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Sense of Wonder Stories 2, July 2008 (5 months late) is edited and published by Rich Coad, 2132 Berkeley Drive, Santa Rosa, CA 95401. e-mail: [email protected] Wondertorial......................................... .........................................page 3 Editorial natterings by Rich Coad The Good Soldier: George Turner as Combative Critic.................page 6 Bruce Gillespie on the well known author and critic A Dream of Flight..........................................................................page 13 Cover artist Bruce Townley on steam driven planes Heresy, Maybe?............................................................................page 16 FAAn Award winner Peter Weston battles James Blish J.G.Ballard A Journey of Inference...............................................page 18 Graham Charnock reminds us how good Mundane SF could be The Readers Write.......................................................................page 22 To get SF fans talking SF simply mention Heinlein Great Science Fiction Editors..................................................back cover Horace Gold: Galaxy Master 2 WONDERTORIAL SF seems to be a literature that thrives upon manifes- Hard to argue with that. Science fiction rooted in sci- toes, written and unwritten, loudly proclaimed for all ence fact - sounds like Campbell’s prescription for As- to inveigh upon, or stealthily applied by editors at large tounding. And the future is here on Earth for most of to shift the field into a new direction. us seems less than controversial He goes on to say Geoff Ryman, a writer of immense talent and ambi- tion as anyone who has read Was will tell you, has fol- “I wrote a jokey Mundane Mani- lowed the loud proclamation route with his provoca- festo. It said let’s play this serious tive call for more mundane SF. It’s difficult to think of game. Let’s agree: no FTL, no FTL a name more calculated to drive the average SF fan communications, no time travel, into a state of copralaliac Tourette’s twitches than no aliens in the flesh, no immortal- “Mundane SF”. For years we have used mundane as a term to dismiss anything outside of the SF realm. ity, no telepathy, no parallel uni- Mainstream novels, even those with far more imgina- verse, no magic wands. Let’s see if tion than 99% of SF, are dismissed for being “mun- something new comes out of it.” dane”. People who possess the fatal flaw of not being fanatical SF readers are simply “mundanes”. Yet here is one of the field’s own better writers embracing the I like the final sentence. But let’s look at some of the term and even splicing it to the beloved SF. Will this other tropes which should be dropped by SF authors be like adding some spider DNA to Peter Parker’s sys- who aspire to more than comic-book-style adventures tem and result in a brand new super-powered literar- in their writing. ture? Or is more Frankensteinian, forced into a sham- bling mockery of life via the galvanic response to such No FTL Travel so no Consider Phlebas a loaded term? • • No FTL communication so no The Left Hand Of Darkness In the first place we must ask, what the hell is meant No time travel so no “All You Zombies” by Mundane SF anyways? Geoff Ryman used his • No aliens in the flesh so no Mission of Gravity Guest of Honor speech at Boreal in Montreal to out- • No immortality so no Chasm City line his view of what he means. • No telepathy so no Time for the Stars (http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-third • -star-on-left-and-on-til.html) Not that his view is nec- • No parallel universe so no What Mad Universe essarily the correct view, or even the prevailing one, • No magic wands so no Harry Potter but as founder of the movement his view should cer- tainly be given some consideration. Simply put, then, It’s easy to see that any number of favorite stories and Ryman says novels would have to be jettisoned if these rules were to be written in stone but even Ryman is not suggest- ing that. His main goal, and it is something for which “Being a Mundane boils down to I have some sympathy, is that final sentence. avoiding old tropes and sticking more closely to what science calls The tired old tropes of SF have become tired not be- facts. We believe that for most of cause they are intrinsically unbelievable but because us, the future is here on Earth.” they are overused, especially in movies and TV, as just a piece of magic used to move the plot from one loca- tion to another or to have it not matter that a prota- ganist has died because their personality backup will be transferred to a pre-prepared clone and they live again. 3 So since I have some sympathy with the points that So we can safely say what Mundane SF is not but what Ryman makes, in particular that there is a threshold is it? Fortunately we have the June 2008 issue of Inter- beyond which the willing suspension of disbelief be- zone, the Mundane-SF Special guest edited by Ryman comes unwilling and either the author drags you along and with stories written specifically with mundane anyhow or you throw the book across the room in dis- ideas in mind. gust. This threshold probably differs for each reader and it appears that Mundane SF attempts to require Ryman lays it on the line in his editorial: little in the way of suspension from the reader. My own threshold is generally reached when in stead of What’s Mundanity? It’s an effort establishing at least a pseudo scientific basis for the to make SF the best it can be. events the author leaps into mysticism. ... If a story says it’s about the future, Two books that had me very nearly performing the toss the tome out the window (instead they went to it should make an effort in good the sell to the used bookstore box) are Dan Simmons’ faith to show a future. That won’t Olympos and Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star. Olympos is be our world with one small the sequel to Ilium which had a fine set of events an change. characters that I could swallow without a whit of complaint: • machine intelligences from the asteroid belt racing Certainly nothing to disagree with there. towards Mars • time traveling archaeology professors brought to Mars to observe the Trojan war • an Earth depopulated due to most of humanity’s choice to become transcendent • an Earth with allosaurs that eat characters who come back due to convenient personality backups and clones • Greek gods manipulating the participants of the Trojan war and, incidentally, pissing off the profes- sor Bulleted out like that, at least half of those look quite stupid but I was quite caught up in Simmos’ narrative. So why, then, does he ruin the sequel by having a deus- ex-machina literally created in the jungles of South America where mystical technology awakens innate powers that allow the protagonist to pretty much save the world from all threats indefinitely and by himself? Ryman is right. It becomes boring. A similar feeling hit me when in Pandora’s Star one pro- tagonist forsook faster than light spaceships to deter- mine what the threat from the-planet-wide controller of hive-mind aliens from a formerly Dyson-sphere enclosed star system and instead uses a mystical ability So how are the actual stories that have been selected to to walk the paths between worlds. There’s pseudo- represent this new force in SF? science and then there’s preposterousness... First off is “How To Make Paper Airplanes” by Lavie But returning to the Mundane SF manifesto. It’s clear Tidhar is a short portrait of a quartet of bored scien- that none of these novels would even begin to achieve tists in Vanuatu who have been parked there to be out a proper mundanity. Even the parts I liked use amaz- of the way. Not much happens and the revelation that ing super-science that has little hope of ever becoming the narrator will be dying is done in pidgin - perhaps actual technology. the main claim to fame of this story is its use of 4 pidgin. Maybe I’m thick but I don’t really see the SF other slice of life set in a future in which total immer- element of this story at all. Isn’t Vanuatu one of the sion in the net makes direct human interactions com- islands most endangered by rising sea levels due to plicated. global warming? You’d never know that from this story. Judging from the special mundane-sf issue of Inter- zone, it appears that mundanity is indeed its main Chelesea Quinn Yarbros story, “Endra - From Mem- trope. Aside from Angell’s somewhat atypical video- ory” seems a bit more affected by global warming. game shoot-em-up, we have half-a-dozen tales in Possibly that is why the sailing is considered a way of which little happens and less is changed. It makes it life or perhaps the story is simply influenced by Clark difficult to keep a sympathetic frame of mind for this Ashton Smith with its exotic locales and odd names. new movement much as I would like to. In the end, Nothing here strikes me as especially making SF the though, it all seems not too different from what Mi- best it can be; just more or less journeyman fantasy chael Moorcock set out to do with New Wave SF that is readable but not memorable. some 40 years ago. From that we got an awful lot of pretentious rubbish and some very good writers.

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