SciFi

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Will L. wonders about the relation of TRP to sci fi...

I've raved a bit about Stanislaw Lem before.  He described his own history 
as a sci fi fan in an interview I read within the last 5-6 years.  He had 
just started writing what I would call literature with science when the 
postwar cultural clampdown essentially cut off access to NATO media.  He 
noted his unhappy surprise when he was able to reconnect with it again...he 
had imagined that Anglo science fiction would be dealing ever more deeply 
with science during the interim.  What he found was the overwhelming flood 
of fantasy.  (I started to notice this in the late seventies, when the 
linear inches of "science" sci fi on the store shelves gave way to newer 
fantasy genres---then one day, there was no longer a distinction.)

I keep mentioning Lem because his work seems to utilize science in a very 
similar way to TRP...as content, not just scenery.  He's also very funny, 
and essentially a humanist---he humanizes robots rather than cyberizing 
people.  Anything you can get of his is worthy stuff---Solaris (made into an 
excellent movie, which I've seen in Blockheadbuster); a book of imaginary 
prefaces to ludicrous but complex "scientific" tomes; The Investigation, a 
mystery with paranormal dimensions; Memoirs Found in a Bathtub; a whole 
series of stories about Pirx the pilot, a sort of Cosmonaut Sweik; and about 
ten other titles.

In all of this, science helps to decribe the human condition.  Just like 
Pirate's rooftop mediations on the trajectory of the rocket.  Or the 
parabolic math of garter belts.  Or the psycological meaning of Pavlov and 
Lamark.  The scope of TRP's intellectual digestion is remarkable, and not 
just in literary business.  The comparison to cyberpunk is back-cover blurb 
stuff.  Not to knock cyberpunk or fantasy genres, I've consumed and enjoyed 
a lot of it---but none of it compares to the works of a Pynchon (or a 
Gaddis, whether you like reading him or not).  Some works are repositories, 
records of the state of our humanity that surpass all others in acumen and 
scope.  We don't need to argue about whether they're art or not.  Science is 
not a scenic element or a plot device at this level.  It needs to be 
subsumed into humanist letters---that will be a mark of our ability to 
control it, rather than vice versa.


 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------  
 -------
Lindsay Gillies                           FMR Corp.
lindsay.gillies at fmr.com         82 Devonshire Street, R22A
617-563-5363                              Boston, MA 02109
 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------  
 -------