Triton (Trouble on Triton) (47 page)

views-the-familiar forms the other. All stories would seem to proceed as a progression of verbal data which, through their relation among themselves and their relation to data outside themselves, produce, in the reader, data-expectations. New data arrive, satisfying and/or frustrating these expectations, and, in turn and in concert with the old, produce new expectations—the process continuing till the story is complete. The new sentences available to s-f not only allow the author to present exceptional, dazzling, or hyperrational data, they also, through their interrelation among themselves and with other, more conventional sentences, create a
textus
within the text which allows whole panoplies of data to be generated at syntagmically startling points. Thus Heinlein, in
Starship Troopers,
by a description of a mirror reflection and the mention of an ancestor’s nationality, in the midst of a strophe on male makeup, generates the data that the first-person narrator, with whom we have been traveling now through two hundred and fifty-odd pages (of a three-hun-dred-and-fifty-page book), is black. Others have argued the surface inanities of this novel, decried its endless preachments on the glories of war, and its pitiful founderings on sublimated homosexual themes. But who, a year after reading the book, can remember the arguments for war—short of someone conscientiously collecting examples of human illogic? The arguments
are
inane; they do
not
relate to anything we know of war as a real interface of humanity with humanity: they do not stick in the mind. What remains with me, nearly ten years after my first reading of the book, is the knowledge that I have experienced a world in which the
placement
of the information about the narrator’s face is
proof
that in such a world the “race problem,” at least, has dissolved. The book as text—as object in the hand and under the eye—became, for a moment, the symbol of that world. In that moment, sign, symbol, image, and discourse collapse into one, nonverbal experience, catapulted from somewhere beyond the
textus (via
the text) at the peculiarly powerful trajectory only s-f can provide. But from here on, the description of what is unique to science fiction and how it works within the s-f
textus
that is, itself, embedded in the whole language—and language-like—
textus
of our culture becomes a list of specific passages or sets of passages: better let the reader compile her or his own.

I feel the science-fictional-enterprise is richer than the enterprise of mundane fiction. It is richer through its extended repertoire of sentences, its consequent greater range of possible incident, and through its more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization. I feel it is richer in much the same way atonal music is richer than tonal, or abstract painting is richer than realistic. No, the apparant

“simple-mindedness” of science fiction is not the same as that surface effect through which individual abstract paintings or particular atonal pieces frequently appear “impoverished” when compared to

“conventional” works, on first exposure (exposed to, and compared by, those people who have absorbed only the “conventional”
textus
with which to “read” their art or music). This “impoverishment”

is the necessary simplicity of sophistication, mete for the far wider web of possibilities such works can set resonating. Nevertheless, I think the “simple-mindedness” of science fiction may, in the end, have the same aesthetic weight as the “impoverishment” of modern art. Both are manifestations of “most works in the genre”—not the “best works.” Both, on repeated exposure
to
the best works, fall away—by the same process in which the best works charge the
textus
—the web of possibilities—with contour. The web of possibilities is not simple—for either abstract painting, atonal music, or science fiction. It is the scatter pattern of elements from myriad individual forms, in all three, that gives their respective webs their densities, their slopes, their austerities, their charms, their contiguities, their conventions, their cliches, their tropes of great originality here, their crushing banalities there: the map through them can only be learned, as any other language is learned, by exposure to myriad utterances, simple and complex, from out the language of each. The contours of the web control the reader’s experience of any given s-f text; as the reading of a given s-f
text
recontours, however slightly, the web itself, that text is absorbed into the genre, judged, remembered, or forgotten.

In wonder, awe, and delight, the child who, on that evening, saw the juggernaut howl into the dark, named it “Red Squealer.” We know the name does not exhaust; it is only an entrance point into the
textus
in order to retrieve from it some text or other on the contours, formed and shaped of our experience of the entities named by, with, and organized around those ono-mal metonyms. The
textus
does not define; it is, however slightly, redefined with each new text embedded upon it, with each new text retrieved from it. We also know that the naming does not necessarily imply, in the child, an understanding of that
textus
which offers up its metonyms and in which those metonyms are embedded. The wonder, however, may initiate in the child that process which, resolved in the adult, reveals her, in helmet and rubber raincoat, clinging to the side-ladders, or hauling on the fore—or rear-steering wheel, as the Red Squealer rushes toward another blaze.

It may even find her an engineer, writing a
text
on why, from now on, Red Squealers had best be painted blue, or a bell replace that annoying siren—the awe and delight, caught pure in the web, charging each of her utterances (from words about, to blueprints of, to the new, blue, bonging object itself) with conviction, authenticity, and right.

IV

Everything in a science-fiction novel should be mentioned at least twice (in at least two different contexts), with the possible exception of science fiction.

V

Saturn’s Titan had proved the hardest moon to colonize. Bigger than Neptune’s Triton, smaller than Jupiter’s Ganymede, it had seemed the ideal moon for humanity. Today, there were only research stations, the odd propane-mine, and Lux—whose major claim was that it bore the same name as the far larger city on far smaller Iapetus. The deployment of humanity’s artifacts across Titan’s surface more resembled

the

deployment

across

one

of

the

gas

giants’”captured

moons”—the

under-six-hundred-kilometer hunks of rock and ice (like Saturn’s Phoebe, Neptune’s Neriad, or a half-dozen-plus of Jupiter’s smaller orbs) that one theory held to have drifted out from the asteroid belt before being caught in their present orbits. Titan! Its orangeish atmosphere was denser (and colder) than Mar’s—though nowhere near as dense as Earth’s. Its surface was marred with pits, rivers, and seas of methane and ammonia sludge. Its bizarre life-forms (the only other life in the Solar System) combined the most unsettling aspects of a very large virus, a very small lichen, and a slime mold. Some varieties, in their most organized modes, would form structures like blue, coral bushes with, for upwards of an hour at a time, the intelligence of an advanced octopus. An entire subgenre of ice-operas had grown up about the Titan landscape. Bron despised them. (And their fans.) For one thing, the Main Character of these affairs was always a man. Similarly, the One Trapped in the Blue, Coral-like Tenticles was always a woman (Lust Interest of the Main Character). This meant that the traditional ice-opera Masturbation Scene (in which the Main Character Masturbates while Thinking of the Lust Interest) was always, for Bron, a Bit of a Drag. And who wanted to watch another shindo expert pull up another ice-spar and beat her way out of another blue-coral bush, anyway? (There were other, experimental ice-operas around today in which the Main Character, identified by a small “MC” on the shoulder, was only on for five minutes out of the whole five-hour extravaganza, Masturbation Scene and All—an influence from the indigenously Martian Annie-show—while the rest was devoted to an incredible interlocking matrix of Minor Characters’

adventures.) And the women who went to them tended to be strange—though a lot of very intelligent people, including Lawrence, swore Titan-opera was the only really select artform left to the culture. Real ice-opera—better-made, truer-to-life and with more to say about it
via
a whole vocabulary of real and surreal conventions, including the three formal tropes of classical abstraction, which the classical ice-opera began with, ended with, and had to display once gratuitously in the middle—left Lawrence and his ilk (the ones who didn’t go into ego-booster booths) yawning in the lobby.
Appendix B. Ashima Slade And The Harbin-Y Lectures:

Some Informal Remarks Toward The Modular Calculus, Part Two

A Critical Fiction for Carol Jacobs & Henry Sussman

Utopias
afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.
Heterotopias
are disturbing, probably because they make it impossible to name this
and
that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax” in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to “hold together.” This is why Utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental
fabula;
heterotopias ... desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.

—Michel Foucault,
The Order of Things

I

[Concerning Ashima Slade and his Harbin-y Lecture
Shadows,
first published in Lux University’s philosophy journal
Foundation,
issue six and the double issue seven/eight.]

Just over a year ago, at Lux on Iapetus, five million people died. To single out one death among that five million as more tragic than another would be monumental presumption.

One of the many, many to die, when gravity and atmosphere shield were stripped away from the city by Earth Intelligence sabotage, was the philosopher and mathematician Ashima Slade. Lux University, where Slade taught, was unaccountably spared by the Earth saboteurs. A keep and suburb to itself just to the south, with its own gravity controls and plasma shield, the University was able to seal itself off until help could arrive from the surrounding holds and ice-farms, and gravity and atmosphere could be restored once more to the city, which had, in minutes, become a charnelhouse and necropolis.

The University housed thirty-five thousand tutors and students. The war did not leave it undamaged. On the campus, a hundred and eighty-three died. Reports of what occurred there only pale beside the devastation of the city of which it was, officially, a part.

Ashima Slade did not live on campus but, rather, in a spare room at the back of a co-op run by the Sygn, a religious sect practicing silence and chastity, in Lux’s sprawling unlicensed sector. Not a sect member, Slade lived there as the Sygn’s guest. From time to time it was rumored Slade was a Sygn official, priest, or guru.

This is untrue. Various Sygn members had been Slade’s students, but Slade’s co-op residency was simple sectarian generosity toward an eccentric, solitary philosopher during the last dozen years of Slade’s (and the Sygn’s) life.

Once a month Slade visited the University to conduct his Philosophy of Mind seminar Once a week, from his room, he would hold, over a private channel, an hour session whose title was simply its university catalogue number: BPR-57-c. During these sessions, Slade would talk of his current work or, occasionally, do some of it aloud or on the blackboard he kept beside his desk. These sessions were observed in holographic simulation by some three hundred students living in the University or in the city, as well as special attendees registered in the University rotation program These sessions were difficult, tentative, and often—depending on the extent of one’s interest—tedious. There was no question or discussion period. All response was by mail and seldom acknowledged. Yet students claimed them, again and again, to be endlessly illuminating, if not to subject, than in method, if not to method, than in logical style.

II

The Harbin-Y Lectures were established forty years ago as an annual, honorary series “... to be given by a creative thinker in the conceptual arts or sciences who will present a view of her (or his) field.”

Seven years ago, Slade was first invited to give that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures. He declined, saying (a bit overmodestly) that his view of his own field was far too idiosyncratic. Two years later, he was invited again. This time, tentatively, he accepted, on condition he could lecture from his room, by holographic simulation, rather as he conducted BPR-57-c.

Slade’s monthly seminar (which he held in person) had only six attendees. The traditional presentation procedure of the Harbin-Y Lectures is a personal delivery from the stage of the K-Harbin Auditorium to an invited audience of several thousand.

Twenty years ago, Slade had recorded a superb programmed course called
The Elements of
Reason: An Introduction to Metalogics
which is still on store, unre-vised, in the Satellite General Information Computer Network (and is considered the best introduction to Slade’s own, early, ovular work, the two-volume
Summa Metalogiae)
. At ease before any sort of recording or mechanical device, Slade still felt he would be uncomfortable before such a large, live audience. The academic confusion over Slade’s not overly exceptional request escalated, however, out of all proportion. Slade was an eccentric figure in the University, whose personal rarity on campus had lead to some extraordinary (and extraordinarily idiotic) myths. Many of his colleagues were, frankly, afraid he would simply conduct a BPR-57-c session, completely inaccessible to his audience. No one was sure how to ascertain tactfully if he would discuss his work at the level they felt was called for by the occasion. How all this was finally resolved is not our concern here. But once more Slade did not deliver that year’s Harbin-Y Lectures.