The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 2

  Kingsley Amis, in New Maps of Hell (1960), quotes his friend Edmund Crispin as saying, “Where an ordinary novel or short story resembles portraiture or at the widest the domestic interior, science fiction offers the less cosy satisfaction of a landscape with figures; to ask that these distant manikins be shown in as much detail as the subject of the portrait is evidently to ask the impossible”; he then goes on himself to say: “This is perhaps partisan in tone, but it does indicate a scale of priorities which operates throughout the medium and which, of course, is open to objection, though this is not often based on much more than an expectation that science fiction should treat the future as fiction of the main stream treats the present, an expectation bound to be defeated” (p. 128).

  Tom Shippey, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories (1992), comments, “ What, then, has science fiction had to offer its human readers? Whatever it is, it has been enough for the genre to make its way into a prominent, if not dominant place in popular literary culture despite every kind of literary misunderstanding or discouragement. A very basic answer must be – truth. Not every science fiction story, of course, can ‘come true,’ indeed . . . probably none of them do, can, or ever will. Just the same, many of them (perhaps all of them, in some way or another) may be trying to solve a question for which many people this century have had no acceptable answer”.

  In the end this anthology is a collection of attempts to get at the truth of the human condition during the twentieth century, so contoured and conditioned by science and technology. Overall, perhaps, you can see the big picture, surely a bigger picture than any other. One might even get some intimations of the scope of the future – which of course leads us always back to the ground at present. And perhaps we return illuminated.

  David G. Hartwell

  Pleasantville, N.Y.

  A Work of Art

  JAMES BLISH

  James Blish (1921–75) was perhaps the most sophisticated of the literary critics grown inside the SF field. Though self-educated, he was respected as a James Joyce scholar and was a music critic as well. Of all SF writers at mid-century, Blish most worshipped the Modernists and most aspired to “high” art.

  Blish moved permanently to England in the 1960s, where his writing was taken more seriously as contemporary literature than in the U.S. His major achievements in science fiction are generally regarded as the four-volume Cities in Flight (1970) and A Case of Conscience (1958), a classic theological SF novel. His short fiction, collected in The Seedling Stars (1957), The Best of James Blish (1979), and several other volumes, is also a major body of work in the modern field. He also edited the first SF anthology about the arts of the future, New Dreams This Morning (1966).

  Perhaps his most ambitious project began with A Case of Conscience, about the discovery of Christian aliens without original sin, which is linked to an even larger literary construct (Blish called it After Such Knowledge – essentially an ongoing theological argument) involving an additional non-genre novel about Francis Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis (1964), and two fantasy novels about the end of the world, Black Easter (1968) and The Day After Judgement (1971).

  At a time in the 1950s when science fiction as a whole had ignored the arts and artists as subjects for most of its history, Blish published this story. Blish said: “Ostensibly this is a story about the future of serious music.” It is of course more broadly about art. Such writers as Brian Aldiss, Samuel R. Delany, Michael Moorcock, and Bruce Sterling carry on the intellectual tradition of Blish today.

  ———————————

  Instantly, he remembered dying. He remembered it, however, as if at two removes – as though he were remembering a memory, rather than an actual event; as though he himself had not really been there when he died.

  Yet the memory was all from his own point of view, not that of some detached and disembodied observer which might have been his soul. He had been most conscious of the rasping, unevenly drawn movements of the air in his chest. Blurring rapidly, the doctor’s face had bent over him, loomed, come closer, and then had vanished as the doctor’s head passed below his cone of vision, turned sideways to listen to his lungs.

  It had become rapidly darker, and then, only then, had he realized that these were to be his last minutes. He had tried dutifully to say Pauline’s name, but his memory contained no record of the sound – only of the rattling breath and of the film of sootiness thickening in the air, blotting out everything for an instant.

  Only an instant, and then the memory was over. The room was bright again, and the ceiling, he noticed with wonder, had turned a soft green. The doctor’s head lifted again and looked down at him.

  It was a different doctor. This one was a far younger man, with an ascetic face and gleaming, almost fey eyes. There was no doubt about it. One of the last conscious thoughts he had had was that of gratitude that the attending physician, there at the end, had not been the one who secretly hated him for his one-time associations with the Nazi hierarchy. The attending doctor, instead, had worn an expression amusingly proper for that of a Swiss expert called to the deathbed of an eminent man: a mixture of worry at the prospect of losing so eminent a patient, and complacency at the thought that, at the old man’s age, nobody could blame this doctor if he died. At eighty-five, pneumonia is a serious matter, with or without penicillin.

  “You’re all right now,” the new doctor said, freeing his patient’s head of a whole series of little silver rods which had been clinging to it by a sort of network cap. “Rest a minute and try to be calm. Do you know your name?”

  He drew a cautious breath. There seemed to be nothing at all the matter with his lungs now; indeed, he felt positively healthy. “Certainly,” he said, a little nettled. “Do you know yours?”

  The doctor smiled crookedly. “You’re in character, it appears,” he said. “My name is Barkun Kris; I am a mind sculptor. Yours?”

  “Richard Strauss.”

  “Very good,” Dr. Kris said, and turned away. Strauss, however, had already been diverted by a new singularity. Strauss is a word as well as a name in German; it has many meanings – an ostrich, a bouquet; von Wolzogen had had a high old time working all the possible puns into the libretto of Feuersnot. And it happened to be the first German word to be spoken either by himself or by Dr. Kris since that twice-removed moment of death. The language was not French or Italian, either. It was most like English, but not the English Strauss knew; nevertheless, he was having no trouble speaking it and even thinking in it.

  Well, he thought, I’ll be able to conduct The Love of Danae, after all. It isn’t every composer who can premier his own opera posthumously. Still, there was something queer about all this – the queerest part of all being that conviction, which would not go away, that he had actually been dead for just a short time. Of course, medicine was making great strides, but . . .

  “Explain all this,” he said, lifting himself to one elbow. The bed was different, too, and not nearly as comfortable as the one in which he had died. As for the room, it looked more like a dynamo shed than a sickroom. Had modern medicine taken to reviving its corpses on the floor of the Siemanns-Schukert plant?

  “In a moment,” Dr. Kris said. He finished rolling some machine back into what Strauss impatiently supposed to be its place, and crossed to the pallet. “Now. There are many things you’ll have to take for granted without attempting to understand then, Dr. Strauss. Not everything in the world today is explicable in terms of your assumptions. Please bear that in mind.”

  “Very well. Proceed.”

  “The date,” Dr. Kris said, “is 2161 by your calendar – or, in other words, it is now two hundred and twelve years after your death. Naturally, you’ll realize that by this time nothing remains of your body but the bones. The body you have now was volunteered for your use. Before you look into a mirror to see what it’s like, remember that its physical difference from the one you were used to is all in your favor. It’s in perfect health, not un
pleasant for other people to look at, and its physiological age is about fifty.”

  A miracle? No, not in this new age, surely. It is simply a work of science. But what a science! This was Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence and the immortality of the superman combined into one.

  “And where is this?” the composer said.

  “In Port York, part of the State of Manhattan, in the United States. You will find the country less changed in some respects than I imagine you anticipate. Other changes, of course, will seem radical to you, but it’s hard for me to predict which ones will strike you that way. A certain resilience on your part will bear cultivating.”

  “I understand,” Strauss said, sitting up. “One question, please; is it still possible for a composer to make a living in this century?”

  “Indeed it is,” Dr. Kris said, smiling. “As we expect you to do. It is one of the purposes for which we’ve – brought you back.”

  “I gather, then,” Strauss said somewhat dryly, “that there is still a demand for my music. The critics in the old days – ”

  “That’s not quite how it is,” Dr. Kris said. “I understand some of your work is still played, but frankly I know very little about your current status. My interest is rather – ”

  A door opened somewhere, and another man came in. He was older and more ponderous than Kris and had a certain air of academicism, but he, too, was wearing the oddly tailored surgeon’s gown and looked upon Kris’ patient with the glowing eyes of an artist.

  “A success, Kris?” he said. “Congratulations.”

  “They’re not in order yet,” Dr. Kris said. “The final proof is what counts. Dr. Strauss, if you feel strong enough, Dr. Seirds and I would like to ask you some questions. We’d like to make sure your memory is clear.”

  “Certainly. Go ahead.”

  “According to our records,” Kris said, “you once knew a man whose initials were R. K. L.; this was while you were conducting at the Vienna Staatsoper.” He made the double “a” at least twice too long, as though German were a dead language he was striving to pronounce in some “classical” accent. “What was his name, and who was he?”

  “That would be Kurt List – his first name was Richard, but he didn’t use it. He was assistant stage manager.”

  The two doctors looked at each other. “Why did you offer to write a new overture to The Woman Without a Shadow and give the manuscript to the city of Vienna?”

  “So I wouldn’t have to pay the garbage removal tax on the Maria Theresa villa they had given me.”

  “In the backyard of your house at Garmisch-Partenkirchen there was a tombstone. What was written on it?”

  Strauss frowned. That was a question he would be happy to be unable to answer. If one is to play childish jokes upon oneself, it’s best not to carve them in stone and put the carving where you can’t help seeing it every time you go out to tinker with the Mercedes. “It says,” he replied wearily, “ ‘Sacred to the memory of Guntram, Minnesinger, slain in a horrible way by his father’s own symphony orchestra.’”

  “When was Guntram premiered?’ ”

  “In – let me see – 1894, I believe.”

  “Where?”

  “In Weimar.”

  “Who was the leading lady?”

  “Pauline de Ahna.”

  “What happened to her afterwards?”

  “I married her. Is she . . . ,” Strauss began anxiously.

  “No,” Dr. Kris said. “I’m sorry, but we lack the data to reconstruct more or less ordinary people.”

  The composer sighed. He did not know whether to be worried or not. He had loved Pauline, to be sure; on the other hand, it would be pleasant to be able to live the new life without being forced to take off one’s shoes every time one entered the house, so as not to scratch the polished hardwood floors. And also pleasant, perhaps, to have two o’clock in the afternoon come by without hearing Pauline’s everlasting, “Richard – jetzt komponiert!”

  “Next question,” he said.

  For reasons which Strauss did not understand, but was content to take for granted, he was separated from Drs. Kris and Seirds as soon as both were satisfied that the composer’s memory was reliable and his health stable. His estate, he was given to understand, had long since been broken up – a sorry end for what had been one of the principal fortunes of Europe – but he was given sufficient money to set up lodgings and resume an active life. He was provided, too, with introductions which proved valuable.

  It took longer than he had expected to adjust to the changes that had taken place in music alone. Music was, he quickly began to suspect, a dying art, which would soon have a status not much above that held by flower arranging back in what he thought of as his own century. Certainly it couldn’t be denied that the trend toward fragmentation, already visible back in his own time, had proceeded almost to completion in 2161.

  He paid no more attention to American popular tunes than he had bothered to pay in his previous life. Yet it was evident that their assembly-line production methods – all the ballad composers openly used a slide-rule-like device called a Hit Machine – now had their counterparts almost throughout serious music.

  The conservatives these days, for instance, were the twelve-tone composers – always, in Strauss’ opinion, dryly mechanical but never more so than now. Their gods – Berg, Schoenberg, Webern – were looked upon by the concert-going public as great masters, on the abstruse side perhaps, but as worthy of reverence as any of the Three B’s.

  There was one wing of the conservatives however, that had gone the twelve-tone procedure one better. These men composed what was called “stochastic music,” put together by choosing each individual note by consultation with tables of random numbers. Their bible, their basic text, was a volume called Operational Aesthetics, which in turn derived from a discipline called information theory, and not one word of it seemed to touch upon any of the techniques and customs of composition which Strauss knew. The ideal of this group was to produce music which would be “universal” – that is, wholly devoid of any trace of the composer’s individuality, wholly a musical expression of the universal Laws of Chance. The Laws of Chance seemed to have a style of their own, all right, but to Strauss it seemed the style of an idiot child being taught to hammer a flat piano, to keep him from getting into trouble.

  By far the largest body of work being produced, however, fell into a category misleadingly called science-music. The term reflected nothing but the titles of the works, which dealt with space flight, time travel, and other subjects of a romantic or an unlikely nature. There was nothing in the least scientific about the music, which consisted of a mélange of clichés and imitations of natural sounds, in which Strauss was horrified to see his own time-distorted and diluted image.

  The most popular form of science-music was a nine-minute composition called a concerto, though it bore no resemblance at all to the classical concerto form; it was instead a sort of free rhapsody after Rachmaninoff – long after. A typical one – “Song of Deep Space,” it was called, by somebody named H. Valerion Krafft – began with a loud assault on the tam-tam, after which all the strings rushed up the scale in unison, followed at a respectful distance by the harp and one clarinet in parallel 6/4’s. At the top of the scale cymbals were bashed together, forte possible, and the whole orchestra launched itself into a major-minor wailing sort of melody; the whole orchestra, that is, except for the French horns, which were plodding back down the scale again in what was evidently supposed to be a countermelody. The second phrase of the theme was picked up by a solo trumpet with a suggestion of tremolo, the orchestra died back to its roots to await the next cloudburst, and at this point – as any four-year-old could have predicted – the piano entered with the second theme.

  Behind the orchestra stood a group of thirty women, ready to come in with a wordless chorus intended to suggest the eeriness of Deep Space – but at this point, too, Strauss had already learned to get up and leave. After a few such exper
iences he could also count upon meeting in the lobby Sindi Noniss, the agent to whom Dr. Kris had introduced him and who was handling the reborn composer’s output – what there was of it thus far. Sindi had come to expect these walkouts on the part of his client and patiently awaited them, standing beneath a bust of Gian-Carlo Menotti, but he liked them less and less, and lately had been greeting them by turning alternately red and white, like a totipotent barber pole.

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” he burst out after the Krafft incident. “You can’t just walk out on a new Krafft composition. The man’s the president of the Interplanetary Society for Contemporary Music. How am I ever going to persuade them that you’re a contemporary if you keep snubbing them?”

  “What does it matter?” Strauss said. “They don’t know me by sight.”

  “You’re wrong; they know you very well, and they’re watching every move you make. You’re the first major composer the mind sculptors ever tackled, and the ISCM would be glad to turn you back with a rejection slip.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh,” said Sindi, “there are lots of reasons. The sculptors are snobs; so are the ISCM boys. Each of them wanted to prove to the other that their own art is the king of them all. And then there’s the competition; it would be easier to flunk you than to let you into the market. I really think you’d better go back in. I could make up some excuse – ”

  “No,” Strauss said shortly. “I have work to do.”

  “But that’s just the point, Richard. How are we going to get an opera produced without the ISCM? It isn’t as though you wrote theremin solos, or something that didn’t cost so – ”

  “I have work to do,” he said, and left.

  And he did, work which absorbed him as had no other project during the last thirty years of his former life. He had scarcely touched pen to music paper – both had been astonishingly hard to find – when he realized that nothing in his long career had provided him with touchstones by which to judge what music he should write now.