A Fisherman of the Inland Sea: Stories (2 page)

Finally, some people tell me that they avoid science fiction because it’s depressing. This is quite understandable if they
happened to hit a streak of post-holocaust cautionary tales or a bunch of trendies trying to outwhine each other, or overdosed
on sleaze-metal-punk-virtual-noir Capitalist Realism. But the accusation often, I think, reflects some timidity or gloom in
the reader’s own mind: a distrust of change, a distrust of the imagination. A lot of people really do get scared and depressed
if they have to think about anything they’re not perfectly familiar with; they’re afraid of losing control. If it isn’t about
things they know all about already they won’t read it, if it’s a different color they hate it, if it isn’t McDonald’s they
won’t eat at it. They don’t want to know that the world existed before they were, is bigger than they are, and will go on
without them.
They do not like history. They do not like science fiction. May they eat at McDonald’s and be happy in Heaven.

Now, having talked about why people dislike science fiction, I’ll say why I like it. I like most kinds of fiction, mostly
for the same qualities, none of which is specific to a single genre. But what I like in and about science fiction includes
these particular virtues: vitality, largeness, and exactness of imagination; playfulness, variety, and strength of metaphor;
freedom from conventional literary expectations and mannerism; moral seriousness; wit; pizzazz; and beauty.

Let me ride a moment on that last word. The beauty of a story may be intellectual, like the beauty of a mathematical proof
or a crystalline structure; it may be aesthetic, the beauty of a well-made work; it may be human, emotional, moral; it is
likely to be all three. Yet science fiction critics and reviewers still often treat the story as if it were a mere exposition
of ideas, as if the intellectual “message” were all. This reductionism does a serious disservice to the sophisticated and
powerful techniques and experiments of much contemporary science fiction. The writers are using language as postmodernists;
the critics are decades behind, not even discussing the language, deaf to the implications of sounds, rhythms, recurrences,
patterns—as if text were a mere vehicle for ideas, a kind of gelatin coating for the medicine. This is naive. And it totally
misses what I love best in the best science fiction, its beauty.

ON THE STORIES IN THIS BOOK

I am certainly not going to talk about the beauty of my own stories. How about if I leave that to the critics and reviewers,
and I talk about the ideas? Not the messages, though. There are no messages in these stories. They are not fortune cookies.
They are stories.

The three last and longest ones are all based on the
same gimmick: an absolutely, inexcusably implausible notion, not extrapolated from any existing technology, not justifiable
by any current theory of physics. Pure hokum. Pure science fiction, as they say.

Writing my first science fiction novels, long ago, I realized that the galaxy was in some ways highly inconvenient. I accepted
Einstein’s proposition that nothing can go faster than light (not having any convincing proposal of my own to replace it with).
But that means that it takes spaceships an impossibly long time to get from here to there.

Fortunately, if they can go as fast or nearly as fast as light, Father Albert also provides the paradox of time-dilation,
which allows the person in the spaceship to experience a near-lightspeed journey as nearly instantaneous. If we’re going to
a world a hundred light-years from here at near lightspeed, we spend, according to our own perceptions, only a few minutes
doing so and arrive only a few minutes older. But on the world we left and the world we come to, in those few minutes a hundred
years are passing.

The paradox is a lovely one to try to handle in terms of the lives and relationships and feelings of the interstellar travelers,
and I have used it in many stories. But it messes up communications something awful. We get to our diplomatic post a hundred
light-years away and have no idea whether the government that sent us still exists and whether they still need that shipment
of megathorium.

If we can’t communicate, there can’t really be much interstellar trade or diplomacy or any other relationship. And fiction’s
mostly about relationships, human or other. So I invented the ansible. (Later on I gave the credit for it to Shevek of Anarres,
who tried hard to explain to me how it worked; but I invented it first.)

The ansible disobeys Einstein. Information is immaterial and therefore (oh, I love science-fictional therefores!) can be transmitted
instantaneously by the ansible. No time paradox, no time lapse. When we
travel the hundred light-years from X to Y, the history of the past century on X is waiting for us on Y; we don’t have to
wonder if the anarchosyndicalist utopians who sent us have been replaced by a demented theocratic dictatorship. In fact we
can call them right up on the ansible and find out. Hello? Comrade? No, sorry, this is a demented theocratic dictator.

Though scientifically ridiculous, the ansible is intuitionally satisfying, easy to accept and believe. After all, in our world,
knowledge and information, even our living voices on the telephone, move (seemingly) instantly, as disembodied electronic
impulses, right round the world, while our slow, material bodies can only walk or drive or fly heavily after.

Of course it is that (seemingly) that makes the ansible work. But nobody has ever complained about it. And now and then an
ansible turns up in somebody else’s story. It’s a convenience, like the telephone, like toilet paper.

In an early story or two I said or implied that unmanned spaceships could also travel instantaneously. This was a mistake,
a violation of my own rule that only the immaterial could go faster than light. I didn’t do it again, and hoped nobody had
noticed.

But in the mistake is the discovery; often it’s the lapse, not the effort, that opens into the unexpected. Long after, thinking
about those unmanned and illegitimate ships, I realized that the implication was that it’s not materiality that makes the
difference, but life or mind. The sole difference between a manned and an unmanned ship is living bodies, mind, or psyche.
Oh, now, that’s interesting. Which is it that keeps the manned ship from going faster than light—is it life, is it intelligence,
is it intention? What if I invent a new technology that allows human beings to go faster than light? Then what?

As the new fake technolgy was as implausible as the ansible, and counter-intuitional as well, I didn’t spend a whole lot of
time fake-explaining it. I just named it:
churten theory. As writers and wizards know, the name’s the thing.

Having the name, I plunged into the experience, and spent quite a lot of time, good time, too, on the vocabulary. I needed
words to demonstrate fictionally what instantaneous travel, transilience, might feel like, finding out in the process that
what it feels like is the only explanation of how it works, and that where words in themselves are inadequate, syntax can
take you straight to another world and home again in no time.

All three of the churten stories are also metafictions, stories about story. In “The Shobies’ Story,” transilience acts as
a metaphor for narration, and narration as the chancy and unreliable but most effective means of constructing a shared reality.
“Dancing to Ganam” continues with the theme of unreliable narration or differing witness, with a hi-tech hubristic hero at
its eccentric center, and adds the lovely theory of entrainment to the churten stew. And finally, “Another Story”—one of my
very few experiments with time travel—explores the possibility of two stories about the same person in the same time being
completely different and completely true.

In this story I found churten theory apparently failing to find its technology, unable to get us reliably from X to Y without
time lapse; but I expect they’ll go on trying. We as a species do love to go very, very fast. My own attention in “Another
Story” was lured by the marriage and sexual arrangements of the planet O, an intricate set of relationships and behaviors
laden with infinite emotional possibilities. We as a species do love to make life very, very complicated.

I don’t want to talk about “The First Contact with the Gorgonids,” or “The Ascent of the North Face”—is anything deadlier
than somebody explaining a joke? I am, however, fond of both. Funny stories, silly stories, are such a gift. You can’t sit
down to write one, you can’t intend one; they’re presents from the dark side of your soul.

“The Kerastion” is a workshop story. My assignment was for each of us to invent an artifact or a prescribed behavior or folkway;
we made a list of all these items, and then each wrote a story using as many of them as we liked. Several oddments, such as
necklaces of vautituber, come from the list, as do the concepts of sculpting in sand and making flutes of human leather. My
friend Roussel described her artifact thus: “The kerastion is a musical instrument that cannot be heard.” A Borges story in
ten words. I made a few hundred words out of it and enjoyed doing so, but did not really improve on it.

Of the stories in this volume, “Newton’s Sleep” and “The Rock That Changed Things” are the ones I’ve had the most grief with.
“The Rock” is a parable, and I don’t really much like parables. Its anger makes it heavy. Yet I like its key image very much.
I wish I could have given my blue-green stone a lighter setting.

As for “Newton’s Sleep,” the title is from Blake, who prays that we be kept from “single vision and Newton’s sleep.” In the
story it is further linked to Goya’s extraordinary “The Sleep of Reason Engenders Monsters.” “Newton’s Sleep” can be, and
has been, read as an anti-technological diatribe, a piece of Luddite ranting. It was not intended as such, but rather as a
cautionary tale, a response to many stories and novels I had read over the years which (consciously or not—here is the problem
of elitism again) depict people in spaceships and space stations as superior to those on earth. Masses of dummies stay down
in the dirt and breed and die in squalor, and serve ‘em right, while a few people who know how to program their VCRs live
up in these superclean military worldlets provided with all mod con plus virtual-reality sex, and are the Future of Man. It
struck me as one of the drearier futures.

The story, however, didn’t stay with that, but with the character, Ike, who wandered into my mind with problems on his; a
worried, troubled man: a truly
rational man who denies the existence of the irrational, which is to say, a true believer who can’t see how and why the true
belief isn’t working. Like Dalzul in “Dancing to Ganam,” Ike is a tragic character, an admirable overreacher, but he’s less
resolute and more honest than Dalzul, and so suffers more. He is also an exile; almost all my heroes have been in one way
or another exiles.

Some reviewers have dismissed Ike as a feeble strawdog, victim of my notorious bloodthirsty man-hating feminist spleen. Have
it your way, fellows, if you like it. Fried spleen with backlash sauce? But however the reader may see Ike, I hope the story
doesn’t read as anti-space travel. I love both the idea and the reality of the exploration of space, and was only trying to
make the whole idea less smugly antiseptic. I really do think we have to take our dirt with us wherever we go. We are dirt.
We are Earth.

Mrs. Jerry Debree, the heroine of Grong Crossing, liked to look pretty. It was important to Jerry in his business contacts,
of course, and also it made her feel more confident and kind of happy to know that her cellophane was recent and her eyelashes
really well glued on and that the highlighter blush was bringing out her cheekbones like the nice girl at the counter had
said. But it was beginning to be hard to feel fresh and look pretty as this desert kept getting hotter and hotter and redder
and redder until it looked, really, almost like what she had always thought the Bad Place would look like, only not so many
people. In fact none.

“Could we have passed it, do you think?” she ventured at last, and received without surprise the exasperation she had safety-valved
from him: “How the fuck could we have
passed
it when we haven’t
passed
one fucking
thing
except those fucking
bushes
for ninety miles?
Christ
you’re dumb.”

Jerry’s language was a pity. And sometimes it made it so hard to talk to him. She had had the least little tiny sort of feeling,
woman’s intuition maybe, that the men that had told him how to get to Grong Crossing were teasing him, having a little joke.
He had been talking so loud in the hotel bar about how disappointed he had
been with the Corroboree after flying all the way out from Adelaide to see it. He kept comparing it to the Indian dance they
had seen at Taos. Actually he had been very bored and restless at Taos and they had had to leave in the middle so he could
have a drink and she never had got to see the people with the masks come, but now he talked about how they really knew how
to put on a native show in the U.S.A. He said a few scruffy abos jumping around weren’t going to give tourists from the real
world anything to write home about. The Aussies ought to visit Disney World and find out how to do the real thing, he said.