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S F Commentary #62-66 1981-06 F COMMENTARY independent magazine about science fiction No. 62/63/64/65/66 June 1981 * 72 PAGES AUSTRALIA $5 (Sub. $10 for 10) I USA/CANADA $8 (Sub. $12 for 10) Aldiss’s puzzles ° Herbert’s God • Australia’s best Disch’s Daniel « Stellar gadflies • Damien’s dragons Everybody’s letters <> Susan Wood: a tribute CONTENTS: Home, Sapiens!: The Awakening of Myth; Mystery Within Mystery (Anne Brewster; Rowena Cory) 2. Three Novels from Cory and Collins: Australian SF Lurches Forward; A Succession of Different Cultures (Bruce Gillespie; Wynne N Whiteford) 4. Gauging the Stellar Gauge (Bruce Gillespie) 7. The Lately Great Alfred Bester (Damien Broderick) 11. Bishop Can't Transfigure It Out (Henry Gasko) 14. God, Frank Herbert, and the Concept of Deity in Science Fiction (George Turner) 16. The Philip Dick Forum: The Really Real; Staying Alive in a Fifteen-Cent Universe (Lesleigh Luttrell; Claudia Krenz) 18. Sing a Song of Daniel (Bruce Gillespie) 23. A Window on Creation: Some Thoughts on Brian W Aldiss' 'Report on Probability A' (John McPharlin) 27. Up from His Midnight Bed (Damien Broderick) 29. 8 Point Universe (Bruce Gillespie) 30. I Must Be Talking to My Friends (Editor; Denny Lien; Joyce Scrivener; Eli Cohen; John D Berry; Thomas M Disch; Brian W Aldiss; Andrew Wiener; Ian Carmichael; Peter Coomber; Stephen Hitchings; Angus Taylor; Christopher Priest; GeorgeTurner; Donald G Keller; Eric Lindsay; Sneja Gunew; Neville J Angove; Philip Stephensen-Payne; John Foyster.)39. Sins of My Old Age (3) (Elaine Cochrane) 63. Criticanto (John D Berry; Cy Chauvin;Tom Whalen; Rowena Cory) 64. ARTWORK: Mostly pen-and-ink renderings by Elaine Cochrane, with apologies to various originals, such as William Blake (p 7), Jack Gaughan (p 11—from Go/em^OO) and Escher (p 27). PP 18, 20: Stephen Campbell. PHOTO P 39: Dick Eney; from cover of Eli Cohen's Kratophany 7. Edited, published, designed, pasted up by Bruce Gillespie, GPO Box 5195AA, Melbourne, Victoria 3001, Australia. Phone (03) 419 4797. Proof-reading, advice, and considerable financial aid: Elaine Cochrane. Printed by Print Mint, Bank Place, Melbourne. Agent for USA/Canada: Hank Luttrell, 2501 University Ave, Madison, Wl 53703. Australian S F: 1 HOME, THE AWAKENING OF MYTH SAPIENS! by Anne Brewster Damien Broderick's novel, The Dream­ ing Dragons, is subtitled 'A Time Opera', yet the central metaphor of time is somewhat obscure. The first three of the five sections are set in THE DREAMING contemporary Australia. Beneath Ayers Rock a vault which is, in fact, 'a dull white sphere on a flat surface' is discovered. It possesses strange qualities DRAGONS: and interferes with the neurophysio­ logical functions of the brain, plunging the unfortunate who approaches too TWO VIEWS closely into the psychic chaos of the id. To what else would a competent Australian writer, telling his tale of the Reviewed: Great Outback, take recourse? Patrick White has set the pattern for the The Dreaming Dragons second half of the twentieth century, by Damien Broderick it seems. Yet Broderick's story is not intro­ (Norstrilia Press; 1980; spective. It takes the Aboriginal crea­ 245 pp; $12.95; tion myth of the rainbow serpent as its Pocket Books 83150.X; 1980; focal motif, translating this myth into 224 pp;$US 2.25; the post-Darwinian vocabulary of a Penguin 14005823; 1981; technological super-culture. Man is no 245 pp;$A4.50) longer determined by blind environ­ mental forces; he is responsible for his own development. The potency at the Damien Broderick had a short story collection, A Man Returned, source of the rainbow serpent myth published when he was extraordinarily young. A novel, Sorcerer’s comes not from the natural elements, World, appeared in USA when he wasn’t much older. In The Zeitgeist the spirits of animals, or even uranium Machine, he gathered the third collection of Australian sf stories to oxide. The vault beneath Ayers Rock is a complex machine, the artifact of a be published by Angus and Robertson. The Dreaming Dragons is past Terran civilisation whose remain­ Damien’s first novel to reach a wide public, with a simultaneous ing members are suspended on their release in Australian hardback and US paperback. It is the second crippled space craft in 'deep time'. The novel that Norstrilia Press has published. vault is, in fact, the 'Soul Core' of that race and embodies its collective uncon­ Anne Brewster is a tutor in the English Department at Adelaide scious. The race has evolved from a University. dinosaur contemporary to that ape from which we claim descent. Saurus Rowena Cory is a member of that vast multi-activity conglomerate, erectus evolves into Saurus sapiens, a Cory and Collins. plumed reptile that towers above man. 2 problems of presenting a mystery of This race cultivates 'pongid' slaves, this kind. At times the grammar strange, fur-covered animals with changes from past to present tense to straight, square teeth, and five digits on make a section more immediate. each hand. The Saurians' space MYSTERY WITHIN MYSTERY Characters are introduced, allowed to ship's controls are disabled by the play their roles in the story's develop­ explosion of a supernova and their by Rowena Cory ment, then fall into the background. civilisation stands on the brink of col­ At one point after Bill delFord joins lapse. In the meantime, the pongid An alien artifact. Aboriginal legends, the team at Ayers Rock, the story­ slaves, who have developed intelligence foreign intervention: do these sound line is interrupted, and we are treated unobserved by their masters, revolt. familiar? Parallel (one assumes) to the mal­ to a chilling first-person account of a The Dreaming Dragons begins with brilliant Russian who finds he has been functioning of the Ancillary Core of the Aboriginal anthropologist, Alf infected by a strange virus. He is told the space craft, the Vault becomes de­ Dean, and his autistic nephew, Mouse, it was an accident, but he suspects that fective and erases the Saurians' past searching for the Rainbow Serpent, They are experimenting on him. Soon history from the face of the earth. which Alf believes is the skeleton of he forgets these nagging doubts as the Without competition, the early apes some ancient dinosaur. But deep endorphin peptide, which is being are now able to evolve unhindered, within the cave system they find a produced at a phenomenal rate in his into Homo sapiens. This explanation portal. A faint breeze reaches Alf as brain, interferes with the cortical summarises the last chapter of The he stands before it and, unable to re­ Dreaming Dragons. neuron receptors, causing mental re­ strain his curiosity, he steps through. tardation. Finally the process is halted The first three chapters describe the Mouse watches his uncle collapse and, adventures of an Aboriginal anthropo­ and he returns to normal, still able to unaware of the danger, runs to his aid. recall in humiliating detail his helpless logist and his autistic nephew, aided They have been transported to the by Bill delFord, a Californian psycho­ infantile behaviour. underground chamber which houses When the sequence ends, we learn scientist researching OOBE (out-of- the Sphere. Mouse drags his uncon­ body experience), who speaks like that this is the Sphere's attempt, scious uncle through the Sphere's through Mouse, to precipitate a Timothy Leary, Arthur Janov, and cavern to where the American and Philip K Dick rolled into one, in inves­ nuclear war. Some argue that it is an Russian personnel watch, unable to aid instruction to use this process on tigating the various psychic properties them. Alf the anthropologist is near of the Vault and cracking the meta­ volunteers for the Sphere's field. death, but the Sphere's shield has no A new break in the narrative intro­ phoric code of the unconscious. They effect on Mouse. They are the first to work among top American and Russian duces a ship (which, as we learn later, survive the field: all others have died travels through time), manned by rela­ scientists and military officials in a bid or returned insane. to simulate the various properties of tively stupid pongids, which is faced On Alf's advice, an out-of-body by a crisis. The damaged master com­ the Vault and tension runs high in this experience (OOBE) expert is flown in puter raises a generation of Saurus atmosphere of co-operative yet not from USA. While it appears that erectus, the ship's builders, to deal wholly stable suspension of hostilities. Mouse is somehow in tune with the with the situation. It seems that ten In his search to plumb the meaning be­ Sphere, he begins to communicate in thousand years before, a nearby nova hind mythic symbols. Bill delFord falls many languages. His cryptic messages, occurred and somehow the ship's even deeper than a yogi's trance. transcribed verbatim, astound listeners. shield was pierced. Those pongids per­ The Dreaming Dragons is textually So we are presented with the first forming their simple tasks at the time uneven and frequently repetitive and, level of the mystery in these three were treated to a massive dose of despite consistent references to tech­ chapters. The narrative shifts to the radiation. The faulty computer raised nological, sociological, and historical viewpoint of Bill delFord, the OOBE a fresh generation of pongids, and data to substantiate the plot, the ambi­ expert, and we find out more about those who were cancerous and crippled guity of place and time (the reader has the total situation. retreated to the Ancillary Core to fend the impression, for example, that the Upon discovering a ruined base on for themselves.
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