Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors by Original (pdf) (no david read aloud txt) 📕

reaching into the Void of

their hearts and minds and plucking forth — what? Chaos, ordered

strangely. Creatures unknown, worlds unseen, emotions combined

with images in w'ays that strike us behind the ear and leave us flat

on the ground struggling for breath.

If we are lucky, that is. Happily, I can guarantee that the stories

in this collection, all by Australians, will not disappoint you. At this

end of the earth, slowly breaking free of the thumb of empires old

and new, the imagination orbits in its unpredictable filigree.

Too often, of course, science fiction fails in its promise and can

then, even more than drab conventional ‘realistic’ writing, become

Strangely Repellent.

Let us, briefly, look into why this should be so.

Fiction is not life — a point which everyone (from David Lodge in

Britain to Umberto Eco in Italy, Kathy Acker in the USA to Peter

Carey in Australia) is shouting aloud. All the fabulists worth their

salt are hard at the Active word-face, beavering away, disrupting

narrative surfaces, nipping in and out of the plot, snatching away

the props of illusion.

Down with mimicry! Art is not comfortable dream, seductive

consolation, labored allegory. It’s sport, free creation, construct. ‘All

art is in a sense symbolic,’ as Vladimir Nabokov told his Cornell

University students, ‘but we say “stop, thief’ to the critic who

deliberately transforms an artist’s subtle symbol into a pedant’s

stale allegory.’ Indeed.

There are some who rebel against this fairly unsurprising discovery. O f course, even for these diehards it comes as no surprise to find that science fiction is not life. But then, unless they are Kingsley

Introduction

11

Amis, they almost certainly know in their bones that science fiction

is not fiction, either. Or, at any rate, not literary fiction.

By contrast, during the last decade or so science fiction has become one of the darlings of the formalist branch of literary criticism (those schools which emphasise the reader’s own creation and deconstruction of each work) precisely because it is (or is meant to

be) innately uncomfortable, disruptive, hair-raising, hackles-

raising, alienating, oddball.

The Russian Viktor Shklovsky, long before Brecht shredded the

safe distance between audience and players, told us 60 years ago

that the primary function of art is ostranenie: estrangement, that

wrenching of our necks which shows us the familiar in a fresh and

challenging aspect.

As you can see, science fiction is the ideal candidate. There are

few bed-sitters, adulterous stock-brokers, race tracks, talkback

radio pundits, karate-trained sirens or crooked cops on the take.

W ith sf, it’s all ghastly clangour and shock, just what Shklovsky

ordered. Looming aliens without eyes, flapples to travel in, doors

that answer back, machines with hearts of gold.

The reality, as every sf enthusiast knows with remorse, is

otherwise.

The salutary jolt of the strange soon loses its force. Like bored

rats which seek out a mild aversive electric tingle, sf readers return

contentedly to the paperback shelves for a buzz of what we might

term cosy ostranenie.

Knowing this only too well, some critics locate the last true sf in

the embattled wastelands of the Soviet Union, where its function

retains (in the writing of such fabulists as the Strugatski Brothers in

Russia, Oles Berdnyk in the Ukraine, Stanislaw Lem in Poland)

some genuine existential spritzig — though often in lumbering

prose and heavy parables which might well be outrageously

pointed in Leningrad and Krakow but fall awfully flat to the rest of

us.

This line of investigation supposes, of course, that all fictions

together comprise a definable set which we might term ‘literature’.

Perhaps this is not valid.

Is putting a humpy together out of scrap tin and old lino the

same hum an activity as building a Mies van der Rohe skyscraper?

Are they both ‘architecture’? Do identical standards of excellence

apply?

O r is the humpy — a structure on a hum an scale and with a

12

Introduction

moral heart — automatically superior?

We may fairly pose such questions about forms of writing:

‘genres’ versus ‘literature’, for example. Looking at the peculiar

objects emitted by Ian Watson or Jerry Pournelle (to leave aside

works at the margin of sf by, say, Ted Mooney or Angela C arter or

Salman Rushdie), I often wonder if science fiction and fantasy are,

after all,