Adventure classics – Remember when, or was it then?

"We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”

by Philip K. Dick

***

“The science fiction writers of this world are resolutely different – from mankind and from each other – except that Philip K. Dick is more different,” editors Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison wrote in their anthology Nebula Award Stories Two. Except that, in a twist Dick would have enjoyed, the story they were introducing, his 1966 “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” was never nominated for a Nebula, the highest honor bestowed by SFWA, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, Inc.

It wasn’t even a runner-up for best short story of its year. Like editor Roger Zelazny, who the next year shoehorned J. G. Ballard’s “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D” into his Nebula Award anthology despite its shunning by the SFWA, sometimes editors gotta do what editors gotta do,even if it requires implanting eerily realistic memories of what ought to have been.

Like those of Dick’s Walter Mittyish, Earth-bound protagonist Douglas Quail, who has become obsessed with a dream of visiting Mars. And not just visiting the newly-colonized planet, but of visiting it as an agent of the solar system’s interplanetary police force, Interplan.

That will never happen, of course. He can’t even afford the cost of trip to Mars, let alone qualify as an interplanetary agent. But he can afford the next best thing – to buy an implanted memory of such an adventure. And he knows just the place to get that done.

The technicians at Rekal (pronounced “recall” the receptionist corrects Quail) are happy to implant such memories. “The actual memory, will all its vagueness, omissions and ellipses, not to say distortions – that’s second-best,” the Rekal salesman assures Quail.

But Rekal’s technicians are stunned to realize that Quail actually has been to Mars as an Interplan spy where he committed a political assassination, only to have his memory of the true event (or was it?) previously erased. Now Rekal’s hypnotic drugs have unleashed a true memory of what was intended to be a false memory.

Not daring to explain this to Quail, the techs make no attempt to alter the existing memory. But he finds the recollection of his Martian adventure, now recalled consciously, just as hazy and vague as any real memory. Preparing to blast off a complaint to the Better Business Bureau, he finds a box of Martian souvenirs in his desk. What's going on? 

And why are there Interplan cops in his apartment, and a telepathic transmitter, and a still more deeply-buried memory, which seems to Quail to be one of his boyhood fantasies? How’s a reader, not to mention Quail, supposed to know what’s real and what isn’t?

If any of this sounds familiar, maybe you’re remembering the movie Total Recall, in either its 1990 or 2012 versions, both based loosely, but only loosely, on “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.”

Or maybe you’re inside the mind of Philip Kindred Dick on February 18, 1982, as he lies on the floor of his small apartment, unconscious from a stroke that will shortly kill him and perhaps thinking, as Anthony Peake writes in A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future, “My God, my life is exactly like the plot of any one of 10 of my novels or stories. Even down to fake memories and identity. I’m a protagonist from one of PKD’s books.”

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an August of adventures at sea with Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle.)

Adventure classics – Women and sci-fi: how things change

“When It Changed”

by Joanna Russ

***

“Of all forms of literature, science fiction is the only one that deals primarily and basically with change,” Isaac Asimov wrote in his introduction to the anthology of award-winning stories for 1972, Nebula Award Stories Eight. “It is not the function of science fiction to predict the actual future, but rather to resent alternate futures of any degree of probability. . . ”

And then, of course, Dr. Asimov, sometimes science fiction does end up predicting the future, as Joanna Russ did in the Nebula Award winning short story that was among those included in in that anthology.

“When It Changed” tells the story of an Earth-colonized planet, Whileaway. Six hundred years earlier, disaster struck Whileaway. First, it lost communication with the home planet. Then a mysterious plague killed all of the men on Whileaway. Instead of succumbing to despair, the planet’s survivors, all women, rebuilt their society, including finding new methods of reproduction.

“We had a big initial gene pool,” local police chief Janet Evason tells new arrivals to their planet after centuries of isolation, “we had been chosen for extreme intelligence, we had a high technology and a large remaining population. . . ”

Her hearers are unimpressed. They are astronauts from Earth, the first men to set foot on Whileaway in generations. And they won’t be the last. “Did you know that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth?” he asks Janet. “I believe in instincts, even in Man, and I can’t think that . . .you don’t feel somehow what even you must miss. There is only half a species here. Men must come back to Whileaway.”

There’s no way to hold back this now unwelcome future, Janet knows, no way to protect her wife Katy and their daughters. “I doubt very much that sexual equality has been reestablished on Earth. I do not like to think of myself mocked, of Katy deferred to as if she were weak, of (our) children cheated of their full humanity. . . to the not-very-interesting curiosa of the human race.”

What would Janet (or her alter ego Joanna Russ) think of a time where, in some places at least, women are free to marry other women and have children together? Or even of a world where women could take control of a genre once thought of as a male preserve.

"In the America in which she came of age,” reads her 2011 obituary in The New York Times, “Ms. Russ was triply disenfranchised: as a woman, a lesbian and an author of genre fiction who earned her living amid the pomp of university English departments.”

She was only the second woman to win a Nebula Award for excellence in science fiction short stories, and women would languish in the minority of Nebula Award winners for decades more. Until this year. Right, there was the U.S. Supreme Court case recognizing the right of same sex couples to marry. And, there’s the announcement of the 2015 Nebula Awards where “with the exception of the Best Novel award, women swept the slate.”

But don’t stop being angry yet, Joanna Russ. There’s still the controversy of the upcoming Hugo Awards, where a backlash by the Sad/Rabid Puppies, science fiction fandom’s equivalent of the tea party, looms against any writing smacking of diversity.Who will win this round? Stay tuned for word August 22 from the 73^rd Worldcon in Spokane, Washington.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction adventures with Arthur C. Clarke’s Nebula Award-winning “A Meeting with Medusa.”)

Adventure classics -- The woman of a thousand faces

“The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D”

by J. G. Ballard

***

Reclusive heiress Leonora Chanel fills her many houses with portraits of herself. Only one famous picture is missing – the one her unfaithful husband, a presumed suicide -- was painting just before his death. “What promised to be a significant exhibit at the coroner’s inquest, a mutilated easel portrait of Leonora on which he was working, was accidently destroyed before the hearing,” reports the narrator of J. G. Ballard’s 1967 surreal fantasy, “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.” “Perhaps the painting revealed more of Leonora’s character than she chose to see.”

As obsessed with her own image as any aging movie queen, Leonora searches for immortality in art, a search that culminates in the strange medium of cloud sculpture.

Every evening, great clouds are born on the heated air rising from the ancient dried sea bed of the resort colony of Vermilion Springs. The wealthy, the jaded, the self-regarding colony members long as much as the visitors flocking to today’s Jurassic World for ever-new, ever-titillating spectacles to distract them from the meaninglessness of their lives. And among those who feed – or perhaps prey – on this insatiable desire, are cloud-sculptors, daredevils in gliders who “carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds,” as Ballard writes. “As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun.”

Among those cloud-sculptors is Nolan, one of Leonora Chanel’s flock of discarded lovers. He has already painted her cruelly ironic, all too lifelike portrait. Is it to satisfy her own vanity or to humiliate her lover that she now demands he sculpt her in the transient medium of a cloud?

“The Cloud-Sculptors” would be among the stories Ballard would collect a few years later in his anthology, Vermilion Sands. It is also the story science fiction writer Roger Zelazny placed at the beginning of his edited collection of Nebula Award-winning stories for 1967.

“Here are seven stories,” Zelazny writes in his introduction. “There is something special about each one of them, or they wouldn’t be here. They were all of them nominated for the Nebula Award. . .a thing which represents our collective opinion as to what is the very best work our area of literature produced. . . ”

Except that some of them weren’t nominated. Specifically the volume’s opening story, Ballard’s “The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D.”

It makes me wonder why Nebula didn’t nominate the story, but “Zelazny does not offer either explanation or excuse for the inclusion of this story,” writes author/fan Steven H. Silver, “allowing Ballard’s words to provide their own justification.”

I double-checked the list of Nebula winners for 1967. Surely it was in there somewhere. But there was, indeed, no record of “Cloud-Sculptors.” Still, I’m grateful to Zelazny for reintroducing me to this work, the perfect heated fever dream for a long summer afternoon before the breaking of a thunderstorm.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction with Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed,” which actually was a Nebula Award winner for its year, 1972.)