Galaxies

Book 97: Gateway Essentials

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Fortieth-Century Space Probe! The diabolically clever Bureau had superbly trained their space pilot, beautiful Lena Thomas. Nothing could go wrong in an age where science had conquered the universe. In one of their fifteen faster-than-light ships, Lena would reach beyond the over-populated Milky Way, carrying her grotesque cargo: seven programmed prosthetic engineers to give advice and comfort, and 515 dead men sealed in gelatinous fix. Exposed to the unskilled ultraviolet of space, they would gradually become the living again! But the omniscient Bureau was not aware of the black galaxy in Lena's charted path. And Lena's ship fell into it, fell through twenty-five billion miles of hyperspace, into the lifeless, timeless expanse of the dreadful pit . . . The cyborg engineers couldn't help Lena now. She was totally alone except for the awakening dead! If she geared the ship up to tachyonic drive, would she break out of the terrifying black hole? Or would she destroy the universe?

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 124

Sample

Let us talk about the writer a little if I may. Writers are not machines, you know, or disembodied personae, part of the printers’ workshops: we have our qualities, we are people, we suffer, we hurt, although not as much, perhaps, as we would like you to believe. Still the writer is entitled to some explication. As he writes this novel he has slid past his thirty-fifth birthday and now confronts the not-distant monument of his thirty-sixth with bewilderment. Thirty-five is practically more than he can handle. He knows that forty is bad and fifty is worse, he has heard grim reports from even further on, but the writer has always thought of himself as being such a young man and ever-youthful; he has lurched through twenty-one, twenty-five, thirty years and similar landmarks in his shambling way, but nothing, either inherited or anticipated, has quite prepared him for the understanding that by Biblical calculation—by calculation, too, of much heredity—his life is fully at the halfway point. How can this be? The writer for many years was always the youngest person in the class. He finds his state hard to reckon with and he does not know with whom he can commiserate. Those older think he is young; those younger think he is old; his contemporaries have similar difficulties. Psychoanalysis is expensive and the writer has never had much faith in it.

The writer has struggled to order his life just as he is struggling now to order his sequence of notes for a novel entitled Galaxies, and yet no less than the wild and wonderful concepts which are surely to follow, he wonders whether he is really under control or whether it matters at all how he contemplates his death. His passage would be of little more consequence than his birth, which did not by much antedate the rape of Poland. Were the two somehow causally linked? Did the writer by being born cause Warsaw to be sealed off, reports moving toward the front lines on fine and invisible connection? Did he, by being born, cause the world to exist and by dying will he end it? This is the kind of megalomania with which he must deal—and yet it is this megalomania which is the key—God help him—to fiction which itself creates or manipulates worlds.

The novel to be based on this material would concern itself with a faster-than-light spaceship in the year 3902 which would tumble into the black galaxy and be unable to leave by tachyonic drive. (“Tachyonic” meaning faster than light, a device long beloved by science fiction writers, since we can keep our characters shuttling through the galaxies much as writers for the Quarterly Review can use subways and taxicabs for understandably slighter terrain, but a device useful here only if the ship can accelerate up to before moving beyond light speed.) Falling into the galaxy would be easy or at least inevitable, since one of the characteristics of the black galaxy is its invisibility, the implosive forces having contained light. Leaving, however, would be much more difficult. Leaving will be the concern of this novel.

Consider. Science fiction, since its formal inception as a romantic subgenre in this country in 1926 with the publication of the first issues of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, has best been known for its simple and melodramatic plots which demonstrate man’s mastery (or later on, loss of control) of technology. The conventions of the genre then demand that the novel pivot upon the attempts of the crew to leave this entrapment and return to their planet of origin.

The ship is known—to us at least—as the Skipstone. It was completed in 3895 after a century-long effort of construction that involved the resources of many worlds and billions of the Systematized Forces. It is one of only fifteen faster-than-light ships now operating. Obviously something like this cannot be cheaply abandoned. The crew must return it to the fleet.

This problem-solving pivot is not one which I might attempt given my own devices. I am not a problem-solver by profession, let alone in my personal life. Left to myself I would be more interested in showing how the ship’s inhabitants and cargo adjust to their new dwelling, how they set up light housekeeping in this unknown and difficult sector of the universe, but this would not do for the purposes of the science fiction novel. We must compete with, sell on the racks against The Rammers of Arcturus. It is important to understand, and I am sure that all of you do, that classically this field of science fiction was meant by its American originators to provide a road map from technological impasse, a map which would show us the way from a confusing and overpowering technology, to the wondrous society it could give us. Science fiction, then, is technological fiction; it is an attempt to relieve anxieties about the encroaching machinery by showing people how that machinery may be usefully applied. Science as benign instrumentation. Amazing’s earliest competitor was Astounding Stories of Super-Science. Super-Science brings us super-solutions. Thrilling Wonder. Astonishing Stories.

Details of the submission of Skipstone’s crew to the unknown should be dystopian. While the dystopian has an honorable tradition in science fiction, reaching earlier than Amazing to the works of Olaf Stapledon and H. G. Wells, it has really had a difficult time making its way, and even now, at a time of technological impasse and collapsed institutions, science fiction writers who go against the pro-technological format have a more difficult time in finding audiences and publishers than the traditionally oriented.

My own decision has been made, however: I would rather command an audience than not, to say nothing of publisher’s advances, and therefore this construct, despite its bleaker aspects and a certain aura of cynicism which may occasionally drift off the pages, will be essentially cheerful, essentially hopeful, quite problem-solving and possessed of qualities of adventurousness. No writer of integrity with a wife and two helpless children could do less for the sake of his controlling artistic vision. This is to be kept in mind at all times.

The Campbell articles were found by others and given to me; I did not locate them myself. There was a time in the late 1960s, early seventies, when I gave up altogether on Analog. Through no fault of my own (I felt), I was unable to read or relate to the contents of the magazine. Now I am back to reading it but not quite up to back issues. The articles were sent by people who thought I might be interested in basing a technologically oriented SF story on their contents. “Hard” science fiction they call it.

I have always had a certain awe for this kind of science fiction, and, although I cannot really do it well myself, wish that the genre had more of it. Unhappily “hard” science fiction is largely a myth; there is almost no science in science fiction and never has been. The recollected masterpieces of the 1940s were fantasies whose scientific basis was almost completely invented or could have been found in a general research work in five or ten minutes. At low word-rates, research is neither desirable nor profitable, since all markets pay the same for all stories that they publish, rewarding merit as they do the incompetent with a standard rate. Consequently, James Blish’s science fiction writer is quoted as saying, “All the science I ever needed to know I got out of a bottle of scotch.”

But how we could use it! Science, that is to say. We could indeed profit by technologically accurate science fiction. The awful expansion of our machinery, the technological manual as the poetics of the age, the rhythms of the machine as analogous to those of the newly discovered spirit … we need writers who can show us what the machines are doing to us in terms more systematized than those of random paranoia. A writer who could combine the techniques of modern fiction with a genuine command of science could be at the top of this field in no more than a few years. He would also stand alone.

There are a few among us who know science and a few more who understand fiction, but there is not a single science fiction writer who can do both. The one who has come closest, at least in his later work, is A—but A, although his undoubted gifts are the equal of any writer in America, is exhausted by a career of hackwork in his youth and embittered by the fact that his newer, important work has not distanced him from the hackwork but to most readers simply extends and reaffirms it. In any event A, like all science fiction writers, is invisible to the academic/literary nexus which controls judgments of literary reputation in America. He made wrong choices at the beginning. It is all his fault, of course, but one may nevertheless have sympathy for A.

B, a writer of equal technical range and even greater delicacy than A, also comes close to this ideal, but his science is weak and his output diminishing; he has, in any event, no interest in continuing to write science fiction and is making desperate attempts to leave the genre. Then there is C who has won a major literary award and is considered by many to be at the level of A or B, but C is clumsy and impenetrable and has little sense of compression. X, Y and Z have all in their way done interesting work but are burned out at the ages of, respectively, 2-, 2- and 2- and little can be expected of them. R had promise, of course, but has been dead for many years, and in terms of their literary contribution, O, P and T might just as well be—although one may wish them long life and health of days. Commercial writing is a difficult field for even its few successes. Ask A about this sometime.

Still, we deal not with A, B or the others (although they would make for an interesting study which I might someday do) but only with this writer, thirty-five years old and stricken M, easy to quick judgments of his contemporaries, slow to wrath or judgment of himself. I would like to accept that challenge: the welding of hard, technological insight with the full range of modern literary technique, but even so, a first confrontation with this material made me feel that I should pass it by. My personal life—I wanted to say this and in an earlier draft, in fact, did—my personal life is my black hole; my two daughters provide more correct and stiffening implosion than does any neutron star, and as far as the song of the pulsars, it is as nothing, as nothing at all to the sounds which come from the paddock area at Aqueduct Race Track in the Borough of Queens, New York, on a dark summer Tuesday. Get me out, Angel; get that seven horse out flying.

“No,” I could have said like Cheever’s adolescent in Bullet Park, “No, enough of your breathtaking concepts, infinite distances, quasar leaps, binding messages from the Crab Nebula; be away with your light years, asteroids, Van Allen belts, methane systems and heavy planets. No, I am aware that there are those who find an ultimate truth there and would bend their lives toward their perception but this is not for me. Where is the pain, the remorse, the regret and guilt and terror? No, I would rather dedicate the years of my productive life which remain to an understanding of the agonies of this middle-class suburb in northern New Jersey. Until I deal with those how can I comprehend Ridgefield Park, to say nothing of Scarsdale, Shaker Heights or the unknown lands of the west? Give me not the year two million which I will not see; give me now. The year two million can say nothing to me, but I may address it if, of course, the collected works can be carefully preserved. At least one writer will survive from this era and if not the notorious Q or the obscure N or the unfortunate A, why could it not be me?”

Nicely put. Cheever’s adolescent would have approved, if not Cheever. Indeed, I found it convincing, until it occurred to me in one of those quick changes of consciousness which control the lives of all of us yet which may never be acknowledged in fiction that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious to me as the swamp of lights perceived through the refinery smog which a. . .