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

simply different in kind from the sort of writing exemplified

by H en ry jam es andjam es Joyce and Joyce Cary.

Consider that possibility with care. It could be, you see, that

Isaac Asimov’s science fiction (detestable in literary terms, often

epoch-making in its own) is quite legitimately nearer in effect (and,

for that matter, intention) to his two hundred instructive, poly-

mathic books on science and technology than they could ever be to

Proust or John Irving.

This is an alarming prospect to the sf critic, one of whom (the

Australian George Turner) has made his critical mark by repeated

and subtle attacks on any ‘double standard’ which allows genre

work its own special criteria of examination and worth. I allow

myself to believe it on even-numbered days of the month, reserving

the rem ainder to a high-toned monism. (Even with leap years, this

tactic favours the pure view.)

You will not find yourself provoked to anguish at that paradox by

these stories. Each is a striking work of speculative fiction. Nor do

they fail to please in their literary dexterity, heart and address. The

several Golden Ages of sf magazines (Astounding, Galaxy, F&SF, New

Worlds) are long, long gone, and will not come again. So what we

have here are stories which these days require an original-fiction

anthology for their setting.

None of them, needless to say, would have been completely at

home in those lost Golden Ages. But the sf impulse has not by any

means been tamed or conscripted by those of delicate sensibilities

who are piqued by the unusual only so long as it comes with a

Spanish name attached: Borges, Garcia M arquez, Vargas Llosa. A

decade ago, the prodigiously inventive Brian Aldiss made

prophetic utterance on this score, speaking o f‘the area of life where

art and science meet nature’:

One becomes more and more preoccupied with the idea that art

is all. Science fiction is an ideal medium for such a preoccupation . . . for the specifics of fiction versus the generalities of

Introduction

13

science. This beautiful tender place has been so betrayed by the

practitioners of pulp science fiction (who use it for thick-arm

adventure and jackboot philosophy) that those who prefer wit to

power-fantasy generally move elsewhere.

Sadly, the multi-megabuck trium ph of Luke Skywalker and the

Force, and all their pitiful paperback progeny, has done nothing in

the interim but strengthen the thick arm of the artist’s foe. One is

indeed tempted to move elsewhere — almost anywhere else. But, as

Aldiss warned,

those reckless or fastidious writers who throw out science fiction’s old banal contents — from last generation’s cliches of faster-than-light travel and telepathy to this generation’s overpopulation and mechanized eroticism — have to take care of form as well, for form-and-content is always a unity.

The stories for Strange Attractors were chosen (and many of them

were specially written) with this dictum in mind. For, yes, the

usages, the tropes, of sf — vulgar and absurd as some of them are

— remain part of its artistic vocabulary. Its idiosyncratic images

and their combinations in the murky depths of each writer’s heart

comprise a grammar devised to speak in a way uniquely valid to

this century.

Like the mathematical point forming random order ineluctably

within the envelope of the Strange Attractor, like a ghost of the

unborn, from Chaos, sf blows its warm breath on the pane which

divides us from tomorrow and our own deep awareness, and in its

dews and condensations shows us patterns we scribble there,

absent-minded children, all unknowing.

The Lipton Village Society

©

LUCY SUSSEX

For rent: flatlet in Gothic Horror folly. Suit tenant with taste for

weird architecture and/or sense of humour. Must be quiet. Apply V. Hirst, Times Gone Books, Hirst Building.

‘I’m sorry about it, but there it is,’ said V. (call me Vini) Hirst. ‘Great

Uncle William went a bit funny in his old age. He’d been a builder all

his life, and he just got sick of ordinary architecture.’

‘Yes. It’s the first time I’ve seen minarets and battlements combined.’

‘W hat was your name again?’ he asked.

‘Susan Gifford. I’m a Research Officer for the D epartm ent of

Education.’

‘Shouldn’t be too noisy,’ he muttered. Vini was interviewing me in

his antiquarian bookshop, which occupied the ground floor of Uncle

William’s aberration.

‘The interior doesn’t seem too bad,’ I hazarded.

‘It’s not. I live on the top floor,