Fans of classic science fiction will be saddened to hear that one of its most imaginative writers has passed. In the 1950s and 1960s, William Tenn stood with pioneers like Theodore Sturgeon in creating vivid scenarios of mind-blowing alien worlds in novels and stories that illuminated emotional, political and ethical issues of good old humanity. Tenn was a pseudonym for Philip Klass. His particular contribution to the Golden Age was a willingness to put humor at center stage. (My favorite story of his: “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi.”)His death on Sunday, a few months short of his 90th birthday, is a blow to sci-fi. Condolences to his wife Fruma (herself an award-winning writer) and daughter Adina. But the loss also extends to those who never did manage to crack his novel about an extraterrestrial race with seven sexes.
After living a scuffling life of a freelance sci-fi writer in Greenwich Village for many years, Klass joined the faculty of Penn State in the mid-’60s. He was instrumental in encouraging the careers of fiction writers and journalists like David Morrell, who dedicated his debut novel, First Blood, to his mentor — that’s right — the book that unleashed Rambo.
“Farewell, William Tenn. And, Thanks” by Steven Levy, Wired 2-8-10During the “golden age” of American science fiction, the short stories of William Tenn were read as avidly as the works of Philip K. Dick, Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury.
The first Tenn story appeared in 1946, the dawning of sci-fi’s literary sophistication. More than 200 followed, as well as two novels, most appearing in Galaxy magazine, but Tenn was a pen name.
The author’s real name was Philip Klass, longtime English professor at Penn State University in State College who retired in 1989 after 23 years and moved to Mt. Lebanon.
Mr. Klass died Sunday at his home of congestive heart failure following a long illness, said his widow, Fruma. He was 89.
P-G obituary 2-9-10
Posts Tagged ‘SF’
The Affinity Bridge
Sunday, January 3rd, 2010According to the 2010 daily planner I bought at Borders, on this day in 1981, “Mary T. Meagher, known as Madame Butterfly, swam the women’s 100m butterfly in a record 58.91 seconds.” 5+8+9+1=23. That said,
Smoke billowed around his face as he regarded Newbury. “He made mention of the fact that the unit in question had been destroyed in the impact.”
Newbury met his gaze. “I find that very difficult to believe, Mr. Chapman. I understand the skeletal frames of these automata are constructed out of brass?”
“Correct.”
“Then why were there no remnants of the unit in evidence anywhere on board the ship? Both Miss Hobbes and I toured the wreckage, and I can assure you, there was nothing to be found.”
Chapman poured the tea, his face thoughtful. “Well, if Mr. Stokes’s assertions are correct, the unit may have burnt up in the fires that followed the crash.”
Newbury sipped from his teacup. “Come now, Mr. Chapman. We both know that the heat in the wreckage would never have reached a temperature enough to incinerate brass. There has to be another explanation.”
The Affinity Bridge
3/5 stars
We meet our dapper hero, Sir Maurice Newbury, fanboy of the latest tech and student of the occult, at a seance (which he entertainingly debunks) and our plucky heroine, Victoria Hobbes (here’s hoping the new year will bring at least one “steampunk” title that fails to reference the odious materialist of Malmsbury), at Newbury’s office for tea and exposition of the “revenant plague” zombifying, exclusively so far, the lower classes… who are also being picked off in a string of grisly murders popularly thought perpetrated by a “glowing bobby”. With such conundra weighing on their minds, the duo dash off to poke around the wreckage of a just-crashed automaton-piloted airship and the game is afoot (or atoot, as in, you know, a noise associated with steam engines).
In tone the book falls somewhere between an Agatha Christie “cozy mystery” and the Tom Swift novellas I devoured as a kid. As a light adventure it works, but as a mystery it kinda fails: by a third of the way through, the reader knows the “who”, by two thirds through, the “how”, and all that really remains are decent, but by no means pyrotechnic, chase and fight sequences (with zombies!), tidying up, as it were, and stage-setting for the sequel. That’s not to say that Mann isn’t talented, that I didn’t get numerous kicks out of The Affinity Bridge, just that I expected more. The novel’s greatest strength is surely the flavor of its world, which I found most agreeable. The airships grounded and in flight, the cavernous, automated factories, the trackless steam engines rumbling over fog-occluded Whitechapel cobbles, Hobbes’ visits to her asylum-bound precog sister – all tasty enough, but not terribly filling. In one of my favorite set-pieces, Hobbes comes upon the unconscious Newbury, half-full bottle of laudanum near at hand, in the center of a pentagram chalked on the floor of his bedroom; but Hobbes never learns, nor do we, “what Newbury had been up to with that pentagram.” What a tease!
The Affinity Bridge is not the “enormous pile of awesome” for which Chris Roberson’s blurb on the back cover led me to hope, but a reasonably awesome foundation on which to heap such a pile. If this weren’t the first volume of a series, I’d conclude that Mann was deficient in plotting ability and unable to follow through on his most intriguing concepts; but I’ll generously attribute these flaws to first-time jitters/canny restraint, and remain optimistic that the sequel will handle its occult/paranormal and mystery elements more deftly and deliver on the various pacts made with readers here.
Happy reading and cuídate.
Hylozoic
Monday, December 21st, 2009Quantum mechanics was known to be only an approximation to the world’s deeper rules. There were three new realms to take into account: the parallel spacetime of the Hibrane, the unexplored zone beyond the infinity of the lazy eight axis, and the subdimensional levels beneath the Planck length. While remaining quantum-mechanically orthodox, teleportation teased its practitioners with glimpses of the subdimensions.
As the shape of Jayjay’s wave function shifted, he felt himself skimming across the surface of a hidden sea: the Planck frontier that separated ordinary reality from Subdee. Voracious, meddlesome subbies lived in the subdimensional sea. They’d once attacked Thuy by sending up harpoon-tipped tendrils. It was good to finish one’s teleportation hops as quickly as possible.
But the mind force of the twelve teekers was barely adequate for the task of moving the house, and the passage was proceeding slower than Jayjay would have liked. And then, just when it seemed like they were ready to bloom up into the redwood glen – old Khan lost his focus.
Thuy’s mother, Minh, was teeping him, she was having a hissy fit because they’d forgotten to bring along her special homemade ginger-plum dipping sauce. As the distracted Khan’s mental grip weakened, the cabin teeped a yip of fear. They were sinking too close to the subbies’ sea. Jayjay heard a noise like a wood chipper.
“Damn you, Mom,” screamed Thuy. “Get away!”
Minh withdrew; Khan regained his focus; the house settled onto the foundation in the woods.
Amid relieved murmurs, the group unlinked.
“You must respect your mother, Thuy,” said Khan. “It’s not easy for her anymore.”
“We’re lucky we made it at all,” said Jayjay, sticking up for his wife. He went over and looked out the door. Most of the porch had been gnawed away by the insatiable beings of the subdimensions.
“I’ll teek for the sauce,” said Khan, briefly closing his eyes. Two little pots appeared on the dining table.
Hylozoic
5/5 stars
With Hylozoic, Rucker applies his manic whimsy and multidisciplinary rambunctiousness and comes out with another fine entry in the “psipunk” subgenre he initiated with 2007’s Postsingular. Not only is everything (from trees and streams to individual atoms) in Rucker’s future self-aware, telepathically chatty and linked via the planetary overmind Gaia, but teleportation and telekinesis are also coming into mass use and reshaping civilization. Though anyone so inclined can take advantage of the eight-dimensional fun, cultural inertia being what it is, fundamentalists and despots are still around to cause headaches for folks who just want to live their lives. In addition to three simultaneous alien invasions, the main problems faced by our heroes (among them a sentient pitchfork and Hieronymus Bosch) are those mainstays of dramatic fiction, the personal and the interpersonal, and Rucker takes the time to make his principals, for all the wonders of which they are capable, fallible, sympathetic human beings. As Gaia tells one character seeking a “viral reset rune” to undo the damage wrought by the avian alien tulpas’ quantum operators,
“Pekka has the edge on me,” said Gaia. “Her birds are diligent and they honor their world. But my humans – my humans are stoners or loners. If I can’t find this thing, it’s your own fault.”
Addiction, guilt and the increased prospect for pain that accompanies increased empathy and interconnectedness are at the bottom of Hylozoic’s gravity well along with all the goodies. In writing about transcending human limitations, Rucker spends a good deal of time picking at those sore spots of conscious awareness, and the result feels less like glossy progress porn than like the societal/mathematical larks of Carroll and Abbott. For all the cutting-edge concepts it showcases, Hylozoic works, against all odds, as a story. If there’s another recipe for singularly rad SF, I don’t know it.
If you’re interested in the far-out ideas included (and not included) in Hylozoic, or in Rucker’s writing process, he’s made available 385 pages of working notes (over twice the length of the novel itself) at his site.
Hylozoic is available from the Carnegie Library.
Happy reading and cuídate.
Cheek by Jowl
Wednesday, December 9th, 2009Realistic fiction is relentlessly focused on human behavior and psychology. “The proper study of mankind is Man.” When fiction disobeys Pope and begins to include the Other, it begins to shade into the ghost story, the horror story, the animal story, or science fiction, or fantasy; it begins the movement outward to the not-entirely-human. Even “regional” fiction, always looked at disparagingly by the modernists, is part of this movement, sliding from human psychology into that which contains it, the landscape.
We need better definitions of terms than the ones we have. Hardy’s Egdon Heath is in itself entirely realistic, but its centrality to The Return of the Native decentralises the human characters in a way quite similar to that of fantasy and even science fiction. Melville’s white whale isn’t a real whale, he’s a beast of the imagination, like dragons or unicorns; hence Moby Dick is not an animal story, but it is a fantasy. Woolf’s Flush is an animal story, because Flush is (and actually was) a real spaniel; but of course it is also a novel about the Brownings; it is also definable as a fantasy, since the dog is a central character, and we know what he is thinking; but then we know what the dog is thinking in the hunting scene in War and Peace, too, which does not make War and Peace a fantasy… The clean, sharp definition of what realism is and what fantasy is recedes even further, along with any justification for despising genre.
I venture a non-defining statement: realistic fiction is drawn towards anthropocentrism, fantasy away from it. Although the green country of fantasy seems to be entirely the invention of human imaginations, it verges on and partakes of actual realms in which humanity is not lord and master, is not central, is not even important. In this, fantasy may come much closer to the immense overview of the exact sciences than does science fiction, which is very largely obsessed by a kind of imperialism of human knowledge and control, a colonial attitude towards the universe.
- from “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists”
Ursula Le Guin writes rad imaginative literature. She also writes rad criticism of same, collected here.
5/5 stars
In the short “Assumptions about Fantasy”, she picks three biggies and inverts them. “The Wilderness Within”, about the influence of early childhood reading on adult writing, the only one of these I’d encountered before, and the only one collected elsewhere (in 2004’s The Wave in the Mind
Le Guin surprised me a few times in this collection. She defends such oft-dismissed (as escapist, militaristic, misogynist, what have you) fantasies as those of Kipling and Tolkien, and takes some other giants to task: the fairy tales of Wilde and Andersen for lacking emotional honesty, only pretending to be for children, and for “disguising adult self-pity in sentimental cruelty”; Richard Adams for feigning to write of rabbits as they are, portraying them instead as he wishes to give men an excuse to be; Philip Pullman for cheating, changing the rules/essential nature of his daemons.
If you’ve not read Le Guin before, dig one of her novels before you hit up Cheek by Jowl, but by all means do hit it up.
All in all this is an excellent book to have on your reference shelf if you’re a reader, writer, a reviewer, a critic, or a teacher of children’s literature.
Review by Gayle Surrette, SFRevu 4-30-09
Or of any imaginative literature.
Happy reading and writing.