I recently reread William Gibson’s Spook Country. I read it first years ago shortly after publication and it has lurked the back of my memory ever since. Its characters, plot elements and moods would surface even though only vaguely connected to the matters at hand. I wanted to get back into it for another full immersion.
It was a very satisfying re-read.
Now then, I read it on the Kindle and the Kindle has a dangerous aspect, particularly for insomniacs: you can buy a book on impulse at 2 am and be reading it minutes later. Spook Country (of which I had vivid memories) lead to Pattern Language (which I remembered hardly at all despite some overlap in characters and vibe) and then on into a mini-sf reading spree of early Gibson, newer Ian Banks, and mop up Kage Baker.
Noting what remained vivid in memory and what didn’t lead to some thinking about what sf does.
I’ve read various theories over the past decades about the pulps and the limits and appropriate role of genre fiction. My theory of sf matches none of that and simultaneously works as a description of why I like all the interrelated genre’s of sf, fantasy, & horror.
The role of sf is, quite simply, to erode the present.
- Imagine that we sit down with a new volume by a favorite author on the flat plain of the present.
- Hills and valleys have been flattened since last time by the familiarity of the everyday world.
- We read.
- If the volume is effective the world begins to erode.
- In the best possible case, like a stroll atop Sheep Mountain in the South Dakota, flat prarie drops away into a deeply erode landscape of shape and color.
The gradient of how things will move forward has now been changed!
The present flows into the future along an altered channel with different resonance and open possibilities.
And finally that new future feeds back and revises the present. Our world becomes more eerie, more open, more wondrous, more strange.