As robot messengers carrying microdots in forked sticks come pounding in from the ends of the universe to bring news items for the latest FF, 1980 is dying the fearful entropy death which will make it a waste of burnt-out stars and nibbled turkey bones. To type these words is to send messages forward through time to all you weird future beings way up the timeline in 1981....
The last months of 1980 brought much depressing news. George R Stewart, author of the popular Earth Abides, died recently at the age of 85 – those interested enough in his work to follow him outside the SF ghetto should look for his books Fire and Storm. Susan Wood also died at the unhappy age of 32, and some of you may be saying "Who was Susan Wood?": she'd won three Hugo awards in the amateur categories, one shared with former husband Mike Glicksohn, and was deservedly well-known in the SF fan community. Galaxy magazine is dead after 30 years of publication, the current owner having scraped together enough money to print a last issue only to find he couldn't afford to distribute it. The younger SF magazine Galileo follows Galaxy down the drain; its first issue was in 1976 and it came from the same publisher (who only bought Galaxy about a year ago), Vincent McCaffrey. No relation, we trust, to Anne... Pierrot Publishing, responsible for much of the glut of 'coffee table' SF books in recent years, has also – it's said – gone under ... The American Book Awards have dropped SF and other genre award categories for such reasons as that "these genres have their own awards". Yeah, SF authors doan' wan' white man's awards. Dey're happy down dere on de ole plantation... Several thousands of copies of Samuel Delany's The Tides of Lust and Charles Platt's The Gas, both naughty books from Savoy, have been seized by our very own Vice Squad... One grim rumour, however, does fill me with secret glee – that Vonda Mclntyre of Dreamsnake fame has written a Star Trek novel (many authors who should have more pride are hacking out such stuff to pay the rent) wherein Bones McCoy has to pull the plug on Kirk's life support system and shuffle him off to the great Captain's Log in the sky.
On a still cheerier note: The 1980 World Fantasy Award went to Elizabeth Lynn's novel Watchtower ... The 39th World SF Convention in Denver, USA, this August has guests of honour C.L. Moore (collaborator and wife of the late Henry Kuttner) and Clifford Simak: SAE for details to 14 Bowmonts Road, Tadley, Basingstoke, Hants. The 40th Worldcon, Chicago in '82, has guests A. Bertram Chandler the Australian author and Kelly Freas the horribly Hugo-laden artist ... If the January Playboy is still on the stands when you see this, it should contain Frank Herbert's new God-Emperor of Dune (an even worse title than the provisional Sandworms of Dune) in, ugh, condensed form ... Gollancz are publishing what they say is the first transatlantic collaboration in February, Ian Watson's and Michael Bishop's Under Heaven's Bridge (an uncharitable friend says "Let's hope it has Bishop's people and Watson's ideas and not the other way round!").... The biannual European SF convention, better called the Continental con since it's never been held in Britain, happened in Stresa (Italy) in '80; the '82 event was to be in Moscow but the Soviet writers' union decided "no"; backup arrangements for Hungary may be shaky and Eurocon '82 could yet end up in Switzerland. The British SF Association, egged on by John Brunner, is plotting to bring Eurocon to Britain for that special year 1984, but as yet plans are vague... Last time I mentioned the 'censorship' of Greg Benford's Timescape (UK edition): cuts involve lese-majeste references to a (1988) royal, Prince 'Randy' Andy... Cultured readers will have heard of things like Tom 'Dr Who' Baker's marriage, and departure from the series, via the scrofulous rags which these days pass for our great national Press, which is why FF concentrates on less familiar factoids... Short Stories magazine, despite too much reprint material in its first issue of December 1980, has items of SF/fantasy interest, but – well, I know my moral influence in this matter is like alpha-particle emission, unable to penetrate even a few thicknesses of paper, but Short Stories believes that SF is called 'sci-fi', and this must not be tolerated....
Now for something completely different. Not getting much reader feedback, I keep trying new routines to see if I can't provoke cries of admiration or loathing. This time, a few words on a book I enjoyed, White Light by mathematician Rudy Rucker (Virgin, 1980, 128pp, £1.95) – which as I said last time tries to do for infinite set theory what Illuminatus! did for modern history/folklore. In spirit it's closer to Lewis Carroll; Carroll's paradoxes come from the inadequacies of language and logic, Rucker's from the weirdness of mathematical infinity. The major, brainblasting idea is the flat place Cimön, which dwarfs Priest's infinite Inverted World as that dwarfs Ringworld. Cimön is infinitely far from here, being aleph-null distance units away no matter what units you choose; aleph-null is the 'smallest' infinity, that of the whole numbers. You get there by counting forever. The hero, one Felix Rayman, travels astrally to Cimön via an intellectual speed-up enabling him to map infinite distance onto finite time, the point being that the 'countable' aleph-null can be intellectually grasped, at least if you're a mathematician. Now one side of Cimön is a mountain of increasing infinities stacked above each other forever – it's possible to climb to aleph-null, but how to make the further intellectual leap to 'c', the higher infinity of the continuum? 'c' is the number of points in a line of any length or for that matter a space of any volume you choose. It's so huge that it swallows aleph-null without trace. It's uncountable: there are only aleph-null whole numbers to count with.... Such a lovely metaphor, too. Released from mundane space/time, Rayman can solve countably infinite problems like, for example, opening a combination lock whose code is pi to the very last decimal place. ("It took me a couple of minutes and my neck got stiff from staring up at the dial.") But he can't climb the intellectual mountain to 'c'. The only route is via the White Light, a philosophical route not involving natural, finite thought ... a flash of Nirvana.
Other set-pieces include the infinite Hilbert's hotel, which has infinitely many guests but where new space can always be made by moving each guest into the next room up. '"I'm in Room 1 ..." I began ... "Don't tell the bellboys that! Thanks to you they had to move everyone!"' And there's the Library whose books have 'c' pages apiece (as in Jorge Luis Borges' 'The Book of Sand') and represent fully exhaustive treatments of their subjects: Rayman is locked up to write his own life story, one page of aleph-null words, plus all the possible alternate lives he might have lived; but his book The Lives of Felix Rayman is rejected since all the material already appears in the less parochial book Lives. Rucker leaves the reader to see the final joke that the Library's 2,469 books could be put into one volume of the same size called, say, Subjects. Best of all, the author thumbs his mathematical nose at uncomprehending readers in a part of Cimön where the process of mathematical induction is stood on its head: if your mind can't even see the way to aleph-null then really it can't cope with the finite integers either, and as Rayman's imagination fails his journey ends with an all too finite fall, downward through our counting system with his universe shrinking to contain only three objects, only two, only one ...
Please note that these infinities are not fantasy but sober maths going back to Georg Cantor's work last century. Now if they were merely shovelled into the book there'd be every excuse for complaint. The importation of gosh-wow concepts can't itself produce a good or even a necessarily interesting story, as Piers Anthony has lumpishly proven on several occasions (eg. the almost incomprehensible use of John Horton Conway's mathematical 'Life' game in OX). Rucker, however, is a mathematician who moves among these concepts as confidently as Tolkien in Middle-Earth. White Light is a lunatic fantasy with a reek of disillusioned post-60s 'head' culture, with a realistic/surrealistic approach that makes you hold still for dollops of metaphysics or personal appearances by Jesus, Satan, Cantor, Einstein, Hilbert and Kafka's cockroach; above all it's 'everywhere dense' (to crack a Ruckeroid mathematical joke) with the stink of infinity. Images which on first glance look merely weird or pretty turn out to be rooted in the theory of numbers and infinite sets ...
If you suspect this 'new cult book' is a trifle Heavy, you're partly right. I doubt that White Light will take off like Illuminatus!, the subject matter being so much less familiar. Knowing something about set theory will certainly help your enjoyment, but it's not necessary (or sufficient, as the mathematician would add) – Rucker painlessly teaches you a good bit of it en route.
So what's the book about? It manages to fit in life, death, heaven, hell and the transmigration of souls, but mainly deals with the reach of the human mind – using infinities as, perhaps, the most convincing and comprehensible yardstick to measure where the mind won't reach. Also it's very funny, sometimes touching, and adequately written despite bits which seem arbitrary or silly; and towards the end, when you fear the whole metaphysical magic-show will be tidied away beneath the carpet of 'it was all a dream', Rucker pulls a final conjuring trick to create and almost make you believe in a wholly absurd, infinitely divisible hypersolid right here on dull old Earth. Possibly he goes too far in letting a subtle mathematical trick, whereby something can be taken apart and reassembled into two pieces each identical to the original, to be accomplished by hitting said hypersolid with the heel of a shoe....
White Light is lively, absurd, densely written – don't skip it, though the nasty typeface may make you want to – and sent my jaded sense of wonder zooming towards aleph-null. Worth investigation. (The US edition from Ace Books has a witless back-cover blurb implying this is a true story about out-of-the-body experiences. Good grief!)
Finally, a problem to occupy your minds until next issue. Why, when a book's cover art is known to play a large part in bookstand sales, and when a good number of SF artists are big 'selling' names in their own right, do so many publishers have the silly policy of not crediting jacket artists? ("Why wasn't X nominated for the BSFA award? He's a great artist," an editor friend asked me. I had some pleasure in pointing out that company policy had made sure the voters never knew X's name.) Solutions to this riddle, especially from publishers, would be very welcome.
Happy New Year!
DAVID LANGFORD
STOP PRESS: (1) Plans for Eurocon '82 in Hungary have definitely fallen through, and the event will be held in Switzerland. More later! (2) British Fantasy Award results just arrived: novel Death's Master by Tanith Lee, short 'The Button Molder' by Fritz Leiber, film Alien, artist Stephen Fabian, comic Heavy Metal. These awards are presented at 'Fantasycon', next held in Birmingham 10-12 July 1981: SAE to 1 Buttery Rd, Smethwick, Warley, W Midlands, B67 7NS. (DRL)