Adrift in the Noösphere Read online

  Borgo Press Books by Damien Broderick

  Adrift in the Noösphere: Science Fiction Stories

  Chained to the Alien: The Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

  Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer

  Embarrass My Dog: The Way We Were, the Things We Thought

  Ferocious Minds: Polymathy and the New Enlightenment

  Human’s Burden: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

  I’m Dying Here: A Comedy of Bad Manners (with Rory Barnes)

  Post Mortal Syndrome: A Science Fiction Novel (with Barbara Lamar)

  Skiffy and Mimesis: More Best of ASFR: Australian SF Review (Second Series) [Editor]

  Unleashing the Strange: Twenty-First Century Science Fiction Literature

  Warriors of the Tao: The Best of Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature [Editor with Van Ikin]

  x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction

  Zones: A Science Fiction Novel (with Rory Barnes)

  Copyright Information

  Copyright © 1964, 1982, 1990, 1998, 2000, 2010, 2012, 2012 by Damien Broderick

  “Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” Copyright © 2010 by Damien Broderick and Barbara Lamar

  “Luminous Fish” Copyright © 2012 by Damien Broderick and Paul Di Filippo

  “Foreword” Copyright © 2012 by Rich Horton

  Published by Wildside Press LLC

  www.wildsidebooks.com

  Dedication

  For Barbara Lamar and Paul Di Filippo,

  Apex Collaborators

  Foreword, by Rich Horton

  I have to admit that until several years ago I didn’t really know Damien Broderick’s work. I was aware of it (as Martin says of Ray Bradbury in a Simpsons episode). I knew that novels like The Dreaming Dragons (aka The Dreaming—and don’t forget that “aka”—Broderick is an inveterate improver of his earlier work) and The White Abacus were held in high regard. I knew he had a reputation as a critic as well as a writer. I knew he was Australian. That was about it.

  My loss. Things began to change when I read for review his diptych Godplayers (2005) and K-Machines (2006), wild post-Singularity sf with echoes of Zelazny and Leiber, and akin to Charles Stross’s Accelerando (2005) which drew upon the same extropian speculations surveyed in Broderick’s 1997 The Spike. These are fast-moving and highly entertaining novels, deeply steeped in the field (and as such highly allusive), also deeply informed by exotic scientific speculation. And still fun! Along the way I also read Broderick’s first novel, Sorcerer’s World (1970), which nods at Vance, and has its moments but is perhaps a bit too much a young man’s jape. (It, too, was significantly revised and extended in 1986 as The Black Grail.)

  I also noticed Broderick’s impressive achievements as a critic, evidenced by books like Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction; and x, y, z, t: Dimensions of Science Fiction. In addition he has produced some impressive futurist-oriented popular science work, most notably The Spike. When I finally “met” Damien on a couple of online fora, I saw immediately a highly intelligent person, clever, sometimes sardonic, and (perhaps most important!) often sharing my tastes in sf.

  But, you know, I tend to approach the field first through short fiction. And in 2009 Damien Broderick began to produce a not yet abated flood of quite remarkable shorter work, beginning with “Uncle Bones” and including such quite outstanding stories as “This Wind Blowing, and This Tide,” “The Qualia Engine,” and two included in this book: “Under the Moons of Venus” and “The Beancounter’s Cat”. These stories hooked me, no doubt about it.

  One feature of Broderick’s work, already hinted at, is the allusiveness towards earlier sf (or not necessarily sf: The White Abacus, for instance, is a science fictional version of Hamlet). This can be a dangerous thing—one can’t depend on the reader to get one’s allusions, to recognize who’s being pastiched or even parodied. But Broderick succeeds in walking the tightrope (stretched, I suppose, over the Scylla and Charybdis of reader frustration at missing things and reader annoyance at traducing beloved past works) between providing a fully successful story on its own terms and at the same time deepening both the new story and the work alluded to by the embedded commentary and references. These new stories notably echo writers like Philip K. Dick, Cordwainer Smith, and J. G. Ballard, while throwing in the odd reference to Sturgeon, Kipling and Wilmar Shiras. But they, I think, will delight new readers as well.

  This is the latest of several illuminating story collections. Each tends to combine early work (sometimes very early) with new stories (sometimes brand new, as with “Luminous Fish” in this book). I’ve been delighted to be able to follow the evolution of Broderick’s work—for example, his very first story, “The Sea’s Furthest End,” which first appeared in 1964 in the first issue of Ted Carnell’s classic UK original anthology New Writings in SF, is available in Climbing Mount Implausible in its original form; and in drastically revised form as “The Game of Stars and Souls” in Uncle Bones. (A still different version is the 1993 YA novel also called The Sea’s Furthest End.) By all means read them both (or all three!)—the first version is indeed the work of a teenager, and shows it, but retains a distinct and refreshing energy, which manages to survive the later improvements. And from the beginning we can see the shape of the mature writer’s interests. Even better is the chance to resurrect unjustly neglected stories, such as “The Ballad of Bowsprit Bear’s Stead” (1980), which I first read in Uncle Bones, and which despite being thirty years old is one of my favorite novelettes in my recent reading. (I should have noticed it in 1980, but what can I say? I was a junior in college, and I missed a lot of stuff in favor of girls, beer, and physics.)

  But what of the stories included here? They are a varied bunch, both in time of publication and theme. But every one is worth reading. There is a brand new story, “Luminous Fish,” written with Paul Di Filippo, taking on Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius character with stabs at sleazy websites and a Heinlein-like brain transplant. There are four first rate stories from the past couple of years: “Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order,” a clever and very funny time travel romp (with a serious aspect); “The Beancounter’s Cat,” set in a far future with Clarkean science sufficiently advanced to appear magic, and meditating on human destiny very effectively (on first reviewing this I called Broderick “one of our prophets of the posthuman”); “Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” (written with Broderick’s wife, Barbara Lamar), is another look at the mystery of human destiny, beginning with an academic seeing himself in a film from 1931, and solving that mystery quite strangely; and finally one of the very best sf short stories of the past couple of years, “Under the Moons of Venus,” which is either about what it purports to be: a man left nearly alone on an empty Earth after aliens take most people to Venus, or about a man gone mad—either way, it’s remarkable, evocative, effectively in homage to one of sf’s greats but still through and through original.

  And there are the older stories. “All My Yesterdays” is one of his first stories, from 1964 (though slightly revised), and it’s not bad at all, a day in the very long life of an evidently immortal man, battling with God. “Coming Back” is a mid-career story, a solid take on the story of a man stuck in a time loop. “The Womb” is a long story on the subject of UFOs and Ufologists and cults, intriguing odd stuff. And “All Summer Long” looks at intelligent robots and asks “What would they really want to do?”

  Damien Broderick is one of our best contemporary writers of sf, and his recent spate of excellent short fiction, matched with excellent collections such as
this, gives all of us a chance to discover this.

  Introduction, by Damien Broderick

  Seven years before I was born, far away and long ago, a British technology whiz who called himself “Professor” A.M. Low published a truly terrible novel for young readers titled Adrift in the Stratosphere. That was a couple of years before the fabled Golden Age of science fiction was kick-started by editor John W. Campbell, Jr., in the pages of a US magazine with the even pulpier title Astounding Science Fiction. Crude as that magazine’s title was—and Campbell tried for years to change it to a simple Science Fiction, which would have helped a lot, and finally managed to shift it to Analog, still its name—a fresh spirit moved over what were already the rather stagnant waters of early sf.

  Archibald Low missed out on these developments, alas, so his young Stratospheric adventurers followed the same ridiculous path to glory in space that had been hacked from the pulp jungle for many years. To quote the wry and entertaining summary by British wit David Langford,

  [Three young men] accidentally launch a “rocket-balloon” spacecraft left unattended by the professor who built it. Soon they’re “passing through a belt of X-rays,” causing the ship and their own bodies to become transparent. Next they dodge a living, mile-long air monster that flies at 800 mph.... Our heroes are tormented by yellow radium beams from Mars. Will they discover the ship’s anti-radium ray? [At length] they plunge to an emergency landing on a Fortean skyborne island.1

  Surprisingly, in the year I was born, Low became, Langford reports, “the first-ever author named as a British sf convention’s official guest.” Surely it wasn’t for Adrift in the Stratosphere.

  I mention this grisly history because a couple of decades after its publication, I had contracted the sf infection, and haunted the closest library, several miles away by bike. I swiftly devoured all the regular science fiction in the place, and finally fetched up at “Professor” Low’s weird emanation. I forced it down, gagging gently. A rocket-powered balloon! War with Martians via radio! (In a way, perhaps this had been a perceptive glimpse, in the mid-1930s, into Hitler’s dreadfully effective use of the new mass media.) It was very silly, and yet, strangely, the title has stuck in my mind through all the decades since.

  This was science fiction, but not as we know it, Jim.

  §

  And what of the Noösphere? Why, that was a notion I encountered at the start of the 1960s, long before people started wearing strange clothes and flowers in their hair. It was first proposed, though not named, by the Russian Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky (1863-1945), a founder of the discipline of geochemistry, whose book The Biosphere (1926) argued that our world has been shaped by the life swarming its surface, waters and air for billions of years. It was a forerunner of James Lovelock’s idea of Gaia, but Vernadsky pushed it further: the planet’s history had seen three mighty epochs, with the new realm of mind following those of inanimate and then living matter. This mental world, the Noösphere, is today given literal expression in the global skein of billions of messages flung through space, wires, and cables, tying humankind into a kind of emerging hive mind.

  The term was the coinage of a French Jesuit, Father Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, S.J. (1881-1955). Teilhard was a paleontologist and early supporter of evolutionary explanations for the shape of species and the biosphere—a somewhat risky proposition for a Catholic priest to maintain in the 1920s, when Darwin’s On the Origin of Species remained on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. Curiously enough, Teilhard’s approach to the topic rejected Darwin’s idea of gradual change via natural selection of random inherited characteristics. He was convinced that life’s evolution is goal-directed, presumably following a path prescribed in advance by a divine Creator. The Noösphere, then, was the gradual fulfillment of this project at its highest levels, with the minds of humankind being drawn together into a gestalt unity that would become, at its highest or Omega Point, the veritable consciousness of Christ on Earth.

  For a while, I thought this was a pretty cool idea. It resonated with a lot of feel-good tropes in science fiction, which tends to be godless yet mystical, non- or even anti-religious yet spiritual, anchored in scientific empiricism as an ideal method yet profoundly touched by a yearning for transcendence. The celebrated “sense of wonder” is its ensign. Eventually I learned enough about evolutionary biology and philosophy to realize that Teilhard de Chardin was, in effect, barking mad; his theories (or “theories”) of radial and tangential energies were pure moonshine. It made as much sense as a rocket-propelled balloon into space. But wait—

  As metaphor the Noösphere promised to be fertile!

  Especially as a science fiction metaphor—one that applied to the stories themselves, as they clawed their way into existence in the heads of their authors and flourished into fresh life every time they entered the hungry consciousness of readers and viewers.

  Humans are creatures of self-aware purpose (some of the time, anyway), utterly unlike the evolutionary process that cobbled us together. But we achieve our purposes as much by dreaming and playing games with ideas and imagined feelings as we do through deliberation and planning, or by following a path already set for us.

  If sf is about anything, it’s that endless, ever-changing dream, that set of imaginary games we play, using the endlessly renewed toolbox of the genre.

  We’re adrift, like voyagers on a raft, carried into strange seas by currents we can barely identify—adrift, indeed, in the Noösphere!

  §

  Some of my own voyages in the Noösphere, brief or extended, are gathered in this collection. Here’s how they came into existence, and the wanderings that led me toward them.

  “Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order,” to my delighted astonishment, was purchased the very afternoon I submitted it to Patrick Nielsen Hayden, at Tor.com, in 2011. It was my second sale to that website, and the story was elegantly illustrated by Victo Ngai. I hope it’s funny, in a grim sort of way. One of these days I should get back to this time-traveling couple; I like them.

  I’ve read a lot of robot stories in the last half century, most memorably Isaac Asimov’s tales of his “positronic” humanoids, and John Sladek’s sarcastic rejoinders snapping at their heels. But in all this trove of mechanical men, Terminators, robots stunned and led astray by paradox, there aren’t many stories where robots...just wanna have fun in the sun. “All Summer Long “ was commissioned by Australian editors Paul Collins and Meredith Costain, and telling it from the point of view of a kid seemed just perfect.

  Some years ago, I produced a burst of stories one after the other without pause, a return to the short form after years of writing mostly novels and other books—although for five years I was sf editor of the Aussie popular science magazine Cosmos, which meant I was reading a lot of short fiction. Let me assure you, this is an experience guaranteed to engender sympathy with the lot of the editor. I was going great guns until I got to the opening stanzas of “The Beancounter’s Cat,” which I carelessly showed to a senior and very astute editor. He told me just what was wrong with it, and that killed me stone dead in mid-stream. I immediately lost the capacity to write short fiction. Trust me, this happens to more writers than you’d suppose (it hamstrung the great Theodore Sturgeon repeatedly). Some years later, the brilliant Australian editor Jonathan Strahan asked me if I could urgently send him something for his non-themed anthology Eclipse Four. Why yes, of course, I said, and pulled out my false start. I saw quickly where I’d been going wrong, and had a very pleasant time reinventing the direction of the story, no longer adrift. It appeared from Nightshade Books in 2011, and I was charmed when Gardner Dozois took it for his 2012 Year’s Best SF volume.

  Gardner had already bought reprint rights to “Under the Moons of Venus” for the 2011 Year’s Best SF anthology—and so too had the editors of four other Year’s Bests (David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, Rich Horton, Allan Kaster, and Jonathan Strahan). I was startled to find how few other sf stories ha
ve been snapped up by so many different anthologies in a single year, and heartened by the success of this ambiguous tale. Is the protagonist psychotic and delusional, or has the solar system been rewritten by Singularity-grade entities? You must be the judge, but I think it all really happened just the way it seems. This was another story bought by Jonathan Strahan, and appeared in Subterranean, in 2010. It was a finalist for the 2011 Sturgeon Award.

  As I write this, I’m in the process of proofreading a book I wrote with Paul Di Filippo, Science Fiction: The 101 Best Novels, 1985-2010. That’s an ambitious guide to the finest long fiction sf in the years after those surveyed in David Pringle’s remarkable Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels, 1949-1984. Paul and I have never met, but we’re frequent contributors to the internet chat group Fictionmags. Our first story together was “Cockroach Love,” in 2008. (It’s in my 2010 book Climbing Mount Implausible: The Evolution of a Science Fiction Writer.) Our follow-up, “Luminous Fish,” is a tribute to the confrontational Jerry Cornelius stories devised by Michael Moorcock and others, and appears here (with Mike’s permission) for the first time.

  Reading “Coming Back,” from F&SF in 1982, is a bit like watching the 1993 Bill Murray movie Groundhog Day a number of times in a row. Sometimes people adrift in the Noösphere find themselves caught in a whirlpool, sucked into the same Sargasso of idea. I don’t know who originated the notion in this story, but it wasn’t Danny Rubin and Harold Ramis (although they came up with an excellent and very funny script). It wasn’t sf veteran Richard Luphoff, whose 1973 story (in F&SF nine years before mine, although I’ve never read it) was also filmed for TV in 1993. Maybe it was me in 1971, when I published the original version of “Coming Back,” as “All the Time in the World,” under the jesting by-line Alan Harlison, in the Aussie men’s magazine Man. But I wouldn’t be surprised if the notion goes back to the Greeks, or further.