170 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
170 lines
9.2 KiB
Plaintext
|
|
0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0 CHEAP TRUTH 8 $0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
|
|
EDITORIAL. Read more fanzines. "Get Into Print"
|
|
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
|
|
CHEAP TRUTH stalwart Sue Denim sharpens her lance and charges the windmill:
|
|
|
|
** REAL SF FANS DON'T READ PRIEST **
|
|
|
|
There's a saying: "REAL programmers don't eat quiche... they eat
|
|
Twinkies and Szechuan food." This kind of junk-food mentality is true of
|
|
your typical SF fan, too. Your REAL SF fan doesn't read Priest. He doesn't
|
|
read Dick or Ballard, either. He reads David Brin and Larry Niven and Anne
|
|
McCaffrey. Junk food for the brain.
|
|
|
|
And what's more, he's proud of it. He holds his head high so the
|
|
light will catch his coke-bottle glasses, hoists his basketball gut, and,
|
|
with the odor of Twinkies on his breath, tells you, "I'm SPECIAL. It takes a
|
|
special kind of person to appreciate this stuff."
|
|
|
|
And the hell of it is, every so often something that really IS
|
|
special comes along in a junk-food wrapper. Like a granola bar, or maybe
|
|
chicken cordon bleu on a bun -- it looks like junk food, tastes like junk
|
|
food, but it's actually got real nutrition in it. This year we're lucky --
|
|
we've had a couple of rich, vitamin-packed granola bars already, and at least
|
|
one of them is being scarfed down by junk-food addicts everywhere.
|
|
|
|
Certainly they like the taste of NEUROMANCER (by William Gibson, an
|
|
Ace Special, $2.95 (Gollancz L 8.95)). I mean, this is high-tech enough to
|
|
satisfy the most acned sixteen-year-old hacker whose only sex life is getting
|
|
his modem on-line with an X-rated bulletin board. Never mind that it shows
|
|
you how the future may very well BE, never mind the political issues, this
|
|
guy knows what it's like the be plugged IN, man.
|
|
|
|
But that's okay. Literature, the really good stuff, has a way of
|
|
changing your thinking whether you want it to or not.
|
|
|
|
But let's talk about our other granola bar for a minute. You see,
|
|
the problem with this kind of literature is it's got a short shelf life. A
|
|
book that comes out in September might as well have a little printed squib on
|
|
the back that says "Best if enjoyed before November 1," like you see on bags
|
|
of Twinkies, because in no time at all it's going to be gone.
|
|
|
|
You may already have trouble finding THE DIGGING LEVIATHAN (by James
|
|
P. Blaylock, Ace, $2.95). You probably passed it by the first time because
|
|
you weren't interested in some Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiche, or because it
|
|
looked like a kid's book. I suppose it IS a kid's book, at least in the
|
|
sense that Jim, the main protag, is only 15 -- but then Daniel Pinkwater's
|
|
LIZARD MUSIC is a kid's book, and you shouldn't miss that one either.
|
|
|
|
What makes this book special is its integrity. Blaylock refused to
|
|
humiliate his characters for the sake of a cheap laugh, quite an achievement
|
|
when those characters are a bunch of lunatic pseudo-scientists trying to get
|
|
to Pellucidar. This isn't Burroughs' junk-food Pellucidar with the dinosaurs
|
|
and all, though -- this is the 'real thing,' the hollow earth written about
|
|
by countless other nutcases over the years.
|
|
|
|
These people get so real that it's scary. We see them at their
|
|
Newtonian Society meetings and in the backyard workshop where they are
|
|
training mice to be amphibians. But we also see Jim's father William raging
|
|
in paranoia at a neighbor's dog, even, in one of the book's most brilliant
|
|
scenes, at a tube of toothpaste.
|
|
|
|
Blaylock's best trick, though, is the way he draws you in so deeply.
|
|
When William looks in the mirror, the readers see their own faces.
|
|
|
|
When you finish this book, give it to somebody who likes Twinkies --
|
|
but don't tell them it's good for them. You don't want to scare them
|
|
off.
|
|
|
|
0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0
|
|
|
|
** CLARKE: A SOCIAL STUDY **
|
|
|
|
Arthur C. Clarke's latest book is 1984: SPRING, a nonfiction
|
|
collection of essays, articles and speeches of varying consequentiality.
|
|
Many are simply filler, the genial time-marking of a dean of letters. The
|
|
flyleaf lists fifty-four Clarke books, and anyone familiar with them will
|
|
find that little has changed. Clarke's personal credo was set many decades
|
|
ago.
|
|
|
|
Some critics have been less than kind to Clarke and his thinking. "A
|
|
two-dementional space-jockey rationalist, a libration away from mysticism"
|
|
was Bob Black's memorable phrase. But Clarke's millenial scientism
|
|
peculiarly fits the spirit of the age. And if the dizzy 1980's fit Clarke as
|
|
well, then it is partly his own doing. To a great extent he has CREATED the
|
|
brand of visionary technolatry that is our era's broadest streak of optimism.
|
|
|
|
His visions -- 'prophecies' is not too strong a word -- have been
|
|
spread across the planet in twenty million books in thirty languages. The
|
|
movie 2001, alone, set Clarchetypes into the backbrains of millions.
|
|
Astronauts joined NASA because of Clarke's books. COSMONAUTS read him. His
|
|
influence on mass culture ranks with that of H. G. Wells, and has possibly
|
|
surpassed it.
|
|
|
|
Clarke is a political and social activist. The originator of the
|
|
communications satellite. The winner of the UNESCO Kalinga Prize. The
|
|
Chancellor of Moratuwa University in his adopted home, Sri Lanka. The man
|
|
behind the revolutionary suggestion that the United Nations create its own
|
|
spy satellite system. (The instant rejection of this notion by both
|
|
superpowers strikingly confirms its essential soundness.)
|
|
|
|
And then there is Clarke the media celebrity. Host of a television
|
|
series. Consider the recent OMNI commercial, in which Clarke, on a deserted
|
|
beach, presides over mystic door-frames opening onto star-speckled cosmic
|
|
vistas. This is his folk-mystique in its purest form: Clarke as pop icon,
|
|
the horn-rimmed Gandalf of the spaceways.
|
|
|
|
Clarke might seem to be a multifaceted, divided man, but this is
|
|
illusion. Clarke is whole; it is our culture that is divided.
|
|
|
|
More than any other SF writer, Clarke truly lives in the interzone
|
|
between science and literature. His career has been a deliberate struggle to
|
|
make this no-man's-land a place worth living and working in. And he has made
|
|
both sides respect him on his own terms.
|
|
|
|
When all is said and done, the social role he has created may be his
|
|
most important legacy. Few will ever fill it, for few have his gifts or
|
|
intellectual stature. But those who do will find their way smoothed by the
|
|
precedent he has set.
|
|
|
|
Clarke's success was no accident. He pursued fame quite
|
|
deliberately, with a set ambition he has followed for years.
|
|
|
|
Clarke has always portrayed his decision to live in Sri Lanka as a
|
|
dreamer's romantic gesture. But one wonders. It made him a large frog in a
|
|
small pond, giving him a scope and influence he could never have had in a
|
|
larger, industrial nation. It removed him from the centers of publishing,
|
|
with their subtly destructive practicalities. It allowed him to pursue both
|
|
his hobbies, and his muse, without distractions. And it erased his
|
|
parochiality, giving him the global view that is one of his most attractive
|
|
attributes.
|
|
|
|
Such hardheaded ambition may seem out of character for this gentle
|
|
and donnish man. But the evidence is there. Consider THE SANDS OF MARS,
|
|
written in 1957. It is utterly dated now -- all except for the role of its
|
|
protagonist, Martin Gibson.
|
|
|
|
Gibson is an internationally famous British SF writer of an
|
|
extrapolated 1990's. He has the sort of bestseller status and critical
|
|
attention that must have seemed pure fantasy to Clarke's fellow SF scribes of
|
|
the '50's. Gibson writes "novels of space travel" and popular science
|
|
journalism. He begins as almost a figure of fun: fussy, overimaginative,
|
|
constantly teased by arrogant know-it-all technicians. But as the book
|
|
develops, Gibson's role becomes crucial: the role of the man in the middle,
|
|
the irreplaceable interpreter, between powerful but mute scientists and an
|
|
equally powerful but ignorant lay public.
|
|
|
|
The book ends with Gibson's mystic vision of his own future:
|
|
political power, a role of leadership in a new world. "For the first time,
|
|
Gibson knew what lay at the end of the road on which he had now set his feet.
|
|
One day, perhaps, it would be his duty, and his privilege, to take over....
|
|
It might have been sheer self-deception, or it might have been the first
|
|
consciousness of his own still hidden powers -- but whichever it was, he
|
|
meant to know."
|
|
|
|
It was Clarke's autobiography -- in the extrapolative mode.
|
|
|
|
As an artist, Clarke may have little to teach the gifted hot-shots
|
|
who are his successors. But those who chafe at the confines of our ghetto --
|
|
those who know that SF is more important to our world than it has ever been
|
|
allowed to be -- have a lot to learn from the canny old Sage of Ceylon.
|
|
|
|
$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$
|
|
CHEAP TRUTH On-Line 809-C West 12th Street, Austin, Texas 78701. Vincent
|
|
Omniaveritas, editing. NOT COPYRIGHTED. "Get Nineties!"
|
|
$0$0$0$0$$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$0$
|