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Tesseracts Ten

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edited by Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom

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BIOGRAPHIES ISBN-10: 1-894063-36-8 ISBN-13: 978-1-894063-36-4 5.5" X 8.5" Trade Paperback $20.95 US $20.95 CN (plus shipping) 320 Pages Robert Charles Wilson Edo van Belkom AMAZON.COM AMAZON.CA

Tesseracts Ten edited by Robert Charles Wilson and Edo van Belkom A Nervous Look Down a Dark Road by Robert Charles Wilson We live in strange and perilous times. This statement is no less true for having always been true. Times have always been strange. The future is as unknowable as it always was. As always, storm clouds have lately gathered on the horizon. As always, there are scattered rays of hope. Sometimes, however, the storm seems closer than ever. You can hear the thunder and feel the lightning in the air. The going gets tough, and the thoughtful get nervous. * * * The nineteen-fifties and early sixties were such a time. Media iconography has draped that era in fading, contradictory images and emblems: Joe McCarthy vs. Marilyn Monroe; the radioactive atolls of Eniwetok and Kwajalein vs. the gilded, monoracial, faux-Christian suburbs imagined in such prime-time sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Ask the average seldom-reader what the science fiction of the nineteen-fifties was like and he’ll probably venture a guess involving The Jetsons, flying cars, and hyperoptimistic visions of cities on the moon. There is some truth to this, but less than you might think. In fact, in those days, science fiction had fallen on hard times. The old pulp magazine markets had dwindled to a precious few. The revolution in paperback publishing took up some of that slack, but did so, in part, by mining the rich back catalogue of those same defunct magazines. SF was occasionally declared dead, and its salvageable organs were freely donated to B-movies and television. Nor did the future seem especially bright for the world at large. It is a cliché now, but was not then, to say that mankind had taken into its hands for the first time the power to destroy itself. Between the brushfire wars and the nuclear brinkmanship there was often giddy talk of a New Frontier — and the economy was booming, after all — but the talk seemed forced, ideologically driven. It might not have been true, exactly, but it was patriotic and probably good for you, like saying the “Pledge of Allegiance” or singing “God Save the Queen”. “They trow not what is shaping otherwhere / The while they talk thus stoutly,” in the words of Thomas Hardy. Or perhaps they trow all too well. What they did often understand — these odd, strangely inhibited people, who could tolerate racism in their public media more readily than they could accept an advertisement for Kotex or condoms — was that some of the problems they confronted truly were unprecedented. Neither a prayer nor an ocean could long deter the nuclear bombers, should they be unleashed, and there was no wall over which the radioactive clouds could not drift. Who wanted to imagine, much less dramatize, such an eventuality? To save itself as a popular literature, shouldn’t SF set aside these all-too-real fears and... well, look on the bright side? Some in the field said so. John W. Campbell would allow doomsday scenarios in the pages of his Astounding (later Analog) only if they were represented as temporary setbacks on the road to human self-apotheosis. Progress, we might imagine, could be interrupted, but never stopped. Wasn’t that what people wanted to hear? Wouldn’t it somehow restore science fiction to its place as a literature of confident optimism? Might it not even bring back the glory days of three-color covers by Frank R. Paul and serials by E. E. Smith? But it was a thoughtful anxiety about the future (plus a healthy distrust of human nature) that produced two of the era’s classic novels, one of which became a perennial bestseller: Edgar Pangborn’s Davy and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz. Similarly, we remember John Wyndham not for his early space fiction written under another name but for the strange biological apocalypses of The Midwich Cuckoos, The Chrysalids, and Day of the Triffids. Likewise J.G. Ballard, who was and is a fine writer in many genres, but whose science fiction of that era remains memorable for the chilly, half-lit, deliquescent worlds of The Voices of Time or The Terminal Beach, fictions stranded, somehow, halfway between bohemia and Armageddon. What was wonderful about these works was not simply that they acknowledged the omnipresent threat-and-weirdness of what we liked to call the Atomic Age. What was wonderful was that they captured these feelings and dispensed them like some fine distilled essence ... feelings everyone of my generation shared but which we had never learned to articulate. One might write bluntly about the Bomb without quite getting it, as Philip Wylie did in his atomic-attack novel Tomorrow! (1954). But Wylie was of an earlier generation, and his book was a polemic for civil defense. To truly understand what 1964 felt like you needed Ballard: At night, as he lay asleep on the floor of the ruined bunker, Traven heard the waves breaking along the shore of the lagoon, like the sounds of giant aircraft warming up at the ends of their runways... Or Pangborn: It happened in 323, in Nuin, whose eastern boundary is a coastline on the great sea that in the Old Times was called the Atlantic — the sea where now this ship winds her passage through gray or golden days and across the shoreless latitudes of night... * * * It’s the tail end of the year 2005 as I write this, and those shoreless latitudes seem closer than ever. This year, three great natural disasters — the tsunami that originated off the coast of Sumatra, the earthquake that caused so much death and misery in Pakistan and Kashmir, and Hurricane Katrina — elucidated great gaps and inefficiencies in the civilized world’s ability to cope with unexpected crises. One of America’s largest and most historic cities was reduced to a sodden, filthy wasteland, and we watched the poorer citizens of New Orleans herded into a battered Superdome and abandoned there, at least briefly, by a flailing and ineffectual federal agency. Natural disasters can happen anywhere, anytime, of course, but overshadowing all this were bigger and more contentious issues. America, we were repeatedly told, is at war. The enemy is a shadow. He might be anywhere. He might be you. “The rules have changed since 9/11.” Your papers will be inspected. Your phone will be tapped, your e-mail will be intercepted. If you are very unlucky you might, like Canadian citizen Maher Arar, be whisked away to some invisible foreign prison and tortured because you had the wrong friends, or were in the wrong place, or possessed a name that sounded like someone else’s. And the hurricane that devastated New Orleans: might it have been a symptom of a rapidly changing climate? The polar icecaps, according to news reports, have shrunk; the vast sea current called the Atlantic Conveyor has slowed measurably as melting ice dumps fresh water into salt arctic seas. Codfish may be facing extinction. Many parts of the world’s oceans have been fished into virtual deserts. Oil — the lifeblood of global civilization as it stands — has begun to grow scarcer and more expensive even as emerging monster economies like India and China demand more and more of it. There are continual rumors, if no confirmed sightings, of an emerging killer influenza — or some other pandemic bred by the combination of massive poverty and unprecedented mobility. And in the face of all this, millions of Americans have united in an organized political movement... to expel the teaching of Darwinian evolution from the nation’s crumbling public school system. Bad times, too, for science fiction. Magazine circulation is down and book sales are sluggish outside a few select titles and authors. Once again, our tropes and stage-sets have been wholesaled to the movie industry. Images that were once the exclusive province of SF literature have become commonplace, digital costume jewelry for the Blockbuster Motion Pictures that shamble through our theaters every summer. “Cyberpunk,” once cutting-edge, is the stock-in-trade of cartoons and direct-to-video thrillers. And there is the same temptation toward denial. We don’t want to admit that, as Tom Smallways says in the H.G. Wells novel The War in the Air, “this here Progress” might not “keep on.” Science fiction, we are once again instructed, must be optimistic. It must hold out the promise of a glowing future. One American publisher has reportedly banned even the idea of global warming from its authors’ works (though the same publisher welcomes stories of a resurrected German SS at war with invading aliens). After decades of denying that science fiction is an “escape literature” there is the pervasive sense that it isn’t, but that it ought to be. Admittedly, fiction that merely reiterated the threats we all face would be dreary. Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, for all its virtues and excellences, came close to meeting that description. But the best SF doesn’t just acknowledge the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, it names them and inquires after their families; it curries and bridles their mounts; it asks politely where they’re bound, and what might happen after the last sinner has been scythed and the last grinning skull stacked with all the rest. Faced with nuclear annihilation, science fiction had the nerve and wit to invent Brother Francis and the Blessed Leibowitz. “Beate Leibowitz, ora pro me!” And the world paid attention. I don’t claim that what we have in this anthology of current Canadian science fiction and fantasy is the post-9/11 era’s answer to Miller or Ballard. But it does represent a groping in that direction. Here we have a double-handful of mostly new, mostly young writers, floating ideas that are often comic, often horrific. Some of these writers are digging through the tropes of older SF and fantasy, rearranging the familiar in unfamiliar patterns. Some are inventing tropes of their own. And perhaps, from one of these new wellsprings, will come the visions we one day recall and say, “God, yes! That’s it, that’s what it was like to be alive and awake and human at the beginning of the 21st century.” Welcome to the new future. Tesseracts Ten: Basic Information Page. Tesseracts Ten: Introduction. Tesseracts Ten: Author Biographies. Tesseracts Series: About the Series.

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