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| The Reference Library |
Don Sakers |
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People read science fiction for many different reasons, reasons that vary from reader to reader; even the same reader can be looking for different things at different times or in different moods.
One big reason people read sf (and fantasy, but that’s another matter) is to experience places, people, and things beyond the everyday world: exotic planets, fascinating futures, alien beings and cultures, superhuman achievers. In lit-crit circles this is called “otherness”—the depiction and appreciation of that which is unlike oneself. It’s this focus on otherness that leads many mundanes to dismiss sf as “escape literature.” Science fiction readers, they imagine, must seek to experience otherness in order to escape the real world which dissatisfies us.
As we all know, that’s only part of the story. Sure, some of it is a desire to escape, at least temporarily, the real world around us. The rest, though, is the marvelous way that otherness allows us to experience everyday reality from different perspectives. It’s often said that you never really know your own native language until you learn another; similarly, we don’t truly know our own reality until we spend some time in another.
It was Maestro Tolkien, quoting G.K. Chesterton’s riff on Dickens, who gave us a wondrous term for this phenomenon: mooreeffoc. All of those fine English gentlemen, you see, spent many hours in Britain’s ubiquitous coffee-rooms (here-and-now we call them Starbucks). From the outside, these establishments are totally ordinary and familiar, with their plate glass windows bearing the letters “coffee-room.” But from inside, ah, the letters spell out something exotic, enticing, glamorous: “mooreeffoc.”
This is the perspective that the otherness of sf can offer: a new way of looking at the ordinary, a way to see magic in the everyday. Escape literature? Yes: because sometimes you can only see aspects of reality by escaping it and looking back.
This time around I have for you an assortment of books that do a great job of invoking otherness and mooreeffoc.
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One of the best ways to get a fix of otherness is with expertly-conceived and well-depicted aliens. Here we’re not talking about creatures who look different but are basically human beings inside funny skins (Star Trek was famous for “aliens” who were humans with prosthetic foreheads). No, the pure quill is creatures who are utterly unlike human beings in significant ways. Intelligent beings whose thoughts and behavior are profoundly different.
For really satisfying aliens, an author can’t just throw out a cool-sounding idea, no matter how intriguing and unusual (even Douglas Adams’ Hooloovoo, who were “a superintelligent shade of the color blue”). Mere difference is not enough; great aliens have to be believably consistent, from biochemistry and evolutionary history to emotional states and cultural norms. Everything they do and say has to make sense . . . on their own terms, at least. Constructing and depicting truly satisfying aliens is a lot harder than you would think. As someone who has written about million-year-old sapient trees, I know a little whereof I speak. That’s why it’s such a joy to find an author who can do it well.
Dave Creek is one of those authors.
If the name rings a bell, there’s a good reason: Creek is no stranger to Analog’s pages. In fact, many of the stories in A Glimpse of Splendor first appeared here, and the book carries an introduction by some chap named Stanley Schmidt (who is himself no slouch in the alien department, as evidenced by Sins of the Fathers, Lifeboat Earth, and a little guy named Tweedlioop).
But don’t fear that you’re getting nothing but recycled stories: there’s a major tale here that has previously only appeared online at Fictionwise. Besides, it’s been a decade since the first Splendor story came out; it’s worth the price of admission to have them all together in one volume.
For those who don’t remember or haven’t read Creek’s stories, here’s a brief outline. The planet Splendor is home to two separate alien species who occupy completely different ecological niches . . . and yet who are completely interdependent. To Splendor comes Earthman Mike Christopher, an explorer with some bad news: Splendor’s sun is going to explode.
Earth is perfectly willing and able to move Splendor’s inhabitants to other, safer worlds . . . but the two races would need to be separated. And that would destroy their culture.
In between the four tales that tell the story of Splendor’s dilemma, we get to follow Mike Christopher on three adventures elsewhere in Creek’s rich galaxy. Just to show that Splendor wasn’t a fluke, Creek invents other aliens and exotic locales; there’s more than enough otherness here to satisfy any sf reader.
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Of Wind and Sand,
by
Sylvie Bérard
Edge,
$19.95 (trade paperback),
307 pp.
ISBN: 9781894063197
Genres:
Alien Beings, Other Worlds
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Sylvie Bérard is a French-Canadian academic, but don’t let that scare you: she’s a real science fiction writer who can do alien beings with the best of them. Of Wind and Sand is an English translation of Terre des Autre, which won the 2005 Québécois Grand Prix for science fiction (as well as several lesser awards). Translator Sheryl Curtis has produced an eminently readable text; it’s easy to completely forget that the book you’re reading was in French just a few years ago.
A human colonization mission goes off course and makes an emergency landing on a world that they name Mars II. It’s a hot desert planet; humans have difficulty surviving even at the polar latitudes.
Enter the natives, reptilian creatures called darztls. Perfectly adapted to their world, the darztls contact the humans and offer their aid. Darztl help means the difference between survival and extinction for the humans.
Of course, the darztls are alien in the purest sense: their thought patterns and culture are decidedly nonhuman. Misunderstanding between the species is inevitable . . . and leads to disaster.
Of Wind and Sand tells the century-long story of human-darztl interaction through the eyes of Chloé Guilimpert, born on Mars II and raised by humans and darztls alike. Chloé sees the world from the darztl perspective as she leads us through violence, captivity, and slavery to the ultimate conclusion.
This is a tale of the clash of cultures and of various forms of imperialism and colonialism (on both sides). There are villains aplenty among both humans and darztls, and lots of blame to spread around.
Of Wind and Sand isn’t just an example of otherness: it’s also a meditation on how we react to otherness. Some characters on Mars II embrace it, others fear it, quite a few die because of it. In the end, those who can best regard themselves from the perspective of the other are the best hope. Definitely a book to be reckoned with.
So let’s see: we’ve had Dave Creek making us think about saving endangered cultures without destroying their essence, and Sylvie Bérard confronting us with peoples whose differences seem to make conflict between them inevitable . . . wow, some “escape” from the real world, eh?
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The Sunless Countries
by
Karl Schroeder
Tor,
$25.95,
335 pp.(hardcover)
ISBN: 9780765320766
Genres: Bigger Than Worlds,
Far Future/Clarke’s Law
Series: Virga #4
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You say you want otherness, and aliens (no matter how well-done) just aren’t other enough? You don’t want to look back at reality from far out in left field . . . you want to leave the stadium entirely behind, if not the whole city?
For science fictional strangeness, there’s nothing quite like something really, really big. Better if it involves floating cities, artificial suns, and high-tech carbon nanotubes holding the whole thing together. Pirates and sapient insects the size of mountain ranges are a bonus.
Welcome to Virga.
To explain Virga, I can’t do any better than the author himself. “Virga is a balloon 5,000 miles in diameter, orbiting in the outskirts of the Vega star system. Built and colonized by humans thousands of years ago, it is a weightless environment lit by man-made fusion micro-suns and one central fusion-driven heat source named Candesce.” This balloon is filled with air, and contains perhaps hundreds of nations and cities, most lit by their own pocket suns. Cities are gigantic wheels or cylinders that spin to produce centrifugal force. Various types of flying vessels carry people and commerce between nations.
In three previous books Schroeder has taken us to various nations of Virga in the wake of Hayden Griffin, hero and sun-builder.
Now Hayden is deep in the lightless voids of Virga, on the city Pacquaea: but The Sunless Countries is not Hayden’s story. The main character is a woman named Leal Hieronyma Maspeth, a historian and academic who was born and raised in dark Pacquaea.
Here’s the problem: an enormous booming voice is sounding in the vast unlit expanses of the Sunless Countries, and Leal thinks she knows where it’s coming from. You see, there are these legendary creatures called worldwasps, creatures truly fit to the scale of Virga. Old books speak of the worldwasps, books that also speak of a universe outside Virga’s skin. A transhuman, post-Singularity universe dominated by something called Artificial Nature.
Thousands of years ago, humans and worldwasps rejected Artificial Nature and together built Virga as a refuge. Then there was war between humans and worldwasps, and no one knows what became of the wasps. Until now . . .
Hayden the Hero has no interest in pursuing the strange new voice and confronting the worldwasps, so it’s up to Leal to set off on a journey that will lead her beyond Virga entirely and change her forever.
You want otherness, you want mooreeffoc, you want different perspectives on reality? After The Sunless Countries, you’ll never look at the universe the same way again. And isn’t that the whole point?
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For an incredible thirty years, Tom Easton was the voice of “The Reference Library” here in Analog. By my count, only two people have appeared in more issues of this magazine: the legendary John W. Campbell, and that Schmidt fellow I mentioned a while back.
Last year Tom Easton took a well-deserved retirement from Analog and moved on to other pastures. Now SRM Publishers has given us this slim, delicious chapbook containing four tales that showcase Tom’s considerable talent as a storyteller. All four stories have a connection to Tom’s home, Maine.
All four of these stories amply demonstrate the quality of otherness. “Blue Bottle Fly,” which appeared in Analog in 1981, is an alien story with a twist. The other three tales were published outside Analog. “Wallflower” is a fantasy of painful choices and eternal love. “A Love Story” involves a widower who gains a different perspective, and “The Bung-Hole Caper” tells what happens when flying saucers land in a small Maine town.
I can’t imagine an Analog reader who wouldn’t be interested in this delightful collection.
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The Medea Hypothesis,
by Peter Ward
Princeton University Press,
$24.95,
180 pp. (hardcover)
ISBN 9780691130750
Genres:
Popular nonfiction
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If you’re intent on the search for different perspectives, you can sometimes find them outside the realm of science fiction and fantasy. Peter Ward gives us a good example from the field of planetary biology.
You’re probably familiar with James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis, which has dominated planetary biology for decades. Named for the kind and caring earth-mother of Greek mythology, the Gaia Hypothesis treats the whole planet, organic and inorganic parts alike, as one gigantic organism.
Gaia is self-regulating and omnibenevolent. Working mostly through the twin agencies of life and atmospheric composition, Gaia uses feedback loops to maintain Earth in the optimum state for habitability. Never too hot or too cold, too acid or too salty, too wet or too dry, Gaia steers a middle course that keeps Earth as a perfect home for life.
Or at least, Gaia kept things under control until we humans got too big for our britches and started messing with things: clearing forests, overfishing the oceans, dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Gaia’s doing the best she can to restore equilibrium, but we’ve got to work with her by minimizing the damage we do.
Ward takes a look at the history of life on Earth and is reminded of a different Greek figure, Medea. This darling woman, who cooked her own children and served them up to dinner guests, certainly ranks among the Top Five Worst Mother Figures Ever.
The problem, as Ward sees it, is inherent in life itself. Lifeforms have a built-in drive to reproduce beyond the carrying capacity of their environment. Sooner or later, very successful lifeforms produce enough waste products to initiate global changes. The atmosphere gets filled with fatal levels of oxygen, or methane and carbon dioxide start a runaway greenhouse effect, or living organisms change the planet’s albedo and the oceans freeze, or . . .
Well, one way or another, life itself has been the cause of many of the great extinction events that have come close to ending life on Earth completely. (Not the dinosaurs—Ward calls asteroid impacts “non-Medea extinction events.”)
Further, Ward takes a look at places like Mars and Venus, and wonders if Medea just won out on those worlds. Damage your planet too much, and you’re going to wind up with an uninhabitable globe that’s no longer fit to start life again. Ward wonders if Medean extinction might be the most common fate of Earthlike planets in the universe.
Rather than get out of the way and let Gaia fix our mistakes, Ward argues that our only chance for survival on Earth is to keep Medea from doing her job. If we don’t manage our planet’s habitability, he suggests, then Medea will ultimately win.
Now obviously, the Medea Hypothesis is brand new; there’s a lot of serious work to be done to see if it will become an accepted part of planetary biology. Ward has given us the first word on Medea, not the last. But for those interested in looking at things from a different direction, and for science fiction readers in particular, it’s certainly a book worth reading.
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Don Sakers is the author of A Rose From Old Terra and Dance for the Ivory Madonna. For more information, visit www.scatteredworlds.com.Genre and series information is based on listings at www.readersadvice.com.
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"The Reference Library" copyright © 2010, Don Sakers
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