Damien Broderick - Strange Attractors

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,