Tickling Wolves - Some Thoughts Inspired by Fritz Leiber

I just finished reading a story about an invention called the Tickler. It starts out as a joke about a mechanical reminder so you wouldn't need a secretary (it was written in the early '60s) and ends up being a telepathic hive minded robot that controls the thoughts of the entire population.

Once I finished it, I opened up my laptop and this thing flashed at me at the bottom of the screen - "I'm Cortana. I can help you. Ask me anything." There's that circle next to it, white and ominous like some unblinking eye. It was eerie.

It's like the time I'd recently finished reading Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 where the main character's wife detaches herself from reality within a TV show that has become her family. The screens are three walls of the living room, she really wants the fourth wall put in, closing the reality, putting her on the stage with the actors and letting her exit the real world. Then I turned on the TV and saw an ad for Big Brother. That was eerie too.

I won't tell you how I reacted when I read about the original Big Brother. Let's just say I nodded a lot as I did.

It all sounds conspiratorial. Too far-fetched. We'd never let those terrible things happen, would we? Authors write what they know. We may stretch and play with ideas, but the ideas come from somewhere. Our world is changing, faster every day, it's difficult to keep up, sometimes we don't want to know everything that's going on, we find ways to tune out. We plug in to switch off - it's a strange dichotomy.

I'm not saying we're living in a dystopia. I'm not saying we're not either. It's hard to know. Are we heading for one? If so, how do we stop it? If we go one way can we be sure that isn't the way to dystopia? In the end what is dystopia? The underlying factor, in the stories of ticklers, book-burning firemen, omnipresent big brothers and others, is thinking. The masses, usually everyone, stops thinking. They may know a lot, they may be very switched on with the news, but they don't think. Nor do they dream. So let's never forget how to think - rationally - and to dream - irrationally and with abandon.

For the record, the story was the first of four in Fritz Leiber's The Night of the Wolf, a sort of anthology/paste-up novel. In the book it's called 'The Lone Wolf' but it was originally published as 'The Creature from Cleveland Depths' in Galaxy 1962.

Keep dreaming!

Fahrenheit 91

I wrote this a couple of days ago but I’m finally putting it up.

I wasn’t sure whether to write a blog about the passing of Ray Bradbury but the Sydney Morning Herald online tipped my hand. Bradbury was without a doubt a master storyteller and a prolific one. He created worlds and ideas with clarity and precision. It’s not stretching anything to say he was one of the greats of SF – by which I mean Speculative Fiction, not just science fiction.

What drives me to write this however is not simple memoriam but an element of disgust with SMH for its reporting of Bradbury’s death; a brief paragraph followed by a reprint of an opinion piece arguing that Bradbury was not a ‘literary’ SF author but the king of ‘pulp’. A simple short obituary would’ve sufficed but to spare the effort they rerun something that ends by saying “The king of pulp [Bradbury] lives.” I ask you, is that appropriate?

Now, the piece was not disparaging of Bradbury overall but it did seem to argue against his skills in writing while explaining how brilliant a writer he was. Regardless, it was not a way to report the death of a writer, pulp or otherwise.

This brings me to the other thing this piece made me want to write about, the whole premise of ‘literary’ and ‘pulp’ as opposite ends of some sort of spectrum. It seems to be a polemic SF is cursed to suffer from for all eternity. Even within the genre there are levels of snobbery demarcating the ‘escapist pulp’ with the ‘heavy’ or ‘literary’ works. Applying such things to Ray Bradbury just seems wrong and, if anything, the piece SMH has deigned to run on the day of his death simply shows that the polemic is an artificial construct – one Bradbury broke.

A piece of fiction should be judged primarily on its own terms. Yes, it needs to be well written. Beyond that it could serve any purpose the author and reader agree between them. For me, the main thing is for there to be a good story told well. My experience of ‘literary’ fiction is of no or limited banal story told with overdone language. My experience of ‘pulp’ or ‘escapist’ stories is stories where things happen. Not all are well told and not all are good – but that will depend on who’s reading them. Bradbury told good stories and told them excellently. So the ‘literary’ side claimed him and the ‘pulp’ side did too. He was neither, they don’t exist. He was Bradbury, the storyteller. Let’s remember that and read the stories and enjoy them. That’s what really matters.

Keep dreaming!