He's pretty much okay now, though, our science fiction author. He can feed himself and sign checks, and he makes occasional supply trips into the cultural anchorage of SF fandom, where he refreshes his soul by looking at people far worse off than he is. But he dresses funny, and mumbles to himself in the grocery line.
While standing there, he doesn't listen to the other folks and make surreptitious authorly notes about dialogue. Far from it: he's too full of unholy fire to pay much attention to mere human beings. And anyway, his characters generally talk about stuff like neutrinos or Taoism.
His eyes are glazed, cut off at the optic nerve while he watches brain-movies. Too many nights in too many cheap con hotels have blunted his sense of aesthetics; his characters live in geodomes or efficiencies or yurts. They wear one-piece jumpsuits because jumpsuits make people one monotonous color from throat to foot, which allows our attention to return to the neutrinos--of which, incidentally, ninety percent of the universe consists, so that the entire visible world of matter is a mere *froth*, if we only knew.
But he's learned his craft, our science fiction paladin. The real nutcases don't have enough mental horsepower to go where he's gone. He works hard and he thinks hard and he knows what he's doing. He's read Kuttner and Kornbluth and Blish and Knight, and he knows how to Develop an Idea entertainingly and rigorously, and how to keep pages turning meanwhile, and by Christ those are no easy things. So there, Mr. John Updike with your highflown talk of aht and beautieh. That may be okay for you Ivy League pinky- lifters with your sissy bemoaning about the Crisis of Culture ... As if there was going to be a culture after the millennial advent of (Biotech) (Cybernetics) (Space Travel) (Robots) (Atomic Energy) (General Semantics) (Dean Drive) (Dianetics) ...
So--there's the difference. It exists, for better or worse. None of this is lost on John Updike. He knows about science fiction, not a hell of a lot, but probably vastly more than most science fiction writers know about John Updike. He recognizes that it requires specialized expertise to write good SF, and that there are vast rustling crowds of us on the other side of the cultural spacewarp, writing for Ace Books and _Amazing Stories_. Updike reads Vonnegut and Le Guin and Calvino and Lem and Wells and Borges, and would probably read anybody else whose prose didn't cause him physical pain. And from this reading, he knows that the worldview is different in SFville ... that writers think literature, and that SF writers think SF.
And he knows, too, that it's not T.S. Eliot's world any more, if indeed it ever was T.S. Eliot's world. He knows we live in a world that loves to think SF, and has thought SF ever since Hiroshima, which was the ne plus ultra of Millennial Technological Advents, which really and truly did change the world forever.
So Updike has rolled up his pinstriped sleeves and bent his formidable intelligence in our direction, and lo we have a science fiction novel, _Roger's Version_ by John Updike.
Of course it's not *called* a science fiction novel. Updike has seen Le Guin and Lem and Vonnegut crawl through the spacewarp into his world. He's seen them wriggle out, somehow, barely, gasping and stinking of rocket fuel. Updike has no reason to place himself in a position they went to great pains to escape. But _Roger's Version_ does feature a computer on its cover, if not a rocketship or a babe in a bubble helmet, and by heaven it is a science fiction novel--and a very good one.
_Roger's Version_ is Updike's version of what SF should be on about. It deals with SF's native conceptual underpinnings: the impact of technology on society. The book is about technolatry, about millennial visionary thinking. This is SF-think as examined by a classic devotee of lit-think.
It's all there, quite upfront and nakedly science fictional. It puzzles mainstream commentators. "It's as though Updike had challenged himself to convert into the flow of his novel the most resistant stuff he could think of," marvels the _Christian Science Monitor_, alarmed to find a Real Novel that actually deals straightforwardly with real ideas. "The aggressiveness of Updike's imagination is often a marvel," says _People_, a mag whose utter lack of imagination is probably its premier selling point.
And look at this list of author's credits: Fred Hoyle, Martin Gardner, Gerald Feinberg, Robert Jastrow. Don't tell me Updike's taken the *science* seriously. But he has--he's not the man to deny the devil his due, especially after writing _Witches of Eastwick_, which would have been called a fantasy novel if it had been written badly by a nobody.
But enough of this high-flown abstraction--let's get to grips with the book. There's these two guys, see. There's Roger Lambert, a middle-aged professor of theology, a white-wine-sipping adultery-contemplating intellectual New Englander who probably isn't eighty light-years removed from John Updike. Roger's a nasty piece of business, mostly, lecherous, dishonest and petty-minded, and obsessed with a kind of free- floating Hawthornian Protestant guilt that has been passed down for twenty generations up Boston way and hasn't gotten a bit more specific in the meantime.
And then there's Roger Lambert's antagonist, Dale Kohler. Dale's a young computer hacker with pimples and an obnoxious cocksure attitude. If Dale were just a little more hip about it, he'd be a cyberpunk, but for thematic reasons Updike chose to make Dale a born-again Christian. We never really believe this, though, because Dale almost never talks Jesus. He talks AND-OR circuits, and megabytes, and Mandelbrot sets, with all the techspeak fluency Updike can manage, which is considerable. Dale talks God on a microchip, technological transcendence, and he was last seen in Greg Bear's _Blood Music_ where his name was different but his motive and character were identical. Dale is a type. Not just a science fictional type, but the type that *creates* science fiction, who talks God for the same reason Philip K. Dick talked God. Because it comes with the territory.
Oh yeah, and then we've got some women. They don't amount to much. They're not people, exactly. They're temptresses and symbols.
There's Roger Lambert's wife, Esther, for instance. Esther ends up teaching Dale Kohler the nature of sin, which utterly destroys Dale's annoying moral certitude, and high time, too. Esther does this by the simple expedient of adulterously fucking Dale's brains out, repeatedly and in meticulously related detail, until Dale collapses from sheer weight of original sin.
A good trick. But Esther breezes through this inferno of deviate carnality, none the worse for the experience; invigorated, if anything. Updike tells us an old tale in this: that women *are* sexuality, vast unplumbed cisterns of it, creatures of mystery, vamps of the carnal abyss. I just can't bring myself to go for this notion, even if the Bible tells me so. I know that women don't believe this stuff.
Then there's Roger Lambert's niece, Verna. I suspect she represents the Future, or at least the future of America. Verna's a sad case. She lives on welfare with her illegitimate mulatto kid, a little girl who is Futurity even more incarnate. Verna listens to pop music, brain-damaging volumes of it. She's cruel and stupid, and as corrupt as her limited sophistication allows. She's careless of herself and others, exults in her degradation, whores sometimes when she needs the cocaine money. During the book's crisis, she breaks her kid's leg in a reckless fit of temper.
A woman reading this portrayal would be naturally enraged, reacting under the assumption that Updike intends us to believe in Verna as an actual human being. But Verna, being a woman, isn't. Verna is America, instead: dreadfully hurt and spiritually degraded, cheapened, teasing, but full of vitality, and not without some slim hope of redemption, if she works hard and does what's best for her (as defined by Roger Lambert). Also, Verna possesses the magic of fertility, and nourishes the future, the little girl Paula. Paula, interestingly, is every single thing that Roger Lambert isn't, i.e. young, innocent, trusting, beautiful, charming, lively, female and not white.