Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

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,