“I don’t want to change,” she said coldly, staring with open distaste at his smooth profile, his soft effeminate hands. Who was he to call her abnormal? “I like my sexuality just the way it is.”
Dr Hamilton returned her look, a glint of human malice breaking through his doctor-act. “Listen. I’ll tell you something for free.” A weird sensation jumped in her crotch. For a moment she had a prick: a hand lifted and cradled the warm weight of her balls. She stifled a yelp of shock. He grinned. “I’ve been looking for a long time, and I know. There is no tall, dark man…”
He returned to her notes. “You say you were ‘raped,’ ” he continued, as if nothing had happened. “Yet you chose to continue the virtual session. Can you explain that?”
She thought of the haunted darkness, the cold air on her naked body; the soreness of her bruises; a rag of flesh used and tossed away. How it had felt to lie there: intensely alive, tasting the dregs, beaten back at the gates of the fortunate land. In dreamland, even betrayal had such rich depth and fascination. And she was free to enjoy, because it didn’t matter.
“You wouldn’t understand.”
Out in the lobby there were people coming and going. It was lunchtime, the lifts were busy. “Sonja” noticed a round-shouldered geek of a little man making for the entrance to the clinic. She wondered idly if that could be “Lessingham.”
She would drop out of the group. The adventure with “Lessingham” was over, and there was no one else for her. She needed to start again. The doctor knew he’d lost a customer, that was why he’d been so open with her today. He certainly guessed, too, that she’d lose no time in signing on somewhere else on the semi-medical fringe. What a fraud all that therapy-talk was! He’d never have dared to play the sex-change trick on her, except that he knew she was an addict. She wasn’t likely to go accusing him of unprofessional conduct. Oh, he knew it all. But his contempt didn’t trouble her.
So, she had joined the inner circle. She could trust Dr Hamilton’s judgment. He had the telltales: he would know. She recognised with a feeling of mild surprise that she had become a statistic, an element in a fashionable social concern: an epidemic flight into fantasy, inadequate personalities, unable to deal with the reality of normal human sexual relations… But that’s crazy, she thought. I don’t hate men, and I don’t believe “Lessingham” hates women. There’s nothing psychotic about what we’re doing. We’re making a consumer choice. Virtual sex is easier, that’s all. Okay, it’s convenience food. It has too much sugar, and a certain blandness. But when a product comes along, that is cheaper, easier and more fun to use than the original version, of course people are going to buy it.
The lift was full. She stood, drab bodies packed around her, breathing the stale air. Every face was a mask of dull endurance. She closed her eyes. The caravanserai walls rose strangely from the empty plain…
Sterling to Kessel, 7 April 1985:
“I once read some remark of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s in which he spoke of wrenching his stories from his emotional wounds — in this case, it was some busted affair from which he was ‘still bleeding like a haemophiliac.’ It was from a letter he sent to some writing hopeful, a young woman begging him for advice, and one suspects he laid it on a bit thick with the Ever-Popular Tortured Artist Effect.
But this sort of ‘writer’s paradigm’ has stuck with me and caused me many moments of doubt. It makes me wonder to what extent science fiction is ‘fiction’ at all. Perhaps it is based on emotion, and the central emotion is wonder. But wonder is such a pale and nebulous thing, and shades off into intellectual curiosity, or even just an abstract admiration for imaginative cleverness….
It also strikes me that each of your examples: Hamlet, The Glass Key, Persuasion, The Secret Agent, fulfills its genre rather than distorting it. Each of them delivers the pop genre elements that the audience expects. The Glass Key, for instance, is not a mainstream piece shoehorned into the restrictions of genre, but a genre piece elevated to the status of literature….
I don’t think anyone can really understand SF who does not have a solid understanding of Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. Here is a story without characters, almost without plot, and markedly devoid of humanistic values. And by any meaningful standard of definition this book is great science fiction.”
Kessel to Sterling, 1 March 1987:
“I just taught Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s some kind of crazy great book, but it’s not all there is to sf, and certainly not all there is to fantastic literature. And Bruce, I hate to break this to you, but to people of a certain disposition it’s boring as three-day-old shit. I’m talking about normal in-the-street readers, not English majors. I think such people are missing something, but they’ve got a case. I suspect that what you think makes Star Maker a great book is also what you consider to be the central virtue of sf: its speculative content. There are other views. I don’t buy into a set of standards that makes only such work the best of the genre….
I could be wrong. I don’t expect us to agree. The most cogent statement I found in your letter was your handwritten note at the end of page one where you suggest, ‘let’s wait until we’re both dead, O.K.?’ I’m ready to declare a truce on the basis of that statement.”
Jonathan Lethem
How We Got in Town and out Again
Jonathan Lethem, in a series of stories in the early to mid-1990s challenged the pieties of CP, seeing the promises of freedom and power offered by such staples as virtual reality as a new realm for hucksters and scam artists. As in so much of his fiction, here Lethem finds a literary ancestor, in this case Horace McCoy’s 1930s novel of dance marathons in the Great Depression, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The result is a vision of desperate humans in a broken economy imagining VR as a way out.
When we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.
It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“You let me talk,” said Gloria.
“You think we could get into town with them?”
“Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”
I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.
“Hey,” said Gloria.
Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.
The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn’t know their names yet.
“Beat it,” said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. “We’re busy,” he said.