J. E. Landau

This post is a follow up to two past posts of mine, an explanation of the idea of retrocausal criticism and a book review, so I would recommend reading those if you haven’t read them yet.

I recently finished Science Fiction: The Best of 2004, edited by Karen Haber and Jonathan Strahan, and I enjoyed most of the stories, although I think it was overall somewhat worse than The Year’s Best SF 17. For the sake of sanity, I will call these works B04 and SF17, so that I don’t have to type out their very verbose titles. As a continuation and extension of my method from In Retrospect, I intend to treat works from B04 as direct reactions to work in SF17.

Like everything else, science fiction goes through trends, with authors reacting to one another, and by looking at these works side-by-side, you can really see that. Take, for example, The Lost Pilgrim by Gene Wolfe, part of B04. This story concerns a time-tourist, who is intending to go back and see the Mayflower visit America, but instead, he finds himself as part of Jason’s crew of Argonauts, questing in ancient Greece. He meets all of the merry band of heroes and a few mythical creatures, but ultimately finds himself trapped in an ancient tomb, even once he jumps forward into the future.

In my opinion, this story is an excessive development on the ideas in Gregory Benford’s Mercies. Mercies is a story about a very wealthy man, who develops time travel technology to go back in time and kill serial killers. The first few are fictional, but he goes after more famous real-life killers as the story goes on, including Ted Bundy and the Manson family. Like a serial killer, he refines his modus operandi over time, and he justifies his killings as “mercies” for the timelines he visits. Then, in a twist, he is assisted by another time traveler, who was inspired by his actions, who helps him take on the Manson family before killing him, noting that he is a serial killer like the people he hunts.

Mercies hasn’t the most shocking twist ending, but it’s competently written, and I appreciate how it blends fiction and reality. Many of the serial killers it discusses are completely fictional, but some are real, and there’s sort of a sliding scale there.

In response, Wolfe exaggerated the mixture of myth and reality. The argonauts are, in real life, not known in detail beyond what the myths say about them, compared to the historical serial killers who are relatively well documented. Because of this, Wolfe decided to play up the mythic elements of the story, treating the Greek myths as being literally true, thus expanding on this historical narrative, while Benford’s story is limited to it. But I think that Wolfe over-committed to this strategy. His protagonist ends up being flat, compared to Benford’s highly developed metakiller protagonist, and this ultimately weakens the story.

Another example of development is Jeff VanderMeer’s 2004 short story Three Days in a Border Town, which seems to be a development on The Master of the Aviary by Bruce Sterling, written in 2012. Both stories take place in post-apocalyptic, desert settings, and concern people who are interested in knowledge. Sterling’s story is about a scholar in post-apocalyptic America, who is hoping to reconstruct past knowledge and pass it on to his students in a rather vicious survivalist community. His head is too high in the clouds, and his knowledge is largely impractical, and after a change in the political order, he is exiled from the city and many of his pupils are killed or forced to renounce him. At the end of the story, he is freed and lives in comfort, but the knowledge he treasured is disregarded and his pupils betray his intellectual ideals.

VanderMeer’s story has a similar topic, but its tone is consistently darker and more violent, and I think that VanderMeer chose to highlight the material over the intellectual, in comparison to Sterling. The titular “border towns” are postapocalyptic communities near a moving city, which is described enigmatically. The protagonist seeks practical knowledge (in comparison to the trivia of Sterling’s story) and their goal is to reach the city. Instead of being driven into being a promoter of ignorance, VanderMeer’s protagonist seeks forbidden knowledge, and fuses with an alien being to obtain it, a theme which he evidently lifted from his later work, Annihilation.

When comparing these stories, I think that VanderMeer also commited to the idea more strongly. The Master of the Aviary is not just about ideas, but about politics and virtues, and has a strong sort of “teachiness”, which I believe that Three Days in a Border Town abandoned in exchange for committing heavily to the idea of apocalyptic forbidden knowledge.

For another point of comparison, B04 has Periandry’s Quest, by Stephen Baxter, which is clearly inspired by SF17’s Tethered, by Mercurio D. Rivera. Both are love stories, concerning relationships with speculative constraints. In the case of Tethered, aliens called Wergens are in love with humanity, and become infatuated with humans whenever they encounter them. This is something that Wergen society as a whole treats as very natural and not something to be worried about, but which individual Wergens (and humans) sometimes protest.

As an added twist, the Wergens also become involuntarily attached to each other. Wergens mate based on biological factors, instead of courtship that we are familiar with, and then they fuse together, and one absorbs the other, before they reproduce. The story draws parallels between these two processes: the main character is a human girl who makes friends with a Wergen, who is infatuated with her. The protagonist, being a child, doesn’t really think about the moral implications of this, and treats the Wergen as a close friend without any reservations, but eventually ends up splitting up with the Wergen after she gets married. Then, when she returns, she discovers that the Wergen has also taken a mate—and is being absorbed into another Wergen, who had previously taken great lengths to avoid humanity. Clearly, there are multiple kinds of tethering: between species, between friends, between spouses, and those connections are the focus of the story.

To contrast, Baxter was clearly more interested in exploring the scientific aspects of speculative romance. In his story, Periandry’s Quest, society is divided into vertical strata, and the farther up you are, the faster time passes for you. At the top of the world, called the Attic, time passes many times faster, and the people up there are relatively poor, and looked down (or up!) on by the people below, who enjoy longer lives.

The protagonist is a young man from a noble family who becomes fascinated by a girl from the Attic. After becoming interested in her, he climbs up the stairs to the Attic, taking the time to observe how the passage of time shifts as he rises, and ultimately fails to win her love at the top, then returning back to the ground below, noting that the people up above might revolt.

This story is in some ways simpler than Rivera’s Tethered, but I think that this is only because it sacrifices the personal for the technical, a trend that would escalate as Baxter moved into his earlier career. In general, Baxter’s work is very focused on the technical aspects of situations, and clearly, Periandry’s Quest is no exception, being a more technical reaction to Rivera’s writing.

For a final example, I would like to compare The Best Christmas Ever by James Patrick Kelly, included in B04, and Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer by Ken Liu.

Liu’s story is about a child who is growing up in a posthuman, digital society. She is very young, and not familiar with the outside world, but her mother, who is one of the relatively few members of their society who was once a biological human, wants to teach her to have more respect for the outside world, when the protagonist lives in a very solipsistic situation.

Even though the digital society usually runs much faster than the outside world, the mother takes her child into a vehicle and flies her over to the ruins of New York City, which are some ways away from their digital living area. The child gets to experience flight in the real world, and watches New York City crumble into dust over decades. The mother informs her child that she must leave for a deep space mission, which will be a one-way trip, and then the child feels a wistful longing for the outside world. It’s about the importance of impermanence and they ending of all things.

In 2004, James Patrick Kelly’s story would cover similar themes, but with reversed roles. The Best Christmas Ever is set after autonomous robots have taken over the world. These robots are very friendly to humans, and want to create a good living environment for them, but are confronted with the fact that, for whatever reason, there are very few humans left. The protagonist is one of the robots caring for a middle-aged man, who is extremely depressed with his situation. The protagonist is in some ways incapable of understanding the man’s needs and emotions, but attempts to cheer him up by having other robots take on different roles in his life, satisfying all of his whims, and celebrating holidays, including the titular Christmas.

Eventually, the robots decide to give the man gifts, and they take the man on a Christmas shopping expedition. On the way, the protagonist encounters another one of the few surviving humans, who is a confused old woman, possibly suffering from dementia, and the two of them share a moment. The man asks the robots for a gun for Christmas, and the protagonist is very nervous that he will commit suicide, but at the end of the story, he doesn’t, and it’s mentioned that he lived for a long time after that.

This is also a story about how good things can’t last, but I think that Kelly expanded on Liu’s work by showing the collapse of something very personal to the protagonist—their ward dying, and by drawing out the suffering. Once again, this shows greater commitment to the theme, and I think that this is the common trend in the development from 2012 to 2004.

While the authors in SF17 focused very heavily on the characters in their pieces, by 2004 this was no longer as necessary, and many of the authors focused on taking a single idea and expanding on it as much as possible. In my opinion, this is a developmental change in the writing of science fiction, showing how the authors included in B04 expanded upon the work of their successors, and drilled down on the unique aspects of science fiction. Looking even further backwards, through the responses of past authors, you can draw a line from this development to the first invention of social science fiction in the 60s and 70s in response to the highly-social sci-fi of the 21^st Century, and then the concentration of science fiction down into a focus on purely technical concepts and strange worlds, as seen in its ultimate form, the premodern speculations of Lucian’s A True Story. The history of science fiction is the history of authors distilling the essence of speculation, until speculation is all there is.