Democrazy, The Personal Planetarium, and the American Way: The Year 1990 in Science Fiction
My most memorable images of 1990 all come from the late summer. We were stuck in a traffic jam, inching past hop fields and little Dorfs up the Autobahn from Munich to Berlin, toward what was still the East German border. All around us were “Trabbis,” little green and beige cars that sounded like motorcycles, jammed to their roofs with Western consumer goods and towing trailers loaded with wrecked Mercedeses, VWs, and mopeds. Over the radio, the Süddeutche Rundfunk played “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.”
Crossing the border, we all slowed down, as if no one really believed the cubicles of the East German customs inspectors were empty. But they were. The only official presence consisted in a convoy of bulldozers scooping up excess concrete. The Cold War was over.
The 1990 World Science Fiction Convention in Holland was the first Worldcon that East Bloc SF professionals attended in force. Many were experiencing their first trip to the West, and their excitement was contagious. One Rumanian SF reader, dropping by a panel in honor of Joe Haldeman, informed Haldeman that he was his favorite author; the Rumanian revealed that Haldeman’s books had been translated and were circulating in the form of typed manuscripts, passed hand to hand. A Soviet science-fiction editor told of publishing an anthology, The Green Book of Science Fiction, filled with stories using the word “green” in the title. It seems that the publisher had located a stock of green paper — Soviet publishing has been continually plagued by paper shortages — so the editors fashioned an anthology to match. The creators of the Polish SF magazine Newa Fantastika explained that their enterprise had just gone private, and they were no longer required to be Party members. Toward the end of the convention, there were many invitations: if you’re ever in Leningrad ... in Warsaw ... in Leipzig...
By New Year’s Eve, the euphoria had died down. A line had been drawn in the sand, and we were two weeks away from a brief but major war. Pat Murphy’s Nebula-nominated story “Love and Sex Among the Invertebrates,” in which the human race is nearly extinct and the machines are just learning to have sex, resonates eerily with the Gulf conflict: technologies were the combatants, and while tanks were “killed,” civilian populations sustained “collateral damage.” But in 1990, we were still innocent. We found ourselves in the middle of a Tolkien knock-off fantasy: a shadow had fallen across the Land (Kuwait), and the forces of Good and Evil were lined on opposite sides of barbed wire and mine fields. Soon the Quest into Mordor would begin!
Although science fiction is now a world literature, to my knowledge no Nebula Award has ever gone to a work in translation. The Nebula process celebrates an essentially American vision of what the field is all about, generally bypassing the Continental product and treating British SF only as a particularly promising colony. When SFWA members say, for example, that British SF exhibits an unnatural fascination with disaster, the implicit comparison is always with the good old upbeat American variety. David Brin, who during his stay in England is said to have impressed the natives with his Americanness, embodies this stance in the preface to his 1990 novel, Earth:
As writers go, I suppose I’m known as a bit of an optimist, so it seems only natural that this novel projects a future where there’s a little more wisdom than folly ... maybe a bit more hope than despair.
In fact, it’s about the most encouraging tomorrow I can imagine right now.
What a sobering thought.
Like the hero of James Patrick Kelly’s fine novella, “Mr. Boy,” in which for those who can afford it all manner of physical and genetic alterations are available, American science fiction is a boy who’s always twelve no matter how old he gets. And yet, for all its traditional callousness and native hopefulness, the field has darkened of late. Brin isn’t the only author to entertain a sobering thought or two. Most American SF writers don’t expect to ever go to the moon, nor do they imagine their grandchildren living there, nor do they necessarily feel it’s a good idea for humans to move into space. These days, travel to other planets is seen as a retreat from the crises unfolding right here on Earth. And while nobody hesitates to concoct even the most implausible nightmare scenarios, the average writer would be embarrassed to extrapolate anything resembling a healthy and functional future. As one of Kim Stanley Robinson’s characters observes in Pacific Edge, “utopia is increasingly difficult to imagine.”check this out American SF, it seems, is losing its American optimism.
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Adventures of the Spherical Cow: Collected Essays
Non-FictionA collection of the essays of Kathryn Cramer. More will be added as I go along. I expect to include "Science Fiction and the Adventures of the Spherical Cow," and others.
