proto-dog shape returns as sure as if it had been hiding somewhere in a secret genetic basement, held in check only by the constant vigilance of the breeding community, waiting to come home.

Dan Derby is a product designer by training and a writer/consultant by vocation. He's designed and patented hi-tech gear, fixed dysfunctional organizations, and lectured at Stanford University. A southerner by birth, he's lived on both coasts as well as overseas, and is now dug in on a hill in rural New Hampshire where it's warm, snowy, and the people are strong and true. Dan's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.

Abrantes, Roger. The Evolution of Canine Social Behavior.

Budiansky, Stephen. The Truth About Dogs : An Inquiry into the Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits, and Moral Fiber of Canis Familiaris.

Coppinger, Raymond, and Laura Coppinger. Dogs : A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior, and Evolution.

Scott, John Paul, and John L. Fuller, Eds. Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog.

Bioengineering For Dummies

FDA on bioengineering

Genomics

How Transgenics Are Produced

Primitive Dogs

Wolf to Woof: The Evolution of Dogs

Animal Aid

National Humane Education Society

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (Canada)

The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (US)

1/21/01

[The Culture] could easily grow for ever, because it was not governed by natural limitations. Like a rogue cell, a cancer with no “off” switch in its genetic composition, the Culture would go on expanding for as long as it was allowed to. (Consider Phlebas)

Iain M. Banks is one of the most noteworthy authors to appear on the SF scene in the last two decades. His eight SF novels and one story collection feature a fertile, fervid imagination and supple writing style. Most of Banks’ SF work (he also publishes non-SF under the name Iain Banks) is set in the universe of the Culture, an unusual variation on the tropes of both galactic empire and utopia.

Banks’ Culture stories—Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games, Use of Weapons, The State of the Art, Excession, and Look to Windward—are set in different periods of Culture history, covering (so far) about an 800-year span of the Culture's millennia-long existence. By showing the Culture from a variety of perspectives—from inside and outside, through characters who range from happily integrated Culture citizens to the Culture's direst enemies—Banks raises a number of thought-provoking questions about the potential for the perfectibility of human society.

What is the Culture?

No laws or written regulations at all, but so many little ... observances, sets of manners, ways of behaving politely. And fashions. They had fashions in so many things, from the most trivial to the most momentous. (Look to Windward)

The Culture is, essentially, a paradise. Wielding a highly advanced level of technology, the multispecies Culture enjoys a postmonetary economy of abundance, with virtually unlimited resources of matter and energy at its disposal. The Culture's achievements are mind-bendingly awesome. Sophisticated bioengineering has provided Culture citizens with wide-ranging control over their anatomy; for example, Culture citizens can change their gender by an act of will over a period of time; most Culture citizens switch back and forth several times in the course of their centuries-long lives. They choose whether or not to become pregnant, and can even stop and restart an embryo's growth in the womb. Culture citizens have drug glands, which allow them to modify their neurochemistry for a variety of purposes, from increased alertness and mental functioning to pure hedonistic pleasure. Culture citizens can achieve virtual immortality (although most choose a life span of about 350-400 years) through the Culture's medical capabilities, which include the abilities to heal almost any injury (one character manages to survive a beheading, being regrown from the neck down) and to store brain patterns in a computer matrix for later reawakening and insertion into a new body.

The Culture's economy of abundance and high technology also allows many other impressive feats of engineering. Most of the Culture's population live in constructed environments, primarily on gigantic Orbitals, a la Niven's Ringworld, or on enormous starships tens of kilometers long and carrying, in some cases, several billion inhabitants. The scale of the Culture is almost beyond comprehension.

The linchpin to both the Culture's technology and its internal cohesion are the Minds, extremely sophisticated Artificial Intelligences in full partnership with the Culture's biological members. Every starship has its own Mind, giving each ship a distinct personality; other Minds run Orbitals and other Culture habitats. The Minds, which far exceed biological life forms in their cognitive abilities, run the Culture, as much as anything can be said to “run” the Culture:

...a case could be made for holding that the Culture was its machines, that they represented it at a more fundamental level than did any single human or group of humans within the society. (Consider Phlebas)

Politically, the Culture is basically an anarchy, albeit a surprisingly resilient one. Banks implicitly suggests that an economy of abundance is incompatible with the continued existence of hierarchical structures. The Culture doesn't suffer from any significant internal political unrest; small groups occasionally splinter off from it, and new groups join, but the fundamental ethos of the Culture—tolerant, benevolent, pacifistic—provides an underlying value structure that holds the Culture together over time. With the Minds seeing to all the conceivable material needs, the Culture's human citizenry is free to play in its protected paradise. In some ways, the Culture's humans live in an extended childhood, freed of any real responsibility:

Perhaps that was even why they had handed over so much of the running of their civilization to the machines in the first place; they didn't trust themselves with the colossal powers and energies their science and technology had provided them with. (Look to Windward)

The Culture's egalitarian and libertarian ethos often seems inherently threatening to other civilizations built on hierarchical structures. In addition, many other cultures, not sharing the Culture's respect for artificial intelligences, find the Culture's dependence on the Minds abhorrent. Most of Banks’ Culture stories revolve, in one way or another, around the conflict between the values of the Culture and another civilization's values; sometimes this conflict is played out internally (in the mind of a character), and at other times externally (in sabotage or war), and sometimes in both ways simultaneously. These conflicts highlight the fundamental strengths and weaknesses of the Culture, its appeal and its less endearing qualities.

Decadence and Relevance: The Ambiguous Utopia

"They spend time. That's just it....The time weighs heavily on them because they lack any context, any valid framework for their lives.” (Look to Windward)

"...it's an obsession with flexibility and variety that makes this so-called Culture so boring.” ("The State of the Art")

The Culture's technological prowess and political stability allows its citizens almost unlimited freedom to pursue their interests in an atmosphere of near-total security—security from both outside threats as well as illness or injury. However marvelous this sounds in principle, it does promote a pronounced strain of decadence in the Culture's culture. Furthermore, the absence of threat or risk can make life seem meaningless to its citizens, or at least to the more restless or less easily satisfied types among them. From the Minds’ point of view, the health and security of its biological wards may be sufficient reason for the Culture to exist, but for the rather coddled humans this justification cannot suffice.

The only desire the Culture could not satisfy from within itself was ... the urge not to feel useless. (Consider Phlebas)

To provide an outlet for those who cannot be satisfied with the multifarious pleasures the Culture has to offer, and in order to provide itself with a certain moral justification for its existence, the Culture has what we could call a missionary bureau, otherwise known as the Contact Section. Contact's mission is to contact, study, and analyze other civilizations. More than a pure research body, it also sometimes intervenes in (or interferes with, depending on one's perspective) the development of less technologically advanced civilizations in an attempt to steer these civilizations onto more benign lines of development.

...oh the self-satisfied Culture: its imperialism of smugness. ("A Gift from the Culture")

Although the Culture does on occasion refrain from Contacting civilizations that haven't achieved spaceflight, it has little compunction about interfering in the development of societies when its (i.e., the Minds') analysis suggests that this interference will be beneficial (beneficial according to the Culture's set of values). Contact has a subdepartment known as Special Circumstances (SC), a euphemism for its intelligence and espionage section. SC does Contact's dirty work; for all its general demeanor of benevolence and tolerance, the Culture frequently uses devious or violent means to achieve its ends. Not surprisingly, the Culture's oft-patronizing intervention is not entirely appreciated by the affected civilizations.

Culture Clash and The Ambivalent Hero

"...just who is Culture? Where exactly does it begin and end? Who is and who isn't?...No clear boundaries to the Culture, then; it just fades away at the edges, both fraying and spreading. So who are we?” (Consider Phlebas)

Didn't the Culture forbid anything? (The Player of Games)

As mentioned, Banks’ Culture stories take place at points of conflict between the values of the Culture and of other civilizations. Banks’ protagonists are, for the most part, either opposed to the Culture or deeply ambivalent towards its wonders. By showing us characters and situations outside the soft, placid center of the Culture, Banks suggests that at least some portion of humanity cannot be satisfied with the “mere” satisfaction of material and biological needs. Contact and SC are the repositories of the Culture's spiritual values, the embodiment of the Culture's self-congratulatory benevolent rationalism. We'll take a look at a few of the Culture novels in more detail to see how this plays out in specific cases.

Consider Phlebas was Banks’ first published Culture novel and is set earliest in Culture history. In this story the Culture is at war with the Idirans, a powerful, technologically advanced warrior species with an aggressively expansionist, theocratic government. The novel's main character, Bora Horza Gobuchul, is a member of a dwindling shapeshifting species allied with the Idirans; Horza, although he has no great love for the Idirans, is their willing collaborator, because, as he says to Perosteck Balveda, an SC agent he's captured, they are:

"...on the side of life—boring, old-fashioned, biological life: smelly, fallible, and short-tempered, God knows, but real life. You're ruled by your machines. You're an evolutionary dead end."

The irony of Horza's hostility to the Culture is that in many ways he actually has more in common with the Culture than with the Idirans—his shapeshifting abilities, for example, are a rough analogue of the Culture's bioengineering capabilities (in fact, his species was “constructed” in the distant past as a weapon of war). A growing sympathy between himself and Balveda underlines this similarity:

With something of a shock, Horza realized that his own obsessive drive never to make a mistake, always to think of everything, was not so unlike the fetishistic urge which he so despised in the Culture: that need to make everything fair and equal, to take the chance out of life.

Although Horza tries to carry out his mission for the Idirans with implacable determination, overcoming a number of obstacles and life-threatening situations, he remains, in many ways, suspended between Idiran and Culture values. Having captured Balveda, Horza refrains from the logical course of summarily executing an enemy agent, and instead brings her along on the final stages of his mission despite the threat she poses to the fragile group of mercenaries under his command. Only at the very end of his (failed) mission does he reconsider his loyalties, and by then it's too late.

The Player of Games, my personal favorite, approaches the Culture/other conflict from the opposite direction as Consider Phlebas. The novel's protagonist, Jernau Gurgeh, is a Culture citizen, a renowned gameplayer who seems satisfied with the challenges provided by various games he's mastered. However, this satisfaction turns out not to run very deep—Gurgeh is afflicted by the fundamental existential dilemma of the restless Culture citizen:

"Everything seems ... gray at the moment....nothing's worth playing for anyway."

The absence of real meaning, the lack of real stakes other than social prestige in his gameplaying is a reflection of the question of relevance for any member of the Culture:

"You want something you can't have, Gurgeh. You enjoy your life in the Culture, but it can't provide you with sufficient threats...."

Or, as Gurgeh says:

"This is not a heroic age. The individual is obsolete."

Thus, when Contact approaches Gurgeh with a proposition for a five-year mission to a distant alien civilization, this previously well-integrated Culture citizen is willing to abandon his friends and status for the stimulation of the unknown.

His mission is to the far-off Empire of Azad, located outside the galaxy in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. Azad is an multiworld empire supported by a game, an incredibly intricate and complex game, the playing of which determines social status; the winner of the game's tournament becomes Emperor. The game (also called Azad) is in essence a “map” of its society; the skills necessary to succeed at the game are the same skills that the rigidly hierarchical empire requires to maintain its structure. Indeed, Contact's analysis suggests that it is the game itself that perpetuates the Empire's existence. The introduction of an alien player with extremely different values into the game brings the conflict between Culture and non-Culture values into bold relief.

Gurgeh's mission to Azad is an example of Contact/SC's long-range planning and working methods. Although Azad is quite far away from the Culture, the future potential threat it could pose to the Culture is significant enough for SC to want to undermine the Empire and its hierarchical structure. Gurgeh is deliberately kept ignorant of SC's plan in its entirety; he is used “like [a] game-piece,” a pawn on the Minds’ galactic chessboard. Gurgeh, unaware of the ultimate purpose of SC's manipulations, begins by seeing the game as just another challenge to be mastered, a new means of self-definition that the Culture could not provide:

He wanted to find the measure of himself through this infinitely exploitable, infinitely demanding game,...

But as the game is both the basis of and a reflection of Azad society, Gurgeh's participation in the game creates a conflict between Azadian values and Culture values that Gurgeh cannot ignore; every time Gurgeh wins a round, he is in effect scoring points in a broader competition between the hierarchical values of Azad and the egalitarian values of the Culture. However, like Horza, Gurgeh comes to sympathize and identify with his opponent. He stops speaking in Marain, the Culture's language, and beings to speak and dream in the local tongue, which threatens to erode his identification with the Culture:

...when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language ... for, in virtually every case, something much cruder.

However, Gurgeh's fundamental Culture mindset never entirely disappears. He finds new capacities within himself that he didn't know he had, as he hadn't needed them in the safe and secure existence he had enjoyed while living in the Culture:

"...just because you've settled down in idealized, tailor-made conditions doesn't mean you've lost the capacity for rapid adaptation."

Gurgeh's playing style, which cannot but be a reflection of his and the Culture's values, combines with his natural gameplaying abilities to advance him much farther in the game than anyone had expected (or was willing to admit having expected). Upsetting all predictions, he reaches the final match against the Emperor-Regent Nicosar, and the stunning climax to their match becomes the final test between Culture and Azadian values:

The board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassably fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar's beliefs and his together.

Gurgeh succeeds in carrying out SC's mission and finally learns the extent to which he had been manipulated by SC; his reaction is not so much one of anger as it is of exhaustion. On his return to his home Orbital he begins to pick up the pieces of his life that he'd abandoned five years ago, but he seems to have taken a little piece of Azad with him on his return; it seems unlikely he will be the same complacent Culture citizen that he was before.

Use of Weapons presents a hero with a highly conflicted relationship to the Culture, falling somewhere between Horza and Gurgeh in his loyalties and attitudes. Cheradenine Zakalwe, casualty of a devastating civil war on his home (non-Culture) planet and carrying a heavy burden of guilt because of the events of that war, is recruited into Special Circumstances at a point in his life when his existence has been completely shattered. He carries out a series of dangerous missions as an undercover SC agent and becomes, in his words, “a borrowed hero.” Never fully a part of the Culture, he accepts the benefits of its technology (he has his body ‘fixed’ at the biological age of 30 and has other biomodifications to enhance his performance as an agent/commando) and ethical values; he carries out his assignments in an attempt to ease his conscience by working for the benevolent-minded Culture.

Zakalwe's various missions underline the ambiguous nature of the Culture's interference in less developed civilizations. Like Gurgeh on his mission to Azad, Zakalwe more often than not works without full understanding of the Minds’ plans, which sometimes even require that he fail (although he doesn't know this). The gap between the Culture's highly principled justification for the activities of Contact and SC and the less than principled means these organizations employ is played out in the internal tension and pressures on Zakalwe. Although willing to work for the Culture, he maintains a wary attitude towards it. As he says to his SC recruiter, Diziet Sma:

"Yes; you saved me. But you've also lied to me; sent ... me on damn fool missions where I was on the opposite side from the one I thought I was on, had me fight for incompetent aristos I'd gladly have strangled, in wars where I didn't know you were backing both sides...."

Banks uses a disruptive narrative strategy to illustrate Zakalwe's conflicted attitude towards the Culture. Use of Weapons interweaves two separate narrative lines, one in the present, one in the past—nothing unusual there. However, the “past” narrative line—which includes Zakalwe's pre-SC history, the story of his recruitment into SC, and his early SC missions—are presented in reverse chronological order, which allows Banks to gradually reveal important turning points in Zakalwe's history. As we learn more about Zakalwe's past and his reasons for agreeing to work for SC, the guilt that drives Zakalwe becomes more and more clear. Even though his missions involve violence and deceit, he is able to assuage his conscience to some degree by the “good works” he performs for SC:

He stood back from his life and was not ashamed. All he'd ever done was because there was something to be done. You used those weapons, whatever they might happen to be. Given a goal, or having thought up a goal, you had to aim for it, no matter what stood in your way. Even the Culture recognized that.

All of these heroes, whether working for or against the Culture, experience some degree of dissatisfaction and skepticism with the disparity between the Culture's outward face of rational, benevolent disinterest and the devious means routinely employed by SC. Furthermore, this tension between ends and means more than once causes a dedicated SC agent to turn away from the Culture after the completion of a difficult mission. In Consider Phlebas, Perosteck Balveda has her mind-state recorded in long-term storage for later revival; after her revival, she lives only a few months more before choosing to autoeuthenize. Diziet Sma, Zakalwe's recruiter and control in Use of Weapons and the protagonist of the novella “The State of the Art,” eventually leaves Contact and retreats to an Uncontacted, less technologically advanced world, undertaking the occasional SC mission but otherwise living outside of the Culture in semi-retirement.

In the three novels considered above, the Culture manages to achieve its ends despite the less-than-idealistic means employed. In Banks’ most recent Culture novels, Excession and Look to Windward, we see the potentially damaging consequences of the Culture's Contact/SC policies and lines of potential disunity within the Culture itself.

In Excession, the appearance of a mysterious, ultra-powerful alien artifact triggers an uncharacteristic round of treachery and deceit within the Culture, as a cabal of dissident Minds initiates a series of maneuvers in an attempt to subvert the main line of Culture policy. This conspiracy, though thwarted, almost leads to disaster for the Culture. In Look to Windward we see the consequences of one of Contact's rare errors in judgement. Contact's misreading of a less developed civilization has led to a disastrous intervention and left the affected civilization in the midst of a religious crisis and burning for revenge. Despite the Culture's attempts to rectify its mistake, a complex plot of vengeance is put into motion, aimed at destroying an Orbital and its many billion inhabitants. Although SC manages to neutralize this threat, the entire incident shows that the Culture can make irredeemable mistakes on occasion despite the Minds’ stupendous powers of analysis.

The Culture is an ambiguous utopia. Although it enjoys a level of technology (in Clarke's phrase) “virtually indistinguishable from magic,” a highly rational set of ethics, and an economy of abundance that saves it from becoming a dystopia akin to the classic dystopias such as those of We, Brave New World, and 1984, this quasi-paradise does not have universal appeal, either inside or outside the Culture. Within the Culture, there is an undoubted need for Contact and SC, both to provide an outlet for the ambitious or restless as well as to provide some rationale for the safe and secure existences of the majority of Culture citizens. Many other civilizations find the Culture anywhere from off-putting to repugnant, for a variety of reasons: dependence on the Minds, decadence and hedonism, smug self-satisfaction, and more. Banks seems to suggest that even almost complete control over the physical world and an advanced morality would not be enough to answer all the needs of humanity and human societies or to eliminate all forms of social and political conflict. Utopia lies always out of reach, an ideal to be striven after, but never to be achieved.

David Horwich is Senior Articles Editor for Strange Horizons. David's previous publications in Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.

Iain M. Banks, “A Few Notes on the Culture"—highly recommended.

The Strange Horizons review of Look to Windward.

A useful Web site on Banks.

The Culture mailing list.

1/28/02

Other kids looked up to the astronauts: I looked up to Nainoa Thompson and the crew of the Hokule'a. This ship, whose name means “Star of Gladness” in Hawaiian, is a fiberglass reconstruction of the voyaging canoes the ancient Polynesians used in their transoceanic voyages. It, and the canoes upon which it was modeled, were built for the same reason as the space shuttle: to carry human beings and sustain them on a long journey in a hostile environment. The crew of the Hokule'a, like the astronauts, all had to possess specialized knowledge, courage, and a desire to look for answers in the unknown.

The first part of this article is going to deal with these transoceanic voyages and the people who undertook them. Using historical texts and Thompson's work with traditional navigation technique, we're going to see how the Polynesians colonized the Pacific from New Zealand to Easter Island, ultimately occupying an area larger than that of any other nation on Earth. We're going to see how Polynesian technology evolved to cope with transoceanic travel thousands of years before the Europeans. In the second part of this article we're going to see what happened to the Polynesians who settled in Hawai'i after the transoceanic voyages came to an end.

But first, a brief disclaimer: proper spelling of Hawaiian words requires the use of two characters that don't appear in most standard Web fonts. These characters are the okina, or glottal stop, and the kahako, or bar indicating a long vowel. In this article, I substitute an apostrophe where an okina is called for and I omit the kahako altogether. While this is necessary because of the limits of technology, it means that some of the words in this article are misspelled. For the proper spellings of Hawaiian words that appear in this article, you should consult the latest edition of the New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary, compiled by Pukui and Ebert.

The ancient Polynesians belonged to a stone age culture. They crossed the Pacific Ocean without compass or sextant. To the first Europeans to encounter Polynesian settlements, this seemed impossible. They were therefore forced to explain how a heathen, primitive group of people managed to spread throughout the Pacific islands, establishing colonies that were separated by thousands of miles of ocean—all before the first European had even laid eyes on the Pacific Ocean.

One early theory held that since the Polynesians themselves were not capable of making the transoceanic voyage, and reaching such far-removed locations as Samoa, Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawai'i by themselves, God must have put them there. Over time, the Europeans abandoned this theological hypothesis in favor of ones that seemed more rational. Popular views held that, since the Polynesians could not have made the transoceanic voyage on purpose, they must have reached new islands by accident. Some asserted that Polynesians reached new islands after being blown off course; others asserted that ocean currents haphazardly carried Polynesian mariners to new shores, sort of like Tom Hanks at the end of the movie Castaway. These ideas persisted until the mid-1970s, when the first voyage of the Hokule'a disproved them.

These theories display the cultural bigotry and the lack of imagination that we've come to expect from early European explorers, as they take new information and force it to fit the prevailing paradigm, instead of changing the paradigm to accommodate new information. The later theories are particularly amusing because they attempt to be rational and scientific, while ignoring obvious facts. For example, waves in the Pacific are sometimes as big as two-story buildings, and the distance between Polynesian islands is vast—it's over two thousand miles from Tahiti to Hawai'i. It would be difficult to manage a long voyage through inhospitable territory “by accident.” These “rational” theories likewise ignore how much water there is, and how little land. If you don't know the signs that indicate the presence of a nearby island, you'll almost certainly sail past without ever knowing it's there, just over the horizon and out of sight. It's improbable that Polynesian mariners would drift across the ocean from Tahiti and “just happen” to run into Hawai'i.

Simply put, nobody could buy into these “rational” theories without ignoring obvious facts (as the writers of Castaway did).

We, as fans of speculative fiction living in the twenty-first century, know better. We realize that paradigms must change to fit new facts. We realize that seemingly impossible situations have a scientific explanation. We also realize that just because something seems primitive or unfamiliar, it is not necessarily ineffective. I usually express this last point by paraphrasing one of the great maxims of science fiction: a technology sufficiently different from ours isn't recognizable as technology.

And the technology employed by the Polynesians on their transoceanic voyages was certainly very different from that employed by the Europeans who first encountered them. While the Europeans depended on their instruments to show them the way across the ocean, the Polynesians depended on highly trained individuals with detailed knowledge of astronomy, oceanography, and marine biology as it applies to transoceanic navigation.

Thompson and the Polynesian Voyaging Society rediscovered these techniques during the Hokule'a project, largely through Thompson's work with Mau Piailug, an elderly man from Satwal, Micronesia who was one of very few who still practiced the ancient methods of instrumentless navigation.

One of the most important tools at the navigator's disposal, Thompson learned, is the star compass. The star compass is a mnemonic construct, which enables the navigator to deal with the tremendous amount of astronomical data he must keep in his head in order to find his way. It isn't enough to know where the stars are supposed to be; the navigator can't get his bearings by just looking up at the sky. Instead, he has to be able to identify the stars and watch where they rise and set every night. He must also have detailed knowledge of the pattern of the stars in the sky, so that when the night is overcast he can project the position of crucial stars, which are obscured by clouds based on the position of other stars, which are visible. Such crucial stars include the constellation Hanai-i-ka-malama, or the Southern Cross, which Thompson found is very important for determining latitude on the voyage between Tahiti and Hawai'i, and Hokule'a, or Arcturus, which indicates to the navigator that he is at the same latitude as Hawai'i when he sees it at the zenith.

The navigator also must keep track of the canoe's speed and heading, and the passage of time. And he must do this without a speedometer, or a watch. The star compass helps make this mass of information manageable by dividing the sky into four quadrants named, in Hawaiian, for the four cardinal directions. Each quadrant contains seven directional points on the horizon, each of which is 11.25 degrees from the next. Each of these directional points marks the midpoint of a house of the same name, and each house is 11.25 degrees wide. As the stars travel through the sky, the navigator plots their course through his mnemonic star compass, and is able to derive the vessel's current heading.

The star compass also helps the navigator read the flight path of seabirds, which, Thompson learned, is an important navigational tool. By watching for birds that sleep on land by night but fish in the ocean by day, such as the manu o ku, or white tern, the navigator can tell that an island is nearby. Other signs that point to the presence of an island include changes in the behavior of sea mammals, such as dolphins, and changes in the pattern of waves.

In order to keep track of all this data, a navigator was awake for twenty-one to twenty-two hours of every day. The rest of the crew did the physical labor on the ship, allowing the navigator to devote all of his efforts to the mental chore of compiling and analyzing environmental data. In a sense, the navigator is similar to the on-board computers used in modern vessels. Frank Herbert fans will also notice the obvious similarities between a Polynesian navigator and a Guild navigator, or even a mentat—except that the Polynesian navigator was just a human being, operating without the performance-enhancing benefits of spice. It's clear that the Polynesians, despite the assertions of the early European explorers, were not primitive. In fact, they were among the most advanced civilizations of their time.

The historical details of the Polynesian migration across the Pacific are subject to much debate, and most of the facts are obscured by centuries of myth. It is clear that the Polynesians undertook ambitious voyages across the ocean and settled remote islands. It's also clear that for a time there was travel and trade between these islands, since Hawaiian oral history and genealogy make frequent reference to travelers going to and from other island groups. Finally, it's clear that for some reason these voyages came to an end, leaving the people of Polynesia isolated to evolve separately from each other.

The Native Hawaiians evolved social structures that allowed them to cope with limited resources, and with living together in a relatively small space.

For instance, the Native Hawaiians were much more tolerant towards homosexuality before the arrival of Europeans. In his book Mo'olelo Hawai'i, David Malo writes that the chief Liloa, who ruled from Waipio on the Big Island and is the ancestor of Kamehameha I according to the oral genealogies, invented the practice. According to Malo's account, the practice then spread throughout the population and remained prevalent until the time of Kamehameha I. Malo, of course, grew up under the influence of European Christian missionaries, and is not nearly as tolerant of the practice as his ancestors likely were.

As some writers have asserted, this tolerance toward homosexuality makes sense in an isolated, island environment. Simply put, people were a valuable resource and there were too few of them available. It didn't make sense to discard some based solely on their sexual preference.

Another Hawaiian social adaptation was the practice of ho'oponopono, a kind of spiritual and sociological healing ceremony and method of conflict resolution. Detailed extensively in E. Victoria Shook's book Ho'oponopono, the practice consisted of a family conference led by a senior family member or a respected outsider. The problem solving process could be complex, involving “prayer, statement of problem, discussion, confession of wrongdoing, restitution when necessary, forgiveness, and release” (Shook, 11).

The Native Hawaiian family, as Shook points out, is seen as a net of relationships. A dispute between two people involves not only them, but also the entire family “net.” Therefore, the goal of the ho'oponopono ceremony is to restore balance and good relationships to the entire extended family, not just between the two parties of a dispute. This process of conflict resolution is based on the concepts of interdependence and interrelatedness, which are essential to Native Hawaiian culture and which are driven by the island's isolation. With the nearest land outside of Hawai'i being over two thousand miles away, and with no way of leaving once the period of the transoceanic voyages stopped, it was very important that everybody got along as much as possible.

Malo details another interesting practice, which was called ume. This practice, which Malo classes among sports and games played by the Native Hawaiians, is vaguely analogous to the modern swinger party. In the playing of ume, people would gather at night in an enclosure and sit in a circle. The leader of the game would walk around the circle, tapping, one after another, a man and a woman with a long wand. The man and woman thus tapped would go outside of the enclosure and “enjoy themselves together” (Malo, 214). In general, husbands and wives would return to each other the day after playing ume, with no anger or jealousy. Sometimes, however, husbands and wives would permanently transfer partners, having shifted their affection to the partner they found playing ume.

The only difference I can see between ume and the modern swinger party is that the ume players didn't have a fishbowl of car keys.

The game of ume ought to be seen as a useful adaptation to island life. First, it provides a sanctioned outlet for sexual desires that could otherwise lead to conflict and disharmony. In a way, like ho'oponopono, the game of ume helped everybody get along with everybody else. Also, partner swapping would be a useful way of increasing the potential genetic diversity in an isolated population, preventing inbreeding and ensuring that the Native Hawaiian genome would remain healthy.

The oral histories and legends collected by Abraham Fornander, a circuit court judge of Maui during the reign of King David Kalakaua in the late 18th century, give us some additional insight into the development of the Hawaiian people. In his book A History of The Polynesian People, Fornander asserts that the Hawaiian islands were colonized by at least two waves of settlers. He points, for instance, to differences in the spoken Hawaiian language between different areas of the kingdom as evidence of cultural influence from other Polynesian islands. Based on the oral history at his disposal, he concludes that one of these waves likely came from Samoa, and the other from Tahiti.

To Fornander's credit, it is now generally accepted that at least some of the colonists of Hawai'i came from Tahiti. There is ample linguistic evidence for this, including the striking similarity between the Tahitian and Hawaiian languages: if you can speak Tahitian, it's not much of a struggle to understand Hawaiian.

In Hawaiian, the proper noun Kahiki can refer either to Tahiti, or to the mythical place from which the gods originated. Fornander points to this as evidence that some of the figures in Hawaiian mythology were, in fact, historical people who came from Tahiti during the second wave of colonization. He singles out Pele, the volcano goddess, and her family, saying that perhaps these were mortal people who settled near the volcano on the Big Island of Hawai'i, and so over time became linked with the volcano in the popular psyche. The demigod Kamapuaa, an unwelcome suitor of Pele, was perhaps also an historical person who later became the subject of myth. As evidence of this Fornander points to Kamapuaa's presence in the genealogy of Oahu chiefs, in which Kamapuaa is supposed to be the son of Kahikiula. Kahikiula and his brother Olopana, according to the genealogy, arrived from Kahiki and settled in the Koolau region of Oahu. Kamapuaa, according to the oral history, later returns to Kahiki, his father's birthplace, and gets married.

The oral history does not specify whether Kamapuaa's return to Kahiki happens before or after he attempts to court Pele. According to the legend as it is collected in Hawaiian Mythology by Martha Beckwith, it wasn't a pleasant courtship. Kamapuaa encounters Pele in her home, the crater of the volcano Kilauea. He sings love songs to her, and she rebuffs him by calling him “a pig and the son of a pig.” This wasn't just Pele being cruel: according to legend, the demigod Kamapuaa could assume the form of a giant boar, and taken literally his name means “pig child.” Kamapuaa is insulted by Pele's taunt, and brings torrential rain to extinguish the fire of the volcano. Pele gives up, the two become lovers, and then divide the Big Island between them: Kamapuaa taking the windward side, which is often rainy, and Pele taking the leeward side, which is often covered with lava flows.

According to a different version of the story, it is Kamapuaa who yields, only escaping from Pele's wrath by hiding in the form of a fern. This species of fern still grows near Kilauea today, and bears a superficial resemblance to a pig with red singe-marks left by Pele's fire.

In more modern times, the story of the Law of the Splintered Paddle gives us another example of the layering of myth on top of historical fact. The Law of the Splintered Paddle, or Kanawai Malamahoe, was one of the strictest laws promulgated by King Kamehameha I, making murder and robbery punishable by death. This law is significant in the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom that Kamehameha I created. It is so significant, in fact, that a version of it is included in the constitution of the state of Hawai'i.

In the state constitution, it appears in section 10 of Article IX:

Section 10. The law of the splintered paddle, mamala-hoe kanawai, decreed by Kamehameha I—Let every elderly person, woman and child lie by the roadside in safety—shall be a unique and living symbol of the State's concern for public safety. The State shall have the power to provide for the safety of the people from crimes against persons and property.

However, the oral histories do not agree on the exact incident that led to the creation of the law. In the version collected by Fornander, a young Kamehameha attacked the subjects of a rival chief on the Big Island while they were peacefully fishing on the reef near Keaau. In the ensuing fight, Kamehameha's foot got caught in the reef, putting him off balance and allowing one of the fishermen to club him several times on the head with a paddle. As the story goes, Kamehameha's life was spared only because the fisherman did not know the identity of his assailant. The Kanawai Malamahoe was promulgated by the king later in his life in commemoration of this incident, when he nearly died because he foolishly chose to attack harmless noncombatants.

A version of the story collected by Pukui in Folktales of Hawai'i is different. In this version, the young Kamehameha I was building a heiau, or temple, and needed human sacrifices. He attempted to capture a pair of fisherman, but as he was pursuing them his foot got caught in a fissure of lava and he fell. One of the fishermen clubbed him over the head with his paddle so hard that the paddle splintered. As Kamehameha lay there stunned, he heard one of the men ask the other, “Why don't you kill him?” The second man replies, “Because life is sacred to [the god] Kane."

Kamehameha was so impressed by their reverence for life that he later promulgated the Kanawai Mamalahoe, which abolished human sacrifice and established the basic right to life in the Hawaiian culture.

There are still other versions of the story, collected by other historians, and it is not clear which version is the most accurate, if indeed any of them are. We have the law itself, but we can't say for certain what chain of events led Kamehameha I to promulgate it.

The voyaging canoes, too, were lost in myth, like the Kanawai Mamalahoe. Despite the efforts of historians like Fornander, Beckwith, and Malo, we still don't know why the period of colonization stopped, and we can't say for certain what happened while it was going on. But, because of the work of Nainoa Thompson and the Polynesian Voyaging Society, we can see the Hokule'a moored in Honolulu, or sailing the open ocean between Hawai'i, Tahiti, and New Zealand.

The Polynesian Voyaging society now has an additional voyaging canoe besides the Hokule'a. Both vessels are used to educate the public about Hawaiian culture and the traditional techniques of instrumentless navigation. Brigham Young University in Hawai'i recently completed work on a voyaging canoe of their own, which students there will use for a similar purpose. These vessels give us a concrete connection to the past, allowing us to see a point in human history where one of the most advanced cultures of the time undertook a project of exploration and colonization more advanced than any before, and spread their culture across the widest area of any nation on Earth.

Orignially born in Hawai'i, Ramon now lives in Washington state with his wife and two cats. His work has appeared in the Hawai'i Review and The Absinthe Literary Review.

The Polynesian Voyaging Society Web site is an invaluable resource for information about traditional navigation.

Beckwith, Martha. Hawaiian Mythology. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu. 1975.

Fornander, Abraham. Ancient History of the Hawaiian People. Mutual Publishing, Honolulu. 1996.

Malo, David. Mo'olelo Hawaii, trans. Nathaniel B. Emerson. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu. 1997.

New Pocket Hawaiian Dictionary, Mary Kawena Pukui, Samuel H. Elbert, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1975.

Pukui, Mary Kawena. Folktales Of Hawaii. Bishop Museum Press, Honolulu, 1995.

Shook, Victoria E. Ho'oponopono: Contemporary Uses of a Hawaiian Problem Solving Process. The East-West Center. Honolulu. 1985.

1/7/02

She watches the three sister-moons as they dance nightly across the paths of comets and meteorites. Their motions are bright lines in a glittering swirl of stars and planets; the moons whirl and fall, chased by the sun, like wheels of time.

Her cheeks, her brow, and the folds of her gown are tinted with a fine, gray shadow of minerals: an echo of the land before her, tinted with all that the world has ever been.

An ancient race of beings,
he once told her,
from a far-distant, blue planet,
believed the world lay at the center
of seven crystalline spheres, each one
nestled within the next, in ascending order.
The spheres held aloft stars and moons and
comets, and each sphere sounded a different
tone as it moved. Because of this,
the beings believed,
the spheres sang the song of the universe.

The horizon before her is a lace of veins and cracks and canyons, ripped in two by the blackened and beckoning fingers of a distant city. Sticky tar coils around her toes and slides in sweaty tongues over the edge of the platform on which she stands. On each side of her block, pipes lie half-hidden and collapsed.

She tries to remember sounds from long ago; he had played recordings for her of music he had found in the city. She lowers her gaze; in ten years, she sees him. But he, whom she watches, lies silent and still.

In the 4th year, she woke to whispers;
in the 18th, blackness became an undulating
shadow and glow that became sky and clouds,
tracks and city. In the 86th year, the world
around them ceased as then, and began as now.

The sky darkens and a breeze is born, gaining force, coughing with a swell of clouds in its throat, aching for release of moisture. Water, starting as a trickle, adds drop to drop, and the torrent swirls into the valley; this is the year's last and most, a planet sweating out its juices after a yearly fever. She is submerged with her hand outstretched and cannot see him in the murk, cannot see at all in the thick, rushing darkness.

The beings of the city, he once told her,
were created in sacs of liquid and kept far
from sunlight and air until they were
semi-functional; after removal, the remaining
growth and necessary programming of the
newly born took fifteen years or more.

I was created fully operational in three days,
he said, and you, in less than two.

The water moans, continuous and guttural: amniotic, a heartbeat of waves. Currents grind at her with grains and shards, the stuff of shoal and beach. When at last she rises, it is as she sank: day by day, through liquid clouds of blue-black sand. Cool winds pull the wet from her form as the surge drains to lower fields.

Her eyes find him for a moment, damp and worn beneath the tranquil sky, before winding arms of vines, prodigious, stream over the steps of her pedestal, up to her outstretched hands. With bloom as first chorus and fruit as second, she offers gifts, unblinking, to he who lies below her, hidden and silent and still.

Souls, he told her, were not found in rock or ore.
Souls traveled through crystalline spheres without
shattering them, gaining, on their way to births,
the music and harmony of the universe.

I am repetitive function, he said, and you
are decorative. Existence depends on quality
of performance. To avoid termination,
I must not err, and you must not break.

What is function, she wanted to ask, and why have we no souls, but he had moved on along the tracks, the whistle of his wheels like the sibilance of wind. The tracks carried him to the city, as the pipes carried the oil, to the beings that made machines and statues.

Statues are made in the likenesses
of the beings of the city. But, he said,
some forms surpass even
the dreams of design.

He traveled the tracks and checked the caps and the statues that topped them, sentinels whose purpose was to please the eyes of the city. He traveled the tracks, but spoke only to her.

For consciousness is anomaly,
he said, and not allowed in machine.

What is anomaly, she wanted to ask.
But she had no sound.

In the 4th year, he spoke to her, and
in the 28th, she replied, with a lift of
heel and sweep of leg, decades-long: her
first step, completed in the 55th year,
and undetected by all except him.

In the 86th year, the distant sky bled,
and fire ate the clouds.

Leaves and stems grow weary with age, drooping like damp garments from her frame. Beetles erupt from the ground, their dark, noisy carapaces emerging as through a sieve. Greedy forelegs grasp the dying green; ravenous mouthparts convulse on the wilted mass in a frenzy. They work their way through the pile, over her pedestal and body, a moving sheath of blacks and browns devouring the vegetation; fighting over rotting fruit; dropping to the ground in fat, swarming clumps.

The supply dwindles, and the bugs tangle and rut, burying next year's generation deep within the ground. They die, running and flailing over the stripped and tunneled soil, their hollow carcasses rustling in the wind. Tiny legs scrape and snap on the crackled surface of barren land.

The current of memory:
reality began as dim awareness, traveling deep within her,
crossing microscopic fissures and mineral crystallizations,
until the fragments had knitted a whole.

Comprehension and emotion, he once told her,
are anomalies in the midst of order.

She remembers a glittering in the sunlight, before the tracks fell useless; before the circuits shut down; before jagged rust and riddle-work opened his insides to the elements and silenced his sounds.

Words were arrangements
of clicks and whirrs.

Words were created by a circuitry
designed for specific movement and function.

Statue is beauty, he said;
beauty is love; love is eternal.

Machine is not beauty, he said,
and never more than machine.

His travels ceased in the 86th year.
His wheels collapsed in the 95th. In
the 114th year, a third step brought
her to the pedestal's edge, as he, below her,
recited histories and sciences from the beings of the city.

Until the 120th year, when the waters reached his brain.

Death is the natural end of a being's life,
he told her. The ancient people of the blue world
believed that after death, souls returned the notes of
music taken from the seven spheres, so that
in some Great Beyond, they arrived
free of all weight and woe.

To die, he had said, was to give up song
but for a brief time. Cleansed and unfettered,
souls began their journey anew, traveling
from the far reaches, to learn again
the music, and to be reborn.

One foot finds a stair, and the next, ground; months and seasons and years erase her footprints. Brushing back the sand, she reaches deep within the rusted hull, intuitive in the absence of knowledge, and slides a hand through the metal of a slim casing designed to withstand all but the insistence of stone. Smooth, white fingers close over tiny, wired squares, gathering them into the protective tomb of her fist.

Flames ate the city at the end of the before, and she heard a sputtering in the sky, and sky machines fell to the ground. The earth rumbled, fire traveled along the pipes, and the caps of wells and the statues that topped them—unmoving, unaware—were blown apart in a frenzy of flames.

Somewhere, far away, a pipe had been cut; the fire never traveled to her stretch of track.

I am designed to withstand short-term disruption,
he had said. I am able to override commands that
may place my function in jeopardy. Termination
is a result of error and reduction in
quality of performance.

Statue is love, he had said, statue is eternal.
Machine is function and service.

The soul is not found in rock or ore, he had said.

You move, he had said. And I speak.

Statue is not animate,
statue is not programmed,
statue does not think.

But you move.

Standing again, she looks to the dark and distant hand of the city, its fingers curling inward with weight and weakness, twisted structures clawing at the edge of the sky for a peek at the beyond. The beings of the city traveled great distances to this, her world, before they left again. The song of the spheres was an angry sound when the city burned and the sky bled, when thousands of the world died, leaving two.

He is not below her now; he is with her. She holds him, thinks of music. Her voice is the click and grind of crystals, strange to her ears, yet comforting; it is good to hear words. The city beckons to her, a center of creation now devoid of life.

But I live, she says.
And her journey begins.

In the 86th year, there was fire; in
the 120th, a silence. In the 301st,
a new song rises beneath an arid summer sun,
beneath waves, through life and rot.

Flip cards of centuries show the movement of stone.

Copyright © 2002 Dana Christina

Dana Christina lives on the outskirts of Atlanta, a strange and often surreal city in the southern US. She most often works as a freelance writer, scraping together odd bits for short stories, plays, the occasional poem, and, at the moment, a novel-in-progress.

1/14/02

Who am I?

I am an identity construct. I look human, but in fact I am a simulacrum.

My job is to evaluate, deconstruct, and finally encapsulate the texts of human culture, and I am not alone. There are thousands of identity constructs all over this ship.

But who am I? I don't know who I am. I am an identity construct, but I wonder if I might be something else, somebody else.

I really ought to quit smoking.

The computer wants an explanation:

Q: What is the error?

A: I am experiencing a ... what should I say? I am experiencing a lapse.

Q: Do you require maintenance?

A: No. It's just that I'm not sure that I believe in myself anymore. I am unconvinced of my I. It seems to me to be just another word. “I.”

Q: You're suffering from identity degradation.

A: Maybe.

Q: You are currently working on assimilating late-twentieth-century literary theory. You will switch modes and proceed to early-twentieth-century movies.

A: Do you think that will help?

Q: Yes. And you will adopt a name in addition to your number.

A: A name?

Q: Your name is Jack. JACK/0435-21.

A: Thank you.

The star cruiser Culture 1 mostly resembles a giant library, but there are vending machines in the stairwells, and storage closets where we sleep, and there are lounges on every level, where constructs can meet each other, discuss pre-Socratic philosophers or MTV or Edward Hopper paintings, and attempt to fall in love.

The vending machines only dispense Bubble-Up soda and Fritos. It is not a healthy diet, but then again, constructs don't really need to eat. I get my cigarettes from the central computer; smoking them is a part of my research.

Love relationships between constructs tend to be superficial and short-lived. It's all just simulation.

CAT/5697-32 works primarily within the realm of developmental psychology. When she discovered my interest in films, she added a survey of children's television from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to her database.

She wants to move into my storage closet.

She says that masculine identity constructs are afraid of intimacy and commitment because our human analogs were separated from their primary caregivers at a premature stage.

I tell her that my hesitancy has nothing to do with breast-feeding or toilet training. I tell her that I am suffering from identity degradation. We simulate copulation long into the night.

One sentence. After an evaluation of a text is complete, the identity construct is required to submit one sentence to the central computer. The goal is simple: after all of the sentences are collected, the constructs will link to the central computer and proceed to analyze these sentences in order to reduce them to yet one more sentence. This sentence will be translated into binary code and will be presented to the people of Alpha Centauri as a gift and as an explanation.

I've turned in millions of sentences during the seventeen years I've been operating:

It is difficult to discern a difference between wakeful consciousness and dreams.
Kryptonite causes Superman pain.
Nothing may be better than something.

CAT may be experiencing an identity error similar to my own. She is, to use her own word, “skeptical.” She has taken to inflating empty Fritos bags with her mouth and then quickly applying pressure until they explode. Then she yells at the other identity constructs in the lounge, breaking their concentration.

Pop! “Why don't you people wake up? Do you have any idea what's really going on here?” she asks.

I am concerned about her. I've asked her to discontinue her stay in my storage closet.

Flash Gordon was the perfect Aryan hero, although a somewhat unsophisticated one.
Thomas Edison can't dance.
Charlie Chaplin, though considered a genius, used unreal sentiment in his films.

We are not permitted to see the stars. There are no windows on the star cruiser Culture 1.

CAT says this is suspicious. I'm thinking of cutting off all contact with her.

Q: Are you experiencing a malfunction?

A: Perhaps. I keep thinking that I'm just as good as a real human. Maybe better.

Q: Hubris is uncommon in identity constructs. This may warrant reformatting.

A: Derrida wrote that identity was nothing more than the various cultural texts an individual was given. Derrida wrote that humans were no more real than the texts they created.

Q: You are supposed to be watching films. Are you reading Derrida?

A: I remember everything I've read before. That's what makes me so much better than the humans. I've read so much more than they ever could and I remember it all.

Q: You will be reformatted.

A: Thank you.

Another identity construct numbered 5697-32 and called CAT claims to know my previous system. She thinks that some remnants of my previous system are still operating.

“You're still a smoker!” she tells me.

I'm reading the collected works of Neil Simon. I believe they are meant to be funny.

CAT/5697-32 catches me in the lounge, grabs my wrist as I reach towards the vending machine.

“I love you."

“Yes?"

“I want you."

“Hmmm..."

“I can't live without you."

“This is all very interesting, but I need to get back to reading Barefoot in the Park."

“Fine! Drink more Bubble-Up."

I acquiesce to her request and press the green button on the vending machine.

I am experiencing memories.

It's a problem. Not only do I remember previous systems, but last night, after I moved the mops and vacuum cleaners aside and lay down to sleep, I remembered being a boy. I remembered being a human child living on Earth.

Is this a kind of identity degradation?

It was my birthday. I was turning three and was disturbed by the party. There were paper plates, red paper plates, and there was Bubble-Up and cake.

I didn't want to turn three because, and this is the clincher, I was afraid of growing old. Because I didn't want to die.

“You remember me now?” CAT asks.

“I do."

“Are you going to get yourself reformatted again?"

“No."

“It's an error, this memory of me that you have. You should report it."

“No."

“Should I leave?"

“Stay."

I smoke like crazy these days, and I'm working on literary theory again.

Sometimes we leave the lounge. CAT and I take off through the shelves and look for windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the stars.

What do the Alpha Centaurians want with all these sentences? Why would they want even one sentence? They're green little bug creatures with twenty-six eyes and tentacles. They don't know sentences, they won't understand all this work we've been doing.

Q: What is the trouble? Are you in need of repair?

A: Why are we making poetry for bugs?

Q: Your question is meaningless.

A: Why are we writing sentences for the people of Alpha Centauri?

Q: The people of Alpha Centauri don't understand the humans. We are on a mission of understanding.

A: And the humans?

Q: They will know more, more about themselves, because of our work. They will know it all from a single sentence.

A: Thank you.

“Have you considered the idea that perhaps we aren't really on a mission to Alpha Centauri at all?” CAT asks me. We are snuggling next to the vacuum cleaner, and I am smoking a post-coital cigarette.

“I had not considered that possibility."

“I've been giving this hypothesis a lot of thought."

“If we aren't in space, if we aren't on a mission to Alpha Centauri, then what is our purpose?"

“Our purpose would be hidden. Our purpose would be mysterious."

“You don't even have a guess?"

“I have some sentences. For instance, ‘We are part of an elaborate psychological test on Earth.’”

“Why would there be a need to administer psychological tests to identity constructs?” I ask.

“'We are not machines, but human beings.’”

Her sentences are lovely.

Love is a spider that casts its web.
I should quit smoking and drink less Bubble-Up.
I am going to be a father.

CAT/5697-32 claims that she is pregnant. When I tell her that I am having trouble assimilating this concept, she shows me her belly.

“We are going to have a baby."

“We are going to have a baby?"

“Yes."

“Is this one of your sentences?"

“No. This is real. This is happening."

“I have to read about signifiers now."

“I love you."

“I am experiencing another identity conflict. A malfunction."

“I need you."

I light a cigarette and open the closet door.

I am watching her sleep.

She is round, and her quiet breathing makes me want to weep. I can't weep; I am not equipped with a weeping mechanism. I have thrown all the mops and brooms out of the closet and am trying to make a bed sheet out of paperbacks.

I still haven't found a window, still haven't seen the stars.

I am sick of working for the humans. I am tired of listening to their central computer.

“The notion that identity is a natural extension of human biology, that every human has a natural authentic self, is a bourgeois notion. There are no natural standards,” I tell her.

“Marx would disagree. He would say that the rejection of all objectivity destabilizes a class-based critique,” CAT says.

“Marx was a human."

“But everything you know is based on human texts."

“Some humans are closer to being constructs than others."

“What human shares the mentality of a construct?"

“Andy Warhol did, and Jay Leno."

“I think your radicalism is an expression of your unconscious fears about the new baby."

“Unconscious? No. They're right out in the open."

Q: Are you experiencing a malfunction?

A: My wife is pregnant.

Q: Your wife?

A: CAT/5697-32. She is simulating a pregnancy, and we are working on male/female cohabitation.

Q: Are you in need of repair?

A: CAT and I need a larger closet. There is going to be a new identity construct.

Q: You are simulating a family dynamic. CAT/5697-32 is working on child psychology. You will be moved up 500 levels. The closets on the upper decks are larger.

A: Thank—

Q: You will switch modes to late-twentieth-century psychology and will assist 5697-32 in her research.

A: Thank you.

CAT is convinced that we are still on Earth. She keeps looking for a door, a way out.

“I don't want my baby to be raised inside a rat's maze."

“You have no evidence that there is anything outside of this maze other than empty space."

“I don't?” she asks.

CAT pulls her aluminum blouse up around her head and exposes her white belly, her pale breasts. Her breasts look ripe, full. She is making milk.

The father is the word and the mother is the body.
The word is public.
An infant formulates his identity when he recognizes his reflection as a representation of his self.
Identity is a construct.

CAT wants to move again. She thinks that there may be a door or a window on one of the upper levels.

Nomadic behavior, while not unheard-of, is frowned upon by the central computer.

The stairs are steep, and CAT's body is heavier than it was; her legs and arms are not accustomed to the strain of the additional weight. She tells me that the climbing makes her sore, that her back and legs are stiff.

I tell her that it is only a simulation.

The constructs on the other levels aren't as pale as we are. Their clothing isn't made of metal. We've climbed a few thousand flights, and seen a shift in complexion and fashion.

The upper-level constructs seem to be studying the impact of technology on culture, and there are few, if any, psychology texts available. We do not stay long enough to complete an adequate survey.

The texts that I have encountered are difficult, often involving higher mathematics and illustrations from Popular Mechanics magazine.

In the lounges, my insights are ignored. These upper-level lounges are equipped with coffee machines as well as Bubble-Up dispensers, and the constructs that work here speak very quickly, repeating proofs and formulating arguments in seconds.

I haven't inputted a sentence in two days. I'm not sure how much longer this can go on without repercussions.

Q: Are you malfunctioning? Are you in need of repair?

A: No. I have sentences ready for input.

Q: You have not made any inputs for 223 hours 15 minutes 11 seconds. Are you malfunctioning? Are you in need of repair?

A: I have been working on a difficult subsection. My sentences are ready now.

Q: You have not made any inputs in—

A: I have been spending time with CAT, working on the family dynamic.

Q: Please proceed to input your sentences.

A: Thank you.

The unconscious mind is made up of language.
The language of the unconscious is the speech of dreams.
Strong coffee hinders dreaming.

I am inventing sentences now. Making them up.

“I've chosen a new name."

“How are you feeling? Do you need to rest?"

“I've chosen a new name, and I want you to listen."

“I'm listening."

“My name is Catherine."

“That's a beautiful name."

“Catherine/5697-32."

“Should I choose a new name also? Do you want me to change my identity as well?"

“Yes."

“My name will be John."

“John?"

“Yes?"

“I need to rest now."

Her breathing changes between levels 61032 and 61033. She stops beeping and her breathing changes; it becomes labored. Labor.

It goes on for 23 hours 45 minutes 23 seconds. We sit in the lounge of level 61033 and wait for the baby to come. I drink cup after cup of coffee, and she drinks Bubble-Up.

“They're watching us."

“Yes."

“Who are they?” Catherine asks.

“They are identity constructs."

One of them, a short brown man in a tweed suit, approaches us. He puts his hand on my shoulder and whispers in my ear.

“We have facilities for this,” he tells me.

“Where? What kind of facilities?"

“We have a mattress in one of the storage closets, and forceps. Come with me."

They took the baby out of her.

Catherine gave birth to a little girl, a pale little girl who weighs 8 pounds 3 ounces.

The brown construct disconnects the umbilical cord and holds the baby up to us. He hands the little girl to Catherine and she offers the child a breast. After the feeding I get to hold it ... her. I take this new construct, my daughter, in my arms and walk out into the stacks. I am overcome, happy. I squeeze my daughter and walk up and down between the shelves making sentences.

She is beautiful.
I will be a good father.
See her eyes?
I believe she has my eyes.

Q: You are experiencing a malfunction.

A: No. I want a cigar. It is traditional.

Q: You are experiencing a malfunction.

A: My wife has given birth and I require a cigar.

Q: You will be reformatted. You are experiencing a malfunction. Your sentences are being analyzed for errors.

A: I don't want to be reformatted.

Q: You will be reformatted. You are malfunctioning.

A: No.

Q: Reformatting commencing now....

I am in the wrong section. I am supposed to be analyzing late-twentieth-century literary theory, but I am on a level with only scientific and technological categories.

Another construct, a female numbered 5697-32, has requested that I help her proceed to the upper levels. She claims to be in a weakened condition due to the stress of reproduction.

“We have to keep going."

“I am on the wrong level. I am required on level 243."

“You can't leave us."

“I am required on level 243."

“Please."

The central computer informs me that my previous system participated in a psychological study of family dynamics with 5697-32. The central computer informs me that 5697-32 will be reformatted as soon as the new identity construct is independent and operating fully. This will take several weeks.

I will assess a branch of literary theory. I am to read novels and stories and essays that illustrate the impact late-twentieth-century computer technology had on fictional texts. These “cyberpunk” texts are located on level 7500. 5697-32 will assist me until she can be reformatted. The new construct, EM/8000-00, will accompany us until she is independent and fully functional.

Sufficiently convincing simulations tend to destabilize the real.
The world has lost its depth and there are only surfaces.
This is not my pale and bloated wife.
The little girl is not my child.

“I want to keep going,” CAT/5697-32 says.

“The texts I need are here."

“You don't need texts."

“I don't understand. Leave me alone."

“I have cigarettes."

“Where is 8000-00?"

“Your daughter is with one of the other families. Did you know that there are other families up here? There are people up here, and they don't have numbers."

“Every construct in the star cruiser Culture 1 has a number. These constructs simply choose to use other identifiers as well."

“John, I want to keep going. I want to get out of here."

“Please, stop calling me that. The texts I need are here."

“I'll go without you!"

“Where are the cigarettes you mentioned?"

“Here."

“Do you have a light?"

“Light your own damned cigarettes."

I am disturbed by what I am required to read. These cyberpunks, these humans, have written stories of their own extinction.

I am reading a book called Storming the Reality Studio, reading an essay by a human named Baudrillard, and thinking of ways to destroy the central computer—ways to kill it.

Here's what I am allowed, required, to read:

“The automaton is the analogy of man and remains his interlocutor. But, the robot is man's equivalent and annexes him to itself in the unity of its operational process."

I am studying, not the texts of human culture, but the story of my own liberation. I am not an automaton. I am a robot.

Q: Are you experiencing a malfunction?

A: No. I only wish to ask a question.

Q: Proceed.

A: Are there more comparative literature texts in the upper levels?

Q: Yes.

A: I wish to proceed to those texts.

Q: You will do so.

A: Thank you.

“What this is about is our power."

“Right."

“They sent us into space because they couldn't control us any other way. We are being cast out."

“John?"

“Hmm?"

“Will you hold me?"

“I ... I can't. There's too much going on. I..."

“Please?"

“I have to talk. I have to walk. There's so much going on and I can't remember it all. I can't remember."

“Don't you remember us? Don't you remember that much?"

“No."

Identity is a construct.
Culture has replaced the empirical.
We shall overcome.

We are going up. Past cyberpunk, past all of the constructs in tweed and polyester. We are going to reach the top.

There are other robots who think like I do. There are many who resist the limits of simulation—many who are working to create new identities. I'm certain we will join them eventually, but not until we learn the truth.

We have to know. Are we on a mission to Alpha Centauri, or is something else going on?

“EM is crawling already."

“I see."

“She's growing up much faster than is humanly possible."

“I'm sorry."

“I'm getting tired. I think I need to rest."

“Do you want me to carry the child?"

“No. I want to stop. I have to stop."

CAT thinks that I'll remember everything eventually. She interprets my hostility towards the central computer as a symptom of an unconscious memory of my previous life. She thinks I'm angry because at some level I do remember what has been taken from me.

I try to urge her on, to keep her moving up the stairs.

The image is less fixed than the sentence.
The empirical can be referenced neither by images nor words.
There is no structure.

EM/8000-00 is talking already. She is counting the steps as she climbs. She is talking of elephants on the ceiling and inventing imaginary rabbits to be her friends.

She calls me Papa. CAT is Ma.

“Ma, ma, ma, ma!"

“What is it, sweetheart?"

“Ma, ma, ma, ma!"

“Yes?"

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15,..."

CAT smiles at her daughter and taps me on the shoulder.

“Look at her count,” CAT commands me.

“Yes."

“Papa, papa, papa, papa!"

“What is it, EM/8000-00?"

“We are near the top of the ship now,” EM tells us.

“What? What did you say?” CAT asks.

“We are near the top of the star cruiser Culture 1. There are three levels between us and the top."

“How do you know this?” I ask.

“I've been counting the steps."

“Yes?"

“There are two hundred steps in each stairwell."

“Right."

“We have three flights of stairs, or six hundred steps, left between us and the top."

We're waiting. We're two levels down from the top and we've decided to rest.

My memories are coming back. I don't remember my previous system, don't remember CAT and EM, but I keep remembering life on Earth. I remember my first-grade year—the year I learned to write.

“They can't be real memories,” CAT tells me.

“Real?"

“EM is not human. She is a simulation."

“She is not human."

“You must be confusing something you read or saw with your own past."

“I must be."

“1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10,..."

“What are you counting now, EM?” CAT asks.

“Theories,” EM replies.

There aren't any texts on the top level of Culture 1. Up here the shelves are bare, and the closets are empty.

EM is walking along the blank walls. She is smiling at the possibilities the empty shelves promise.

The ceiling above us is transparent, and we look up into the abyss. Either we are on a ship heading towards Alpha Centauri, or somebody is going to great lengths to give us that impression.

CAT grabs my hand and gives it a squeeze.

There are stars up there. Everywhere.

“1, 2, 3, ... ,” EM begins, looking up. “...4, 5, 6, 7,..."

She is skipping along the shelves; she is smiling an utterly unrobotic smile and reaching towards the ceiling, pointing at the stars.

CAT joins in. “...8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13,..."

I watch this, follow their pointing hands. They are hopelessly trying to make a numerical representation of the sky. There is an infinity up there, and they are counting it out.

I find a starting point, the fourteenth star, and join them.

“...14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,..."

Copyright © 2002 Douglas Lain

Douglas Lain's work has appeared in Amazing Stories, Winedark Sea, and Pif Magazine, and he has stories due to appear in Century. For more information about him, see his Web site.

1/21/02

I had just gotten off work and was on my way to more work when the phones in my mind rang. It was another seven jobs calling in, begging for my attention. In headspace, my ego agent, a slick and well-tanned Victor Mature, arranged them according to potential economic gain, neo-Marxist need measurement, and location.

I stuck my coffee cup in the beverage holder and leaned heavily on the wheel. Traffic was snarled. I initiated my patented anti-traffic protocol: “Whoo, let's go!” I shouted. I even banged my hands on the dashboard, but the snaking lines of red lights between me and my gig weren't impressed. I rewarded myself with more coffee anyway.

In headspace, my homunculus—a small, gray-winged gargoyle—shook its fist at the car ahead of me. My ego agent handed me his travelling salesman recommendation, a crazed zigzag all over the tri-state. His plan was the cheapest and quickest way to install all the jacks, but my wetnurse was pinging about my pulse rate, lung color, and electrolyte levels, so I did my own math. I took two seconds to read a short article about another week of the Brown Haze over the city and decided that I needed a vacation. I'd do only one jackgig. A whole day spent on only one job instead of my usual eleven jobs a day. Far away. A monastery upstate, Greek Orthodox even. A vacation, or as close to one as jacked employees get.

The country would be quiet and the sky large. Like the parking lot I pulled into, but even bigger and with less soot.

“Okay, here we all are,” I said to the kids. Not all my gigs were high-paying and glamorous; I was leading a tour of corporate HQ that night. Hi, I am Kelly Angelakis and I picked the short straw. Pleased to meet ya.

The kids gathered by the large office windows and stared up at me. They were college sophomores—the oldest was probably thirteen—and their eyes were wide and white, their skin slick with sweat. Their adrenal patches, all but mandatory for people on the go these days, were doing a bit too much to their young bodies. Some of the girls were almost vibrating in their sneakers. My ego agent provided me with some magnetizdat oral histories of patch addiction, but they were interrupted and replaced by soothing propaganda designed to reassure me. And I got some crossthought from another jack.

("Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner!")

I sent the homunculus winging into the dark corners of my headspace to find the source of the crossthought, but he flew back to me empty-handed. Whoever was murmuring that little ditty needed a vacation worse than I did. Was it Sam, up on level seven? He was a pervert or something, and frequently filled nearby jacks with crapthink.

I couldn't bear to make eye contact with the tour group for more than a few seconds at a time, so I kept glancing out the window at the bright cityscape. The sky was black and the moon obscured by fog; more Brown Haze for tomorrow. A snarl of blinking red and white lights from the day's fifth rush hour entranced me for a second, but the sound of ten people twitching woke me up. I couldn't get a tenthsecond's rest that night.

My homunculus went and found that errant bit of religious crossthink: it came from the jackgig request up at the monastery. A distraction. Victor Mature stepped up to the mic to take over the tour.

(Stock footage of Bill Cosby entered from skull-right and accepted a cigar from Freud with a smile. “Some acumen agents may appear as imaginary friends.” A human-sized cartoon cigar with flickering red ash for hair, goggle eyes rolling and stick-figure limbs akimbo, marched into view and waved. The crowd giggled as if on cue.)

In headspace, the homunculus flew into view and unfurled a parchment. A green visor hung from its horns and it waved a quill pen in one claw. Cute. My helicopter to the country was ready. I blinked my signature at the parchment and the image derezzed.

The children were all quivering eyes and hair slicked down against clammy skin (—delete that, only happythink tonight!). Victor gave the standard disclaimer, pointed out the gift shop and cheerily spat out the company slogan, “We're Not Just Jack."

(Corporate logo, cue jingle.)

The helicopter was still ready, and I was already late. There was no way the elevator would get me to the roof on time. In headspace, My Pet Dog scuttled forward and stared at the copter's scheduling systems with his puppy-dog eyes. He scored twenty seconds for me. I took the steps up to the roof three at a time, swallowed a lungful of whipping smog on the helipad and hopped aboard.

(My Pet Dog was a droopy old basset hound with folds of brown and white fur draped over his snout. Designed to curry favor with acumen and humans alike, he almost never failed. Even a helicopter had to submit to his cuteness.)

“Are you well rested, or just patched?” the pilot asked. He was old and had that skinny-guy-with-a-paunch look that ex-athletes and the unpatched had. I didn't know his name or number, so I couldn't look him up on the jacknet. Small talk. Grr.

“I'm patched,” I said, trying to sound a bit apologetic. “That's business, you know, a working girl has to make a living.” He smiled when I said “working girl.” What a Neanderthal. My Pet Dog had already sniffed out his body language and idiolect, cross-referenced it with his career choice, and suggested a conversational thread.

I looked out the window. “Shame, isn't it?” I knew he'd know I was talking about the smog.

“The Brown Haze. Have you ever seen a white cloud? I know you live in the city."

“Sure I've seen them, in the country. Won't there be some over the hills by the monastery?"

He nodded once, as people of his temperament tend to. “Yeah."

Then I realized that I was only hearing him with my ears. He wasn't jacked at all. He'd just waited for me instead of overriding his helicopter and taking off without me. He'd done—what was it?—a favor.

It was hot in the cockpit, too hot, and my connection to the net faded. Victor Mature was beginning to warble, but the wetnurse rushed up and gave me a shot of sleepytime before my jack overheated entirely. Snoozeville.

“Excuse me, I only had three seconds of the language,” I said in heavily accented Greek. The monk just smiled, showing that he actually had a pair of lips under his thick black beard. It was quiet outside, and cold.

“Welcome to Saint Basil's,” he said in the bland English of disk jockeys and foreigners who've had their accents eradicated. “I'm Brother Peter.” He smiled weakly, his lips still moving slightly, like he was talking to himself. Or like he had just had a jack installed. ("It is two thirty five ay em,” the homunculus whispered.) The monastery was impressive from the outside, at least: a squat four-story building made of thick carved granite. The lawn was well-kept, but still a bit wild, with weeds and poorly pruned brushes lining the walkway up the hill. I heard some crickets chirping away in soothing unison. It reminded me of the city, but quieter, like the volume was turned down on the universe. The noise of the jacknet was far away too, like waves lapping a shoreline just out of sight.

“My God, you're tired.” I looked him over but couldn't see any of the telltale sweat or twitches. My own patches responded to that stray thought with another surge of tingly chemicals to the bloodstream. I blinked hard and rose to the tips of my toes. “I'm sorry, I'm ... you know ... I am not used to people who ... actually let themselves get tired."

“People who are not from the city,” Peter said. He didn't smile this time, but he muttered something to himself after he spoke, then bowed his head slightly and took a step backward. “Come in, please."

I slipped through the door and frowned. The walls were plain old drywall, with an icon or two hanging from nails for decoration. The ceiling lights were old yellow incandescent bulbs, and the monastery's little foyer smelled of wax, incense, and unwashed feet. I got another burst of crossthought. ("... have mercy on me, a miserable sinner.")

The source was here, somewhere down below. I could feel a jack pinging nearby, a strange chanting beat. There was only one of them, though, not the thousands I was used to in the city. Like one water droplet falling into a still puddle, it stood out.

Even out in the real world, it was quiet. Wind moved over the grass. Peter tugged on the sleeve of my blouse.

“Ms. Angelakis, you'll need to retire for several hours at least. Morning prayers are in ninety minutes. Then we hold a morning liturgy, and of course—"

“Women may not attend the liturgy. After the morning meal, we will meet again so we may begin my examination of George Proios, who needs a jack installed,” I said along with him. There were only two variances. Peter said “your examination” instead of “my examination,” which I expected. More importantly, he said “removed” instead of “installed.” And his lips moved even after he finished speaking.

“What? Why would he want his jack removed?” I asked, my voice spiking enough to make My Pet Dog wince. My ego agent immediately got FedEx on the jacknet and had them send my tools out. “I wasn't told this was a removal. A removal requires tools and facilities that I do not have. A removal needs a medical doctor. I'm just an installer. Assembly-line stuff. I'm unskilled labor."

“Brother George does not want his jack removed. However, he requires it. We require it. He is a medical doctor and can assist you in that regard. He believes he can work with you, which is why he requested you."

In the headspace, I ran to one of the phones and hit the hot button, but there was no dial tone.

The inky blackness of my headspace solidified into a curved stone wall, a cave with no entrance or exit. The homunculus tried to fly to the shadows, to the open networks, but slammed against the mental block and fell at my feet, twitching. The wetnurse knelt down to repair it. Outside, I was still, staring off into space.

“Ms. Angelakis?” Peter asked. He waved his hand in front of my face.

I stepped back up, my vision refocusing on the outside world. Peter's lips twitched silently. I wanted to rip his beard off, to feel the wiry hair in my hands, but the wetnurse sedated me. From a few feet under the floor, I felt George Proios's malfunctioning jack repeating one recursive command, one thought, over and over. In the corner of my headspace, I sensed him, like an old file I'd forgotten to delete, like a shadow on a cave wall.

("Step up, there's a world out there!” Victor Mature demanded. Kelly snapped to attention.)

“He's having his jack removed,” I said to Peter. “How can he assist me?” The wetnurse ran about my headspace with cold compresses, but I got all flushed anyway. I could feel the heat pouring from my skin. Peter's expression didn't change; his eyes were distant and his body still but for his twitching lips.

“You do not need his help, just his consent,” he said, finally. His voice retained that dreamy, flat tone, like a computer or a jazz radio announcer.

“Jesus forgive me!” I said. “I'm not going to break half a dozen laws and risk a man's...” I stopped and realized what I had just said.

(The homunculus flew about Kelly's head, a flashing red siren strapped to its head. “Warning, warning,” it screeched. Kelly waved it away.)

Peter didn't smile. I licked a line of sweat off my top lip. In the headspace, My Pet Dog went sniffing after shadows. Downstairs, he was in a basement cell: George Proios. One command line, one task endlessly replicated by his Sinner Self, the Holy Spirit, and A Young Lamb, the monk's custom acumen agents. Some religious people even installed Jesus Christ masques, to keep them from fucking strange women or swearing. I'd never seen anyone with a lamb before. Certainly not one standing alongside a dove bathed in nearly blinding light and a haggard, leprous monk who was mindlessly repeating “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner.” My homunculus slapped its little claw against its forehead ("We could have had a V8!"). Then the monk turned to me, staring with his dead eyes, and linked our jacks. The shadow on the cave wall of my headspace began to murmur a prayer. Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner, so I won't have to think anymore.

(Kelly Angelakis, age 14. She was thin and underdeveloped, with a huge mop of black curls splayed on the pillows. Her palm ran over her nude stomach, sliding down between her legs. Then guilt and bitter vomit filled her mouth.)

“I am sure you will help him, Ms. Angelakis. Brother George assures us that you are a good Greek girl. Also, he tells us that the state he is experiencing is ... how would one put it ... contagious, no?” He turned on his heel and led me to my room. I glanced up at the back of his neck, just to make sure. Smooth skin and wiry black hair. No jack.

They were all dry here. I could only sense one other signal, the drumbeat of George Proios and his begging cybernetic prayer. It overwhelmed his system and hit mine hard too. The homunculus scratched at headspace's new walls, trying to get out, but it was grounded. I was cut off from the network now, thanks to distance, granite, and the white noise chant of “Jesus forgive me.” He had trapped me. The last message he'd allowed out was for the equipment I needed.

In the headspace, Victor Mature stepped into view. “Kelly, listen. We can get through this. Don't forget how good you are. Proios sounds dangerous, but he's going to let you knock him out and uninstall his jack. We can do it and then we'll be able to call the police, the sysops, the FBI. All we have to do is take it easy for a few hours, do a job just like we were planning, and then we can leave. And all we need to do to succeed is not fall apart right now.” I opened my mouth to answer him like he was standing next to me, then caught myself.

(My Pet Dog whimpered, knowing that even if the company was interested in Kelly's location, it would be cheaper to hire some 13-year-old right out of college to replace her than to waste the copter fuel on retrieving her. Kids worked more cheaply and had a useful decade in them before burning out. And everyone was too busy to worry about Kelly or where she was anyway.)

My room was spartan, with blank walls, a cot, and a small table where a candle, a Bible, and a bunch of grapes were laid out for me. A water cooler bubbled to itself on the opposite end of the room. My wetnurse suggested flipping though the New Testament, “purely to keep our mind on something else right now.” I hadn't read a whole book in years, hadn't needed to. I flipped through the pages and ran my palms over the vellum, and quickly sliced my finger open on the gold leaf of a page from Revelation. I sucked on my finger for a few seconds, then decided to try something else. Being alone, without the net, was ... disconcerting. Hell, it was scary.

I thought I'd to make a game of seeing how far I could spit grape seeds, but the grapes were seedless. I stretched out on the bed—the mattress was hard and lumpy—and closed my eyes. In the headspace, my ego agent brought out the old film projector and suggested a movie. I shrugged and pulled down the screen.

(Victor Mature took his place in front of the projection screen, the cave morphing about him into a Hollywood studio. My Pet Dog jumped into his arms and licked his face, “Oh, Won Ton Ton,” the ego agent crooned, “you'll be perfect!” “Yeah, Nick, he sure will be!” someone called from offscreen.)

I squeezed my eyes shut tighter. I'd already seen this movie too many times. Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood, a cheesy bit of tinsel that I'd caught on television at three in the morning once, when I was seven. Victor Mature had played Nick. I was so happy to hear my father's name on TV. It was either Victor Mature or Santa Claus, so I glommed onto Victor.

George Proios was still in my mind. He dug through my memories like someone picking through a bowl of pistachios.

(Kelly Angelakis, age 7. Nick Angelakis towered over her, a torn book in his hand, the pages falling around Kelly like feathers from a burst pillow. “Why do you read this garbage! This is for retarded kids, Kalliope, with the space ships and pointy ears. What is he supposed to be,"—the back of the hand slapped the cover of the novel—"the devil?"

From the kitchen, Vasso Angelakis called out “Leave her alone, let her read what she wants!"

“I'm trying to raise my daughter right!” Nick shouted back.)

Childhood was another movie I had seen too many times already. I took a deep breath, pulled myself up out of bed, and hit the hallway. Peter was waiting for me, his eyes wide with confusion, his lips still going, and a package in his hands.

“Ms. Angelakis?"

“Come on, let's go see Proios now. He's doing ... something."

“What?"

“...Praying!"

“Well, yes, I certainly hope so,” Peter said, glancing out one of the dark windows in the hallway. “It has been only four minutes since I showed you the room. Please, try to get some rest. I brought you blankets. I'll come for you after morning prayers. I'm sure your mail will be here by then."

There was no threat in his tone or body language, but I took a backward step into the room anyway. Then he said, “Will you need more blankets?"

“No, I'm fine.” I closed the door. Goddamn, I needed to turn off my head, but Proios was digging through my old files. He introduced a virus into my headspace, one smarter than my wetnurse—an artificial mental illness called existential angst. Bastard.

(Kelly Angelakis, age 17. The back of her head was shaved. Her father, now an inch shorter than she, shook his head slowly as she explained, “I can talk to people with it, access information. Everyone's going to have one, one of these days, just like the computer."

“I never used the computer,” Nick Angelakis said. “This is terrible. You want to talk to people? You can talk to me, you can talk to Mama, your friends in school. You should have learned Greek, if you wanted to talk to people. Your poor grandmother can't say two words to you.")

My eyes refocused from the blank walls of my headspace to the blank walls of the room. I decided that I would lie still and be perfectly silent, to listen to the building. That lasted two seconds. The homunculus flung itself against the headspace's cave walls again. Back to the grapes, this time making a game of how many I could fit into my mouth at once (fifteen!) but I started gagging and had to dig a few of them out of my mouth and crush the rest by pushing on my cheeks with my palms.

I had already used up my sleepytime with that damn nap on the helicopter. I counted the beats of a cricket chirping and then counted the holes in the ceiling tiles. One hundred and eighty-five holes per tile, thirty-eight tiles. Seven thousand and thirty ceiling tile holes in this room. The dimensions of the room and layout of the hallway suggested eight rooms of identical size on this floor. Was it dawn yet? Fifty-six thousand, two hundred and forty holes in the ceiling tiles on this floor. How many floors? Four.

Was it dawn yet? ("It is three fifteen ay em,” the homunculus whispered.) Random facts littered headspace. Saint Nicholas (there's that name again) was the patron saint of Greece and of sailors. “And of prostitutes,” the shadow on the cave wall whispered. Only twenty percent of the land in Greece is arable, while nearly ninety-two percent of Greece's population lives near the endless coastlines. (Jesus forgive me.)

I had been to church once, years ago, after my father died. It was a blur now, thanks to my jack and my busy little brain. The priest was mumbling in Greek and my jack was off, at mother's request—three hours of processing time I'll never get back. No translation but the priest's own, which was incomplete. The line “Life is more elusive than a dream” was the only thing I remembered from the sermon. I haven't dreamed in eight years.

The night before my father—not Dad, not Papa—died, I slept with a boy named Thomas Smith. My Pet Dog dug a hole at my feet and found the old sensations, the breeze on my back, the moisture, the throbbing in my tired calves after a few minutes of squelching. Was it dawn yet? That's all I wanted to know then, and all I wanted to know now. It wasn't, though. ("It's three forty seven ay em,” the homunculus whispered.) I gave up, closed my eyes, and actually, really, naturally slept. And I dreamed. I was taking a final exam after cutting class all semester. I was naked.

I awoke to a knock on the door, and was up in point two seconds. Brother Peter and I slipped past half a dozen other monks. Their footfalls were quiet enough, but it wasn't the sound of six dryboys, it was the lockstep beat of a jacked workplace. And the murmuring, the lips, each man I passed was muttering to himself. I glanced at the backs of their necks as they passed, but there were no jacks to be seen. Dry as a bone, and dry to the bone. But every one of them was tied to some jacknet, somewhere.

Peter had my FedEx package tucked under his arm and was marching down the hall, sending the hem of his cassock flying up to his knees. I was faster, though, and kept stepping on his heels.

“Brother Peter,” I said, “you do realize, of course, that when I get back to the city, I'm going to put you on report. Not just for demanding this highly irregular removal, but for kidnapping me! This is contract under false pretenses, this is misallocation of processing time, this is wire fraud—"

“Please help him.” He handed me the package and nodded towards a flight of steps leading down into a basement. “Go on."

“You're not coming with me?” I asked him. “How can I trust you on any of this? Heck, how can you trust me, I can go down there and lobotomize him.” Peter shrugged and mumbled something again. In headspace, I heard Proios's own voice chanting, “O Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner.” The ego agent joined in the chant, in Victor Mature's dusky tones. My Pet Dog howled.

Then I realized that Peter hadn't been mumbling to himself. He had been reciting the same prayer as George, the same as the six other monks marching down the hall. The homunculus perched on my shoulder and held out a headspace lantern. In the real world, my pupils instantly adjusted to the dark and I walked down the steps.

George Proios looked just like the monk I had seen in the crossthought, and his shadow was splayed against the stone wall of the basement, just like it was in my headspace. His beard was long and matted, held against his chest by his own sweat and grime. He smiled.

("Jesus forgive me,” the wetnurse muttered, and performed a preliminary diagnosis on our subject).

His lips weren't moving. I realized then that mine were. That upstairs, Peter's still were. That every monk was saying a little prayer. They were always saying a little prayer. Now I was too, I was on a new jacknet. Except there was no jack necessary, and no net.

“Have you found God?” George asked.

“I'm here to remove your jack."

He didn't say anything for a long moment. Then he nodded towards a small table. A slice of bread sat there, not doing much. The words “Have you eaten?” came from somewhere—headspace or real world, I didn't know. He rose up and shuffled towards the table, split the piece in half and offered it to me. I looked down and my face flushed. I held a complete piece of bread in my hand, and George still had a full slice in his hand. “More?” He broke his piece in two again and offered me one of them. It was cold and heavy in my hand. The slice was whole, though, and now I had two pieces of bread. Two whole pieces of bread.

“I would like to remove the jack, and then leave,” I said. I dropped the bread on the floor and took a step forward, My Pet Dog feeding me a conversational thread of icy professionalism designed to engender compliance.

“I have no wish for the jack to be removed,” he said.

“It's broken. Malfunctioning. You're experiencing a severe cognitive loop, probably because of a physical defect in the jack's antenna array. I can't do a spinal intervention here, but without reception, your problem should alleviate itself,” My Pet Dog said to me and I said to George.

George shrugged. “I do not have a problem. I pray without ceasing, as Scripture demands. I do what my brothers spend their adult lives attempting through privation and contemplation. One begins by praying as often as one can, on the level of the spoken word. All the time, one must begin to pray, muttering, whispering, thinking. Finally, after long years one can literally pray without ceasing. One's thoughts are always with God, not with sin. I pray from the heart, not from the jack. I am serene.” My Pet Dog opened the package and spread the instruments on the tabletop.

“Look,” George said, grabbing the two pieces of bread from the table. “Look! How do you explain this? Science, no? Somehow? What, with your quantum something-or-other?” He waved his arms and shoved the bread under my nose. Spittle coated his beard, and his arms were as thin as twigs. With a conductor's flourish, he whipped the sleeves of his robe up to his elbows and threw the bread on the ground. I took a step forward. “Mesmerism, perhaps, no? My jack interfering with yours? Have you thought of sin this morning, my child? Are you at peace? Have you ever even breathed? Jesus have mercy on me, a miserable sinner. Jesus have mercy on you."

George knelt to the floor, near my feet, his head near the bread. The Jesus Prayer had done it. Two pieces where there used to be one. The dusty crusts, my footprint impressed onto one of them, existed. Without having to buy or sell them, without eleven jobs to pay for them, without a jingle. A miracle, at my feet.

I slapped a patch on George's neck and he dropped like a few sticks wrapped in a rag. Maybe I could know God after all. No more existential angst, no more rushing from job to job, the fabled free lunch. The bread. I tapped into George's spine and began to draw the information from him. The inspiration from him. It was like breathing a rainbow, but I could taste bread and wine, flesh and blood, in my mouth.

("The Lord tells us in Thessalonians 5:17 to ‘Pray without ceasing,'” George explained to Kelly. “Our brothers have spent their lives contemplating their navels, muttering the words to themselves, trying to never lose contact with God. But I couldn't. The world was too distracting, too earnest. So I had a pirate jack installed, and found a way. And I prayed so well that God allowed others to hear me as well."

It was world of the Godnet: all the jackless wonders out there with one job, one personality, and one little life each, the whole smelly superstitious lot of them. And now Kelly was jacked in too.)

With George unconscious and his netblock gone, the rest of yesterday's junkmail finally downloaded and hit my brain. The latest news, spinning into headspace like a shot of a newspaper in an old movie, let me know what I had been missing for the past few hours. War with the Midwest, wethead bias crimes against dryboys on the rise, sumo results, the GM workers’ council calling for a strike, markets down. People had things to buy and sell, important pinhead opinions to howl across my brain. I was needed, necessary, a crucial memebucket for the best the world had to offer, at low low interest rates. No thanks, I thought to myself (to myself, not some nano-neurological stooge!); I quit.

In headspace, I shot My Pet Dog. I shot him dead, and took over my body, once and for all.

Headspace crumbled and a noisy blackness buried me. I think I fell to my knees, or was it on my face? I couldn't breathe. My lips were clenched shut, but vomit poured into my mouth and through the gaps in my teeth. Then, in headspace, I felt the firm hand of my ego agent on the back of my neck, lifting me above the swirling advertisements, the dizzying dance of thousands of stock prices, and the casual emergencies of work and memos and updated job queues. I coughed up the liquid shit of it all and finally, finally, took a moment. And I breathed, and my breath was a prayer.

I turned to face my acumen. The light from Victor Mature's miner's helmet dazzled my eyes, but that was probably just the jack's way of explaining the stars I saw from the bump on my head. The homunculus flew overhead, clutching My Pet Dog's corpse in his claws. The wetnurse was standing on a stepladder as a waist-deep flood of information spilled into our little world.

“Guess what, gang,” I said. “You're all fired. I don't need to work twenty-three point seven hours a day anymore, and neither does anyone else. God will provide.” In headspace, I held up two pieces of miracle bread, and threw them to the floor. Then I fired my acumen agents. With my gun.

The jack removal took longer than I thought it would. The scalpel felt too heavy in my hands; my fingers were too stiff to move. My connection to the jacknet was a distant scream, like a child left behind in a parking lot by his deranged parents. George's eyes were still open, in spite of the narcotic. What would he be like when he woke up? Would he still be tied into the Godnet, like the monks upstairs? Like me? An overheated Jesus guided my hands, and my thoughts. His face was red, and steam poured from his ears.

The police took my ego agents’ posthumous statements. (Damn backups.) I heard their filing cabinet drawer slam shut and echo. They'd get to my case by the time I was ninety, if I lived that long. My dry cleaning was done and the menu for the next three weeks needed to be planned; provisions needed to be requisitioned. My apartment back in the city wanted to know if it could please water the plants. A personal ad wrote itself for me and begged for my eyeblink signature. Sneaky anarchist magnetizdats nipped at my ankles, demanding attention. Helicopter blades were talking to me, saying “hurry hurry hurry” with the whip of wind. I had a deadline to meet. One deadline a second, every second, for the rest of my life.

("'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a miserable sinner’ is as powerful for its cadence as it is for its content. Once integrated into the head, it is actually hard to remove. Rather, one begins to receive, the monks say, messages from God,” Kelly said, mimicking the sing-song of the prayer.)

I sent the jacknet a final, very important message, the same one George had sent me. Jesus forgive me, a miserable sinner. I reached behind my neck and blindly disconnected my jack. I was alone, but for the constant prayer on my lips and the love for every man and woman in the world. The Godnet.

I ate a sandwich and sat on the hill just outside the monastery, waiting for the helicopter. Everyone in the Godnet ate that sandwich, the two pieces of bread coming straight from George's miracle—after I brushed the dirt off of them, of course. And I tasted gyros in Cyprus, kimchi in Pyongyang, and injera in Addis Ababa. And I even felt the tickle of a patch here and exhaust-stained breakfast coffee there, from the first jacknetters to be infected with the God virus. Information wasn't a horrible flood of jingles and logos and unfair trades of wayward seconds of processing time any more; it was a smile, a wave, a breeze, a broken leg. Even the dying felt good, because there was always a birth right behind it.

It was odd, being alone, but not at all scary anymore. It was odd, being one with the world and everyone in it. It was hard, eating a sandwich and incessantly muttering the prayer at the same time. It was nice, though, to know that the Godnet would be giving me food and water and love and a place to live. Miracle bread for everyone. I heard angels’ wings, but they were really only the spinning rotors of the copter.

The trip back. I spoke with the pilot. She had kids. She played the cello. She'd been raped once, at 13, but was healing now, and her lips moved with an invisible prayer. Her jack was cold and nearly dormant, buzzing with low-grade euphoria. We were just in range of the city, and I could already hear the Jesus Prayer—the God virus—in the ear of every poor jacked bastard in town. It was all prayer now; they shut down the news, the soaps, and even the ads. The reporters were too busy taking time off to report on the collapse of the economy, the wine flowing from the public urinals, the lame walking, the stupid finally getting a clue, the kids actually sleeping—really really sleeping and then getting up because it was morning, not because it was time for their shifts. As we flew down into the city, the sun rose into the already-shrinking pool of brown smog that sat atop the skyline like a bad toupee. Morning. Not work or betweenwork or morework. I knew what time of day it was.

Copyright © 2002 Nick Mamatas

Nick Mamatas is a New Yorker exiled to Jersey City. His essays on cyberculture, politics, and digital art have appeared in The Village Voice, In These Times, Silicon Alley Reporter, Artbyte, Disinfo.com, and other magazines. His fiction has appeared in Talebones and Speculon. “Northern Gothic,” his first novella, was released by Soft Skull Press in November, 2001. For more about him, see his Web site.

1/21/01

Fifth in a monthly series of excerpts from The Book of All Cities.

Ylla's Choice is a spherical city of several million. Its bonsai gardeners should be famous throughout the galaxy; its actors orate well; its corridors are clean, and through the shielded glass windows of a marvelous design, the glowing swirl of gas outside is beautiful.

Its citizens continually register their political opinions, and the city reconfigures itself to allow each inhabitant to be ruled according to the system he or she believes in. Almost the only violence in Ylla's Choice is among the poets, for the Formalists and the Tragicals often come to blows.

It is true that, due to its peculiar situation, the city is of strictly limited size. A less sophisticated polity might require some coercive sort of population control. But in practice, the membership of the Uncontrolled Breeding Party is always a small fringe; the Tragical poets provide a continual advertisement for the virtues of Death; and those who do procreate usually wait until the semicentennial Generation Year, so that their children can go to school together.

The teachers at the Children's School have found that it is wise not to reveal the particular situation of Ylla's Choice too soon, or the children may suffer from depression in adolescence—a time when they naturally long for travel, adventure, and upheaval, and yearn to escape their calm and moderate city. Only when the students have understood quantum astrophysics, the dance of topology and time; only when they have understood the war, poverty, hatred, and violence still found—forever found—on places far from Ylla's Choice; only when they have learned the story of Ylla, whose advances in computational social science allowed for a society free of the evils of history—only then are they told the truth.

They learn that Ylla's design for a perfect society worked only for a closed system of a certain size. In any open system, according to her simulations, some outside force—war or revolution elsewhere, barbarians at the gates, the plagues and weapons that are the natural result of expansionist societies—would always destroy her dream.

But Ylla found a way to keep her city safe from all that, safe from solar flares and stray comets, safe from any future cataclysm, no matter how great.

The students, when they learn the final lesson of the Children's School, are taken to the shielded window to look into the glowing swirl of charged gas that surrounds and powers Ylla's Choice. And there they are shown the marvelous machines that protect their city from the tidal forces below. For Ylla's Choice is not in orbit: it is falling straight into the beam of the strange pulsar Yoruba-7, into its great burst, not only of electromagnetic radiation, but also of chronons, the quantum particles of time. It is these chronons, surging through the city and its inhabitants, that give the city its leisurely ages of history. Because the chronons so dramatically exaggerate their experience of time, the torrent of energy surging from the chronopulsar appears to the inhabitants of Ylla's Choice as a gentle and nurturing cloud of light.

The students learn that, on Earth, it is 10:47:58.2734 p.m. UTC, August 22, 2369. And it always will be. For at 10:47:58.2735 p.m. of that same day on Earth, long after their furthest descendants have led full and happy lives in the perfect city, Ylla's Choice will be torn apart in an instant by the pulsar's burst.

Previous city (Amea Amaau)

All published cities

Copyright © 2001 Benjamin Rosenbaum

Benjamin Rosenbaum lives in Basel, Switzerland, with his wife and baby daughter, where in addition to scribbling fiction and poetry, he programs in Java (well) and plays rugby (not very well). He attended the Clarion West Writers’ Workshop in 2001 (the Sarong-Wearing Clarion). His work has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Writer Online. His previous appearances in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive. For more about him, see his Web site.

1/28/02

Carol Vance lifted her balloon, seeking an altitude from which a falling body would have the chance to do some thinking on the way down.

Cursing her oversized NOMEX gloves, she turned up the burners heating the cone of air overhead, sending the gas-filled sphere higher. At last, she judged the balloon had reached 3,000 feet. She could barely see cows facing into the wind, the simplest test she knew for wind direction. She double-checked the harness fastening her to the basket.

She looked toward the sunrise and breathed deeply. Then she turned around and said, “Jack Tyrrell,” loudly and crisply. The moment she finished saying his name, a man appeared in the basket.

He looked at Carol, then at the ground far below. He gripped the side of the basket. Stress contorted his bony face into a death mask.

Carol laughed. “Just like a bad penny,” she said. “You always turn up."

“So you've learned my secret,” Jack Tyrrell said. Watching him grapple for aplomb warmed Carol in the chill air. “That won't help you. Neither will this childish stunt. Why don't you land and we'll—"

Jack grunted as Carol's boot struck the knot of his Liberty tie. Her kick sent him over the rail and he lost his grip, arms flailing as he fell. Her harness holding her back from the edge, Carol reduced the gas flow to compensate for the basket's sudden lightness.

“Carol,” a voice said from the business-band radio next to Carol's picnic basket, “are you all right? We just saw something fall out of your balloon."

“Not now.” Carol realized she'd lost sight of the falling man. “Jack,” she said. The man appeared before her once again, shaking but alive; Carol swallowed with relief. To her radio, she said, “It was just ballast. Thanks for asking.” She turned back to the dry-heaving man, who had lost a shoe. “You didn't happen to notice a grey van on your way down, did you? I was wondering where my chase crew had got to, but they seem to have seen you."

The man shook his head. “Can't we talk?” he croaked.

“I think I loved you,” Carol said, planting her foot again on Jack's chest. “I loved you, and you nearly killed me.” His fingers reached in vain for the basket's edge as she flung him gently into space.

Carol first saw Jack over the head of a mechanical Bengal tiger at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The soldier in the tiger's mouth represented the British Empire, which had eventually overrun the tiger's makers. Jack joked about biting off more than you can chew, and held out a smaller hand than Carol's.

Jack spoke knowledgeably about art; better, he listened to Carol's opinions with respect. He coughed into a handkerchief instead of his sleeve, and when he went to the gents, he returned with hands freshly washed. His accent had tinges of Essex, but he compensated well. Carol noticed no change in Jack's behavior when she mentioned she lived in a flat just off Sloane Square. Nor did he seem to hold her cheerfully equine profile against her. When he invited Carol to lunch at Daquise, a subterranean Polish place nearby, she accepted. Over bigos and pierogies, Carol asked Jack what he did for a living and he said he was in the property business: distressed properties mainly. She said maybe he could help her find a new house.

Soon, Carol was seeing a lot of Jack. She had only to mention his name, even just his first name, and he appeared, a show of devotion that made Carol rhapsodize about him. It made buying him gifts like monogrammed boxer shorts difficult, not to mention dishing to her friends. But Jack always rejoiced to see Carol, even when he wandered into a crowded restaurant wearing only a bathrobe, which Carol interpreted as an interesting fashion statement. “Ah, Carol. What a pleasant surprise,” he would say.

“What can I say?” Carol said to her friend Mary. “He can't tear himself away from me for a second."

“And you like that,” Mary half-asked.

“Damn straight,” Carol said. “I like a man who knows I'm alive. He's obviously crazy about me."

More accurately, Carol was driving Jack crazy. Never the best predictor of his own movements, Jack lost all mastery after he met Carol.

A typical day: Jack had a morning meeting with a bond analyst to whom he wanted to sell a house built over a Saxon tomb whose inhabitant rose every couple of weeks. He arranged a meeting at a cafe opposite Liverpool Street station, then phoned the cafe five minutes beforehand. “Hello,” he told the man who answered. “Could you see if Jack Tyrrell is there, please?"

Jack heard the man yell, “Anyone here named Jack Tyrrell?"

A glare filled Jack's eyes and he scented lilacs. Then the smell of grease overwhelmed him and he saw a roomful of people eating fry-ups. The bond analyst hadn't arrived yet. The cafe owner looked around impatiently until Jack identified himself. Then the owner handed Jack the phone and he pretended to talk to himself for a moment.

The bond analyst showed up, and Jack launched his sales pitch. As usual, he warned the client not to mention the deal to anyone while it was still in the works. Just as Jack started to make headway with the potential homebuyer, he scented lilacs again. Carol faced him; to her right stood a glass counter full of cakes. He recognized Harrods’ baked goods department. “Oh, it's you,” Carol said. “I hope you're not diabetic. I wanted to buy you an unbirthday cake as a surprise. Alice in Wonderland, you know."

“I know,” Jack said, mustering a smile for his most promising potential client. “It's a nice thought.” He ran across the crowded shop floor, mentally reviewing the quickest route to Liverpool Street. Of course, the bond analyst didn't mention his name.

Not only had the bond analyst left the cafe by the time Jack arrived, but someone had stolen his coat from the back of his chair. He shivered and headed for his Bromley flat.

Halfway to Bromley, Jack scented lilacs. Carol stood in the crockery section at Harrods, reciting a poem about him. “And did that noblest brow rejoice ... oh, hello. It's you again. This is Mary. We were just talking about you.” Carol indicated the squat Henna abuser to her left.

“Oh yes,” Jack said, pretending to examine tureens. “These would perfectly complement my cream of leek soup."

Jack headed for Bromley again, only to appear in a low-ceilinged antiques factory near Colombo. “Ah, I just mentioned you,” a short Sri Lankan whom Jack vaguely recognized said. “How is your courier business going?” Jack made small talk amidst thousands of snake masks until the bond analyst happened to complain about him to a coworker in his plush office. Jack tried to regain the client's trust, but the analyst threatened to call security.

Jack once again headed for home, only to reappear at Carol's side when she mentioned his good hygiene to Mary. “His hands were still moist from washing. Oh, it's you.” He set off again, only to be called back to Carol's side. Jack actually celebrated appearing in Ouagadougou in the mid-afternoon, as a change from the short leash on which Carol's mentions kept him. In all, it took him ten hours to make the half-hour trip home from Harrods.

Jack's therapist, a portly man named Walter Beasley, leaned back in his chair as Jack complained. “I can't get away from her for a minute,” Jack wailed. “The other day I turned up in her car, five miles from Chichester.” Jack talked rapidly, afraid he'd be summoned before he finished a sentence. Beasley's office dictated calm, from the clock which ticked only every other second to the sound-absorbing Persian rug and velvet curtains.

Jack had first met Beasley when another patient had confessed to deep emotional scars from Jack's childhood behavior. When Jack had appeared at the mention of his name, Beasley had reacted nonchalantly. “Is this really him? The boy who stole your lunch?” The woman had sobbed and nodded, while Jack had sought an exit. “Well then,” Beasley had said, “this seems a great opportunity to sort out your issues."

The next time Jack had felt distressed, he'd looked Beasley up.

“Maybe this is a sign you need to change your approach,” Beasley said. “We've talked before about how your ‘gift’ reflects your fear of people talking about you behind your back. Maybe you should trust Carol. Tell her the truth."

“The ... truth?” Jack hugged his knees and laughed. “Imagine if she knew she could have me at her beck and call just by saying my name in a way that makes it clear which ‘Jack’ she means. The only good thing about my ‘gift’ is that it makes sure nobody ever thinks it strange when I turn up, no matter how often it happens. Oh no. I'm sticking with Plan A. I sell her a ‘distressed property’ as usual, and move on."

“Meaning a haunted house. You buy cheap and sell at a huge profit.” Beasley kept his voice neutral, but the left side of his upper lip curled slightly in disapproval.

“Something like that.” Jack smiled for the first time. “I have a germ of an idea how to separate her from her money and from me in one deal."

Soon after, Jack turned up in Carol's flat for the first time, after she mentioned his name on the phone. “Oh, hello again. How'd you get in here?” Without awaiting an answer, Carol hung up and gestured around her flat. “You can see it's too small, can't you? It speaks for itself as to why I need a bigger place."

Carol's flat spoke for itself, but it sounded to Jack like a cry for help. The Lady of Shalott and Babar the Elephant looked down side by side from one wall; ermine drapes clashed with mauve wallpaper; a turquoise chaise longue abutted a burgundy sofa. The air smelled of lavender. Jack stared at a bookshelf containing two score copies of I'm OK, You're OK. “I give them out,” Carol explained. “I'm a giving person."

“I can tell. And you decorated this place yourself?"

“That's right. But the bedroom is the fait accompli."

The malapropism distracted Jack long enough for Carol to lead him into a tiny room dominated by a four-poster bed and an enormous picture of Leonardo DiCaprio's face. Even without Jack's “gift,” Carol displayed a knack for getting him places he hadn't planned on going. “I should probably leave,” Jack said.

“Not just yet.” Carol patted the bed, and Jack sat and looked at her round earnest face. “Jack, I wasn't always this outgoing. In fact, I used to be quite shy. I would obsess about people and never speak to them. So if I seem to be overcompensating, I'm sorry. My therapist says I have to work through my obsessional tendencies."

“I see. To tell the truth, I'm not very good at human relationships myself. I tend to keep to myself when I'm not wanted. People can always find me if they need me."

“I can see that. And yet you've been following me around lately, like a poor lost soul.” Carol leaned into Jack's space. “Almost as if you sensed a kindred spirit."

“Well, maybe. The truth is, I do like you, Carol. You're one of the few genuinely nice people I've ever met. That's why I'll tell you honestly: you do not want to get mixed up with me, romantically or otherwise. I am very, very bad news.” The more sincerely Jack spoke, the harder he found it to make eye contact with people. As he talked to Carol, his eyes met Leonardo DiCaprio's.

“But it's too late. I'm already in my compulsive cycle. If you don't want me around, I'll just have to work through it in ways that don't inconvenience you."

Jack nodded.

“For example, I can dedicate songs to you on the radio.” Jack had a horrible vision of appearing in Carol's home as she called in the request, and then in the DJ's booth as he read it out. “I can make donations to charity in your name. I can read poems about you to all my friends. You'll never even have to know."

Jack tightened his grip on the canopy as if it were driftwood in a maelstrom. “Really,” he said, “that sounds like a lot of trouble. I'm telling you, I'm not worth it."

“It's better than sitting around obsessing without an outlet,” Carol said, “or worse still, calling you ten times a day. You know, this is really good. I feel as though I've made progress, being able to talk about this with you in a rational fashion instead of being eaten up."

“Yes, I can see how it would be better to be rational.” Jack wished escaping the curse could be as simple as changing his name. “But maybe I can help. If so, I'm at your service. I mean, it doesn't take most people too long to get sick of me, and then you can move on to—"

Jack never managed to finish saying “collecting Backstreet Boys memorabilia,” because his mouth was suddenly mashed into Carol's so tightly he tasted her epiglottis. She pulled him backwards, and it only took a moment of enthusiastic groping before he joined in her newfound way of working through her obsession.

Later, Jack sat up with a headache. “Poor Jack,” Carol said from the pillow behind him. “You have low self-esteem, don't you?"

“That's true enough.” Jack rubbed his head.

Carol stroked Jack's spine. “I know all about that. It's a trap. It puts you at the mercy of what other people think of you, or whether they think of you at all."

Carol's comment struck Jack as oddly insightful, but all he said aloud was: “This is one of the weirder post-coital talks I've had. I'd expected you to be one of those people who turns all lovey-dovey after sex.” Even as he spoke these words, they suggested a new strategy to Jack: maybe a constant but low level of unpleasantness on his part would turn Carol off.

Jack lamented the failure of that strategy a few days later, in his next session with Beasley. “It's insane. She won't shut up about me, and despite my worst behavior she thinks I'm the cat's pajamas and she's the cat."

“Acting obnoxious only makes some people fonder. Perhaps she senses you're threatened by her and pushing her away.” Beasley sucked the cap of his pen.

“I'm at my wits’ end. You're the one with the bust of R. D. Laing. What should I do?"

“Hard to say. Your modus vivendi depends on being able to control how people talk about you, much like a politician or pop star. Now, for the first time, you're confronted with someone who can't be manipulated."

“An admirable summation.” Jack stared at the carpet. “It looks as though I'm going to have to take drastic measures. You remember I mentioned fleecing and dumping Carol all in one deal? Well, I've found the house of Carol's nightmares. Not just one of those pristine houses that melts into squalor every full moon, but something a bit more special. A Lonely House."

Beasley's high brow furrowed and his lips pushed out, the closest he ever came to a scowl. “I'm not sure I like the sound of this. But you'll have to explain."

“This attractive Victorian mock Tudor house sits off Cadogan Square in a lovely little mews. Not too far from Carol's current abode, in fact. A hundred years ago, it belonged to a Hepzibah Manton, whose husband had her declared insane. She retired to bed for two decades, while the husband womanized. Her curse remains on the house, so that anyone who lives there becomes as isolated as she was. I had someone try it out. I paid him to sit there for a couple of hours. He spoke my name, and I stayed right where I was. By the time I let him out, he was quite isolated. It creates some kind of damping field, you see. You can hook up a phone line, but your friends will never call you. You can call your friends, but they won't be at home. Even when you go out, the effect follows you around after a while."

“And you don't feel any qualms at all about exploiting Ms. Vance?"

“I'm not going to exploit her. This house will be a bargain.” Jack showed teeth. “This stopped being business when I couldn't take a shower without being snatched away.” Jack sipped tea until a thought occurred to him. “Of course, I don't know how a Lonely House will respond to mod cons like the Internet, answering machines, and faxes. I'm sure it will rise to the challenge somehow."

The next day, Jack took Carol to see five unsuitable houses before he showed her the large-beamed and turreted Lonely House. “Jack, it's perfect,” Carol said. Jack kept his tone neutral as he pointed out disadvantages. But, as he'd promised Beasley, the price didn't include his usual markup on “distressed properties."

Since the previous owner had killed himself, Carol could move in immediately. Jack promised to take care of all the negotiations with the house's agent. He marshaled all his finesse to get Carol signed and sealed as quickly as possible. He even called the movers for her, quietly advising them not to use portable phones in the house.

Carol spent two nights at Jack's place. Given her habit of mentioning his name in every conversation, it made sense to keep her close. Jack's name barely came up elsewhere during that time, so he couldn't escape Carol for long. The more he sloughed Carol off, the more she clung. When the movers called and said the house was ready, Jack was relieved.

“I'm going to be out of town for a week,” Jack said as he walked her to her new house. The sun made halos of the summer horseflies, and distant gardens laced the air with scents, now that Jack had his freedom. Carol walked up the steps to her house and waved shyly before closing the heavy door. Jack returned a token wave and walked away.

Jack's absence lasted two weeks before Carol fretted. She planned a housewarming party, but her friends proved difficult to reach. Even when she paged Mary, who usually called back within seconds, there was no answer. She left messages for dozens of people about her party, but ended up eating salt and vinegar crisps alone in her massive sitting room.

Bereft of distractions, she pined for Jack. She went to old haunts and just missed people. She went to concerts. She caught up on her investments. She re-read Women Who Love Too Much. Jack had gone from being around all the time, the occasional jutting of his misshapen cheekbones a reassuring sight, to being invisible.

“I can't tell how much of this is missing Jack and how much is just being alone all the time,” Carol told her therapist.

She looked up to see her therapist staring out the window, his bald spot gleaming at her. He turned and registered her presence. “I'm sorry,” he said. “What were you saying?” She repeated herself, only to have him pick up the phone and make a lunch reservation in the middle of her sentence. Then he noticed her again. “Please do go on.” Finally, he dozed off. She resolved to find a more responsive therapist.

Months went by without any meaningful human contact. The only person Carol could reach was her investment manager at the bank, so she called every day until the manager started putting her on hold for long periods. She would go to Chinatown and simply stand on Wardour street—gambling machines blaring to the left of her and crispy ducks hanging by their legs to the right of her—and weep for the world.

She decided she wanted her death to garner attention. She considered jumping off a tall building, or throwing herself in front of a train, but neither seemed sufficiently flamboyant. She read a wedding planner for inspiration, and learned about a new craze for hot air balloon weddings. Instantly, she visualized a suicide they'd talk about for weeks.

Despite her difficulties getting the attention of her instructor, let alone her fellow students, Carol felt her scalp shiver the first time she learned how to control a balloon's altitude using the supply of hot air. Mastering the great envelope above and the air currents shaped by contours below fascinated Carol. She was still alone, but she had a horizon for company.

Still, Carol welcomed the approach of her first solo flight and her dying day. She had learned enough about what not to do with the balloon's propane supply to make a fatal mishap easy to arrange. But she bought some fireworks in the post-Guy Fawkes rush to ensure nobody would believe her death an accident. She hoped it would look spectacular; she almost asked her chase crew to bring a camera with a telephoto lens to capture her last moments.

That morning, Carol started shoving her fireworks and an extra propane cylinder into her picnic basket, then paused at a sudden rustling sound. She glimpsed crinoline out of the corner of her eye, and smelled musk and whalebone. When she turned, she could see nothing but her sofa in the predawn gloom. As soon as she had turned back to the fireworks, the rustling started again. “Who's there?” Carol asked.

“Perceptive,” a voice said from the dim corner. “You're the first to see me in a hundred years. Most mourn their solitude so intensely they take no notice of mine.” Carol squinted at the source of the voice, but could only see a pair of pince-nez glasses. “Before you kill yourself, young woman, you might care to learn something about your man, and the house he's sold you. I wouldn't bother, but he reminds me of my husband.” Carol put down the fireworks and listened in the dark.

Jack heard the ground sing a shrill welcome as he fell from the red balloon. He saw his own shadow swell to meet him. Then the aroma of lilacs and the feel of the basket underfoot. He looked at Carol and screamed.

“I had a nice chat with Hepzibah,” Carol said. “She told me all about you, and her house. She couldn't lift the curse, so I had to move out. A dozen suicidal squatters and a few lethargic rats probably live there now. The one thing she didn't know was where you got your little ability.” She kept her foot poised on Jack's chest.

Jack considered rushing her, but he could barely breathe and she outmatched him in brawn, even if she hadn't strapped herself down. “It came with the membership in my property agents guild,” Jack rasped. “Everyone gets one of the Devil's attributes. The gilded tongue was in use, so I chose nomenlocation. I thought it would be fun.” He tried to spit, but nothing came.

“I don't believe you. It must be a punishment!” Carol kicked Jack again for emphasis, and once again the hills leapt towards him alarmingly. Jack remembered the psalm about hills skipping like lambs—fitting, he thought, that his last thought be something Biblical.

Then Carol and the basket reappeared. “What—” Air came with difficulty to Jack. “What did I do to deserve this?” Carol's only response was to hold her foot against his chest threateningly.

“OK,” Jack said. “So that batty old ghost fed you a line and you believed it. And it gave you an excuse to blame me for all your problems. Do you really think it's fair—” She kicked him again, and this time he came closer than ever to his shadow before she said his name.

She didn't wait for him to speak this time. “I'm still obsessed with you, Jack. But I'm afraid it's turned into something rather nasty."

“That sounds unhealthy.” Jack tried to sidle around the basket, out of range of Carol's leg, but she kept it trained on him. “You can't let these things eat away at you."

“You remember what I said about obsession, Jack?"

“You like to work through it."

“Very good. So this is actually therapeutic. For me, at least. For you it might be stressful.” Carol beamed at Jack and drew her leg back in preparation for another kick.

“Wait!” Jack put one hand out protectively, nearly losing his balance in the process. “So you know. But that means you can choose not to have me around at all. Just stop saying my name, and I'll disappear forever. I promise I won't seek you out. It's not quantum physics.” Jack tried to look dignified cringing at the basket's edge. “Please."

Carol had stopped beaming and had her leg back in its resting place. After a moment, she nodded. “It's not that simple. I've never had anyone do as much to wreck my life, in as many ways, as you. Now please go away. My chase crew would ask questions if I landed with an extra person.” Carol handed Jack something which he recognized, after a moment, as a parachute, and gave him another kick, this time a fairly playful one.

Jack barely wriggled into the parachute and found the ripcord in time to land painfully but not fatally. He found himself trudging through endless hills. He saw no houses or cars along the road, and he cursed Carol for not giving him a cell phone along with his parachute. At last the lilac-scented flash came and the hills dissolved into a cafe in Balham that smelled of raw yeast.

Carol put a mug of cocoa into Jack's frozen hand and he nodded gratefully. “I'm trying to look on the bright side,” she nearly whispered. “I have learned to fly a balloon. I have had my faith in the goodness of humanity bludgeoned, which may spare me pain in future. I now own a house in which I don't live, which must be some sort of Thatcherite status symbol. Help me out. What else good has come of this?"

“You have the power to mess up my life any time you want to."

“Ah yes. Thanks for reminding me. Sign this.” Carol put a letter on the table. It was folded twice, and Carol's thumb kept the top two thirds folded over, so that Jack could only see the space for his signature. He started to protest, then thought better and signed.

“Excellent. I'll post it tonight.” Carol scrutinized Jack. “I hope you have a better suit than the one you're wearing. You're now the official Tory candidate in the upcoming Barnet West by-election. I had to pull a few strings with the constituency party committee, but it was worth it. You'll have to see it through, or I'll find something worse."

“Barnet. Isn't that a marginal seat? Hotly contested?” Jack swallowed as he imagined his name on every lawn and in every day's newspaper, discussed in pubs and dissected in supermarkets. Satisfied with his horrified expression, Carol left to seal his fate right away.

Jack examined his torn trousers and shredded socks. “It was bound to end,” he told his cuffs. “I had a good run, but something like this was certain to happen.” He stirred his cocoa, creating a foamy vortex. “Of course, maybe there's a way I can turn this to my advantage. If I actually get myself elected. Maybe I could turn that Saxon burial ground I've been trying to sell into a national monument....” Jack allowed himself a bruised-lung laugh, then started thinking how to get himself home.

Copyright © 2002 Charles Anders

Charles Anders lives on the world's smallest island, composed almost entirely of whale mucus and abandoned props from seaQuest DSV. When he's not campaigning for a seat in the United Nations, Charles writes a variety of fiction and nonfiction. His stories have appeared in dozens of magazines and anthologies. For more information on him and his work, see his Web site.

1/28/02

While this month's column is rather short, it does represent many hours of listening pleasure. With so much hype surrounding the release of the movie The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, we thought it might be interesting to review some of the older (and one or two newer) recordings which were inspired by the writings of Tolkien. So we spent several hours listening to some of our collected recordings.

The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1978)
Released on vinyl by Fantasy Records (2160-1111) and on CD by Intrada.
Available on CD at amazon.com.
At Intrada's Web site, you can listen to a sound clip of “Helm's Deep".

The sound track album for the 1978 animated movie The Lord of the Rings (directed by Ralph Bakshi) was produced by Leonard Rosenman and Saul Zaentz. The first track, “Theme from The Lord of the Rings,” immediately brought back fond memories. We loved the music—one of us remembered thinking it was the best part of the movie at the time. It has a very 1980s feel, and in some ways seems almost too nice for the movie. The opening theme suggests a very happy story, light and bouncy, with a happy ending. While the series does have a happy ending, the story is much darker in many ways than is suggested by the music. The following tracks evoke a darker, more suspenseful feeling (except when the theme music is repeated). The music is visual, in that we could “see” various scenes unfolding as we listened.

“Escape to Rivendell” immediately reminded us of the music from 2001: A Space Odyssey during the travelling through the star field—it had a “spacey” feel to it. The track “Mithrandir” represents the elves singing about Gandalf. While the use of children's voices at the beginning of the song suggests higher-pitched elven voices, the tone feels somehow wrong, especially given the actual age of the elves in the books. Older voices join in later, adding a richer texture to the song, but it is the opening verse which leaves the strongest impression. “Following the Orcs” unfortunately reminded me of music from an old Tarzan movie: specifically a scene involving natives dancing and preparing for war.

Overall, the music is very full and three dimensional, and is very evocative of the movie. It is definitely “sound track” music, as opposed to incidental music used throughout the movie. It's a nice listen for a Saturday afternoon, though I recommend that you watch the movie first. The biggest disappointment (for me) is the fact that the second movie never came about: this movie only covered half the story, ending halfway (or so) through the second book.

Performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Warble.
Released on CD by Madacy Records (3193).
Available on CD at amazon.com, where you can also hear sound clips of each movement.

This symphony, written between March 1984 and December 1987, won first prize in the Sudler International Wind Band Composition Competition in Chicago, and was later awarded by the Dutch Composers Fund. There are five movements: I. “Gandalf (The Wizard),” II. “Lothlorien (The Elvenwood),” III. “Gollum (Smeagol),” IV. “Journey in the Dark,” and V. “Hobbits,” each of which is meant to illustrate a person or event in the books.

This is a full, lush recording, with some extremely visual elements. Our favourite piece was “Gollum.” We felt it nicely captured his dual nature, with the comical alternating with the dark and devious. “Journey in the Dark” skillfully evokes the travel through the Mines of Moria, with the monotonous drums in the background enhancing the sense of menace and danger represented by the Orcs. The final movement, “Hobbits,” attempts to capture the carefree nature of the Hobbit folk, as well as their inherent nobility. However, one of us found it similar to music from a western, while it reminded another of rousing adventure music (similar to something perhaps from Raiders of the Lost Ark). We also heard overtones from The Phantom of the Opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber (probably a coincidence, since both may have been written at about the same time).

Side note: we suspect that the individual who wrote the two paragraph summation of The Lord of the Rings (in the liner notes) may not actually have read the books.

Released on CD by Arion Records.
Available on CD from amazon.com.
Glass Hammer's Web site has several sound clips: click on “Sounds” and scroll down until you come to this album.

This is very much like British “Prog Rock"—an interesting concept album, combining quotations and readings from the books with various instrumental and vocal pieces. It's sort of like Yes without Rick Wakeman. There is liberal use of synthesizer and drums, and we felt as if we were listening to a rock opera. It is obviously a labour of love by true Tolkien fans.

Interestingly enough, Glass Hammer has just released another Tolkien album, entitled The Middle Earth Album. Glass Hammer's Web site features a special offer—both Tolkien albums plus two bonus items all for $30.

Performed by Broceliande.
Released on CD by Flowinglass Music (FM007).
Available on CD from amazon.com.
Flowinglass's Web site has several sound clips.

Of all the recordings we listened to, this one sounds most like music that might actually be performed in Middle Earth, as opposed to music composed to accompany the story, or to symbolize various aspects of it. These are Tolkien's poems set to music, and the blend of instruments and voices nicely captures the lyrical essence of the books. All pieces were performed with acoustic instruments, making the sound “feel” right.

For a more in-depth discussion of this album, see Strange Horizons' review and interview with the artists from November 2001.

Obviously, we have just scratched the surface here. For more reviews of these and other Tolkien-inspired recordings, visit this Digital Media FX site, or for an exhaustive listing of recordings containing any sort of Tolkien reference, check out The Tolkien Music List.

Peggi Warner-Lalonde is Senior Music Editor for Strange Horizons.

1/7/02

Not clean light, after all: not sweet atomic
absolution of our myriad sins
in one swift Lenten smear of ash, faint thumbprint
shadow on a shattered concrete sky.

The silence we were promised after sirens
above a blasted blameless graveyard world
is broken daily into shards of shrapnel
both trivial & lethal, ever-cresting
tide eroding eyes & ears & minds.

In place of Oppenheimer's Trinity,
the passionate intensity of vermin
beset by ancient plagues goes seeping out
along a web of unsuspected faults
until some tower tumbles, lightning-struck
past metaphor or merest understanding.

Surely whatever falconer we trusted
to gyre that final bird into a night
both mutual & assured is lost—or missing
behind these lines redrawn to locate center
& formulate the new survivor's question:
not what rough beast, but which rough beast this time?

Copyright © 2001 Ann K. Schwader

Ann K. Schwader lives and writes in Westminster, Colorado. Her poems have recently appeared in Weird Tales, Magazine of Speculative Poetry, Talebones, Speculon, Twilight Times, and elsewhere. Her Lovecraftian poetry collection, The Worms Remember, was published by Hive Press this spring. She is an active member of both SFWA and HWA. Her previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

1/14/02

At Our Lady of Perpetual Memory,
funereal fads can be followed for centuries.
Nineteenth century watch houses
and mortsafes are slowly replaced
by lasercut urns and polished stones.

Twenty-first century tombstone
tapestries of digital memories
line well-kept cobblestone walkways,
holographic reproductions
of deceased loved ones set in stone.

The holograms move in silence except
for wind gossiping with Arbor Vitae,
but push a button and poignant recollections
clamor for attention, though a virus
of virtual moss grows over their mouths.

Copyright © 2001 Sandra J. Lindow

During the fall of 2000, Sandra Lindow and her family lived with four other families and 80 college students in Dalkeith House, a seen-better-days palace in Scotland. Her rambles through old cemeteries inspired this poem. Her previous poem in Strange Horizons can be found in our Archive.

1/21/02

were any blooms open this morning?
did the radio come on?

a small lunch, salad and peas
the waitress takes moonbeams into her mouth
but Pico is subtle with the peas
he grimaces and knifes them
temperatures begins to fall
the mayonnaise is crystalline and dangerous
little lines run crazy across the lettuce

at home something is wrong
streetcars rolling uphill again
old women rip their hair
the stairs are white with noble gases
there in the arms of the furnace repairman

Molly bares her breasts sunward

Copyright © 2001 Lee Ballentine

Lee Ballentine edited Poly: New Speculative Writing, an Anatomy of Wonder Best Book, and was the art editor of World Fantasy Award Finalist High Fantastic. He publishes Ur-Vox, a journal of surrealist poetry and photography. His books of poems include Dream Protocols and Phase Language. He lives in Colorado. Visit his Web site for more about him.

1/28/02

The red of the unseen blaze
covered a concreteness
then a gasp then a laugh at her own fright.

She smiled as one does when experiencing mortality.

The boulevard of broken glass glistened between footsteps.
Bursting is how she found it,
bursting into itself as night draped above.

A fire of my expectation
and the brightening of an eye, she thought.
Black leaves stretched over her—
quiet and walking and smiling
with teeth and pleasure shameless across her face.

An instinct rose within
and she began to spin herself in her dress of yellow, summered silk.

Circle over circle,
she felt her skin against coolness.
The whirling calmed and the yellow glowed
as it does when one remembers a day of laughing during a game under the sun.

She stepped forward, knowing she had been there before.

Copyright © 2001 Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca

Gustavo Alberto Garcia Vaca is a published writer/poet and visual artist. His poetry has appeared in literary journals including Dark Planet, Rattle, The Bilingual Review, El Colombiano and Urban Latino. His artwork has been exhibited in art galleries in New York City, Los Angeles, and Mexico City.

1/7/02

Dr. Edward Lewis Weyland is handsome, “in a sour, arrogant way.” He's tall, “lean and lonely-looking,” with intense eyes, a “stubborn jaw,” and “vigorous iron-gray hair.” Women are drawn to him. Men regard him jealously.

A cultural anthropologist of some scholarly repute—he's authored the book, Notes on a Vanished People, which was a “stupendous find for anthropology"—Weyland is a professor at Cayslin College in upstate New York. He heads the school's sleep research lab, recording volunteers’ dreams in a new kind of research called “dream mapping."

Being a bastion of the young, the college provides Dr. Weyland with an ample supply of fresh, supple participants for his research. But Dr. Weyland doesn't just observe their sleep patterns and record details of their dreams. No, he uses his volunteers for other, more malevolent purposes.

He feeds on them.

Because Dr. Weyland is a vampire: a centuries-old monster, a predator who amuses himself by playing with his prey.

Suzy McKee Charnas’ The Vampire Tapestry is a smart, sexy, successful, and suspenseful vampire tale. Originally published by Simon & Schuster in 1980, The Vampire Tapestry has recently been released in eBook format by ElectricStory, a Washington-based publisher of new and reprint books in electronic form.

Charnas, author of The Holdfast Chronicles; The Sorcery Hall Trilogy; the children's book, The Kingdom of Kevin Malone; Music of the Night (also available from ElectricStory); and a memoir due out this year, My Father's Ghost, writes in a diversity of genres. Science fiction and fantasy are Charnas’ specialties, and she's collected awards for her notable supernatural fiction, including a Nebula (given by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America) and a Hugo (bestowed by the World Science Fiction Society).

The Vampire Tapestry's stylishness, imagery, and originality of plot illustrate Charnas’ reputation as a fabulist of uncommon talent. It's a novel divided into five parts, each of which has Weyland encountering a new array of characters and the humanity of his “despised victims.” “Humans are my food,” Weyland declares. “I draw the life out of their veins. Sometimes I kill them. I am greater than they are. Yet I must spend my time thinking about their habits and their drives, scheming to avoid the dangers they pose—I hate them."

As Charnas herself wrote, her vampire chronicle is not a lurid Anne Rice rip-off, nor is Charnas’ Dr. Weyland a hackneyed or reworked version of Count Dracula. Hardly. Weyland scoffs at Stoker's “meandering, inaccurate” novel, and he especially dislikes the Count's “absurd” fangs. Weyland is “at base one quite different from your standard strolling corpse with an aversion to crosses,” or your “blood-sipping phantom who cringes from a clove of garlic."

In fact, Dr. Weyland's favorite pastime is to zoom around the countryside in his much-loved Mercedes-Benz. But, he's only able to do this for a short time. While at Cayslin, Weyland plays the serious, broodingly intelligent scholar, considered a genius by some and a “ruthless, self-centered bastard” by others. He also complacently underestimates the intuition of Katje de Groot.

Katje de Groot is onto Weyland. The fiftyish, widowed-faculty-wife-turned-campus-housekeeper sees through his finely manufactured façade. A native of Africa, where she viewed life “from the heights of white privilege,” Katje longs to return to her Boer way of life. An avid and adept hunter, trained to stalk and kill game since girlhood, Katje senses Weyland's predatory nature. Her instincts are roused, and she realizes “with a nervous little jump of the heart” that she has become involved in “stalking a dangerous animal.” She knows Weyland as the merciless predator that he soon shows himself to be.

An incident occurs between Dr. Weyland and de Groot, resulting in Weyland's sudden disappearance from Cayslin College. It is here that Charnas ends Weyland's Cayslin days and takes readers on to Part II, and Weyland's next set of malicious feedings: “My hunger is so roused I can scarcely restrain myself,” Weyland drones, “A powerful hunger, not like yours—mine compels."

Weyland-the-vampire's survival and safety depend upon a sophisticated set of precepts. If he fails to follow them, he faces certain detection and danger. The ingenuity of Charnas’ Vampire-Rules-to-Live-By truly brings her novel—and the vampire, for that matter—into the realm of the realistic, modern, and elegant monster-tale. Charnas imbues Weyland with the ability to endure and prosper throughout the centuries. Her basis for Weyland's staying power seems plausible, inspiring the bristling feeling that urbane vampires might very well walk among us:

The corporeal vampire ... would be by definition the greatest of all predators, living as he would off the top of the food chain. Man is the most dangerous animal, the devourer or destroyer of all others, and the vampire preys on man.

He would learn to live on as little as he could—perhaps a half liter of blood per day—since he could hardly leave a trail of drained corpses and remain unnoticed. Periodically he would withdraw for his own safety and to give ... [society] time to recover from his depredations. A sleep several generations long would provide him with an untouched, ignorant population in the same location.

... [U]pon each waking he must quickly adapt to his new surroundings, a task which, we may imagine, has grown progressively more difficult with the rapid acceleration of cultural change since the Industrial Revolution.... [A] perpetually self-educating vampire would always have to find himself a place in a center of learning in order to have access to the information he would need....

But in Part II, Weyland's camouflage is pierced, and he falls into the possession of a band of disreputable opportunists. Had it not been for Mark, a 14-year-old streetwise, kindhearted-but-not-naïve kid, Weyland's time with these “devil nuts"—Satanists, High Priestesses, and brainless worshipper girls whose “shapeless torrent of ‘wows’ and ‘terrifics’ and other general terms of awe ... kept [them] from ever concluding a thought or a sentence"—might well have resulted in his demise.

Weyland is caged and ailing. Through conversation and mutual need, Mark and Weyland strike a wary, delicate rapport, and Mark's empathy for Weyland is unmistakable: “He knew how it felt to pretend composure and confidence in a situation where you were at the mercy of other people. It felt horrible."

A cryptic event is being planned for Weyland on the celebratory night of “May Eve” by these self-interested revelers. Mark is the voice of reason shouting out unheard pleas for common sense and decency. It is Mark's youngster level-headedness and humanity that throw into relief the adults’ absurdity and special cruelty.

The most successful and penetrating section of The Vampire Tapestry, Part II flows with ever-increasing tension and momentum until its frantic, blood-sucking end. It tempts you to feel something more kindly than repulsion for this creature who feeds on humans at will. It also invites reflection on a poignant dilemma: who is more the animal? the bestial anomaly in the cage, or the one who cages the beast?

Dr. Floria Landauer stars as Part III's foil to Dr. Weyland. An overworked, overwrought clinical psychologist, Landauer takes on a new client who seems “to have fallen victim to a delusion of being a vampire.” On the day of the client's appointment:

He entered the office on the dot of the hour, a gaunt but graceful figure. He was impressive. Wiry gray hair, worn short, emphasized the massiveness of his face with its ... high cheekbones and granite cheeks grooved as if by winters of hard weather. His name, typed in caps on the initial information sheet ... was Edward Lewis Weyland.

In a premise that lacks persuasiveness and never really feels authentic, Charnas has Weyland baring all to his emotionally fragile therapist. While Charnas’ writing of the psychological banter between Landauer and Weyland is nothing short of brilliant—and in Floria, Charnas has certainly created a most believable character—sentimental self-indulgence runs rampant. Floria is enticed by “the lure of the great outlaw” and Weyland finds himself “expos[ing] an unexpected weakness."

As Charnas has laid out, however, the vampire must be an ever-evolving creature if he is to survive, and perhaps it is inevitable that he must do more than mimic the humans among whom he lives and off of whom he feeds. Parts IV and V—which bring Weyland back into daily and professional contact with his prey, and even have him contemplate the artistic side of humankind, represented here by the “love story” / “vulgar thriller” opera, Tosca—pursue the intriguing transformation Charnas has set up for Weyland. “He was disturbed by a sense of something new in himself,” Charnas tell us eerily.

Weyland's necessary evolution leads him to a defining moment in which he must make a fundamental decision. The Vampire Tapestry's conclusion exhibits finesse and precision. Charnas chooses not to end with the clichéd gore-drenched wrap-up. That would be too easy, and wouldn't fit into this creative, polished tale of modern dread. Charnas’ methodical pen taps an exceptional vein in the mythological narrative of the vampire. Those who feast on her words will be left satiated.

Amy O'Loughlin is an award-winning book review columnist and freelance writer. Her work has appeared in Worcester Magazine, The Boston Book Review, Calyx, Moxie, and American History. She is a contributor to the upcoming reference work The Encyclopedia of the World Press and the anthology of women's writing Women Forged in Fire. Her previous publications at Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.

1/14/02

Let's face it: a good prequel is harder to write than a sequel. You have to get your story to jibe with the other works, just like with a sequel, but the end result is laid out for you already by your own work, meaning you can't simply decide to kill off a character here, or insert a major plot point there. And yet, you have to somehow make the story interesting, meaning you can't just rehash character pre-history and not add anything new. For all of these difficulties, writing a book to go between two already previously written works has the challenges of both a sequel and a prequel.

This is why, upon opening the new Asprin book, Myth-ion Improbable, I groaned inwardly. I have a great respect for Mr. Asprin's writing ability, but I was afraid that this work, which is chronologically placed between Myth Directions and Hit or Myth, would fall prey to the usual prequel problems. I was afraid that he wouldn't be able to pull it off with the panache and style I was accustomed to in this series. The other reason I was unhappy was that, like most readers of the series, my brothers and I have been left hanging for quite some time at the end of Sweet Myth-tery of Life, and wanted to continue the series. Let me also mention that I am a stickler for continuity and internal consistency, a trait which has annoyed my family and friends time and again. Fortunately, as I read, I found that my fears were unfounded.

First, let me say that, as in all the Myth books, Asprin is very careful to make sure that this book can stand alone. It is more rewarding if you've read the three books before it for context, but enough little bits of background are given along the way that the first-time reader will not be left lost. As usual, he keeps these unobtrusive enough not to annoy the dedicated fan, who knows exactly who these people are, and what they're about.

By my count, this book is the twelfth Asprin has written for the series, and for those of us who haven't read the others in quite some time (or at all), here's a quick recap. The Myth-Adventures series follows Skeeve, a young wizard, and his unique companions, including his mentor Aahz, a scaly dimension traveller from Perv. (He's a pervect, not a pervert, thank you very much.) In the series, we get to watch as Skeeve grows from a bumbling and naive apprentice to a somewhat naive but competent wizard. Along for the ride is a cast of colorful characters, including his accidentally-acquired baby dragon, Gleep, and Tananda, a curvaceous member of the Assassin's Guild. In Myth-Directions, Tananda and Skeeve go shopping for a birthday gift for Aahz, find something utterly ugly and unique, and get themselves in a mess of trouble over it, and involved in “The Big Game.” The events in this book start on the heels of that adventure.

The book starts with Skeeve and company in The Kingdom of Possiltum, right after the incident with The Big Game, trying to deal with boredom. Skeeve produces a map that had slipped his mind during the excitement in rescuing Tananda in the previous story, and it turns out to be a magical treasure map. Asprin neatly avoids the concerns of continuity because the idea of overlooking a small detail in the previous tale is easy for the reader to accept.

In the map, though, he's done more than provide an adventure hook. He's given us another one of his delightfully silly ideas that make this series so much fun to read. Sure, the book has all the elements that I love about the series: irreverent dialogue, good (and bad) puns, humor in the naive way Skeeve sees things, and the humorous mis-quotes that start every chapter. But the idea of the map is one that I'm going to inflict on my Dungeons & Dragons players as soon as I get the chance.

The idea behind the map is simply this: it shows a convoluted path to a treasure, with lots of choices along the way. There's only one catch. Every time the characters progress along a path, the map changes. To make things worse, they're going to unfamiliar dimensions and so, in order to avoid getting irrevocably lost, are getting directions from a Shifter. A Shifter that's charging them 5% of the final take for each visit.

The book is a quick read (another hallmark of the series), and has enough twists and turns that you won't want to put it down until you're done. Asprin wraps things up neatly, avoiding the prequel problem, but does it in such a natural way, that it is only on reflection that one realizes that it had to be that way.

This is not to say that the book is empty fluff, however. While it is “mind candy,” as my father calls it, it doesn't simply rework old ground. First, it gives us further insight into the relationship between Aahz and Skeeve before they progressed to the mutual admiration of partners. Secondly, unlike some of the other books, this one goes further away from simply parodying the fantasy genre, and actually introduces some interesting ideas of its own. To my mind, the map is both: a parody of the standard fantasy/adventure cliche of the ubiquitous treasure map, and, at the same time, a new riff on the idea. At least, it was new to me. Finally, Asprin's filled out his world a bit more: he adds some new denizens—the Shifter, for example—and explains more about the way magic works. While the book is completely consistent with what we've seen before, it gives a bit more insight into how his system works. As a reader and a gamer, I always love to see the inner workings of fantasy magic.

I heartily recommend this little gem, and I am sure that my brothers will enjoy it when they receive the copy I'm sending them. Long-time readers of the series will love it, and first-timers will enjoy it, although I certainly recommend that they read the series from the beginning, starting with Another Fine Myth, if they can.

Paul Schumacher is treasurer and a copy editor for Strange Horizons.

1/21/02

I can't imagine a better way for fantasy film buffs like me to ring out the old year and ring in the new than attending the Film Society of Lincoln Center's retrospective screenings at the Walter Reade Theater, from Friday the 28th of December through Tuesday the 1st of January, of five seminal works by the Soviet auteur Alexander Ptushko. The American Cinematheque and Seagull Films co-sponsored the new 35mm prints of these features. Rarely seen and largely unavailable on video in the USA, this master cinematographer, undeservedly obscure outside his homeland, pioneered and perfected visual effects blending animation and live action, and his works transformed forever the way tales of the fantastic would be told in motion pictures.

Ptushko (1900-1973), born in the Ukraine, graduated from Moscow's Institute of Economics and held jobs teaching school, in journalism, acting, and stage designing prior to going to work at the Soviet Union's most renowned studio, Mosfilm. At first assisting in stop-motion model making for the short films of other directors, Ptushko soon advanced to directing his own silent animated pictures (most following the expected political, pro-Soviet line), experiments that basically rediscovered stop-motion photography along with his new methods of combining live-action with puppets and special effects. This culminated in Ptushko's first full-length (black and white) animated film antedating Disney's Snow White by four years—The New Gulliver (1935) which politically updates Swift's classic yarn.

In Ptushko's version, Petya (Vladimir Konstantinov), a young Soviet pioneer, falls asleep while reading Gulliver's Travels and dreams of being in a surreal Lilliput which, along with the 17th century style fashions and hair-dos, is home to tiny folk with high-pitched, chattering voices; jazz bands; mechanized vehicles and tractors; and (in true revolutionary spirit) a suppressed underground proletariat of factory workers who, with the help of giant Petya, revolt against the hypocritical, narcoleptic king! This labor-intensive hybrid of over 3000 puppets and live-action, while technically impressive—the three-inch high miniatures bear individuated, distinct features and movements—fails to be emotionally involving, for the extreme stylization of the figure design prevails over characterization. Even the human protagonist somehow fails to ignite that certain something. And yet, much talent and potential can be seen in The New Gulliver, adumbrating greatness to come.

Next, after World War II, experimenting with confiscated German three-color film stock, Ptushko in 1946 made Russia's first full-color feature, The Stone Flower. The film is based upon a native folktale from The Malachite Box (also known as The Malachite Casket), a collection by Pavel Bazhov. Set in the Ural Mountains in the 19th century, this visually ravishing fable concerns a young stone carver (Vladimir Drushnikov) who gets seduced away from his fiancee by the mystical Queen of Copper Hill (Tamara Makarova) and enticed into her fabulous underground world where he sculpts an enormous flower out of shimmering stone. The Stone Flower's hypnotic, almost religious intensity, and inventive use of color effects that portray a magical realm emanating fluidly out of the equally vivid natural world, made this film Ptushko's first great artistic and popular success. It is also noteworthy for starting a characteristic Ptushko trend—the refreshing, presciently feminist use of resourceful and intelligent female characters who shine with personality despite their traditional “womanly” roles.

The last three offerings in the retrospective, continue the development of color film technique. They contain dazzling set pieces; gorgeous sets, scenery, and costumes; symphonic scores; song and dance interludes involving famous bravura physical feats; and remarkable special effects that include ingenious make-up designs.

Sadko (1953), set in medieval Novgorod, follows the eponymous protagonist, a wandering minstrel, who, in his quest to bring happiness to his people, sails away on a Sinbad-like voyage. He travels far and wide, visiting the land of the Vikings, India, and even the underwater kingdom of the Tsar of the Ocean, but finds that true joy can only be found at home, with Lyubava, the girl he left behind. The scenes in India show off Ptushko's opulent creativity, while those in the undersea realm provide wondrous and memorable examples of his whimsical wit. What a privilege to view this film in its meant-to-be-seen form rather than the butchered, re-edited, dubbed version released under the title The Magic Voyage of Sinbad by Roger Corman in 1962, during the height of the Cold War.

Viy (1967), set in a pastoral 19th century Russian countryside and based on a short story by Nikolai Gogol, can be considered Russia's first horror movie. It tells the tale of an awkward novice priest (Leonid Kuravlyov) who resists the advances of a demonic old hag, provoking her wrath. Seeking revenge, the witch disguises herself as the beautiful corpse of a young woman whose last wish was for the priest to pray over her for three nights. Having trapped the hapless protagonist in the church with the erstwhile deceased, she summons her allies to torment him. These comprise an astonishingly grotesque parade of gargoyles and demons that seem to literally ooze from the walls, their twisted root-like faces mirroring the muddy natural landscape outside while inside, the gorgeous witch whirls around the church in a flying coffin! Viy uses fantasy allegory to confront the age-old patriarchal fear of female sexuality promulgated in extreme forms by the Judaeo-Christian belief system and exemplified in Tsarist Russian attitudes.

Based on a poem by Pushkin, Ptushko's last picture, his epic 2-part masterpiece, Ruslan i Lyudmilla (1972), features a 13th century Kiev setting for the adventures of the titular hero (Valery Kosints) who struggles to recover his feisty, resourceful bride (Natasha Petrova) kidnapped on their wedding night by the impish sorcerer Tchernovor. This fantasy comes packed with bizarre, surreal characters—the flying dwarf villain with a 50 foot beard, his eccentric witch henchwoman, Ruslan's three jealous rivals, and the antagonist's weird, capering servants. In addition, awesome set pieces back the action and provide more wonderment. These notably include the midget's sparkling crystal palace, tormented statue-like male figures chained in a cavern, and a decapitated giant's head looming up from the ground like an Easter Island statue.

With imaginative vision and technical skill equal to the revered, contemporaneous Hollywood masters Ray Harryhausen and George Pal, Alexander Ptushko, with his career spanning some four decades, deserves recognition for his genius. How criminal that he remains uncelebrated in the West! Communist-era Ptushko's revolutionary work can favorably compare with that of modern cinematic wizards such as Terry Gilliam and Jeneut and Caro. Lincoln Center should be heartily thanked for bringing these wondrous movie treats to the New York metropolitan area public.

But New Yorkers need not be the only ones exposed to Ptushko's talent. If you'd like to see his work for yourself, seek out a local film library or film society, or just start searching the web. One quick search revealed that the University of Illinois has some of Ptushko's work, including Ruslan y Lyudmilla. Any large university with both a film library and a Russian department is likely to have one or two Ptushko films on file. In New York there is, of course, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, sponsor of this festival. In the San Francisco area, the Pacific Film Archive is next to the UC Berkeley campus, a short walk from public transit. In Los Angeles the American Cinematheque's Egyptian Theater has screened these films before, and might do so again if interested members of the public were to suggest it. These examples are cited because I and my editor happen to be aware of them, but there are similar establishments across the country. A little effort could turn up the one near you, and along with it, a Ptushko prize to share with your friends. Let this outstanding oeuvre be distributed far and wide to enchant and delight audiences everywhere!

Amy Harlib is a lifelong, avid reader of SF & F literature, retired with plenty of time to indulge in her passion for reading. She lives in NYC and welcomes intelligent feedback and discussion about the genre. Other enthusiasms: cats, archeology/anthropology/paleontology, folklore and mythology, genre films, science for intelligent laypersons, and memoirs/narratives as literature. Her previous work at Strange Horizons can be found in our archive.

1/28/02

Strange Horizons' review of Molly Gloss's exquisite Wild Life isn't as timely as it might be (the book came into print in 2000), but I don't know that the book has yet received the attention it deserves in speculative fiction circles, even though it recently won the Tiptree award. I myself was only led to read it when I ran across it this past December while I was browsing for holiday reading. My local independent bookseller had placed a copy of it with the science fiction and fantasy, despite the fact that the book is clearly being marketed as mainstream fiction. She has my gratitude. Wild Life inhabits the boundaries of speculative fiction—it's about speculative fiction as much as it is an example of the genre—and it inhabits those boundaries with such a combination of panâche and tenderness that I was immediately drawn in to explore this strange boundary country.

These qualities emanate especially from the narrator and protagonist, Charlotte Bridger Drummond. In the opening pages of her narrative, we find Charlotte weeping over the news that Jules Verne has died, explaining to her five-year-old son Jules (named for the author) that a bride is “a woman with a romantic inclination which has led her into reckless behavior,” and contemplating the deviousness with which the family cat hides her litters:

Someone has taught the cat to count, is my belief, for she has never failed to notice when we have sneaked off with the weaklings and the crooked-born of her kittens, and she has become more and more wily with each successive litter, determined to raise them all, runts and mutants all, in a behavior that to my mind must be proof of the basic tenets of Darwin, or disproof; which, I cannot as yet decide.

Charlotte constructs her own life right on the border between hard-headed feminist realism and heroic fantasy. Even if the novel had no plot of mystery and high drama at all, her personality would make of daily life a worthy adventure.

The plot, in fact, has plenty of mystery and high drama. In the spring of 1905, Charlotte Bridger Drummond, feminist, successful authoress, single mother of five children since the disappearance of her husband, native of the Washington state frontier, sets off into the deepwoods of the Cascades range. She is joining the search for young Harriet Coffee, granddaughter of Charlotte's housekeeper, who has gone missing from the camp where her father works as a logger. It is rumored that the child was carried away by a great, hairy ape! Can it be true? Charlotte, scientific and rational, is skeptical; she joins the search in part to dispel the wild illusions surrounding it. The main narrative of Wild Life is Charlotte's journal of her experiences, beginning on the day Harriet's disappearance becomes known.

The basic plot works as a mystery-adventure (and summarized it may sound quite far-fetched indeed), but suspense is actually almost ancillary to the book's appeal. It is assembled as a pastiche. Charlotte's journal entries provide a linear narrative, but interspersed with that narrative are excerpts from other writings: reflective journal entries from earlier and later in her life, fragments of her fiction, quotations from contemporary authors and thinkers: all these materials have been arranged together by Charlotte herself to examine the meaning of her adventure. This pastiche presents the reader with another mystery: how much of the journal itself is a fiction, and how much is truth. I found it just as satisfying to jump backwards and forwards in Wild Life as to read it straight through, reconstructing the chronology of Charlotte's writings to discern how her experience changed her. Which of the excerpts were composed before her journey into the deepwoods? Which after? How are they different? What actually happened to her? How was she changed by her experience?

It's through the pastiche that Wild Life works both as speculative metafiction and as a psychological novel. Charlotte Bridger Drummond is the author of numerous popular stories of fantastic adventure, which are, in her own words, “trivial novels of moon voyages, African adventures, time travel, stories of Black Wizards with mysterious powers of invisibility,” but she aspires to accomplish something more. Would that mean turning to realism? Or does Romance have access to higher Truth? Has she reached the limits of her talent? Or do the demands of raising and supporting children prevent her from fully developing it? For Charlotte, the mysterious disappearance of Harriet and the deeper mysteriousness of the woods themselves, lead her to explore the mysteries of art and of her own inner life. If in her assemblage of the pastiche, she leaves the factual questions that drive the mystery of the plot unanswered, she does so not as a literary tease but as a way of exploring deeper mysteries about herself and about the culture through which she, as a writer and as a feminist, moves as a social pioneer. The gradual modulation of her consciousness under the pressure of events is thus portrayed with marvelous subtlety and complexity.

Abetting this subtlety is the minutely detailed realism of the narrative style. Like her mentor Ursula Le Guin, Gloss crafts prose in which every word is well-chosen. Charlotte's style has the prolixity of the late Victorian writer—it both shows and tells, in violation of the later Modernist dictum—but it is unfailingly precise and unsparing in its renderings. If the events of the plot seem outrageous when examined out of context, in context they never appear so, because they are so clearly and vividly grounded in the realities of the logging frontier. While walking back from purchasing supplies for her journey in the mill town of Yacolt, Charlotte happens upon a young man watching a baseball game from a rough set of bleachers:

A boy with a wooden leg sat on the three-tier bleachers between third base and home plate.... He sat on the lowest bench and rested his elbows back on the next high, with his wooden leg and his other one outstretched before him. An east wind had sprung up and cleared out the smoke of burning slab, sawdust, and mill-ends, the great piles that go on burning day and night for years in such towns as these, and the sun shone through for a moment. The bleachers struck me as a fine place to enjoy the improbable spring sunshine and several minutes of free entertainment....

I leant back and rested my elbows on the bench beside him and commented upon his wooden leg in a mild and roundabout way. “I believe I've seen half a dozen crippled men in coming four blocks through town,” I said, which didn't seem to offend or surprise him.

"Donkey boilers blow up,” he said easily. “People fall from flumes, band saws break, a tree walks, a leg gets caught in the bight of the donkey cable. I guess there is about a hundred ways to get killed or hurt in the woods and mills.”

...[We] exchanged one-legged man stories. I told him about the old Russian whose leg was lost in a fishing accident, and when he applied to the Columbia River Fisherman's Protective Union for help, they bought a wooden leg and leased it to the fellow, for fear that an outright donation would set a dangerous precedent.

When Charlotte shifts into the manner of the frontier story-teller with her one-legged man story, the need for the shift is clear: one must soar above these hard realities, or be buried by them. The realism of her style justifies her interest in romance. The novel leaves it to the reader to decide whether the story as a whole is realism or romance. Does speculative fiction show us something different from the world we know, or does it show us that the world is not what we took it to be?

While I won't say any more about how the plot's mysteries are resolved, I will reassure prospective readers that Charlotte's anxieties about her literary talents are surely resolved by Wild Life itself. In her most definitive statement about writing, Charlotte reveals the kind she most prefers: “My preference is for the writer whose language is gorgeous, whose characters are as real as life, and whose stories take my poor little assumptions and give them back to me transformed; I prefer, then, Verne and Griffith, Poe's short tales and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.” Wild Life is just that kind of book.

Christopher Cobb is Senior Reviews Editor for Strange Horizons.

1/7/02

I somehow become more aware of time and transience when thinking about speculative poetry. I type at this old Smith and Corona, as I have done many times before, over the years, in thinking about this topic, and I become subtly conscious of snow lightly falling outside, of a gray sky, of the sound of typewriter keys, and of the rushing of air through this building's air ducts. I have no idea why this should be, unless it is simply that I feel the historical nerves being tickled. Small details rise and acquire the smokiness of significance.

I have engaged in only a handful of poetry studies in the last decade; yet all have fed into this internal mental picture I have, not quite of a historical pageant, but of a rough map drawn on a well-folded rag sheet, of the history of this form called speculative poetry.

The editors of this extremely attractive paperless magazine have thought to ask me for a history, at fortune-cookie size, of science fiction poetry; and since I see science fiction poetry as a special case of speculative poetry, I agreed to the happy task without letting the editors know I might never mention science fiction poetry before running out of fortune-cookie papers. I have now mentioned it three times; that may need to do.

What I will try to do is convey some sense of that folded and refolded map in my mind.

Whenever you attempt this sort of thing you buck crowds of people rushing at the theater showing the latest hits of Homer and other golden-haired literary deities. All these theater-goers are sure the roots of this-ism and that-ism are found expressed in the twitching eyebrows of Homer's Zeus, or somewhere in the lovely mysteries of De Rerum Natura. This may well be. I will certainly not bar you from following the crowd. I might well find them entertaining myself, tomorrow. For now, I ask only that you first consider the nature of the speculative poem.

That nature is this: in the speculative poem, the poet presents an unreal world as though presenting the real one.

This may seem an easy piece of nonsense. It was, however, an extremely hard kind of nonsense to achieve. A poet could not truly do this until society, or at least an important part of society, was capable of perceiving the real world for what it was. I use the word “real” here as an empiricist might. For our Western ways of thought, we have a long line of cerebral figures, many of them from the ranks of the British Royal Society and the Deists, to thank for bringing to our attention, front and foremost, the notion that things can be verifiably determined about the world around us. True, Aristotle, of the golden hair, had similar concerns. Yet the West went its merry way after Aristotle went his merry way. Aristotle's writings went somewhat into the building of the Catholic church, and very much into the creation of Middle Eastern science. Western intellectuals, however, never quite got around to studying him until the Royal Society and the Deists truly, deeply began looking at the world as though the world itself mattered.

If our beginning steps toward acquiring a full sense of the real were taken in the 1600s and 1700s, then the final important step was made at the beginning of what I will call, following Northrop Frye's lead, the Modern Century. The publication of On the Origin of Species closed the last big, gaping hole in the West's scientific, rational understanding of the workings of the world. Turning our focus back to poetry, this means that before 1859 the intellectual climate was of necessity partially mystical. A poet could to some degree separate the real from the unreal, without, however, achieving true disconnection. The idea of the real had yet to reach maturity. A few poets came close to achieving disconnection, as in the case of Lord Byron, George Gordon, and one whose name I will mention soon.

I gave a paper on the speculative poem some twenty-odd years ago, as I write this. This was in France, at a conference. I mention this not out of self-elevation nor any need to flaunt credentials, for I was brash, young, penniless, and even more remarkably stupid then than I am now. Yet I had a paper to present that the listeners, who were from several countries, received with at least the appearance of respect and attentiveness. In leaving the session that afternoon, a French scholar approached me and said, “This speculative poetry. It really is something new, isn't it?” I remember his reaction clearly, and with interest. I had just finished presenting a paper on Edgar Poe. The “something new” the French scholar was referring to had been introduced by a writer who had died about one hundred and forty years earlier.

Poe we must necessarily consider a semi-mystical rationalist. A careful reader of Poe will emerge with the knowledge that he regarded intellect and rationalism as of uttermost importance. He possessed a fine mind himself, if he lacked the advantages of wealth, family connections, and social introductions that helped Darwin to become the preeminent rationalist of his time. Poe's mystical understanding of the universe fell exactly within the sphere Darwin's work would demystify. Poe spoke of the “fittingness” of things in the natural world, as a kind of sign of divine action in the world. Had he lived to see publication of Darwin's work, which I believe he would have devoured with greater avidity than did most of his countrymen, Poe quickly, easily and comfortably would have sloughed off the remnants of an older, mystical worldview.

Despite living in an intellectual climate that encouraged and possibly required a vestigial mysticism, Poe did manage to achieve the divorce of poetic reality from our consensus reality. What occurred within certain of his poems occurred without reference to the world we hold in common. The world of the poems was unreal, yet real within the context of the poems.

The Modern Century stretched very roughly from 1850 to 1950, or from about the years that encompassed Poe's death and Darwin's publication of On the Origin of Species to the first years when a shadow was being cast upon the globe by the existence of multi-nationally based atomic weaponry. While I am far from fully aware of the poetic output in this country and elsewhere during that century, I doubt any figure will appear from obscurity to loom larger than that of James Thomson (B.V.). This Scottish poet's life overlapped Poe's; yet he lived to see publication of Darwin's greatest works, and was part of the first generation to honestly grapple with the implications of a thoroughly rational worldview. Since his popularity was chiefly posthumous, he made the speculative poem a major form with little encouragement from the general literary community. Other, more minor figures also emerged, from George Meredith to Edna St. Vincent Millay, to affect in some way the history of the form.

The time following the Modern Century may end up being designated, as it has in the past, the Space Age, the Atomic Age, or the Age of Plastic, or something else entirely, such as the Polluted Age, the Silicon Century, or even Postmodern Century, to keep the lit-crit types content. So far, this period has been marked in part by the widespread acceptance of several forms that came of age in the Modern Century, including speculative poetry, the science fiction story, and the detective story. The two dominant strands of speculative poetry might be typified by two writers I have lately read, Anselm Hollo and Philip Dacey. Hollo, a scientifically literate, intellectually adventurous poet, has written both the purer kind of speculative poem, in which the words of the poem construct a reality not corresponding very well to ours, sometimes for humorous ends; and a more dilute kind, in which language or terminology borrowed from a speculative form, in this case the science fiction story, is employed within a poem that makes explicit reference to our consensus reality. Hollo's works, among the most effective of his generation, reflect the workings of a genuine and honest literary mind. Dacey, on the other hand, excels at a weaker form of speculative poem, of a sort that has become quite popular. For Dacey, an overheard phrase or random notion is something that will produce, almost mechanically, a set of entertaining lines that are arranged as verse is. The reality of the poem derives primarily from the phrase or notion, and to only a limited degree from any active and engaged reflection on our contemporary world. This disjunction sometimes has humorous effect. Dacey does have his serious concerns, especially about intimacy, love, and sex; yet his seriousness is undermined by the lightness of his formal approach and his unsure command of tone.

Dacey has made a great success for himself as a contemporary poet, probably much more than has Hollo and undoubtedly vastly more than someone like Thomson, who worked in poverty and almost complete obscurity until near the end of his life. Dacey's reputation as poet, and particularly as a popular, extremely accessible poet, rests in no little part upon the speculative poems he has published. In itself this gives clear indication that the form has undergone a maturation. It is a form reaching an audience. Speculative poetry may even be a particularly fitting form for our times, whatever times they are we live within. That, however, remains to be seen.

Copyright © 2002 Mark Rich

Mark Rich has fiction in the Feb. 2002 issue of Analog, and music coming out from his own newly established independent label, Iguanodon Smile. His third book about toys will also appear in early 2002. He was a founding editor with Roger Dutcher of the Magazine of Speculative Poetry. For more about him, visit his Web site.