In Christopher Priest’s The Extremes, this quest takes a disturbing
and challenging turn. The harrowing story of an FBI agent widowed in a mass
shooting, the book follows her to England as she tries to comprehend what
happened. Using a form of virtual reality in which she can become the observer,
the victim or even the murderer in scenes based on the memories of those
involved, she finds herself drowning in the terrifying event.

There is considerable heft to Ken MacLeod’s alternative reality, amply shown
in The Cassini Division, the third in his series of linked novels set a
century or so from now. A leading anarchist, one of the troops protecting Earth
from the depredations of post-humans on Jupiter, finds a safe way through a
wormhole to a distant part of the galaxy. Beautifully written, the novel is a
skilful blend of space opera and extrapolated politics.

Alison Sinclair and Tricia Sullivan plumb the depths of the realm of dreams
to shape their worlds. Sinclair’s Cavalcade, for instance, offers an
intriguing new slant on first contact. Aliens invite people to join them, then
step back into the shadows. Thousands wake up in a vast, semi-organic spacecraft
and simply have to make do. Their tasks are to find food, build shelter
and—the most difficult job of all—learn how to get on with each
other. Meanwhile, they discover that the only way of communicating with their
alien hosts is through dreams. Cavalcade is a well-drawn study of how a
diverse bunch might cope under extraordinary circumstances.

Sullivan, like Sinclair, is on her third novel, and Dreaming in
Smoke is an excellent offering from this accomplished young writer. Her
scientists spend their dream time productively, linked to an artificial
intelligence. When the AI goes mad and crashes, plunging the colony into
disarray, the colonists are forced to fend for themselves on an unfriendly
planet. The scenes in which the characters interact with the mad AI in virtual
reality are surreal.

Peter Delacorte’s reality is our own, historical version, but in a souped-up,
infinitely malleable form. In his Time On My Hands, we have good,
old-fashioned time-travel story. Gabriel Prince goes back to the US of the late
1930s to stop a certain young B-movie actor from getting interested in
right-wing politics. The world of the 1980s is certainly a better place without
Ronald Reagan as President, but Prince cannot stop himself tinkering, and the
world gradually teeters into chaos.

Prince’s inability to admit his mistake and walk away could be seen as a
disturbing aspect of human nature. John Barnes has gone one better, taking human
nature per se as his theme in Earth Made of Glass, a sequel to his
excellent A Million Open Doors. A married couple, diplomats and agents,
are sent to a planet inhabited by two cultures that hate each other’s
guts—one based on concepts in Sri Lankan poetry, the other on Mayan
mythology. Ultimately these are well-drawn cultures and characters in search of
a plot.

I have to say that I think the Barnes is a makeweight on the shortlist; the
Sinclair and Sullivan are not bad, but not winners, and the Delacorte is too
traditional. This year’s winner must be either Macleod or Priest, both devoted,
in stunningly different ways, to exploring “the nature of the universe, of man,
or `reality'”.

The one thing you can be sure of with the Clarke award is that it rarely goes
to the safe choice. The judges, who include authors, critics, fans and the odd
scientist, tend to be a bloody-minded bunch.

The politically safe choice this year is Stephen Baxter’s Titan
(HarperCollins, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0002254247), a near-future account of a
one-way NASA voyage to Saturn’s moon. Baxter is constantly praised for assuming
the mantle of Clarke: the bright new hope of British hard SF. His exposition of
technological detail is, as always, superb, but the story, like Titan, is cold.
This is the fourth time that Baxter has been short-listed in the 12 years of the
Clarke award—is he fated to be a bridesmaid forever?

Jeff Noon was the surprise, but very popular, winner five years ago with his
first novel Vurt. His latest, Nymphomation (Doubleday,
ÂŁ15.99, ISBN 0385408129), is also set in his dystopian parallel
Manchester. Like all of Noon’s novels, Nymphomation is complex, weird
and crazily written. Suffice to say that the National Lottery pales into
insignificance next to domino day’s weekly effect on Manchester. And
Nymphomation? Imagine information with a rampant sex drive . . .

James Lovegrove’s Days is a satire about “the world’s first and
foremost gigastore”, 2.5 kilometres square. We follow shoppers, staff and the
store’s owners through the events of the day in which the ugliness of unbridled
merchandising reigns supreme. Although beautifully written, often funny, and at
times poignant, Days (Phoenix, ÂŁ6.99, ISBN 0753802287) is only a
short-list filler. In the end, it’s simply a day in the life of a big
supermarket.

Elizabeth Hand’s The Glimmering (HarperCollins, £5.99, ISBN
0006480276) is a dark, dystopian novel set in a parallel now, the last gasp of
the 20th century. It’s a book about AIDS and drug-taking, and the desperate gap
between the haves and the have-nots. At times brilliantly written, it evokes the
hopes and fears of a world falling apart.

Sheri S. Tepper has also appeared on the short list once before. In the
contemporary tale of The Family Tree (Voyager, ÂŁ9.99, ISBN
0002246686), scientists working to give animals human intelligence and speech
are murdered. In the parallel fantasy-style future story, a group of adventurers
is on a quest for the answer to an enigma. The two story streams converge
through a stroke of authorial daring that only just works. Not Tepper’s best,
this is still better than many SF writers manage at their very best.

So far, it should be a straight fight between regular contestant Baxter and
the past winner Noon. But there’s one more to come, an astounding first novel.
Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (Black Swan, £6.99, ISBN
0552997773) is the story of a Jesuit expedition to a newly discovered alien race
and how it goes dreadfully wrong. Eight set out to Alpha Centauri; decades later
one returns, alone and horribly mutilated. Worse, this well-loved,
much-respected and highly intelligent priest is branded a child-murderer. In
alternating strands, The Sparrow recounts the harrowing interrogation
of the priest, and tells the astonishing story of his and his friends’ journey,
physical and spiritual. This is a novel of “first contact” that emphasises that
the one thing we know about aliens is that they are different from us.

Russell is an anthropologist and linguist who manages to turn her specialist
knowledge into real wisdom. The Sparrow is about religion and faith
(not the same thing) and friendship, love and sex (by no means the same thing).
It is about cultures and misunderstanding, and the conflict between freedom and
duty. This is one of the most beautiful and awe-inspiring novels of the decade.
I predict it will win the Arthur C. Clarke Award this week. It doesn’t come from
a science-fiction imprint but I doubt if anyone will complain.

The UFO Invasion, a collection of articles fromThe Skeptical
Inquirer edited by Kendrick Frazier, Barry Karr and Joe Nickell (Prometheus
Books, $25.95, ISBN 1573921319) is one such rarity. The writers usefully
demonstrate that the “official” documents referring to a UFO crash at Roswell,
New Mexico, in 1947 are almost certainly forgeries. And several important
articles show the close resemblance between UFO abduction experiences and
hypnagogic and hypnopompic experiences, the images and physical states which
often occur while falling asleep or waking up.

Most worthwhile are the pieces detailing the appalling dangers inherent in
hypnotic regression, which is used to “prove” not only alien abductions, but
past lives and, more seriously, sexual abuse. As the evidence accumulates, it is
becoming increasingly apparent that it is the therapists, who are often the ones
guilty of abuse by inflicting such make-believe scenarios on their vulnerable
patients.

There are drawbacks in this approach, however. ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s tend to dismiss
anything that smacks of pseudoscience, or ideas which link those traditional
archenemies, science and religion. This is the case here, and the writers often
display flaws of logic similar to those they attack, frequently taking a
patronising tone. They assume the illogical proposition that anyone who believes
in something can’t possibly write objectively about it, while someone who
disbelieves in it can.

This is not a fault of UFOs and Ufologyby Paul Devereux and Peter
Brookesmith (Blandford, ÂŁ18.99/$29.95, ISBN 0713726571), which
gives an excellent, beautifully illustrated overview of UFOs, abductions, crop
circles and so on. It manages to be sceptical in the literal sense—of
questioning rather than condemning. Its conclusion, that UFO-type “experiences”
should be considered from societal, psychological and religious perspectives,
has much to recommend it.

And what does a professor of psychology make of it all? In After
Contact (Plenum, $28.95, ISBN 0306456214), Albert Harrison brings
his own discipline, plus sociology and the physical sciences, to bear on the
question of what alien life might be like, and how likely we are to encounter
it. Harrison presents a carefully argued case for the importance of SETI, the
search for extraterrestrial life, and discusses how we should react to alien
contact if it ever happens. Sound, sensible, and a good blueprint for
action.

For all those who claim that science and religion are incompatible, Gerald
Schroeder, a former MIT physicist, presents a detailed, cabalistic analysis of
chunks of the Old Testament’s Genesis alongside current thinking on
physics, cosmology and evolution in The Science of God(Simon &
Schuster/Free Press, $25, ISBN 0684837366). Ardent creationists and
hardline evolutionists will bin this immediately, but Schroeder suggests the two
sides should perhaps listen a little more instead of simply shouting at each
other.

Now for the fool’s gold. Faces of the Visitors by Kevin Randle and
Russ Estes (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, $12, ISBN 0684839733) gives
accounts and drawings of around fifty aliens supposedly encountered during the
past 50 years. Although it shows that the “Grey” with wraparound eyes so beloved
of Whitley Strieber is only one of many claimed images of aliens, this book is a
complete waste of a good tree.

David Furlong’s The Keys to the Temple (Piatkus, £16.99, ISBN
0749917458) also takes us into silly land. He explores “geometry on the
ground”— apparently regular alignments between old churches, hilltops and
standing stones. All very interesting and in places thought-provoking . . . but
he loses it completely when he suggests that Stonehenge and the Pyramids were
both built by the survivors of Atlantis. Time to pull the plug . . .

M. John Harrison is one of the few authors to merge SF/fantasy with literary
mainstream fiction, and be respected by both sides. Signs of Life
(Gollancz, ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 0575055561) is a contemporary thriller about a
courier, Mick “China” Rose, who doesn’t look too closely at the goods he’s
carrying—genetic samples and biological waste. His girlfriend Isobel is
obsessed with wanting to fly. The novel gets going halfway through, when Isobel
leaves China for one of his clients, a doctor experimenting with interspecies
DNA manipulation—with horrendous results. This novel is a timely warning
about the need for ethical guidelines in genetic research.

Brian Stableford is also straddling borders, though less successfully.
Chimera’s Cradle (Legend, £16.99, ISBN 0099443716), the conclusion to
his “Books of Genesys” trilogy, looks and feels like a fantasy novel set in a
world with many strange creatures, but in fact it’s an SF book about genetic
adaptation. There are some good ideas here, but it might have made for a better
novel if Stableford, one of Britain’s more intelligent SF writers, had gone
straight for the SF meat.

Foundation’s Fear (Orbit, £16.99, ISBN 1857234634) by Gregory
Benford is a strange collaboration, the first of a new trilogy based on the late
Isaac Asimov’s famous “Foundation” trilogy. The second and third novels will be
written by Greg Bear and David Brin respectively.

Asimov’s original trilogy, though a classic of its time, is dated. His own
late attempts to add to the story were stodgy affairs. It’s interesting to see
three of today’s top hard-science writers take on Asimov’s original and extend
it. In Benford’s case, it is a sometimes uneasy marriage between the author’s
awkward simulation of Asimov—in the main story of how Hari Seldon develops
psychohistory—and an excellent Benford-style subplot of the “lives” of two
self-aware computer simulations, Joan of Arc and Voltaire.

Strider’s Galaxy (Legend, £5.99, ISBN 0099791218) by Paul
Barnett is a deceptive little book. It’s the first I know of to be published
under the author’s own name—he is far better known as John Grant,
co-editor with John Clute of The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, and
author of more than 50 books in a wide range of fields. And while it appears to
be no more than another lightweight space opera, it is actually a careful study
of intergalactic diplomatic relations and that dirty word “prejudice”.

How would you react if you were captain of a colonising spaceship that falls
through a wormhole to surface in the middle of a vast interstellar war? How
would you cope with conscience-less alien warlords bent on depredation and
destruction? Or with almost godlike bodiless aliens who “speak” straight to your
mind? Or with your own crew, half of whom despise each other for an assortment
of human cultural differences? Strider’s Galaxy may not be a classic,
but it’s an excellent example of how the most cliché-ridden area of SF
can still have a thing or two worth saying—and thoroughly enjoyable.

Tricia Sullivan’s second novel Someone to Watch Over Me (Orion,
ÂŁ16.99, ISBN 1857985230) is an interesting post-cyberpunk rendering of the
idea of living your life vicariously for “watchers”—similar in ways to D.
G. Compton’s classic 1975 novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe
(filmed as Deathwatch). In Sullivan’s novel, Adrien has an implant
which broadcasts whatever he sees, hears, touches and smells to a mysterious
watcher, “C”. Tiring of his increasing criminality, Adrien has his implant
removed—shortly before C apparently dies. But is C dead, or has (s)he
managed to take over not only someone else’s senses, but their mind? This is an
intriguing novel about identity, a more ambitious but rather heavier work than
Sullivan’s brilliant debut, Lethe.

Deny All Knowledge: Reading the X-Files edited by David Lavery,
Angela Hague and Maria Cartright (Faber and Faber, ÂŁ8.99, ISBN 0 571 19141
X) is a collection of essays by American academics in English, communication and
cultural studies, investigating the meaning and significance of the television
series.

The essays explore The X-Files from within several
frameworks, including conspiracy theory, mythology, gender definitions and
popular culture. One contributor examines it in the light of the current spate
of “true alien abduction” stories in the US, while another looks at the serious
X-Files fannish activity on the Internet.

A recurrent theme is how the rational, scientific, sceptical Dana Scully and
the intuitive, sensitive, believing Fox Mulder are reversals of traditional
societal gender roles.

Agent Scully is a medical doctor, and both Scully and Mulder employ
state-of-the-art scientific and technological aids in their work. Although these
are commented on, there could have been an interesting essay on the uneasy
relationship between science and “parascience”.

And it would have been good to have more discussion from a psychological
perspective on how Mulder and Scully are affected by their experiences, and how
their characters develop from episode to episode and series to series.

But this is a valuable and generally very readable collection of essays,
offering a largely feminist critique of what is at the same time a popular,
significant and intelligent television phenomenon of the 1990s. At times, you
might wonder though if these academic writers have forgotten that, first and
foremost, The X-Files is fun.

Both Simon Ings and Neal Stephenson have taken virtual reality way beyond the cyberpunk fathered by William Gibson. Ings is a young British writer with an assured future. Hotwire (HarperCollins, £4.99 pbk, ISBN 0 00 647724 0) is his third novel, and a more than worthy sequel to his first, Hot Head. Its action takes place in a near-future world, and is a powerfully written thriller about a young professional hitman’s efforts to steal the “wetware” from an old space station. The wetware is half-human, half-AI, and more than half-crazed.

Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (Viking, £9.99 pbk, ISBN 0 670 86414 5) is a glorious blend of the mannered neo-Victorian and an imaginative future. In a world where most people belong to a “phyle”, or self-chosen nation that transcends geographical boundaries, a nanotechnologist designs the ultimate teaching aid: a fully interactive book. The book bonds to its owner, “growing up” with her as a storybook and an encyclopedia, a companion and teacher. The primer’s fantasy quest told throughout The Diamond Age, mirrors the action of the harder SF world of the outer book. This is metafiction without the usual self-congratulatory archness. It’s also a rattling good yarn, and its social and scientific extrapolations from our own world are all too believable.

Set in real Victorian times, Christopher Priest’s The Prestige (Simon & Schuster, £15.99, ISBN 0 671 71924 6) is beautifully written. Two magicians vie with each other to create the perfect illusion: vanishing from one part of the stage and reappearing instantaneously in another. It’s a story of utter fakery and scientific audacity. The pioneer of electrical power, Nikola Tesla, appears in a supporting role; to say more would reveal too much. Priest masters the merging of SF and mainstream, and The Prestige is his finest novel to date.

Michael Moorcock is an enigmatic rarity. He churned out a prodigious number of pulp fantasy novels in the 1960s to finance the influential SF magazine New Worlds. He has written for and performed with Hawkwind and Blue Oyster Cult – and he has won major literary awards for his later, more serious fiction.

Fabulous Harbours (Millennium, £15.99/£8.99 pbk, ISBN 1 85798 408 0/409 9) is, like its predecessor Blood, a study of the eternal battle between chaos and law, between entropy and stasis. Either may destroy humanity. “Our role,” says one character, “is to create Order without losing the creativity and fecundity of Chaos,” a moral, political, social and scientific issue perhaps more vital to our present time than to any other. Fabulous Harbours is a collection of Moorcock’s recent short stories on this topic – plus one from 1966 that emphasises the significance of this theme throughout his career. I found it quirky, but it will be more accessible to a newcomer to SF than some of Moorcock’s work.

For fantasy aficionados and computer games addicts, the plot of Jonathan Wylie’s Other Lands (Orbit, £16.99, ISBN 1 85723 309 3) will come as nothing new: a young woman finds herself, through hypnosis-induced “dreams”, in a parallel world. It is the medieval, magical, fantasy version of the rural Norfolk where she lives. Her task is to solve problems there to save her real-world husband from his coma. But this variation on a well worked theme is a lot better than most. The “author” is in fact a married couple who turned from being SF and fantasy editors to being very capable writers. I would not call this novel literature, but for readers new to the genre its combination of ancient and modern, of magic and computers, of love and hate and terror and courage, makes for a well-written, thoroughly enjoyable tale. It is also highly recommended for weaning teenagers off genre pap onto the real stuff.

Short stories have an uncomfortable place in Britain today. Some are
happily accepted by consumers of women’s magazines, though derided by critics;
others are often given a pretentious worthiness by the literary establishment
which makes them unappealing to the ordinary reader. But for decades they’ve
been central to science fiction, fantasy and horror, which the literati
dismiss as genre fiction, and so beneath contempt. Edgar Allan Poe and M.
R. James are acceptable, probably because they’re dead; their successors,
such as Ian McDonald, Garry Kilworth, Lucius Shepard and many others, aren’t
even noticed – a ridiculous distinction, for what is science fiction if
not the descendant of Victorian tales of the supernatural and lost worlds?

Today’s science fiction was born in short story magazines from the 1920s
onwards. All its famous names – Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C.
Clarke, Fred Pohl, Philip K. Dick – cut their teeth on short stories. For
what is often an ‘ideas’ genre, the short story is perfect: one idea, one
short story.

Each short story idea has its own natural length. Many a lesser writer
would have pared down ‘The Coming of Vertumnus’, the 50-page title story
of Ian Watson’s new science fiction collection, to make it more acceptable
to editors. Or worse, they would have stretched it into an unsatisfactory
novel. This is a deeply disturbing story about loss of identity, which draws
together the less attractive side of eco-awareness and contemporary fears
about designer drug research, in a setting of art research and deception,
the history of the Hapsburgs, and what might or might not be dark magic.

Where does history become myth, myth become religion, religion the supernatural,
the supernatural fantasy, and fantasy science fiction? One of the delights
of Watson’s collection is that all these categories merge together, and
the silly arbitrariness of subgenre classification becomes irrelevant. They’re
simply good stories, many with a scientific basis, which make us question
reality – and surely that’s what science fiction should be doing.

‘Swimming with the Salmon’ is a beautiful love story based on the olfactory
chemistry of pheromones. ‘The Odour of Cocktail Cigarettes’ and ‘Nanoware
Time’ are unusual stories of ‘first contact’ with aliens in that none of
the tales assume that we know what they really want. Several stories are
fantastical, darkly magical: the humorous ‘Talk of the Town’, where Daventry
speaks to the youthful narrator and ‘Happy Hour’, in which an ancient power,
now dwelling in an air extractor fan in a country pub, becomes hungry.

Full marks to Gollancz for publishing this collection of stories by
one of Britain’s consistently finest science fiction writers – but it, and
other book publishers, would be doing themselves, writers and readers a
favour by providing more outlets for short fiction. Short stories force
them to be disciplined, to learn the value of every word, to plot carefully,
to create characters with a few memorable brush-strokes – useful skills
which they can then adapt to the task of writing novels. Is it mere coincidence
that the ready availability of the word processor, which makes it so easy
simply to spew out words, is contemporaneous with the slag heaps of fantasy
trilogies spilling off the shelves of booksellers?

Watson learnt his craft in the science fiction magazines and anthologies
of the 1960s and 1970s. Today, Britain only has one professionally published
science fiction magazine, Interzone. There are several small magazines that
appear only occasionally where new writers can serve their early apprenticeship,
but where can they progress from being journeymen to master craftsmen? Publishers
claim that anthologies of new science fiction stories don’t sell – but there
are plenty of regular horror anthologies, often of considerably lower standard
than the few science fiction anthologies which do appear. I think that it’s
a marketing problem; if publishers put a bit of effort into selling these
anthologies, they would sell. Where else will the Ian Watsons of the next
century come from?

David Barrett is the administrator of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for
science fiction.

If Leonardo da Vinci had been able to put some of his more advanced
ideas into practice, the history of the past 400 years would have been somewhat
different. Imagine early 16th-century Florence with steamboats, submarines
and electric light. How would the Renaissance and the Industrial Revolution
have coped with each other?

Unfortunately, this is something that doesn’t really come through in
Paul J. McAuley’s latest novel. All the elements are there – the politics,
pageantry, costume and easy death of the Renaissance, and the technology
(pollution included) of the 19th century – but it somehow doesn’t mesh.
Both were periods of new ideas, of excitement, of change; the combination
should be electric, but Pasquale’s Angel reads like a period detective
story with the industrial elements imposed on top.

In genre terms, it is as much a starstudded detective story as an alternative
history; the luminaries include Pope Leo X, Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo
(the Great Engineer) himself. One of Raphael’s men is killed in a classic
locked-room case; the unlikely young hero Pasquale, a pupil-artist, is recruited
by the journalist Niccol Machiavegli to help investigate the murder and
to do on-the-spot illustrations for his broadsheet. Pasquale pockets a model
helicopter powered by rubber band that he finds by the body, and precipitates
an avalanche of kidnappings, torture and further murders.

Pasquale is guided into the beginnings of mysticism by a Native American
woman who believes he can stand between the two worlds, ‘the world of things
and the world of the names of things, where their essence lies’. Sadly,
this neo-Platonic hermeticism – intellectually one of the most exciting
aspects of the development of the philosophy of science – becomes buried
beneath the political complexities of the novel.

Despite McAuley’s excellent imagination and his detailed research,
Pasquale’s Angel, like his last couple of novels, is almost, but not quite,
brilliant. It’s not helped by the clumsiness of his prose. The book is littered
with verbless sentences (stylistically allowable, but grammatically dodgy),
subordinate clauses linked to the wrong noun, cliches (‘The man squealed
like a stuck pig’), and repetitions. By the sixth reference to someone dragging
someone else ‘by main force’, I wished he had had a firmer editor.

David Barrett edited Digital Dreams, a collection of science fiction
short stories about computers, and is secretary of the Arthur C. Clarke
Award for Science Fiction.

How to Write Science Fiction by Bob Shaw, Allison & Busby, pp 144,
ÂŁ6.99

A few months ago J. G. Ballard was described as a ‘science fiction
writer and novelist’, an interesting distinction that set me wondering.
Science fiction has been a ghetto genre since the days when almost all
the SF available was published in cheap pulp magazines. That image has
proved hard to shake off. As Bob Shaw says in his excellent How to Write
Science Fiction, even Hollywood ‘for the most part is creeping towards the
stage occupied by printed SF in about 1940’. People can still be ashamed
to admit that they read science fiction.

The genre shows no signs of dying – if anything it is increasing in
popularity. Shaw aims to encourage aspiring SF authors but, unlike most
‘how to’ books, which fall into the worthy but dull manuals and deal only
with the nuts and bolts of a topic, this book is suffused with Shaw’s characteristic
wry Irish humour, and is inspiring.

Several of the 16 writers in The Profession of Science Fiction also
concentrate on the relationship between mainstream writing and SF. Their
essays, originally published in the British academic journal of SF, Foundation,
explore what the writers think of the area in which they write, how they
got into it, and why they still do it. Most of them take a hard look at
why SF is, in their view, vitally important.

Ballard goes the furthest and, quoting from his earlier writing, says:
‘Science fiction, far from being an unimportant minor offshoot, in fact
represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century . . . The main
‘fact’ of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited future . . .
All literatures other than science fiction are doomed to irrelevance. None
have the vocabulary of ideas and images to deal with the present, let alone
the future.’ In the 20 years since Ballard first wrote that, it has been
interesting to watch mainstream writers borrowing this ‘vocabulary of ideas
and images’. Ian McEwan, Peter Ackroyd, Barry Unsworth, Russell Hoban and
other major ‘literary’ contemporary writers all make use of SF tropes in
their work.

One of the major criticisms levelled at SF, and its close cousin fantasy,
is that it is escapist. Richard Cowper asks what is wrong with that in
his essay: ‘I realised early on in life that the ability to ‘escape’ is
but to exercise the divine faculty of the human imagination. A great writer
lends us his whole sensibility. The intensity of the imaginative experience
communicated is what counts.’ For him, seeing SF as ‘fairy tales for adults’
is the ultimate accolade. SF, he says, is ‘the sole extant literary form
which would allow me the total imaginative freedom I craved, without the
inevitable limitation upon adult experience which the fairy tale proper
must of necessity impose.’

American SF writer and astrophysicist David Brin sees the SF writer
as the modern-day shaman: ‘We are the ones who toy with new myths, with
the images and ideas our culture may need as it rushes headlong toward a
future that may glow or may burn but in any event will certainly feature
profound change.’

Historical novelist Naomi Mitchison, daughter and sister of the two
great Haldane scientists, also sees part of the function of SF as warning:
‘Who better to bring the disasters which we are making for ourselves forcibly
home to voters and opinion-makers than committed SF writers?’ Other writers
in this fascinating book include James Blish, Ursula Le Guin, Norman Spinrad
and Garry Kilworth.

So what is science fiction? My belief is that SF is that area of creative
activity that steps aside from consensus reality, the better to examine
‘reality’. (Reality is as much a fiction as everything else – ask the Buddhists.
Or a particle physicist. Or read The Sun.) By coming from an unusual angle,
SF can cast a sharper light on our lives, illuminating hidden corners far
better than can mainstream fiction.

As Shaw says of alternative history SF stories, in his ‘how to’ book,
‘By portraying the way things might have been they give us new insights
into the way things are.’ He sees the vital ingredient of SF as otherness:
‘A true science fiction story has as its keystone an imaginative element
which cannot be properly expounded in any other literary form.’

I was recently asked by a science journalist how many of SF’s scientific
predictions have come true. She cited William Gibson’s ground-breaking Neuromancer,
which dealt with virtual reality before most people had ever heard of it.
(Gibson is embarrassed to be seen as the founding father of cyberspace,
acknowledging that Alfred Bester and others also explored these ideas,
but Gibson’s cyberpunks caught the public imagination.) SF has never been
about predicting the future; its few accurate forecasts are far outweighed
by its many glorious failures. ‘If you predict everything,’ says Shaw, ‘now
and then something will come true.’

‘Hard’ science fiction is often written by scientists. In this country
Arthur C. Clarke is the most famous, but younger writers like Paul McAuley,
Steven Baxter and John Gribbin are continuing the tradition. At the other
end of a wide spectrum, writers such as Mark Helprin, John Crowley and Karen
Joy Fowler in the US and Christopher Priest, Mary Gentle and M. John Harrison
in Britain are exploring the philosophy of science in its older sense of
knowledge and ideas. Their work, alongside McEwan, Ackroyd and other mainstream
writers, is now being called ‘slipstream’. Purists argue about whether
it is truly SF or not. Does it matter?

It is precisely on these fuzzy edges and interfaces that we find the
significant work, books that are thoughtful and thought-provoking and possibly
even ‘literature’ (whatever that is). This is fiction that challenges, that
takes risks, that dares to bring dollops of strangeness into an ostensibly
everyday narrative, that forces the reader to re-evaluate his or her perception
of ‘reality’, to question values and beliefs whether scientific, religious,
philosophical, psychological, sociological or whatever.

And that’s what the profession of science fiction is all about.

David V. Barrett is the editor of Digital Dreams (New English Library)
and administrator of the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

* * *

Anti-Ice by Stephen Baxter, HarperCollins, pp 256, ÂŁ14.99 (July
1993)

Neuromancer by William Gibson, Grafton, pp 320, ÂŁ4.95 pbk

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin, Harcourt Brace/Pocketbooks, pp 704, $12
pbk

Aegypt by John Crowley, Bantam, $8.95 pbk

Sarah Canary by Karin Joy Fowler, Henry Holt, pp 352, $21.95

The Glamour by Christopher Priest, Abacus/Sphere, pp 234, ÂŁ4.50
pbk

Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle, Corgi, pp 512, ÂŁ4.99 pbk

The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison, Flamingo, pp 224, ÂŁ4.99
pbk