Early Literature

I've been trying to remember the first science fiction story I ever read. And honestly, I don't remember. The first book I can remember reading had something to do with pumpkins and autumn leaves. The first book I can remember in halfway concrete terms was a kid's biography of the seven Mercury astronauts.

But the first science fiction I ever read that had a distinct impact on me was Arthur C. Clarke's Against the Fall of Night. It impressed me so much that soon I had dredged the family's old Royal typewriter out of the closet and was hammering away, using a ribbon so worn out the letters were no more than ghosts. I'd guess I was about twelve, but that's just a guess. The highest praise I can give a book is that it makes me want to write something equally good. The worst condemnation I can give a book is that it makes me think I could easily write something better. Against the Fall of Night definitely is of the former variety.

I've been a fan of Clarke ever since. I remember there was a lot of argument about the Clarke school of science fiction and the Asimov school. I was definitely a Clarke partisan. I liked Asimov well enough (though I never actually made it all the way through the hefty Foundation business), but if I had to pick one author to have dinner with, it would have been Clarke. I particularly liked the fact that his science fiction has all the usual technical elements, but it also had a strong metaphysical component, something that I thought was lacking in the Asimov/Niven tradition. That metaphysical element was present in Against the Fall of Night and would eventually reach fruition in the masterful Childhood's End.

It doesn't seem to me that science fiction today has figures like Arthur C. Clarke any more. It seems that everything I've read lately (meaning, since about 1985) falls into one of about four categories:

1. Hard science fiction in the manner of The Integral Trees, which is interesting as an intellectual exercise but not very much fun as a story. This also includes the later Ringworld novels, which I didn't find very compelling.

2. Cyberpunk stuff, where the authors try to imitate the power and style of William Gibson's short stories Burning Chrome and Johnny Mnemonic and fail every time.

3. Alternate history stuff of the Harry Turtledove ilk, which I find interesting for a little while, but these "what if Julius Caesar had a Piper Cub" speculations are a bit like shoestring potatoes - good at first, but I don't want the whole can, and they aren't good for me anyway. (Curiously, I had a cat that loved shoestring potatoes and got pretty good at hooking them out of the can with an extended claw. Maybe she would have finished the World At War series.)

4. Avant garde stuff that tries so hard to be "unconventional" I can never seem to figure out what's going on. Such stuff often takes on weird textual forms - multiple levels of indenting, lack of capital letters, strange out-of-context sentences that may well be snippets from a Maytag washing machine manual for all I can tell.

Where are the novels like Childhood's End these days?

IJ

I just finished reading the David Foster Wallace novel Infinite Jest yesterday. Been at it for a while too, have I, inasmuch as the novel runs over 1,000 pages with endnotes, and often confronts the reader with page-length multi-clause sentences, deliberately obfuscatory denseness that brings post-structuralist writings to mind, and a wild lexical exuberance that expanded my personal vocabulary considerably. It may not be the Mount Everest of novel-reading experiences, but it's way up there, high enough that oxygen stops being a good idea and becomes a requirement. It's not Tarnsman of Gor, in short.

I'm not always good at discerning themes in novels, and I'm known to claim that a great many novels have no theme at all. Reviewers seem to be much better at this sort of thing than I am - this novel is about retribution and redemption, they write, while to me it was either a good story or a bad one. (I think reviewers occasionally invent improbable themes just to make themselves seem smart - this novel examines the ontological implications of left-handedness within a context of post-modern urban ennui and its effect on the Ozone Layer.) I'm quite certain that Infinite Jest abounds with thematically-oriented material, but the best I can come up with is a vague notion that addiction sucks, recovery from said addiction is next to impossible, and everyone in the novel completely screwed, being either addicted or mentally ill or, usually, both.

It's incredibly literate, and Wallace's command of the craft of writing is masterful. It is also madly funny in places, but the humor is usually countered by many-page digressions on the physical and mental decay that comes with addiction (there's rather a lot of defecating in one's pants, for example, not normally something I go out of my way to read, especially since chemo brought me face-to-face with that particular horror).

The story is highly segmented and nonlinear, with many levels and subplots that often seem to (and occasionally do) have nothing to do with anything. The narrator and narrative style change often, as often as not within and not between chapters - it sometimes takes the reader a while to figure out who's talking (and speaking of talking, there are long sections that are nothing but dialogue entirely without attribution, and if you forget who's talking, well, trouble arises).

It's not easy to read, but it's gripping, mostly as a window in a world of mental illness and addiction that I have next to no experience with. My main experience with addiction and recovery comes from my attempts to quit smoking, and somehow a mild cigarette jones doesn't seem to be worth mentioning when you're reading about, say, Kate Gompert's completely unresolvable unipolar depression or Don Gately's problem with oral narcotics.

Don't get me wrong, it's a fabulously worthwhile read, especially if you're of a mind to see a master writer work his craft. Just don't expect anything particularly uplifting to happen, because it doesn't. It's funny, sometimes outrageously funny, but it's also deadly depressing in places and - dare I say it - somewhat turgid and overwrought in other places. (Wallace, it should be pointed out, committed suicide by hanging himself, and if this novel is any guide to his inner landscape, it's not too hard to see why - but regarding Wallace, de mortuis nil nisi bonum.)

The novel leaves me with many unanswered (and now, unanswerable) questions, but here's the one that I think about most often:

Q: Why does the ghost of Himself manifest itself to Don Gately and, it is alleged, Ortho "The Darkness" Stice, but not to Hal? Is this some sop to Hamlet, perhaps, a work that I am next to entirely unacquainted with?

I'm not going to read it again, at least not any time soon. I put my life on hold for quite a while reading this gigantic opus and I'm not inclined to do so again - but I will think about it, you can bet on that.