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Short Science Fiction Collection 081, by various authors
full contents (9h 5m)
with: "Dr. Kometevsky's Day", by Fritz Leiber (1952) - text / audio (42m)

Some background: Like the Insomnia Collection, LibriVox's many short-story anthologies are semi-random assortments, based on whatever the volunteers happened to feel like reading and could find in a public-domain source. But since those sources happen to include so many mid-20th-century pulp magazines, the SF collections tend to be heavily weighted toward "Golden Age" stuff, and even more heavily weighted toward whichever issues of those pulps most recently got added to Project Gutenberg. So, while this installment includes material as old as 1894(*), and (due to the vagaries of US copyright law) as recent as 1962, it's mostly from 1952-1958 and mostly from the magazines Amazing Stories, If, Imagination, and Planet Stories.

What I read

Fritz Leiber is legendary for all kinds of reasons, but "Dr. Kometevsky's Day" isn't one of his better-known stories and I hadn't seen it before. It's an odd one for sure, even by his eclectic standards: a world-in-peril thriller that's almost all dialogue and interior monologue and theorizing until there's one weird special effect, followed by an exposition-dump from an alien-possessed kid, and the big question other than whether the world will end is whether the partners in a six-person polyamorous marriage will manage to feel like coequal parents.
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I know some of us, if we are nerds, got a little verklempt in 2019 when we realized Blade Runner took place in 2019, and in 2015 because of Back to the Future II, and so on. Some disappointment; some relief. So maybe people are wondering what kind of inaccurate future is in store for us this year. You have a choice! Possibly the most recent 2021 is from the 1992 novel Children of Men (the movie moved it ahead a little); the most famous is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (so Blade Runner was a rare case of an adaptation picking an even more unrealistically early future).

But a lesser-known 2021 is the year of the earliest scenes in Thomas M. Disch's Vietnam War-era story cycle/novel 334, one of my all-time favorite books by a unique and sometimes maddening writer. This is a slice-of-life thing about a dozen major characters just dealing with life in New York City over several years in the 2020s, which is kind of crappy in many ways, and science-fictional in two or three ways, and ordinary otherwise. The prose is graceful and surprising, even though a large section of it was structured as a kind of writing game, where the narrative was required to change focus in just one of three ways from one scene to the next. It's an often bitter satire that seems to read pretty differently for different people—some take it as a totally cynical bummer, I don't really. I spent a while writing up annotations because there are a lot of little side things in it I enjoy, and as usual time has put some of it in a different light: for instance, the idea that you could pretty easily see 53 different movies over several weeks in theaters was not a misguided futuristic notion, it was an entirely realistic description of 1972 New York and a thing you could do well into the '90s when I lived there (and some of his fictional films have since been made, for better or for worse).

Anyway, there's a bit in it that always makes me a little weepy, where this pissed-off family is watching a TV movie based on Walt Whitman's life and work, which sounds simultaneously super-cheesy and maybe a little cool. The movie throws in some lines from "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry", where Whitman is trying to imagine people of the future and he decides they'll be doing a lot of the same stuff, going around New York, seeing things and having problems, and he loves that so much. "What is it, then, between us? What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?" The narrator doesn't dig the movie at all, and that kind of lofty earnestness isn't the book's usual style; but you can tell Disch does like these people, not because they're necessarily nice or smart or making him hopeful about the future, but just because they're managing to get by.

There's a less sympathetic character, a jaded social services manager with a bad case of affluenza, who is into a sort of drug-assisted historical LARPing. In the game, she's chosen to be a 4th-century Roman matron—because she thinks of her real world as being on the way out, just like the Roman Empire. It's written such that you can see how it'd be tempting to think that way, but also how it can be a self-indulgent luxury, a way of reassuring yourself that all the things that bother you will surely be destroyed soon. It's the mean flip side of Whitman's empathy: I identify with you, people of the past, because you're doomed and unworthy like me, and because nothing either of us does matters!

This novel (in its collected form at least) is pretty much the same age I am. I was a science-fiction-crazed kid, but my own ideas about the future were usually pretty vague. If as a kid in the '80s I'd been able to hear from my future self how 2021 looks right now, it would've been a mixed bag for sure: pretty scary in some ways, frustrating in many, and a nice surprise in a few—a similar mix to the style of 334, and unfamiliar to about the same degree that that world would be from either the real present or the past. Past-me wouldn't have known what to say, but I would've wished us all the best.

Making up stories about the future, especially one you could theoretically live to see (even though Disch didn't), is like placing a marker to get the future's attention: remember here I was thinking about you, hoping you're carrying on, give me a nod back when you get there.

This section is mostly about things that aren't comics and aren't by Grant Morrison. After that, I promise I'll get to the main subject.

The Final Programme (1968)
A Cure for Cancer (1971)
The English Assassin: A Romance of Entropy (1972)
The Condition of Muzak (1977)
Novels by Michael Moorcock

Moorcock needs no introduction from me, but here's one anyway. He's most widely known as an author of high fantasy; anything written in that genre after 1961 that has a sort of Gothic poetic sensibility and isn't a Tolkien riff owes a lot to his Elric series. He was also at the center of the hard-to-define-but-unmistakable New Wave movement in SF, during his time as editor of New Worlds magazine. He wrote some lyrics for Blue Öyster Cult. And he's the creator of the psychedelic fashion-forward homicidal incestuous metafictional dimension-hopping secret agent Jerry Cornelius, who appears in various forms in these four novels plus assorted shorter works.

That's the basis of Moorcock's gigantic animosity to Grant Morrison, who he thinks went beyond Cornelius homage into ripoff territory, particularly with Morrison's very early strip Gideon Stargrave and parts of The Invisibles. Moorcock has said that Morrison's done nothing but imitate him, which I don't think is true, but I do think anyone with any interest in avant-garde SF/fantasy who grew up in the '70s would be certain to absorb this stuff by osmosis even if they didn't like it—and Morrison clearly did like it. I wasn't a huge fan as a kid (at least, I thought not; I'll explain below), but I was pretty sure I had read these things too young, so I wanted to try again. Well... I'm still not a fan, but it's an undeniably unique work that I think might work better as an influence than as itself; that is, these manage to suggest all kinds of other interesting books that they're choosing not to be. John Clute in his introduction to The Final Programme makes about the best case for the series that I can imagine, and I can see what he's talking about now and then.
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I "adapted" Jack London's disease-apocalypse novella "The Scarlet Plague" in 2017 for Lauren Davis's and Stephenny Godfrey's anthology Sci-Fi San Francisco. The quote marks around "adapted" are because the novella has about 20,000 words, but the comic has about 400 words and entirely leaves out the main action of the story. It's now online here, so I thought I might talk about it and its source material a little.
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In a few decades (if we still have genre entertainment) the idea of characters stuck in a time loop will be either completely forgotten, or one of those strangely long-lived subgenres that most people aren't familiar with the origin of, like "zombie apocalypse" or "people flying around inside giant robots." I've seen it done half a dozen times and you basically always get the same story beats, where the person accumulates a lot of information about people and has to repeat a series of actions to get toward whatever the goal is and make it all stop. Usually, unlike the original version in Groundhog Day where the limit is the end of the day or death, they just go with it being death (which kind of parallels how the zombie idea evolved from Romero: he had every dead person coming back and also it's contagious, but now it's usually just that it's contagious). And usually, unlike Groundhog Day, there's some attempt to explain why this is happening other than "because you're a jerk and it's funny." And usually I just don't see the point, except for Edge of Tomorrow which is great.

Anyway, Russian Doll deceptively looks at first like just another one of these things. ( Read more... )

You could argue about whether this book is science fiction, or a case of a "literary" author dabbling in genre from an ironic distance— especially since the main character repeatedly mocks the premise of his story as "sci-fi bullshit," and that premise is time travel— but what matters to me is that this is fantasy being used to do what it can do: make the emotional level of a story literal. Time travel is about bringing stages of life and points of view together that can't meet in reality. There's a man plagued by loss and regret, he badly needs to know things there's no way to know, and a device he doesn't understand allows him to stalk his wife in her past— with sort of good intentions, but this isn't a stable person, and not surprisingly things go wrong.

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