4/10/2002 7:04 PM
“Of course.” said Cadrax, the three snouted Balovina GortWorm pointing a blasix cannon in the direction of the ottoliner, “I cannot let you escape into N-dimension.”

I have this problem and I would like to believe that it has nothing to do with Nostalgia Ain’t Being What it Used to Be. Or when I was a child I spoke like a man, now that I am a man I speak like a kid. Or I’m older and set in my ways. Or even that the failing isn’t mine but the failure belongs to:

Science Fiction!

What, you say, the hell is this all about? I hold that many of the littler pleasures that I encounter as I move through this day to the next, are precisely those non-earth shaking, seemingly inconsequential rather than life over death items that make living not only bearable but worth the living. Worth more than your work position, social standing, religious persuasion, ethical demeanor, bathing habits (I will however point out here that in my mind clean is better) and just about anything else you can petulantly point to as “important and/or meaningful.” In short, in the small matters lies my spirituality. Seeing, if you will,
a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
(Thank you, William!)
Always sweat the small stuff.

Where was I before all this heady poetical muck ... oh, yes... Science Fiction.

I love Science Fiction! Since the days of third grade at William Penn School when I took a trip with Tyco M. Bass and Eleanor Cameron’s Wonderful Trip to the Mushroom Planet.
I have never returned.

You never found me as a pre-teen too far from an edition of Astounding Science Fiction Magazine. I knew that John W. Campbell Jr. was the kind of brilliant editor that was there to discover me along with Heinlein and Asimov and Sturgeon. I wrote a story. It had, with little exaggeration, Scores of Bug Eyed Monsters (called BEM to let the cognoscenti know just how hip I really was), Beamers and Blasters. A thing that would attach itself to part of your spine and take over your nervous system, revealing your inconsistent behavior to only those closest to you, and one of the best Air Force/UFO battles of all times, flashing lightning and red blaster bursts while an evil saucer shaped intergalactic cruiser tried to fight it’s way against Earth’s obnoxious gravity. John W commented long enough to send me a form letter that thanked me and explained that what I had written was not quite the kind of story that Astounding Science Fiction could use. The fool! And then he changed the name to Analog Science Fiction. (It is still, Chilren, on the newsstand today.) I have long since figured that he was forced to change, because he rejected my story.

The problem.
I have recently renewed my waning interest in Science Fiction. (Periodically I have dabbled over the decades and have always read this and that, subscribed to a sf mag here and there, attended a convention or two). I walk into a bookstore. Approach the science fiction racks. Run my hands hungrily down the spines of hard and paper backed books. And I find….

Well….I find a lot of fantasy novels with guys and gals in chain mail hacking at a dragon with reptilian wings, or I find….dark stories of dark fantasy with dark things happening to really dark people who are in the thrall of their dark past. I move down the aisle and come across computer games that have become science fiction novels, followed by thousands of TV shows that have become science fiction novels, followed by movies that have become science fiction novels, followed by a cottage industry of books about the various incarnations of the Star Ship Enterprise and more yet about Hans Solo, Luke Skywalker, Lando Calrissian, Obi Wan, Yoda and Darth Vader. Seldom do I find what I am looking for. What I will call, for lack of a more cogent term, “real” science fiction. Oh, sure there are the classics repacked, more Heinlein, Sturgeon and Asimov than you can shake a stick at. And the military guys, who are always fighting BEM’s with Blasters (okay they are better than that, but conservative and about a wacky a contingent as you can find short of the green Berets.)

I have tried! Honest, I have read, Stephen Baxter into Greg Egan into Greg Baer into Ken MacLeod into Robert Sawyer into Nancy Kress into Catherine Asaro into Charles Sheffield into Connie Wills into .. well I have tried. They all fall short of satisfying my wonder. Some of it is the science. I hate many modern conceptions of the cosmos, they may be superior in theory but they lack poetry. The modern changing biological world just plain scares me silly. It smells more of Stephen King, it is more awful that awe inspiring. And I never believed in sociology nohow.

Look, the “classic” writers weren’t much when it came to creating superior literature. Most were close to inept. But they often featured a breathless view of the cosmos that rivaled guys like William Blake. Current writing has become more competent. Less sloppy. I just don’t care for the vision.

Tonight I will move on to Manifold Space (The second in a (so far) trilogy (please, I keep saying in a mantra, stop writing series and trilogies) by Stephen Baxter. Volume 1 Manifold Time - Great science, writing in need of an editor, and unformed characters. What’s to like so far?

Dr. Borthwick flipped the toggle switch on the massive Townsend p-brane generator and disappeared. Maybe John Jr. was right!