In 1967, the CIA conducted Operation Acoustic Kitty, in which it surgically wired up a cat with a microphone and antenna to spy on the Russians. The project is rumored to have cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 million. Its first mission was to spy on a Soviet facility in Washington, DC. Shortly after being released, the cat was killed by a taxi and the project was declared a total loss.

This story—firmly in the so-wacky-it-can-only-be-true category—is just the kind of thing that inspires The Men Who Stare at Goats, a movie about the rise and fall of a unit investigating the military possibilities of New Age spirituality and the paranormal within the U.S. Army in the 1970s and 1980s and its effect on the current war in Iraq. In place of the “a true story” tag that opens so many movies, Goats tells you that “more of this is true than you would believe.” This, like the rest of the movie, is fun and funny, but the tension between what’s real and what isn’t is a tightrope that Goats, unfortunately, can’t quite walk without falling off.

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Every aesthetic movement has—or should have—its own soundtrack. I would argue that an aesthetic movement that doesn’t have a soundtrack is doomed to an early death;¹ having music to gather around, after all, makes it a lot easier for like-minded folks to hang out together and have fun, and isn’t that part of what any decent aesthetic movement is about? (Apart from making cool stuff, that is.)

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Hip hop’s connection to science fiction goes way, way back—to these ears, it’s encoded in the genre’s DNA, thanks to its heavy sampling of P. Funk—but some groups make the connection more explicit than others (OutKast, Kanye West). Kid Cudi’s album, Man on the Moon: The End of Day, is the latest addition to this lineage.¹ This isn’t a novel observation by any means; it’s part of the album’s marketing strategy. In the week since its release date, the buzz around this album as a step toward the future—starting with the future of hip hop itself—feels fairly relentless, even for someone like me, who doesn’t keep up with current music nearly as much as he should. At a late-August listening session the record label (UniversalMotown) held, Kid Cudi was described as “the Jimi Hendrix of rap” and the album as a work that would “change the game.” Is it?

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This is the third part of a three-part interview with Robert Charles Wilson about Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. The first part, along with an introduction to the book, appears here. The second part appears here.

Brian Francis Slattery: What’s your opinion of James Howard Kunstler? [Ed. note: Kunstler is a journalist, novelist, and cultural critic; he is the author of The Geography of Nowhere, a critique of suburbia, and The Long Emergency, a rumination on what could happen to us when the oil runs out.]

Robert Charles Wilson: Unlike most science fiction, Kunstler is predicting the future, and I freely borrowed much of the worst-case scenario he presents in The Long Emergency. (You might say the keys to Julian Comstock are Kunstler, Gibbon, and Oliver Optic.) Is he right? Well, he makes a good case for the absolute unsustainability of our way of life. The idea is that we’ve basically fed on oil for 150 years—literally, in the sense that we used oil to bring marginal cropland under cultivation and to create the system by which we transport food worldwide. And like any animal population, our numbers increased accordingly, to such a degree that the system would be strained even if we weren’t facing radical oil depletion. Not to mention the dozens of other potential ecological and economical disasters implicit in the problem.

I don’t think science fiction writers are obliged to be optimists or pessimists. I do believe in the possibility of progress—but not its inevitability.

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This is the second part of a three-part interview with Robert Charles Wilson about Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America. The first part, along with an introduction to the book, appears here. The third part will appear on Friday.

Brian Francis Slattery: In essays, reviews, and popular conversation about science fiction as a genre, one of the constant questions is to what extent science fiction attempts to predict the future and to what extent it seeks to comment on the present day. This has always struck me as a silly question to ask of the entire genre, but a good one to ask of individual books. With Julian Comstock, how much are you in the prediction business and how much are you in the social commentary business?

Robert Charles Wilson: I don’t believe science fiction is about prediction, except in the sense that we try occasionally try to explore some obvious contingency like nuclear warfare or space travel. What interested me in writing Julian wasn’t the particular minutiae of change (about which I’m as ignorant as anyone), but an attempt to represent a realistic degree of change.

I mean, how bizarre would contemporary headlines look to Herman Melville or Harriet Beecher Stowe? Air war over Afghanistan, a black Democratic president, gay marriage: this stuff would never have been considered “plausible” prediction, back in the day. And yet here we are. And that’s how it works. The future is contingent, deeply and intrinsically unknowable. Much of the background stuff in Julian Comstock that seems kind of off the wall—the U.S. battling the Dutch for possession of Labrador—is there to represent the changes that are both inevitable and not linearly predictable.

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Robert Charles Wilson’s Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America opens on an America 163 years from now that looks a bit like the 19th century but feels, in unexpected and delightful ways, very much like the present. In Julian Comstock, with the demise of oil, America has returned to preindustrial levels of technology. The nation’s calamitous fall—involving a thorough depletion of the population and the collapse of the political system as we know it—is a hazy historical memory, replaced by a larger-feeling country, more sparsely populated and more difficult to control. The much-weakened government vies for authority with the Dominion, a huge religious organization with theocratic aims, while waging a war with a European power for possession of a recently opened Northwest Passage.

Into the political, military, and religious tumult steps Julian Comstock, the nephew of the current president, Deklan Conqueror, and—inconveniently for Deklan—also the son of Deklan’s brother Bryce, the former president whom Deklan had executed in his ascent to power. Julian’s own artistic and political ambitions carry him and his best friend, Adam Hazzard, from the Midwest to Labrador to New York City, from homesteads to army barracks to the halls of power. The novel, narrated by Hazzard, is funny and sad, accessible and thought-provoking; a story of the future written in the style of the past; a light romance and a war saga; a novel of power plays and intimate friendship, where the personal is political and the political is personal.

When Tor.com asked me if I’d be willing to interview Wilson about Julian Comstock, I quickly said yes and then became intimidated, wondering how I’d manage to ask him questions that he wouldn’t think were stupid. As it turned out, Wilson was as generous in reality as he is in his books. The interview, conducted over email, took several weeks. I originally imagined that, after editing it, I’d come up with a good 1,200-word piece. However, Wilson kept answering my questions in such entertaining and intriguing ways that I had no choice but to keep asking more questions. I’m thus dividing the interview into three parts, of which this is the first. The second part will appear on Wednesday; the third part on Friday.

[Interview below the fold!]

It’s considered good form for novelists to maintain a serene distance from reviews and critical essays of their work. After writing a book, they’re supposed to be quiet about it unless asked to speak (e.g., in an interview, on a panel, in fan mail), and there are a lot of good reasons for this to be so; in a big way, the novelist has already had her say by writing the book in the first place. But many novelists can’t completely play dead like Roland Barthes says they should, as they (which would include me) work with words in other ways. They are editors, essayists, and publishers, and—even more problematic—review books themselves.

In celebration of John Updike’s life, Paper Cuts recently drew attention to a Critical Mass post detailing his rules for reviewing other people’s books. The meat of his approach, to me, is contained in two points—“Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt¹…. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author’s ouevre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it’s his and not yours?”—and in this longer passage:

Review the book, not the reputation. Submit to whatever spell, weak or strong, is being cast. Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.

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My last post about how nothing is weirder than the truth came from history. This one comes from biology.¹ Kleptoplasty is the ability of one organism to steal the intact cells—and incorporate some of the abilities of—another organism. The term is most frequently used to describe how certain sea slugs can retain and utilize the chloroplasts and (as far as I understand this)² genetic material of algae after ingestion so that they can photosynthesize; in somewhat plainer English, the slugs eat the algae and afterward can be considered to be solar-powered plant-animal hybrids. Depending on the species, the slugs are able to photosynthesize for anywhere from a few days to several months.

As a sheer natural phenomenon, it’s pretty crazy, a little bit like someone being able to sprout wings after eating a live chicken. It’s also a shot across the bow to creation science, as it may be an honest-to-God example of a species in the early stages of evolving from one type of animal into another—the paucity of obvious cases of which creation scientists use to argue against the theory of evolution. Sorry, guys.

¹ Thanks to a friend who’s also a PhD candidate in oceanography for this one.

² People who know more about biology than I do—and believe me, it doesn’t take much to know more about biology than I do—are hereby welcomed and encouraged to walk all over this post.

One of the many reasons I prize science fiction, fantasy, and the more psychedelic aspects of other branches of fiction is the simple thrill of watching writers unfetter their imaginations on the page. Most of my favorite books take me on a trip, usually the longer the better.¹ Yet for fiction to work, there are rules to follow and conventions to at least nod to. Expectations must be set up and employed, if not necessarily satisfied. There must be road signs, something like a beginning, middle, and end. We like to be surprised, but not too surprised. We like our irony, but not too tight. Fiction, in short, has to keep it between the ditches: For each reader, there is such a thing as “too much”—on one side, too much randomness or craziness, too much suspension of disbelief, and on the other, too much familiarity, predictability, inevitability.

Reality,² however, has no such constraints. Things can just happen, seemingly unconnected to anything. In our interpretation of actual events or facts, coincidences can pile upon coincidences, or absurdities upon absurdities, that would seem altogether too forced if they appeared in a novel but delight us when they appear in nonfiction. And the natural world often seems to outstrip the human ability for invention, leaving us in awe. Really, nothing is weirder than the truth.³

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Hello all. Long time no see. Been a bit busy; more on this later. But I wanted to respond first to Joshua Starr’s post about the Thermals a few weeks ago (in response to my post about Joanna Newsom). His post reminded me of another album that listens like a novel: Camper Van Beethoven’s New Roman Times,¹ which is, well, about the disintegration of the United States in a civil war, all told from the point of view of a young man who, in the course of the album, goes from soldier to intelligence officer to resistance fighter to suicide bomber. It’s all laid out in the song index,² though this being Camper Van Beethoven, the plot is often strayed from to include some neo-hippie gorgeousness; surreal, angry, and funny political snark; big genre-blending instrumentals; a piece by Steve Reich (!); and a little ska-inflected trip to Uzbekistan. Also, the music is pretty great.

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The connection between music and books is strong and deep. Paul Bowles was a composer. Nicholson Baker was (is?) a musician. The last page of Jeff VanderMeer’s Shriek has a music acknowledgments page detailing what he was listening to while he wrote the book. This paragraph could go on and on, and it’s easy to see why: in some sense, musicians and writers are after the same thing in the effect they hope to have on their audience.

Yet music has a leg up on words in the way that it can hit us so directly. Using words alone, it’s really hard to bottle the kind of lightning that countless three-minutes-of-heaven-type songs have bottled. But some music provides much the same kind of pleasure as reading a great book; it’s capable of transfixing listeners for a long time, taking them somewhere and bringing them back again, and changing them in the process. One such album is Joanna Newsom’s Ys, which, having listened to it at least a hundred times, I’ve started to think of as the best fantasy novel I’ve ever heard.

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Despite the occasional writing I do, short and long, I’m really an editor; not only do I seem to have more of an editorial personality (as has been told to me anecdotally by both editors and writers), but it’s what I do with the vast majority of my working hours as well as some of my free time.

One project that I’m involved in these days is the New Haven Review, a fledgling journal that has the mission of drawing attention to both New Haven–area writers and unfairly neglected books.¹ Our website publishes reviews on a regular basis of said books; in our print edition, which comes out twice a year, we’ve so far published essays, memoirs, photography, poetry, and fiction. One unintended but really interesting consequence of our desire to celebrate New Haven’s writers, however, is that we’ve become—well, not genre blind, because that’s being willfully ignorant, but what I’ve taken to calling genre blithe.

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It is one of the strangest stories we have heard of. It concerns one of the great mysteries of creation, life and death. Beware. Perhaps it will offend you. It may even terrify you. Not many films in the whole world have had a greater impact. But I advise you not to take it very seriously.

So says the man in the tuxedo who introduces Frankenstein, the movie within a movie at the beginning of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, a Spanish movie from 1973. Made in the last years of the Franco era, the plot concerns a young girl, Ana, who lives in a remote town in Spain at the end of the Spanish civil war. After seeing Frankenstein, goaded by her sister, Ana comes to believe that the actual Frankenstein monster lives in an abandoned building outside of town—the same building where a fugitive happens to take refuge. Thus do the girl’s imaginative world and the world of her country’s politics get woven together, until the game of what is real and what is not matters much less than what the filmmaker is able to do by blending the two together.

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My last post about why Latin American science fiction is relatively unknown in the United States led to an interesting discussion of translation costs. David G. Hartwell argued that the cost of translation makes it very difficult for translated books to make a profit, and both he and bluejo talked about how U.S. readers may tend to see translated works as damaged goods—they aren’t the words the author wrote, after all, and there’s no telling how good the translation is going to be.

Certainly good translations can be done (see, e.g., Edith Grossman and Ralph Manheim); in some cases, they might even improve the text. This story is probably apocryphal, but I remember hearing that German students of philosophy sometimes resort to reading Hegel in English translation because he makes more sense that way. But particularly good translators are doubtless more expensive than average. From a financial standpoint, getting an award-winning translator to work on an unknown novelist is almost certainly not in the cards.

But that’s assuming that the entity shouldering the translation costs wants or needs to make a profit. Derryl Murphy pointed out that arts organizations, sometimes with government funding (e.g., the Canada Council) might help to foot the bill. And just yesterday, the New York Times blog Paper Cuts brought up Kalima, a project funded by the United Arab Emirates to translate English works into Arabic. Which brings me to the reason for this post’s existence.

Kalima is, to me, a fascinating initiative. “What literature best captures American dreams, opportunities and challenges?” its website asks. “Which books could help build mutual understanding between the United States and the Arab world?” To answer these questions, Kalima “invites Americans to nominate U.S. novels, poetry or short stories for translation for Arabic readers worldwide.”

The Paper Cuts thread was started by Barry Gewen, the Times’ nonfiction editor, whose five recommendations for Kalima include Samuel Huntington’s political science classic The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, which remains as important and controversial a book as ever, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles: Volume One—as Gewen puts it, “the first volume of the autobiography of the man who is arguably America’s most important cultural figure of the last 50 years.”

But if it’s American dreams we’re talking about here, then science fiction and fantasy should be included. Which SFF books do you think would best serve as U.S. emissaries to the Arab world? And, after reading this post, why not head over to Kalima’s website and nominate them? And while we’re at it, who do we lobby for a similar initiative to translate Arabic works into English?

Commenting on one of my previous posts, rogeronthehill said that he “would love to hear from anyone who knows of any non-U.S. and non-European SF that reflects a complementary view from what used to be called ‘the developing world.’”¹

He’s not alone. Where are the science-fiction authors that aren’t from the United States and Europe? Why aren’t they as well-known as their U.S. and European peers?

This week, late to the party as usual, I finally got a hold of my first anthology to try to get at this question, a book from 2003 called Cosmos Latinos: An Anthology of Science Fiction from Latin America and Spain. I confess that I’ve only just begun to read the stories in the book, but a comment in the introduction is worth mentioning all by itself. According to the editors,

most bookstores in Latin America and Spain that do have a science fiction section stock mostly translations into Spanish or Portuguese of the European and North American classics. Regional authors are not yet being seriously cultivated by publishers, who see little profitability in marketing domestic SF, both because there is insufficient demand for it among the local book-buying public, and because most people’s familiarity with SF has come by way of Hollywood blockbusters and therefore, by extension, for any SF to be “good” it must be imported…. Significant cultural and economic barriers still need to be overcome so that [Spanish and Latin American SF] may enjoy the wider readership at home and abroad that they deserve.

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I was going to write something more about the connection between science fiction and academia, but Jon Evans’ post last week about the difference between magical realism and fantasy—and the ream of comments it produced—was too interesting to pass up. Genre definition questions are endless, of course, but they’re fun to talk about because they get at the heart of why each of us loves books; why we’ve spent countless hours of our lives looking at letters printed on bleached sheets of pulped wood.

Anyway, the post sent me racing back to David Lodge. As a literary critic, Lodge is in a relatively unique position in that he’s also a successful novelist, and one of the pleasures of reading his essays is to witness the way in which he can switch roles in mid-argument, speaking as a creator and a recipient of both books and criticism about books. This is most apparent in “The Novelist at the Crossroads,” an essay from 1971.

In this essay, Lodge—who, by his own description, writes “realistic” novels, by which he means simply novels about plausibly real people doing plausibly real things in plausibly real places—is responding to what he saw at the time as a crisis in definition as to what the heck a novel was any more.¹ Faced with people like Norman Mailer on one side and William S. Burroughs on the other, Lodge writes:

The situation of the novelist today may be compared to a man standing at a crossroads. The road on which he stands…is the realistic novel…but the pressure of skepticism on the aesthetic and epistemological premises of literary realism is now so intense that many novelists, instead of marching confidently straight ahead, are at least considering the two routes that branch off in opposite directions of the crossroads. One of these routes leads to the nonfiction novel and the other to what Mr. Scholes² calls “fabulation.”

Lodge, brave soul, then attempts to define fabulation:

Such narratives suspend realistic illusion in some significant degree in the interests of a freedom in plotting characteristic of romance or in the interest of an explicitly allegorical manipulation of meaning, or both. They also tend to draw inspiration from certain popular forms of literature … especially science fiction, pornography, and the thriller. Of these, science fiction has the most respectable pedigree.³

I know, I know—inherent in Lodge’s formulation here is the yawning gulf he creates between literary fiction and other kinds of fiction, and the value judgment that gulf always seems to imply. Let’s forgive Lodge what appears to be his condescending attitude toward science fiction, because I don’t think he means to be a jerk.

The point he’s making is that for the writer, issues of genre label conventions and their importance to what the writer is trying to accomplish aren’t constraints: they’re choices. They’re only as important as the writer wants them to be. She can choose to work within the bounds of a particular genre and write straight-up realistic fiction or the hardest of hard SF or the surrealest of the surreal. Or, she can mix and match the rules of these separate genres to her heart’s content.

[Read more below the fold...]

A couple of years ago I covered a conference of military officers and academics who gathered together to speculate on what America’s next large-scale war—as in, a war on the order of World War II—might look like and how it might be fought. In the paper I was commissioned to write, I was encouraged to poke at the meta-question of why we conceive of war the way we do, which led pretty naturally to science fiction.¹ One book I came across that proved really useful for getting my bearings was Future War Novels: An Annotated Bibliography of Works in English Published Since 1946. Published by Oryx Press in 1984, this book must have been a labor of love for its authors, John Newman and Michael Unsworth, who read and wrote up paragraph-long synopses of 191 novels from the famous to the obscure (at least to me), editorializing when they were so moved.²

Clearly avid science fiction readers, Newman and Unsworth also explicitly connected their efforts to their contemporaneous geopolitical situation: the Cold War, and more to the point, the chances of it becoming hot. As the authors put it,

nuclear war is not unthinkable, as persons outraged at the idea sometimes say. Indeed, we think and write about nuclear war, and future war in general, all of the time…. The fiction since 1945, even that dealing with small or undeclared wars, reflects a political and military situation in which weapons are never far over the horizon.

It’s not even remotely news that science fiction offers a running commentary on current events. For me at least (I was born in 1975), science fiction defined the Cold War more than what I learned in school did; to this day, whenever I think about the Cold War, the sound of a theremin is not far behind.

But the obvious connection between science fiction and current events brings us to an interesting point: What is science fiction commenting on now? It’s a slippery question, as since the end of the Cold War, the way that the world appears in the popular imagination has been in a bit of flux.

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Hello all. You’re probably wondering who I am and why I’m blogging on Tor.com. A couple of years ago, I finished the first draft of a book that had as its backdrop the economic collapse of the United States. That book—Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six after the Collapse of the United States of America—just happens to be coming out (from Tor) today, and its eerie convergence with current events led the folks at Tor.com to ask me if I’d be interested in doing some blogging about politics, economics, and science fiction, and the connections among them. Even though I said on my website that I’d be a horrendous blogger, I decided to give it a shot. Here goes.

As Patrick Nielsen Hayden pointed out yesterday, new Nobel laureate Paul Krugman has said that economics is as close to Asimov’s psychohistory as you can get. I’m not as well-versed in either economics or science fiction as I should be—see my standing disclaimer here—but from where I stand, knee-deep in both fields, the mindsets that practice economics and create science fiction appear to be startlingly similar. (We’ll leave aside for now the question of whether economics is really a science.) In many instances of both, a model of a world is constructed and tested, its implications teased out, its contradictions probed. Both resemble the real world in important ways, but diverge from them in other important ways; both can be understood as exercises in alternate realities that inform the reality that we believe we live in.

Please excuse the ridiculous pomposity, gross simplification, and sweeping generalities in that last sentence.

[I’m going somewhere with this.]