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.
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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!
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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
