BURNING MEN, BYZANTINE DESPOTS, AND GODIVA'S CONSTRICTOR THIGHS: THE COOLEST SCI-FI
by Jim Trombetta
Sci-Fi's Cool School has had little truck with hobbits, maidens on flying unicorns, iron-pumping sword jockeys, ideological preachments, or "simple" ideas suitable for synopsis in TV Guide. No, the Cool School was always for adults. It features ambiguous people you might know or even be, societies with histories that count, carefully documented realities -giving rise, in turn, to fabulous adventures, bizarre occasions, potential cerebral overload. The Cool School aspires to a pace approaching the speed of light. There's always an explanation on the way, though it may well arrive too late.
Finally, cool sci-fi is sexy-an illicit liaison between reason and madness is its very essence. Here's the best of it.
THE STARS MY DESTINATION-Alfred Bester (Signet, 1956). Buck Rogers would have had a nervous breakdown in this Twenty-fifth Century, 11 a fabulous century of freaks." Man's psychic abilities have been enhanced (teleportation is as common as a driver's license) but serve the same old masters: money, power, and lust. The freaks include an albino femme fatale who can only see radio waves, a radioactive genius physicist, a seventy-year-old mind reader who never passed puberty, disease junkies, commandos with souped-up nervous systems, and the terrifying Burning Man, who haunts our hero, Gully Foyle. A spaceman shipwrecked by war who seeks revenge on those who refused to rescue him, Foyle bullies, cons, seduces, and prays his way from shlub to superman, saving humanity in the process. The quest leads to ultimate trauma, which twists his senses -"sound registered as sight, motion registered as sound, colors became pain"-and sends him hurtling backward through his own story! The typographical effects created by Bester to convey the experience make this the first 3-D novel. Often imitated, never duplicated, The Stars My Destination is the great original cool sci-fi.
MARTIAN TIME-SLIP- Philip K. Dick (Ballantine, 1964). "Mr. Kott was a sack of bones, dirty and shiny-wet. His head was a skull that took in greens and bit them..." That's how Arnie Kott, a union big shot on colonial Mars, looks to Manfred Steiner, a schizophrenic little boy with a proven ability to see the future. Kott would like to use Manfred's gifts to make a bundle, but Manfred has more pressing concerns-he's been crazy since he had a vision of his own lingering death from old age. The boy would do anything to avoid this fate, including warping time for everyone who crosses his path. Several dwellers on boring suburban Mars-all beautifully drawn everyday people-begin to live crucial events over and over again, to the tune of Manfred's visions, as the boy struggles to literally get his life in order. Perhaps the best-realized novel by the late, irreplaceable Mr. Dick (who also wrote Ubik and Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch), Martian Time-Slip stays just this side of insanity and moves with the grace of an inspired improvisation to one of the most bizarre happy endings in fiction.
MISTER JUSTICE-Doris Piserchia (Ace, 1974, oop). Crammed into half of an Ace double and never reprinted, Mister Justice remains in a class by itself: hardboiled America, Sci-fi-style. Here the 2030s appear as a mutated 1930's, complete with an economic catastrophe that threatens evolution itself. The Shadow, the Green Hornet, the Untouchables-they never had what Mr. Justice has going for him. Sprung from humanity's threatened altruistic genes, this masked vigilante has the ability to travel into the past, where he can witness, but not prevent, murders. He then returns to the present, where he arranges "an eye for an eye" treatment for the slayers, including full-scale gangland rub-outs. But he can't easily dispose of one Arthur Bingle, global crime archon' who has the same powers as Mr. J. and then some. Bingle feels about the human race in general what Mr. Justice feels about criminals, and he plans to thin us out and "empty the world." With the help of his powers, his syndicates of henchman and corrupt cops, and his dreadful lady friend Godiva-she of the constrictor thighs-Bingle gets the drop on humanity. But justice is just a matter of time. Piserchia relates this furious folktale with Chandler soul, Hammett snap, and not a trace of camp.
MASTERS OF THE MAZE-Avram Davidson (Manor, 1965). Conspiracy paranoia will never be this much fun again. An order of mystical adepts, now based in upstate New York, has guarded the Maze since the seventeenth century. Their secret is coveted by John Joseph Horn, fanatical Sunbelt plutocrat of the Dog Eat Dog school. But Horn himself is no more than the unwitting pawn of the alien Chulpex, a swarm of elephantine, razor-mandibled insects who think of man as a potential food supply and the earth as a nice new hive. These bugs hope to infest us via the Maze, which "traverses space, transects time"; enter it and you're likely to end up anywhere: the past, the future, other planets, realms deemed mythical ... But getting to a desirable place often involves crossing nasty ones. Someone must get to the center of the Maze and alert the legendary Masters, and this chore devolves upon Nate Gordon, a hack author of fake adventures for Man's Man-type magazines. There's nothing hack about this adventure, with its breakneck pace, historical detail, delight in occult esoterica, and jazzy style, which yields up the coolest last sentence in sci-fi-describing Horn's thuggish driver, marooned in prehistoric Australia, where "sometimes he smiled and babbled contentedly about cars as he stumbled across the achingly empty continent which had never seen a wheel."
THE BOOK OF THE NEW SUN-Gene Wolfe (Timescape Books):
VOLUME 1: THE SHADOW OF THE TORTURER (1980)
VOLUME II: THE CLAW OF THE CONCILIATOR (1981)
VOLUME III: THE SWORD OF THE LICTOR (1982)
VOLUME IV: THE CITADEL OF THE AUTARCH (1982)
The last word in cool sci-fi-a mind-boggling cliffhanger, this tetralogy opens a future in which what we think of as "the future" is ancient historywhere whole mountain ranges have been carved into statues of long-dead rulers, where the long-ago forested moon sheds a greenish light, where you can look directly at the sun at noon, so rapidly is it fading ... Man's conquest of the stars is long past, and we have slipped back to byzantine despotism.
The hero Severian, trained since childhood as an official torturer, exiled for sins of compassion, goes forth into a world haunted by uncanny technologies and alien visitors: titanic intelligences imprisoned under the seas, the beast which speaks with the voices of its victims, the maimed machine-man patched with flesh, the mirrors that transport vision faster than light, and much, much more. The most adept of killers, Severian possesses a relic that enables him to heal the sick and raise the dead. Can he fix the sun itself? All this invention, and the literary juice which powers it, comes to us through the fingers of Gene Wolfe, in daily life an editor of Plant Engineering magazine. He lends even swords and sorceries a technical rigor, and faraway events the urgency of your secret dreams.
FIVE RUNNERS-UP
GLADIATOR-AT-LAW- Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth (Ballantine, 1955). Citizens fight for dream homes in real-life TV bloodbaths, while financial brains who have dispensed with their bodies keep score.
"WALL OF CRYSTAL, EYE OF NIGHT"-Algis Budrys (Berkley, 1961). Sollenar has the sweetheart contract on total sensory thrills sewed up, until an alient competitor changes all the rules. (A novel imploded into twenty pages, this is available in the author's collection Blood and Burning, Berkley, 1978.)
THE DEMOLISHED MAN-Alfred Bester (Signet, 1954). Killer outwits mindreading cops and reaps Chaos itself.
AND CHAOS DIED-Joanna Russ (Ace, 1973). Coolest telepathic fuck scene.
THE FAIRY CHESSMEN-Lewis Padgett (Gnome Press, 1947). Coolest first sentence: "The doorknob opened a blue eye and looked at him."