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 have 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.
“Walls of Flesh, Bars of Bone” is another story commissioned by the indefatigable Jonathan Strahan, for his 2010 anthology Engineering Infinity. It is one of several collaborations by me and my wife Barbara Lamar. Our longest is a 400 page sf/thriller, Post Mortal Syndrome, which was the first novel serialized on-line in Australia (by Cosmos, the beautiful popular science magazine) in 2005, and released by Borgo Press in trade paperback in 2011. Barbara and I met through mutual interest in advanced technology, especially the kinds associated with the prospect of extended healthy longevity; at the time, she lived on her permaculture farm in Texas, and I in suburban Melbourne, Australia, and we were quite literally brought together by a confluence in the Noösphere. Nowadays we live near downtown San Antonio in a heritage-listed dwelling, formerly the family seat of the Texan painters Robert Onderdonk and his impressionist son Julian. We don’t, though, own an early Rauschenberg.
Just for the form of the thing, and for auld lang syne, let’s dip back to the dawn of time for my 1964 story “All My Yesterdays,” which I revised slightly for Van Ikin’s anthology Glass Reptile Breakout, in 1990. Frankly, it’s more a fantasy than sf, unless an interventionist deity (rather more annoying than Teilhard’s) is regarded as an sf idea.
Finally, “The Womb” was one of the longest pieces in the landmark 1998 original anthology Dreaming Down Under, winner of the World Fantasy Award in 1999, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb. Jack is my doppelgänger; he moved from the US to Australia after falling in love with writer, editor, and literary scholar Dr. Webb, and they spend most of their time there now, while I rusticate in the States. Meanwhile, the very much longer, closely detailed saga of Daimon Keith and his daughter Flake is told in the collaborative novel Dark Gray, by Rory Barnes and me, released in the US in 2010 by Fantastic Books.
§
All of these stories—all sf stories in general, perhaps all fiction—drift in the Noösphere, drawn and shoved by the currents of strange attractors we rarely identify. Perhaps science fiction is the story-telling medium best suited for this understanding. At its best, it is not programmatic, not goal-driven by ideology or compulsion (yet not, of course, plotless)—a kind of zestful or mournful or hilarious or yearning contemplation impelled by wonderment. These stories are my attempts upon that ambition.
It’s appropriate, perhaps, to close with a few of the thoughts of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who taught that “Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come to being.” But he wasn’t always so high-toned. Sometimes the world bit him on the ass, as it does with us: “Growing old is like being increasingly penalized for a crime you haven’t committed.” But finally he and we know this much: “It is our duty as men and women to proceed as though the limits of our abilities do not exist.” And who knows—maybe those abilities, enhanced by deepening knowledge, will burgeon and continue to enrich and enliven us, as our favorite fiction promises. Meanwhile, here are the stories.
1. http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/2008/cur0808.htm
Time Considered as a Series of Thermite Burns in No Particular Order
My time machine was disguised as a Baronne Henriette de Snoy rosebush in full bloom. I left it in the Royal Botanic Gardens, next to a thicket of imported English foliage. We could have appeared near the Library building itself, but I wanted to get the lay of the land and insinuate myself. Besides, seeing time machines pop out of the air can make people nervous. Moira remained inside, shielded, and said through my inload, “Good luck, Bobby. Try not to get arrested again.”
“Should be back in a couple of hours, max,” I murmured. The internet and global communications systems had been dismantled some six decades earlier, after the tsunami of leaked classified documents. “I’ll keep the images rolling, but let’s nix the chitchat. Oh, and if I do get arrested, maybe you should come and get me.”
My wife sighed. “Just don’t get all tangled up, I hate time loops.”
There were still trams running along St. Kilda Road, so I waited at the nearest stop and took one up Swanston Street to the State Library.
In this year the trams floated atop some kind of monorail set flush into the road, probably a magnetic levitation effect. Luckily, as the garbled pre-catastrophe records suggested, public transport was free in 2073 Melbourne, so I had no hassles with out-of-date coins or lack of swipe cards or injected RFID chips, all that nonsense that’s tripped me up before and always ruins a nice outing. Especially if it ends with incarceration in the local lockup.
On the tram, I had a different kind of hassle, the usual sort. Other passengers stared at me with surprise, disdain or derision. You couldn’t blame them. For obvious reasons, we’d found no reliable records in 2099 or later of the fashions in 2073. I was clad in the nearest thing to a neutral garment Moira and I have ever come up with: an inconspicuous gray track suit, no hoodie, sports shoes (you never know when you’re going to have to run like hell, and anyway they’re comfortable unless you find yourself up to your ankles or knees in an urban Greenhouse swamp), backpack.
A broad-shouldered youth with acne was nudging his bald oafish associates and rolling his eyes in my direction. I moved further down the tram and tried to merge with the crowd. Most of the men, except a few elderly, sported shaved heads decorated with glowing shapes that moved around like fish in a bowl. The women wore their hair like Veronica Lake in those old 1940s black and white movies. We crossed Collins Street, which didn’t look all that different from 1982 or 2002, it’s
