Beam Me Home, by James Tiptree Jr.

A lesser known story by the late great Alice Sheldon, Beam Me Home has all of Tiptree's trademarks: a certain slant towards an extreme emotional payoff, a credulous dissatisfaction with the world, a nausea inducing testament of the world we are a part of. But it is also extremely perceptive science fiction, in that it is, as Hartwell has suggested, exemplary of the masterly feel Tiptree had for the tropes of SF, especially the trope of the alien. I cannot say much more of the story without revealing it. It is interesting to compare this story with Waldrop's Flying Saucer Rock and Roll to understand why, in spite of both articles being 'literary' in the best sense of the word, Tiptree succeeds. 

Fringe Benefits

This will be a very odd kind of list. The list will include those science fiction stories which aren't enormously famous, but are still concerned certified classics. The fringe, if you will. I will be adding to the list as I go along, so here are today's entries:

1. Lobsters by Charles Stross
2. Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan
3. The Ugly Chickens by Howard Waldrop
4. Stable Strategies For Middle Management by Eileen Gunn
5. Engine Summer by John Crowley
6. Forgiveness Day by Ursula Le Guin
7. Seven American Nights by Gene Wolfe
8. The Winter Flies by Fritz Leiber
9. Jeffty is Five by Harlan Ellison
10. Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress
11. The Rose by Charles Harness 

Influential stories

The Ugly Chickens
Wang's Carpets
Jeffty is Five
Beggars in Spain
Kirinyaga
Breathmoss 

Flying Saucer Rock and Roll, by Howard Waldrop

Another sad monday, begun expectantly with a story that disappoints. Or maybe it's the breakfast I never have. Whichever the case might be, Howard Waldrop's Flying Saucer Rock and Roll was a little like James Tiptree Jr.'s Beam Us Home, Joanna Russ's Souls,  and, to a lesser extent, Gene Wolfe's The Ziggurat: a science fiction story which almost wasn't one, if it weren't for a tacked on trope that feels like it's dragging the story down Allegory lane. I don't like my science fiction done that way.

A good example of a science fiction story which balances social criticism and science fictional novum organically is Nancy Kress's Out of All Them Bright Stars. And that's largely because the reveal in the story isn't something that sticks out like a sore thumb. It uses a science fiction trope to shed light on a political reality, and not to necessarily 'solve it'. In this way, it avoids accusations of being 'escapist'.

I guess one good thing this story led to was reminding me of why I consider Kress's story to be so essential to the short SF canon. 

The Crowd, by Ray Bradbury

In having to research for a paper on Ray Bradbury, I read this story in Hartwell's The Dark Descent. My motive for doing so was specific: I needed to juxtapose Bradbury's science fictional horror with him at possibly his purest. It is quite clear to anyone familiar with Bradbury's oeuvre that the kind of fiction he wrote owed more to gothic horror and a familiarity with human reaction to the supernatural than science fiction per se. His speculation was not rigorous extrapolation; it was rather, much like his contemporary Fritz Leiber, utilizing the vocabulary of SF to render the everyday of reality into mythic proportions. It is a crestfallen mythology, one where the gods have been displaced by complacency behind which lurks a kind of dread of the future, a dread of having mistaken an utility for what that utility promises.

In The Veldt as well as Mars is Heaven!, this dread has a tangible locus. In case of the previous story, it is a sentient nursery which surmises the deepest needs of its inhabitants and virtually provides them with it. In the latter, it is Mars itself, which for Bradbury becomes a landscape of the human unconscious, mixing desire with dread in equal measure. I shall not attempt a psychoanalytic reading of Bradbury however, precisely because while much of his fiction might show traces of dream logic given rational heft, it is made more corporeal by the inclusion of the science fictional novum, which leads to both it becoming metaphor and a kind of supra-realism.

In The Crowd, however, there is no such one material locus. The object of our attention in this case becomes the perverse attraction J G Ballard would go on to write about in his pornographic novel Crash, which fetishizes the speeding sports car and car crashes in general as a sexual pursuit. Both Ballard and Bradbury are writing about a kind of horror, but this horror is sublimated in two different directions entirely. For Ballard, the horror is intrinsic in the almost sexual gratification humans receive in such physical exhibition of destruction and violence, while for Bradbury, the horror is underscored precisely by the fact that such a pleasure is an unstated reality we brainwash ourselves into thinking does not exist. The paradigms, therefore, are different, and perhaps not as subtly as it seems. The Crowd is science fiction in the sense that Bradbury makes explicit a social fact that is relegated to a kind of invisible conceptual hell that, try as we might, we shall never intentionally exorcise. Ballard is not afraid of such truths, and the horrors of his fiction lie precisely in the fact that neither are his characters. They have surrendered to a new paradigm of humanity, where humanism as we know it and morals as we accept them have no place. It is a perverse parody of the ubermansch, an animal rationale with a limitless capacity for redefining and extending the boundaries of immorality, rendering the entire concept moot in the process.

A Comparison

Surface Tension is a story of human settlers in another world who decide to change human physiology significantly in order for their successors to survive in that world; the successors have no idea where they come from, and they piece what facts the humans made available to them to get at the truth.

Driftglass is about the pitfalls of physiological manipulation to have humans plumb the depths of the oceans to carry out complex engineering and oil rigging projects. It's a complex story of how change might sometimes only achieve a return to one's limitations, instead of transcendence.

Oceanic charts a man's journey from fledgling believer in a troubling religion and his final disillusionment through science. It too, like the two previous stories, is set in the ocean, in another planet, and the humans themselves are not aware that they may be something more.

Surface Tension by James Blish is one of the purest examples of hard science fiction. It is perhaps not as 'hard' as The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin, in which story there is very little in the way of a world-building imagination at work, but it is 'hard' in the sense that every aspect of the story seems geared towards a specific ending, and revelation. It is single minded in its endeavor to bring about a paradigm shift, or 'conceptual breakthrough'.

Oceanic by Greg Egan is similar, but it decides to shed the sense of adventure the Golden Age was so fond of for a more introspective and personal glimpse into the world of faith and science. Where it moves away from the joyous exercise of world-building, it excels in a painfully believable tale of one man's gain, and loss of faith.

Driftglass by Delany decides to walk the fine line by bringing such far flung exercises in speculation down to earth and dulling its edges down. It is what Geoff Ryman might have labeled 'mundane SF', but in being mundane it is that much more invigorating. It offers a world not unlike ours, but sufficiently unlike ours to permit a certain expenditure of energy in traversing that rift, with the intention of having that energy transmuted into a heightened awareness of our world.

In short, where the previous two stories used our knowledge of the 'real' world as a jumping off point into speculative forays, Delany does just the opposite. He begins by having taken for granted a supra-truth, and then works tirelessly to reel it in, into the murky depths of our own world. 

The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu

A bit sentimental, and plays on audience emotion, but the end result is a gentle fantasy of the kind I wish there was more of. Very unique and didn't feel derivative. Very lovely.