Lost in the Library of Life

Alarums and Excursions

It’s a busy summer, what with trips to the Lake District, canal boating and Mary getting a new job (she’s left Future to become the Producer: Computers and Internet at AOL UK) and having to move to London… we don’t really want to be stuck in the long-distance relationship again, so I’m now talking to recruitment agencies, and as the interviews are starting to be scheduled, perhaps it’ll be sooner than I’d expected that I’ll be a regular at the Champion again.

I’ve decided to avoid the capsule reviews this month, and after a trip to Oxford in which I tracked down a couple of wanted books (not unlike the recent Hay trip where I managed to find the original Scribners editions of a couple of Heinlein juveniles…) I put together this little essay.

Springing from the head of Zeus: Art in Science Fiction.

I recently finished reading Alexander Jablokov’s excellent Carve The Sky (AvoNova 1991). Like most science fiction dealing with art (or for that matter history) Carve The Sky is a detective story. The role of the artist is purely that of the maguffin, the key that leads our heroes across the heavens and to a glorious future. The art detective: the dealer, the agent all trapped in a hunt for yet another Maltese Falcon. All carefully deconstructed in Bowie and Eno’s strange and haunting album 1.Outside.

It’s a common sin, this devolution of art into plot element. It’s only in a few rare cases that the role of the artist or the art form becomes the story. Ian MacDonald attempts to break down the barriers in his novella Scissors Cut Paper Wrap Stone, but here his tool is low art, the comic book tales of manga, the craftsmanship of the font designer: though the font can easily be high art, take the sublime lines of Eric Gill’s sans serif work or Russell Brady’s avant garde designs. Even here though, MacDonald takes the creative element and subsumes it into the thriller.

Bruce Sterling perhaps comes closest to the ideal, in The Beautiful, The Sublime, set in a post-scarcity future that has turned engineering into art. Perhaps his finest work, this short story takes into a society where everyone is an artist. Is this the godlet wreakings of Zelazny’s Amber written on a human scale? Here, the machines have become as gods, so the only hope of humanity is the creative impulse. His latest novel, Holy Fire, takes us into the heart of the crucible once again - the holy fire of the title is the drive to create. There’s a part of Sterling’s writing that reminds me of Dylan Thomas, in his drive to extract spiritual meaning from every dreg of experience.

There’s a breathtaking scene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s under-rated The Memory Of Whiteness, where the Holywelkin Orchestra is played on Mars. One man and one instrument to captivate a whole world. Perhaps it’s here on the barren face of a freshly terra-formed Mars that we start to see that science fiction is no longer a literature that struggles to present a hard face, full of logic and engineering, to the world, but instead is able to show us the place of the numinous in our many individual worlds.

We’re in now a place where science fiction is starting to transcend its technophiliac roots. It’s a place where Mary Gentle can show us the links between art and the hermetic Art, in her distorted city of Rats And Gargoyles. It’s a place where Walter John Williams can treat the caper movie as the distinct art form it is, and then going on and treat it as farce in his Drake Majistraal divertimenti.

It’s in the strange middle point between science fiction, fantasy and horror that Jonathon Carroll perhaps solves the mystery. For him, or at least his narrators, Art is allegory, and the eponymous building of Outside The Dog Museum is yet another attempt to build a bridge between man and his gods. His message is simple; the Tower of Babel is always being built, everywhere, everywhen. We’re always struggling to communicate, and perhaps art can be the only real way we can break down the boundaries between human and human 9let alone human and the alien…)

 And yet there’s still a strange beauty in science, and Gregory Benford, a physicist by trade, goes a long way to showing the core of art that lies beneath science’s hard exterior. Even that dry master of the old hard-science novel, Arthur C. Clarke, isn’t shy of showing us the beauty that lies in the simplicity of mathematics - building an ornamental lake out of Mandlebrot sets in The Ghost From The Grand Banks.

Art in science fiction has many faces. It can be the maguffin, it can be the raison d’être of a story, it can be the keystone that holds together several strands of plot it can even be the cold stark mathematics at the base of the world. In a world where literature is often seen as one of the high arts, it seems apt that the low genres like science fiction are now able to break down the walls of the creative process.

Notes and Queries

Not to much else to say this month, so I’ll pack up the keyboard for tonight, and get on with thinking about the possible companion piece that Carve The Sky has inspired - a look at late 80’s and 90’s views of the Moon.

Simon Bisson