Canavan, Gerry

English

epublications@Marquette

Marquette Universitye-Publications@MarquetteEnglish Faculty Research and Publications English, Department of1-1-2015Anything Could Happen (And We Would BelieveIt)Gerry CanavanMarquette University, gerard.canavan@marquette.eduPublished version. New Orleans Review, Vol. 41 (2015): 223-226. Publisher link. © 2015 LoyolaUniversity. Used with permission. 223222  & the lungs of God expand, remain empty, vessels made dear   as constellations— patterning space now & before  with a million points of night—ANYTHING COULD HAPPEN (AND WE WOULD BELIEVE IT)gerry canavanScience fiction defies definition, resists origins, refuses boundaries. If it’s the genre that considers the impact of “science” on human life—a reasonable first attempt to describe what it might mean to slap “science” and “fiction” next to each other as a single term—you immediately run into the problem that modern life is so totally suffused with “science” (and has been for so long) that it would be hard to name any work of contemporary literature that isn’t also science fiction. If it’s the genre that names what isn’t real, but might be, you ultimately run into the same problem: where’s the bright line that divides that kind of “speculation” from the telling of any other story you know isn’t actually true? All fiction, by its nature, posits some alternative but plausible world; the worlds of science fiction may be more alternative than the worlds of mimetic fiction, but they’re somewhere in the same ballpark. We all know perfectly well there was never any such person as Leopold Bloom, but, for the duration of Ulysses, we’re willing to suspend our disbelief.If science fiction is framed as an oxymoron—if the genre is actually essentially about the things we know aren’t true, like ray guns and hyperdrives and time travel and superpowers—the problem still doesn’t go away. If I tell you a story about a flood that destroys civilization, is it only a science fiction when I say it is going to 224  225happen tomorrow, but not yesterday or 4000 B.C.? (What if I say the flood is happening right now, as we speak, just so incredibly slowly that only scientific instruments can see it happening?) If I tell you a story about people who defy the laws of nature in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, and are punished for their transgressions, does it really matter whether we’re talking about a magic apple from the Tree of Knowledge or a ghastly reanimated corpse or the Manhattan Project or climate change or the illegal invention of bleepblorp on the planet Myxlplex?Even given all these caveats, I do think there is something distinct about science fiction, despite the inability to name that distinction with much certainty or specificity. I wouldn’t call it an aesthetics; I don’t think it’s a politics, exactly; it’s really something more like an ethos, or a mood. The singular proposition that undergirds all science fiction, from the Book of Genesis to The Book of the New Sun, is that things could be different than the way they are. Science fiction is what you get when you turn the world into a philosophical thought experiment: both the person who writes science fiction and the person who reads it fiddle with the knobs of reality, turning this part up and that part down, adding in this, taking out that, to see what you get when you make some changes. Sometimes the focus of the experiment is what change does to just one person, or to families, or to friendships; sometimes it’s on what happens to an entire society when it changes too fast, or too slow, or too much, or too little, or even (we might dare to hope) changes just the right amount, and in plenty of time, without anyone having to suffer.“I love you sons of bitches,” exults one of Kurt Vonnegut’s char-acters to a convention filled with science fiction writers. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastro-phes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”What makes science fiction so vital, I think, in our moment—what makes it more than just abstruse or borderline psychotic ramblings about triangle people from the purple dimension—is the way our world has become so supersaturated with change that the stuff now oozes out of every new breakthrough, gadget, or once-in-a-century environmental catastrophe (which seem to be occurring at least two or three times a year). Our society is totally unrecognizable not just from the perspective of the 1890s but from the perspective of the 224  225happen tomorrow, but not yesterday or 4000 B.C.? (What if I say the flood is happening right now, as we speak, just so incredibly slowly that only scientific instruments can see it happening?) If I tell you a story about people who defy the laws of nature in the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, and are punished for their transgressions, does it really matter whether we’re talking about a magic apple from the Tree of Knowledge or a ghastly reanimated corpse or the Manhattan Project or climate change or the illegal invention of bleepblorp on the planet Myxlplex?Even given all these caveats, I do think there is something distinct about science fiction, despite the inability to name that distinction with much certainty or specificity. I wouldn’t call it an aesthetics; I don’t think it’s a politics, exactly; it’s really something more like an ethos, or a mood. The singular proposition that undergirds all science fiction, from the Book of Genesis to The Book of the New Sun, is that things could be different than the way they are. Science fiction is what you get when you turn the world into a philosophical thought experiment: both the person who writes science fiction and the person who reads it fiddle with the knobs of reality, turning this part up and that part down, adding in this, taking out that, to see what you get when you make some changes. Sometimes the focus of the experiment is what change does to just one person, or to families, or to friendships; sometimes it’s on what happens to an entire society when it changes too fast, or too slow, or too much, or too little, or even (we might dare to hope) changes just the right amount, and in plenty of time, without anyone having to suffer.“I love you sons of bitches,” exults one of Kurt Vonnegut’s char-acters to a convention filled with science fiction writers. “You’re all I read any more. You’re the only ones who’ll talk all about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that’ll last for billions of years. You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstanding, mistakes, accidents, catastro-phes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distance without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.”What makes science fiction so vital, I think, in our moment—what makes it more than just abstruse or borderline psychotic ramblings about triangle people from the purple dimension—is the way our world has become so supersaturated with change that the stuff now oozes out of every new breakthrough, gadget, or once-in-a-century environmental catastrophe (which seem to be occurring at least two or three times a year). Our society is totally unrecognizable not just from the perspective of the 1890s but from the perspective of the 226  2271990s (which themselves would have looked completely mad to the person from 1940). And the pace is accelerating: the world of ten or five or three years hence will be just as bizarre and inscrutable, from the perspective of 2015. Most of us will still be there, hope-fully, but we’ll be different too; we’ll have to be. Today anything could happen—immortality is invented, the aliens finally show up, the comet is spotted that will kill us all—and we would believe it. We are bathing in change, marinating in it, maybe drowning in it. And science fiction is the primary way we talk about the strange world of difference that is all around us, the imminent, radical histori-cal changes that will free us, or transform us, or eat us. The joy and terror and power and urgency of science fiction comes, for me, in the fact that everything really is science fiction, now. Science fiction is the air we breathe. We’re all halfway up the roller coaster, click-clacking higher and higher up the ramp, about to peak over the crest and finally see what’s on the other side—and our science fiction writers are in the very first car, seeing everything that’s coming that tiny bit sooner, shouting back their prophecies: “Everybody hold on tight. We’re really close. It won’t be long now.”CONTRIBUTORSSARA BATKIE received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2010. Previous work has appeared in Gulf Coast, LIT, and Epiphany, and her story “Cleavage” was an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories 2011 . Currently she lives in Brooklyn where she is at work on a novel.C. WADE BENTLEY lives, teaches, and writes in Salt Lake City. For a good time, he enjoys wandering the Wasatch Mountains and playing with his grandchildren. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Green Mountains Review, Cimarron Review, Best New Poets, New Ohio Review, Western Humanities Review, Subtropics, Rattle, Chicago Quarterly Review, Raleigh Review, Reunion: The Dallas Review, and Ilanot Review, among others. A full-length collection of his poems, What Is Mine, was published by Aldrich Press in early 2015.SCOTT BRENNAN lives in Miami, Florida. His poetry has appeared in The Sewanee Review, The Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Smithsonian, and elsewhere. He was a winner of The William Stafford Award sponsored by Rosebud magazine and the recipient of the Scotti Merrill Award given by the Key West Literary Seminars and Writers’ Workshop.GERRY CANAVAN is an assistant professor of twentieth and twenty-first- century literature in the Department of English at Marquette University. His research focuses on the relationship between science fiction and the political and cultural history of the postwar period, with special emphasis on ecology and the environment.

Anything Could Happen (And We Would Believe It)

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Anything Could Happen (And We Would Believe It)

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