ICFA, Orlando, Florida, March 2011

Andy Duncan & Terry Bisson

Andrea Hairston & Suzy Charnas

Karen Burnham, Paul Park, Cecelia Holland & Eileen Gunn Tom & Tania Dougherty The New York Review of Science Fiction ISSUE #273 May 2011 Volume 23, No. 9 ISSN #1052-9438 ESSAYS Spyros A. Vretos: Towards an Explication of the Missing Text: The Lost Greek-American Pages of Philip K. Dick: 1 Gary Westfahl: Space Stations in Fact and Fiction: 6 Michael Swanwick: Impossible Russias: 12 Victor Grech: Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction: 14 Nader Elhefnawy: A Revolution of Falling Expectations: Wither the Singularity?: 19 REVIEWS Hello Hi There, concept and direction by Annie Dorsen, reviewed by Jen Gunnels: 1 Dancing with Bears: The Postutopian Adventures of Darger & Surplus by Michael Swanwick, reviewed by Henry Wessells: 11 The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell, reviewed by Ernest Lilley: 16 Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik, reviewed by Greg L Johnson: 18 Modern Times 2.0 (Outspoken Authors No. 5) by Michael Moorcock, reviewed by Eugene Reynolds: 20 PLUS Plus: David Drake, mythologer (5); questioning Hartwell (11); screed (23); and an editorial (24). Samuel R. Delany, Contributing Editor; David G. Hartwell, Reviews & Features Editor. Kevin J. Maroney, Managing Editor; Kris Dikeman and Avram Grumer, Associate Managing Editors. Staff: Ambrose, Ann Crimmins, Alex Donald, Jen Gunnels, Eugene Reynolds, and Anne Zanoni. Weekly Crew: Lisa Padol. Special thanks to Arthur D. Hlavaty and Eugene Surowitz. Published monthly by Dragon Press, P.O. Box 78, Pleasantville, NY 10570. $4.00 per copy. Annual subscriptions: U. S. Bulk Rate, $40.00; Canada, $44.00; U. S. First Class, $50.00 Overseas Air Printed Matter, UK & Europe, $47.00; Asia & Australia, $48.00. Domestic institutional subscriptions $42.00. Please make checks payable to Dragon Press, and payable in U.S. funds. PDF subscriptions and PayPal payments are available; e-mail for information on both. Send all editorial inquiries and submissions to and . An up-to-date index of past issues in Excel format is available at . New York Review of Science Fiction Home Page: www.nyrsf.com Copyright © 2011 Dragon Press. Victor Grech Interdisciplinarity in Science Fiction * Referring to C. P. Snow’s 1959 Rede Lecture, The Two Cultures amplified by territorial aspects of disciplinary knowledge and methods and the Scientific Revolution is clichéd yet mandatory in any project (Crane and Small 197). Multitalented inventors, such as Edison, Ford, that attempts to discuss interdisciplinarity and to identify affinities and others, have not only captured our imagination but also served as between, on the one hand, “science,” arguably the last metanarrative inspirations for fictional characters, including in science fiction. with any significant cachet in the post-postmodern condition, and, SF, in its typically positive and optimistic fashion, has repeatedly on the other hand, the humanities. It has been nearly 50 years since warned of indulgence in super-specialization and has depicted heroes Snow famously lamented the lack of mutuality between the sciences who embody interdisciplinarity, seen as an ideal modus operandi and the humanities and especially the vagueness of practitioners in whereby knowledge can somehow become greater than the sum of its the latter about important and basic aspects of the former. And the parts. Such protagonists range from prolific boy inventors or adults situation has degenerated further in that it is perfectly obvious that of Edisonian forte all the way to true interdisciplinarians who have a we currently lack not only interdisciplinarity, but, more urgently, wide range of knowledge that encompasses diverse disciplines. This intradisciplinarity within either. paper will review sf’s depiction of some protagonists who have reified The present is the age of the specialist and the subspecialist, a the interdisciplinary paradigm within sf and some lessons that may be form of superspecialist, such that one can no longer even utter the learned from these narratives. words science or the humanities with innocence or precision, and it is almost certain that no field within either of the camps demonstrates Interdisciplinarians in Science Fiction complete univocity or internal coherence. Thus, for instance, and to One of the earliest fictional interdisciplinary geniuses appeared limit ourselves for the purposes of this example to “the humanities,” in Hugo Gernsback’s 1911 novel, Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of philosophy remains riven by polarities between logical positivism and the Year 2660. The protagonist was a truly Edisonian inventor, and Continental philosophy (which themselves permit, in turn, further this particular story predicted television, tape recording, microfilm, subdivisions); the study of literature continues to be embroiled in the solar energy, atomic weapons, fluorescent lighting, plastics, synthetic struggle “against itself”; and the study of culture, not least the very fabrics, stainless steel, hydroponics, and juke boxes. It was by way of the definition of culture, is highly contested. Gerald Graff contends that cheap pulp magazines that sf “emerged as a self-conscious genre” (per postmodern literature and critical theory has tended to be nihilistic, the Encyclopædia Britannica), despite the repeatedly recycled series refusing to define or relate to external reality, a worldview that leads and clichéd stories, such as square-jawed heroes rescuing hysterical to self-trivialization and loss of referentiality, weakening literature’s blonde damsels in distress, meretriciously attired in brass underwear claim to truth. while fleeing from bug-eyed monsters. More and more, it seems that because of the vast amounts of The Tom Swift boy-hero character has appeared in over 100 knowledge that specialists accumulate, they tend to speak mostly among novels since 1910, ghostwritten under the corporate pseudonym of themselves, solely within the borderlines of their specificisms and hardly Victor Appleton or Victor Appleton II. Swift’s fantastic, hopelessly at all (and certainly with questionable authority, reliability, or purpose) implausible, and veritably endless flood of inventions paralleled to specialties other than their own. In his famous lecture, Snow, a well- contemporary research or prefigured eventual technologies in all of known British physicist and novelist, somewhat simplistically blamed the fields of science, such as diamond synthesis, the transmission of the communication breakdown between the two cultures of the sciences pictures via telephone, the portable movie camera, electric trains, and and the humanities (“scientists” and “literary intellectuals”) as the many others (Prager 74). major stumbling block to solving the world’s problems. Snow saw these These early stories had a common allegorical thread: they as two diametrically opposed worldviews separated by intense suspicion portrayed science and technology as desirable and completely beneficial and mutual incomprehension, outlooks that virtually eliminated the to the individual, to the race, and to the planet. The inventor was possibility of harnessing solutions that a combination of the two camps glamorized and worshipped as a hero, and perhaps because of his might bring about. This was not an original concept, as Snow himself modesty and absence of hubris, tragedy did not befall the champion. admitted; even in 1798, Wordsworth, in The Tables Turned, wrote that Later sf stories have abandoned this naiveté and have focused the appreciation of nature was starkly different when approached as a on cautionary tales that deal not only with the importance of poetic truth as opposed to a scientific quest conducted by the “meddling interdisciplinarians but also with the consequences of unnecessary and intellect” which “murders to dissect.” exaggerated strictures that prevent specialists from benefiting from Snow’s frequently overlooked second edition—The Two Cultures: the splintered knowledge and techniques utilized in other disciplines, And A Second Look (1963)—reexamined the divergence of these two strictures that paradoxically may eventually prove to be necessary. camps and, indeed, the divergence of the specialities and subspecialties In addition to The Two Cultures, Snow is also known for his series within each camp. Snow also wondered why this notion had raised of eleven related novels, the Strangers and Brothers series, which follow such a storm at the time. He believed, rather naively in retrospect, a lawyer from his training to his employment in an important position, that all could be solved by despecializing education in developed while delineating changes in English life through the twentieth countries such that future scientists would have a strong grounding century. The Search (1934) contrasts a conventional scientist in the in the humanities, and future literary intellectuals would have a solid near future with a relatively new breed of almost universal synthesists scientific background. Snow also thought that the material lot of poor who relate new discoveries to the existing body of knowledge and plan nations could be solved simply by educating their populations. Snow’s the next step and direction that new research must logically undertake perceptions were already somewhat dated in 1959 and have become for the sake of maximum efficiency. more so with the passage of time, as even individual disciplines have A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle (1939) details become superspecialized. A particular notion that Snow attempted the adventures of a huge exploratory spaceship with an almost to introduce was the concept—or hope—of the emergence of a new thousand-strong, all-male crew. The book is divided into four sections third culture which would comprise individuals who could bridge the corresponding to the four original short stories on which it was based. communications gap between the two camps. The ship comes across several hostile individual aliens and entire alien Bare numbers will out the truth. Even back in 1987, it was civilizations and only manages to survive these encounters through estimated that there were more than 8,530 individually definable the efforts of the main protagonist, the only “Nexialist” on board. knowledge fields, and it is obvious that these multiple specificisms may Nexialism is the study of the merging of different fields of knowledge by categorize knowledge almost hermetically, making it inadvertently integrating science and thought, allowing Nexialists to solve problems inaccessible to researchers in related fields. More reprehensibly, the that specialists or military minds could not due to their narrow inefficiencies and tensions that the trends of centralization of academic training. At one stage, the nexialist is even forced to take control of research and super-specialization inevitably bring about may be the ship using a combination of simple persuasion and psychology, 14 The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 along with coercive hypnotism and outright brainwashing, in order manner; and “synthesists,” whose function is to recognize knowledge to prevent a particularly powerful alien from taking over the ship. and research that can be applied across disciplines. Throughout the narrative, on-board revolutions and power struggles Alfred Bester’s marvelous satire of the military mind, the short take place among the leaders of individual academic and military story “Disappearing Act” (1953), explores the linked themes of time, groups, both political and scientific. space, dreaming, escape, and creativity. It portrays the United States Robert A. Heinlein’s van Vogtian equivalent in Beyond This of America in an atomic war with the protagonist, a political general, Horizon (1942) was called an “encyclopedic synthesist,” the most insisting on specialization as a necessary strategy to win the “War important occupation in the world. Such an individual was said to be for the American Dream.” The general insists that every man and the master of all knowledge, one who stays abreast of all of the latest woman must become a specific tool for a specific job, hardened and research, a person who can analyze the sum total of human knowledge sharpened by their training to win the fight for the American Dream. for untapped potentials that might be missed by specialists. The However, he is baffled by a ward of mental casualties who disappear at main difference between van Vogt and Heinlein was that van Vogt will back in time. He asks for a historian, and one is found serving a emphasized holism, while Heinlein’s emphasis was on eidetic memory prison sentence of twenty years of hard labor for daring to question the with perfect recall and command of knowledge, an admittedly crucial war. The historian defends himself to the general by stating, “You’re trait for such an occupation. The novel depicts an economic utopia that fighting to preserve me . . . that’s what I’ve devoted my life to. And has utilized eugenics to improve health, longevity, and intelligence. what do you do with me? Put me in jail.” This is a clear reference The protagonist is the culmination of these efforts, an archetypal to Lytton Strachey’s resistance to World War I: when asked why he Übermensch with a superhuman physique, an intellect to match, and was enjoying the safety of England while brave young men were a life expectancy of centuries. However, his lack of eidetic memory risking their lives to defend civilization, Strachey retorted, “I am the disqualifies him from the occupation of encyclopedic synthesist, and civilization for which you are fighting” (Hynes 244). The historian he thus finds society pleasant but somehow meaningless. It is only realizes that the casualties are fleeing the present back into a timeline when one of the synthesists seeks him out, in order to inquire whether of their own construction, in effect turning dreams into reality, and or when he plans to continue his line by siring children, that he finds he urges the general to send for a poet to study this phenomenon himself drawn into an adventure that eventually convinces him that so as to be able to explain these twin, miraculous, godlike abilities, his society is worth saving. creation and immortality. However, the search for a poet among all Isaac Asimov’s short story “The Dead Past” (1956) depicts of the specialists in the United States is in vain, and the historian draconian state control of scientific research using an extrapolation “laughed and laughed at this final, fatal disappearance.” of the current twin trends towards the centralization of all academic research and its subspecialization with bureaucratic state control Discussion of both. Researchers are prohibited from working outside their It is interesting to note that apart from the early, almost juvenile individual, clearly demarcated, and very narrow fields of specialization. stories, the other narratives mentioned follow the pattern of the Postdoctorate researchers apply for grants after choosing a cautionary tale set out by Mary Shelley in what is (per Aldiss) arguably subspeciality that they would then pursue for the length of their the first sf story, Frankenstein (1818). Furthermore, like all narratives, career. Research planning and funding are completely centralized, and these stories “are uniquely time-bound; they are reflections of the era . . straying from one’s chosen course is branded as intellectual anarchy . re-creations and representations of the events, attitudes, and concerns and actually unethical, inevitably leading to termination of all of one’s of the people and the times in which they are written” (Roberts 18), research funding. However, even in this dystopia, interdisciplinarians dealing with concerns, for example, about a possible atomic war, an are tolerated, albeit with some degree of disdain, and actually do very extrapolation of the possible effects of increasing superspecialization, well working as science writers, often without any degrees but knowing and fear of the unknown as in what might we encounter in our own something about practically everything. They use this aptitude to exploration of the cosmos. All of the above narratives have also followed shape highly technical research grant applications into documents the basic, if unspoken, sf dictum, arguably instigated and inculcated that can be understood by nonspecialists for the purpose of obtaining by Campbell during his editorship of Astounding Science Fiction, that funds to further research by specialists. Payment for such services is narratives “must not offend against what is known. Only in areas where from grants thus obtained. This leads to situations where academics nothing is known—or knowledge is uncertain—is it permissible to just cannot benefit from the work and findings already carried out and ‘make it up.’ (Even then what is made up must be systematic, plausible, freely available in other specialities. The protagonist, a professor of rigorously logical, and must avoid offending against what is known to ancient history whose field is ancient Carthage, wishes to access the be known)” (Russ, “Towards an Aesthetic”). “chronoscope,” a device that allows the past to be viewed, but he is The trend to reflect the zeitgeist parallels the tendency for fobbed off time and again by the authorities. He is aided by a physics different stories to explore new avenues, extrapolating from the impact researcher and, more importantly, an unlicensed science writer whose of changing technologies on the species, while consistently supporting admittedly superficial knowledge of many disciplines sets in motion sf’s penchant for dismissing humanity’s petty national and regional the clandestine construction of a small and low-powered chronoscope bickering, bigotry, and outright hostility to its own members. It is that works using a new, better, and very different method than that of almost as if sf authors are continually attempting to inculcate in us the cumbersome and power-demanding technology in current use. It the sheer insignificance and parochiality of such attitudes by the transpires that the state’s suppression of chronoscopy was an attempt supposedly intelligent members of the human species. It is up to to prevent universal voyeurism with snooping into the immediate past authors to continue to explore the potential impact of technological by all and sundry. Thus, the protagonists unleash a dystopic future changes on the species, perhaps leading us to realize what sort of where privacy is nonexistent. world we wish to live in and alerting us to possible and undesirable Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage (1968) pictures a dystopic future side-tracks that we may avoid along the way. one hundred and fifty years after the wars that destroyed Earth, The import of interdisciplinarity, albeit not named as such, has wars brought on by extreme overpopulation. Mankind survives been discussed outside the realm of fiction by noted sf authors such precariously on a hundred rather hastily established colony planets and as Robert A. Heinlein. Heinlein was a tremendous admirer of H. on the seven gigantic ships that had initially ferried mankind to these G . Wells, particularly of his sf work and his encyclopedic general colonies. The ships roam between the colonies, acting as repositories knowledge. Heinlein mentioned this publicly in “The Discovery of of knowledge and skills which are traded with the colonies for raw the Future,” his Guest of Honor speech at the 1941 World Science materials. The ships test their adolescents’ mettle by casting them out Fiction Convention in Denver, alluding to Wells as a synthesist who to survive or die in a month of Trial in the wilds of a colony world. had both a greater than average grasp of the whole and the ability to Panshin formally proposes a trinary divide for scholarly endeavor: present a comprehensible picture of the whole. researchers, who are “incredibly busy, incredibly messy, nearsighted Heinlein amplified this in 1950, even then declaiming that people, all of whom are eccentric recluses”; “ordinologists,” who the greatest crisis facing us is . . . in the organization and function principally as librarians, organizing knowledge in an orderly The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 15 accessibility of human knowledge . . . it might take a lifetime integration. Interestingly, individuals who harness the exponential to locate two already known facts, place them side by side and rise of computing power and the Internet (a technology that even derive a third fact, the one we urgently need. . . . We need a sf failed to prefigure in all its implications, ramifications, and direct new “specialist” who is not a specialist, but a synthesist. We impact on society and on the individual) can also be viewed as a need a new science to be the perfect secretary to all other breakaway third culture in its own right, spawning both digital art sciences. (“Where To?”) and scientific models. It is these “nerdy” folks who grace the covers of international magazines, become heroes in movies, and epitomize This concept of such a third culture was popularized by Brockman that which is “cool.” This culture is accompanied by slang, jargon, in The Third Culture: Beyond the Scientific Revolution (1996), and idiom that dictionaries find difficult to keep track of, to the point but unlike Snow, Brockman seemed to intend to replace literary that “the culture of science, so long in the shadow of the culture of intellectuals rather than to collaborate with them. He depicts them art, now has another orientation to contend with, one grown from as superfluous and nonempirical, deliberately ignorant of scientific its own rib” (Campbell 992–93). advances, utilizing jargon that is strictly limited to their specialities. Interdisciplinarity is arguably one of the main strengths of sf and Moreover, theirs is a jargon characterized by an ever-spiraling series of the reason why fans enthuse and are passionate about the genre. In comments on comments, to the point where any vision of the real and “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction,” Joanna Russ imagines empirical world is lost. Brockman therefore argues that the dichotomy what C. P. Snow would have to say about this split between between the two camps is disappearing not because a third culture the two cultures. One thing he might say is that science fiction is emerging but rather because scientists have transcended the divide bridges the two cultures. It draws its beliefs, its material, its by mastering the art of effective communication with the general great organizing metaphors, its very attitudes, from a culture public (18). This attitude does not foster any degree of cooperation that could not exist before the Industrial Revolution, before between the two camps, and in no way does it afford any form of science became both an autonomous activity and a way of reconciliation or integration. looking at the world. In short, science fiction is not derived A superior approach is suggested by Joe Moran in Interdisciplinarity from traditional Western literary culture. (2002). He posits that interdisciplinarity might be better served by probing the routes by which scientific ideas and advances reach And this is precisely what this paper has attempted to do, beyond and into contemporary culture and their interaction with to demonstrate how sf has tried to bridge the two cultures using “non-science” (2), with both camps forming “part of a much broader interdisciplinarians within its narratives, while being itself the literary philosophical questioning of the nature of reality itself” (157). genre that is arguably the best suited for such a deserving role. The The extreme expression of this view is espoused by the Harvard following statement from Russ in “Toward an Aesthetic of Science biologist E. O. Wilson, who optimistically counsels “consilience,” a Fiction” seems curiously dated when she states that “it is unlikely that spirit of united efforts at knowledge. Wilson sanguinely believes that science fiction will ever become a major form of literature” because that the current fragmentation of knowledge is not a reflection of the “life-as-it-is (however glamorized or falsified) is more interesting to real world (8). most people than the science-fictional life-as-it-might-be.” I have inside knowledge of the medical field, and, to me, the SF’s perspicacity may also assist us by preparing us for the most realistic view is advocated by Donald T. Campbell, who, potentially profound and fundamental transformations that our while mindful of the disruptive effects of ethnocentric viewpoints environment and our society may be forced to undertake due to between disciplines, suggests that the current situation is acceptable, the ever-increasing impact of science and technology on everyday with collective comprehensiveness through overlapping patterns life. (The Internet, as mentioned above, is only one example of such of unique narrowness. Campbell uses the metaphor of a fish scale, technologies). In “Teaching Science Fiction,” James Gunn says the with each subspeciality represented by a slightly different scale with genre is particularly versatile and supple and therefore marvelously a varying degree of overlap with neighboring and sometimes only suited to this purpose since it has no specific slightly dissimilar disciplines, resulting in a continuum with local

The Reapers Are the Angels by Alden Bell New York: Holt, 2010; $15.00 tpb; 240 pages reviewed by Ernest Lilley * The last thing I expected from a post-zombie-apocalypse Fifteen, she says, taking a chance on the truth and the novel was a book both literary and enthralling, but that’s what The fatherly instincts of the man in the cap. Reapers Are the Angels delivers. The writing is excellent and the Fifteen! You’re too young to be wanderin the characters well developed, rooting around through the ruins of our countryside. Too young by a mile. civilization, looking for something more than survival, but playing I tried to be older, she says. But it’s somethin that’s hard the hands they’re dealt in the meantime. to force. He chuckles and rubs his eyes and looks out over Temple, the young girl the story follows, has ghosts to bury that the shrubby verge to the river below and then back at her. are all too zombielike, refusing to lie down and die, but her will to What you got behind your back? he asks. survive and her ability to find beauty in the darkest places make her She reveals the gurkha knife, holding it up to show him. a match for the worst life throws at her. The story is more disturbing What were you planning on doin with that? than delightful, but so it goes in the land of grownups. If you turned out to be trouble, I was gonna kill you Temple is a post-zombie-apocalypse teenager, but this is no with it. YA title. Born after things changed, she’s never lived in a world The old man looks at her with eyes still as toad ponds where shambling undead corpses didn’t roam the streets looking in the aftermath of a storm when the air is gluey with ozone. for their traditional diet. Raised in an orphanage and now traveling Then he begins to laugh. randomly across an America populated sparsely by survivors and less so by the ever present “slugs,” Temple has lived too much for her Speaking of sin, Christianity is as omnipresent in The Reapers Are fifteen years, carries too many ghosts around inside her, and knows the Angels as it is absent in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, which rings with a deep conviction that she’s committed unforgivable sins: true. Not a Bible-thumping, crusading Christianity but one just part of the fabric of folks’ lives, there to offer a reference point for those How old are you? he asks. trying to carry on after the dead began to rise from their slumber and

16 The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 identifying action or place . . . defining event or setting . . . Works Cited science fiction can incorporate other genres; we can have a Aldiss, Brian. Billion Year Spree. London: Corgi, 1975. science-fiction detective story, a science-fiction western, a Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell. New York: Ballantine Books, science-fiction gothic, a science-fiction love story, or, most 1960. likely of all, a science-fiction adventure story. Asimov, Isaac. “The Dead Past.” Astounding Science Fiction, April 1956. SF studies are also being taught, with several hundred Bester, Alfred, “Disappearing Act” (1953). Virtual Unrealities: courses available worldwide. Moreover, Gunn says, because of its The Short Fiction of Alfred Bester. New York: Vintage Books, interdisciplinary nature, there are many “kinds of subjects that can be 1997. taught through science fiction . . . all the social and physical sciences, Brockman, John. The Third Culture. New York: Touchstone, history, ideas, futurology, religion, morality, ecology, reading skills, 1996. and many others” (ibid.). Conversely, Stephen Hawking, arguably the Campbell, Donald T. “Ethnocentrism of Disciplines and the greatest living physicist, would like to make “real science as exciting Fish Scale Model of Omniscience.” In Interdisciplinary as science fiction” in order to increase interest in the sciences and in Relationships in the Social Sciences, Muzafer Sherif and how the cosmos works (qtd. in France-Presse). Hawking also believes Carolyn W. Sherif, eds. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Co., that “science fiction is useful both for stimulating the imagination 1969. and for diffusing fear of the future” (qtd. in “Science Fiction and Crane, Diana and Henry Small. “American Sociology since Pseudoscience”). The recompense of sf has thus been recognized not the Seventies: The Emerging Crisis in the Discipline.” In only by fans and critics but also by scientists (including this author) as Sociology and its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary aptly put by Jason Pontin, editor-in-chief and publisher of Technology Organization, Terence Halliday and Morris Janowitz, eds. Review: “Most of us came to technology through science fiction.” Our Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. imaginations remain secretly moved by science-fictional ideas, and Culler, Jonathan. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction. perhaps the quotation that best encapsulates all this is by the celebrated Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson who mused that “science is my Derrida, Jacques. “The Future of the Profession or the territory, but science fiction is the landscape of my dreams” (9). Unconditional University.” In Derrida Downunder, L. In conclusion, this paper has shown how sf, with its penchant for Simmons and H. Worth, eds. Palmerston North, New predicting future trends, prefigured the importance that would be Zealand: Dunmore Press, 2001. associated with interdisciplinarity as early as the 1940s. Furthermore, in Dyson, Freeman. Imagined Worlds (The Jerusalem-Harvard typical optimistic, idealistic, and guileless sf fashion, the genre has attempted Lectures). Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University to convince us that interdisciplinarians will rise to span specialities and Press, 1997. facilitate mankind’s lot, along with cautionary tales as to the negative impact France-Presse, Agençe. “Hawking Pens Kids’ Cosmology Book.” if such individuals are not heeded or allowed to function. Cosmos Magazine, September 2007 ., accessed 29 May 2010. helps academics immensely through databases and the Web itself to Gernsback, Hugo. Ralph 124C 41+: A Romance of the Year 2660. a degree that sf did not imagine, the proliferation of knowledge and Modern Electrics, April 1911–March 1912. of new specialities has balanced or even negated the benefits of these Graff, Gerald. Literature Against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern tools. The concept of a “universal synthesist” is clearly dated and is Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. probably impossible in practice, given the total and ever-increasing Gunn, James. “Teaching Science Fiction.” Science Fiction amount of knowledge and information available. Other approaches will Studies, 23.3 (1996) , accessed 29 May 2010. Heinlein, Robert A. Beyond This Horizon. Reading, Pennsylvania: Victor Grech teaches at Mater Dei Hospital, Tal-Qroqq, Malta. Fantasy Press, 1948. the old world ground to a halt. giving in to despair never occurs to her. Most zombie stories take place during or soon after the emergence The main characters here are Temple and Moses, though of the hordes, but the basic paradigm has now become sufficiently along the way Temple acquires a traveling companion, a “dummy” entrenched in our culture that movies like Zombieland and Book of Eli named Maury who she meets on the road and takes in tow. Maury can begin to address the longer view, which is what this book gives is a stand-in for the brother she lost, and though she’d like to hand us. We never find out what caused the change, but since the story isn’t him off to someone else, some part of her recognizes a chance at about how we’re going to reverse it or engineer a way out of the crisis, redemption and won’t let go. including the cause would have just undermined the reader’s belief in Trying to deliver Maury to relatives—whose address is the world author Bell has created. scribbled on a paper she can’t read in his pocket—takes her on a Temple comes from the first post-change generation, and as folks ramble through the deep South and over to Texas, which explains are reluctant to bring children into a world where the dead won’t stay some of the Christian overtones in the book. Moses dogs her heels down, she possesses rare qualities, youth and beauty among them. The everywhere she goes, but accepting his judgment and retribution first is only skin-deep, and the second of no great value to her, since isn’t something she’s eager for, though her moral sense informs her she’s a determined loner. Unfortunately it makes her a magnet for the that she has it coming. wrong sort of person, and she winds up killing a would-be rapist at In the world here, the lights are mostly on, but there’s pretty an enclave she thinks she might have liked staying at for a while. That much nobody home. Those who managed to keep from becoming option no longer likely, she helps herself to some of their weapons zombie fare or shambling undead themselves live off the stockpiled cache, takes a car from their yard, and heads out on her own again. resources of a nation of Walmarts, and unlike stories following Trouble takes after her in the form of Moses Todd, brother of biosphere collapse or atomic war, the cost of survival is little more the man she’d killed, determined to settle a blood score even though than keeping in motion, one step ahead of the undead. That the he figures his brother had it coming. This theme of commitment to inexorable march of the meatskins will overrun them seems the the forms of moral action in the face of a world that no longer keeps expected future for most, but while there’s life there’s a need for score makes the reader wonder who the real zombies are, the pathetic something, not quite hope, that keeps the survivors moving and slugs or the hopeless humans? For Temple’s part, she knows that her readers turning the pages until the end. * life is without meaning, having failed at the one mission that might have given it form, but she’s wired for survival, and the thought of Ernest Lilley lives in Arlington, Virginia.

The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011 17 ——. “Discovery of the Future.” In Requiem: New Collected , Works by Robert A. Heinlein and Tributes to the Grand accessed 29 May 2010. Master. Yoji Kondo, ed. New York: Tor Books, 1991. ——. “Towards an Aesthetic of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction ——. “Where To?” Galaxy Science Fiction, February 1952. Studies, 2.2 (1975). , accessed 29 May 2010. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and “Science Fiction.” In Encyclopedia Britannica 2010. , Klein, Julie Thompson. Interdisciplinarity: History, Theory, and accessed 29 May 2010. Practice. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1990. “Science Fiction and Pseudoscience—Interest in Science Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Post-Modern Condition: A Report Fiction.” National Science Foundation, Division of Science on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Resources Statistics. In Science and Technology: Public 1984. Attitudes and Public Understanding. 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New Haven and London: the World’s Greatest Inventor!” American Heritage, Yale University Press, 1979. December 1976. Van Vogt, A. E. The Voyage of the Space Beagle. New York: Simon Roberts, Thomas J. An Aesthetics of Junk Fiction. Athens: & Schuster, 1950. Georgia University Press, 1990. Vasari, Giorgio. The Lives of the Artists, Volume 1. New York: Russ, Joanna. “SF and Technology as Mystification.” Science Viking Penguin, 1987. Fiction Studies, 5.3 (1978). Wilson E. O. Consilience. New York: Knopf, 1998. Tongues of Serpents by Naomi Novik New York: Del Rey, 2010; $25.00 hc; 288 pages reviewed by Greg L. Johnson * Time to return with Naomi Novik to those thrilling days of colony. In each case, the descriptions of the action are vibrant and the nineteenth century, when the British Navy ruled the waves, men compelling; Novik is particularly good at conveying the excitement, were men, and dragons were dragons. That is the spirit of Tongues of fear, confusion, and reactions of the characters as they whirl through Serpents, the sixth volume in Novik’s series recounting the adventures the air in unexpected ways or find themselves in a battle that does not of the dragon Temeraire and his captain, Will Laurence. go the way anyone had expected. To a newcomer to the series, it’s evident that there are already Still, all that would make Tongues of Serpents a fairly routine some well-established conventions in the story. The changes to adventure novel. What sets it apart and what is undoubtedly the command structure, logistics, and tactics brought on by the existence reason that readers in great numbers keep returning to the series is the of an aerial corps composed of dragons and humans are taken for character and personality of the dragon Temeraire and his relationship granted by this time and fit well into the usual jealousies and politics with Laurence. In many ways, Temeraire is a typical dragon with all of a military establishment engaged in a global war. Especially in the the usual lusts and desires for power and material wealth. But there early days of military aviation, flyers were regarded as unconventional is an overlay of civilization within him; Temeraire is a very British individualists, so it should come as no big surprise that as Tongues of dragon with the sensibilities of an upper-class Englishman of his Serpents opens, Laurence and Temeraire have in effect been exiled to times. Those aspects of Temeraire’s personality come out most in Australia due to past transgressions against the chain of command. the interactions between him and Laurence, where Temeraire’s first This poses a problem for the story. The war against Napoleon has impulses are mediated by Laurence’s grasp of the larger consequences. blossomed into a true worldwide conflict, with the scene of conflict Their relationship is a never-ending tug of war played around expanding from Europe to Africa and South America. With the setting Temeraire’s inner reluctance to act in a socially approved manner moved to Australia’s Botany Bay, Laurence and Temeraire are in effect and Laurence’s own internal feelings that sometimes the dragon is removed from that action. Instead, they find themselves confronted right and they should just go ahead and lash out against anyone they with what are basically side issues involving relations between the disagree with. colonial government and the “colonists” in their charge and the need The complexity of Temeraire’s behavior and motivations is set out to protect and hatch three dragon eggs placed in their care. in contrast with two new dragons who are introduced into the story. When one of the eggs is stolen, the story basically becomes one Caesar is a young dragon who often comes off as a petulant whiner, long chase scene across the continent. It’s also where the novel drags. dedicated to going his own way despite the consequences. Kulingile The problem is that for an adventure story, the long chase isn’t all is the embodiment of unrestrained appetite, a dragon whose very that exciting and adventurous. There are a few problems dealing with presence threatens to rid the countryside of all available food sources. the local flora and fauna, but for the most part the journey is one of They are both extreme examples of what Temeraire could have been, tedium and coping with the various personality conflicts amongst the and their presence in the story couldn’t do a better job of conveying just crew and officers, most of which come off as fairly petty and immature. how different and interesting a character Temeraire has become. Two incidents, by contrast, show just how good Novik’s writing can Tongues of Serpents is a transitional novel. Temporarily, at least, be when circumstances allow. The first occurs near the beginning of removed from the hot spots of Britain’s global ambitions, the novel the chase, as the dragons fly into a fierce thunderstorm; the second serves both to establish its characters in a new setting and to open the when, at the end of the journey, a battle erupts between a British naval future to new scenarios. Temeraire and Laurence may feel that they vessel and the Chinese, who are attempting to establish a trading are now outside the British military establishment, but there are hints 18 The New York Review of Science Fiction May 2011