Appeared in the Washington Post in 1992.

Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews With Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers conducted and edited by Larry McCaffrey. Champagne, Illinois: University of Illionois Press; September, 1991; $12.95 trade paper, $29.95 cloth; 267 pp.

Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction edited by Larry McCaffrey. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press; January 1992; $17.95 trade paper, $49.95 library cloth edition; 387 pp..

Kalimantan by Lucius Shepard. New York: St. Martin’s Press; January 1992; $16.95 hc; 160 pp..

Griffin’s Egg by Michael Swanwick. New York: St. Martin’s Press; January 1992; $15.95; 101 pp.

The science fiction field was born in the nineteen-twenties, the decade of high modernism, which was also a decade of intense genrefication of the contents of American magazines. While a few science fiction writers, most notably Kurt Vonnegut, escaped over the wall, as American literary intellectuals, the best and the brightest science fiction writers have largely been excluded from literary culture and restricted to conversing with each other. But in this time after the ‘great divide’ between high culture and popular culture, science fiction writers are becoming integrated into American literary culture. In two very different books, Across the Wounded Galaxies and Storming the Reality Studio, Larry McCaffrey documents this process.

Across the Wounded Galaxies, contains interviews with Gregory Benford, William S. Burroughs, Octavia E. Butler, Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch, William Gibson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Bruce Sterling, and Gene Wolfe. The misfit in this group is non-SF writer William S. Burroughs who, despite interesting questions posed by his interviewers, emerges as a man in radical retreat from reality. McCaffrey chose these writers “guided principally by intuition and matters of personal taste,” and because he was “drawn to authors whose thematic preoccupations overlapped their postmodernist contemporaries.” (p. 5) In contrast to Charles Platt’s Dreammakers volumes, which sought to capture the individual personalities of the writers and give a comprehensive impression of the science fiction field, McCaffrey’s approach is personal, eccentric and intellectual: “My premise is that SF’s formal and thematic concerns are intimately related to characteristics of other postmodern art forms, that SF has been influencing and influenced by these forms. Science fiction can, in fact, be seen as representing an examplar of postmodernism because it is the art form that most directly reflects back to us the cultural logic that has produced postmoderism.” (pp. 2-3). Because McCaffrey is an excellent interviewer whose intuition has directed him to many of science fiction’s most vibrant intellectuals, reading this book is like attending a marvellous dinner party populated by fascinating people.

Apparently without knowing it, what McCaffrey has documented in this book is the intellectual legacy of the Milford Conference held in Milford, Pennsylvania from the late nineteen-fifties through the nineteen-sixties—the very conference Kurt Vonnegut’s character Eliot Rosewater drops by in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, to tell the assembled writers “he wished they would learn more about sex and economics and style.” (GBYMR, Dell, 1965, p. 30). Across the Wounded Galaxies shows that the post-Milford SF intellectuals know plenty about all three.

As with most good books, one wishes there was more of it—Norman Spinrad and John Crowley are the most significant omissions; and because of the intellectual apprenticeship common to most of the writers in the book, one also have wishes for interviews with major figures of the Milford era—Damon Knight, whom Gene Wolfe claims “grew him from a bean” (p. 239 - 239), writer and radical anthologist of the fifties and sixties Judith Merrill, and SF stylist R. A. Lafferty. Because McCaffery restricts his book to American writers, there is an aching void where interviews with Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock et. al. ought to be—one hopes for a companion volume of interviews with British SF writers.

Interesting, irritating, illuminating, and no less intellectual, eccentric or postmodern than Across the Wounded Galaxies, Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction is a whiter, maler, and more heterosexual book. Although most of the best (and the worst!) science fiction and fantasy written today is in one way or another identifiably postmodern, this book gives the unfortunate impression that cyberpunk is the primary intersection between SF and postmodernism. But like Across the Wounded Galaxies, this is a book structured by McCaffrey’s interests and obsessions, so this failing can be forgiven.

A montage of hip, noir, technocentric bytes, cyberpunk fiction and poetry, comprise the first section of the book; essays on cyberpunk and postmodernism, the second. Although the fiction and poetry section succeeds in showing the aesthetic unity of the cyberpunk and postmodern projects, juxtaposing postmoderns Kathy Acker and Mark Leyner with cyberpunk SF writers William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley and Rudy Rucker pries cyberpunk’s imagery loose from its plots, giving the mistaken impression that Rudy Rucker’s sentence “They were going to cut off the top of Sta-Hi’s head and eat his brain with those cheap steel spoons,” (p. 130) loosely approximates Kathy Acker ’s sentence “GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.” (p. 40) Many of these pieces are quite forgetable, but some are excellent. My favorite is Bruce Sterling’s “Twenty Evocations,” which, like his novel Schizmatrix, spans vast periods of time in relatively few words.

The second section presents the reader with a kaleidoscope of essays on cyberpunk and its relation to postmodernism, ranging from excellent to silly. Among the best are Brian McHale’s “POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM” and Tom Maddox’s “The Wars of the Coin’s Two Halves: Bruce Sterling’s Mechanist/Shaper Narratives.” By far and away the silliest essay is Timothy Leary’s “Cyberpunk: the Individual as Reality Pilot”—these pages of vacuous hype with section titles like “Christopher Columbus: Another Example of Cyberpunk Behavior” show that Leary missed his Madison Avenue calling. While this book gives the reader a sense of the excitement and exhilaration of the cyberpunk movement, it also makes drearily clear cyberpunk’s limited subject matter and that what Octavia Butler describes in Across the Wounded Galaxies as “stories about thirty-year-old white men who drank and smoked too much” (p. 57) have reemerged as avant garde.

Even more strongly than cyberpunk, Lucius Shepard’s Kalimantan displays the characteristics of men’s adventure fiction. Two self-destructive low-lifes, Barnett and MacKinnon, compete for control of a magic drug in the jungles of Borneo. Barnett, a jaded and sentimental Joseph Conrad fan who is the point of view character, describes MacKinnon, his accidental protege, as “a typical romantic fool.” Both become enmeshed in the schemes of the waidan of Tanjung Segar, a mysterious, manipulative, and ultimately emasculating witch who is by far the most interesting character in the book. The settings are exotic and lush, yet infused with Gothic melancholy: “Despite the butterflies and birds the place had a deserted air that made me increasingly leery.” (p. 10)

The science-fictional elements of Kalimantan are sufficiently muddled that it is easier to read them as metaphors for the characters’ experiences than literally what happens—as science fiction, the book has more in common with John Fowles’ A Maggot than with traditional science fiction. Kalimantan is a passionate book that should have had a strongly emotional conclusion. When, near the end, Barnett claims, “I believe that’s the saddest story I know,” (p. 146) the reader rebels. There were too few good intentions all the way around for the story to achieve real sadness. Barnett concludes “I keep feeling I should have learned something” (p. 159). Shepard seems to intend for this line to resonate with the reader’s own experience, to elevate Barnett to the status of Everyman in an increasingly confusing world, and to elevate the story just related to an exemplar of the Human Condition. But both Barnett and MacKinnon are too much the romantic fool for the reader to identify. Instead, one wants to kick Barnett in the shins and say ‘You certainly should have!’

Gunther Weil, the protagonist of Michael Swanwick’s Griffin’s Egg is also a romantic fool, though a smarter, more interesting fool. Like William Gibson, and Lucius Shepard, his first novel was published as an Ace Special in the mid-nineteeneighties. His most recent novel, Stations of the Tide showed that his writing had reached a new level of excellence, a standardGriffin’s Egg maintains. As the book opens, he is one man against a maternalistic bureaucracy, a comic hero on the Moon. He wants to lay “tracks over virgin soil,” (p. 1) going where no man has gone before. But his truck tells him, “‘You’ve left your prescheduled route .... Deviations from schedule may only be made with the recorded permission of your dispatcher.’” (p. 1). Like the hero of Arthur C. Clarke’s “Transit of Earth,” Gunther goes there because he wants to know what’s out there. His bosses worry that he might hurt himself.

He hooks up with Ekaterina, a Gibsonian cyberpunk heroine who is really much too good for him: she is a Heinlein individual updated, a Russian military commandeer who wears make-up and a silk teddy under her “Studio Volga” space suit. Gunther’s fantasies of adventure are disrupted by global nuclear war on Earth and sabotage at the Moon base. Gunther and Ekaterina rise to the occasion, but in the end are both trapped by their own notions of heroism as heroism itself becomes technologically obsolete.

Michael Swanwick is one of the most intellectually astute science fiction writers of his generation. Griffin’s Egg is his foray into hard science fiction, and also his critique of hard SF, a critique that may infuriarate some hard SF fans. Science fiction was founded with the messianic mission to predict and create the future. Very few science fiction writers still believe that they have the power, or in many cases even the desire, to do either. Thus, science fiction has been left in somewhat the same position as the CIA after the end of the Cold War. In Storming the Reality Studio, McCaffrey presents one of science fiction’s new missions. Griffin’s Egg, in its exploration of the relationship between technological obsolescence and the self, a theme also present in Stations of the Tide, represents another, which has not yet received enough discussion. As the book concludes with Gunther’s realization that “He was done with romantic delusion. It was time to grow up,” (p. 101) the reader wants to applaud his new maturity, but is prevented by the creeping horror of the situation: Gunther surrenders his identity to technology, as he always has; his surrender is always based upon his perception of himself as a rational actor who makes enlightened, utilitarian decisions. Swanwick implies that the hope for our future must come from new ways of thinking of ourselves in a technological age; otherwise there may eventually be no ‘self.’